Quick Insights

  • Visa has partnered with WeFi, a stablecoin infrastructure firm co-founded by Tether's Reeve Collins, to build what Collins calls the "last half mile" of onchain banking, including IBAN accounts and Visa card access built on DeFi rails.
  • WeFi describes itself as a "deobank" — an orchestration layer between DeFi and regulated payment infrastructure — targeting underbanked populations in Europe, Asia and Latin America in the first rollout phase.
  • The partnership is the latest in a series of onchain moves by Visa, which last December launched USDC settlement over Solana with Cross River Bank and Lead Bank, and became a design partner for Circle's Arc Layer 1 blockchain.

Visa has partnered with WeFi, a blockchain-based stablecoin infrastructure firm co-founded by Tether's Reeve Collins, to build what both companies describe as the missing final link in onchain banking. The announcement, made Tuesday, positions WeFi's decentralised rails as the underlying layer and Visa's global network as the regulated payment surface on top, targeting people who currently lack access to basic banking services.

Collins, who co-founded Tether in 2014 before going on to build NFT platform BLOCKv and Web3 engagement company SmartMedia Technologies, describes WeFi as the next evolution beyond the neobank model. Where neobanks moved banking from branches to smartphones, WeFi is trying to move it fully onchain, with stablecoin balances, tokenised real-world assets, and user-owned yield systems replacing the deposit accounts and centralised ledgers that underpin traditional banking.

WeFi Gives Users IBANs and Visa Cards Built on DeFi Infrastructure

In practical terms, the partnership means WeFi users will be able to hold onchain balances, receive IBAN numbers, and spend via Visa cards at any of the 150 million merchants on the network. Collins describes it as giving people bank accounts in places where traditional banks have no interest in operating.

"We're upgrading the plumbing and offering essentially people bank accounts, because they'll soon have their IBAN numbers, and we're getting the various licenses around the world to operate appropriately," Collins said. "The partnership with Visa really closes that last half mile of onchain banking infrastructure."

The rollout begins with selected markets in Europe, Asia and Latin America, expanding into additional regions as local regulatory approvals and issuing partnerships are secured. WeFi has been building out its payments team in anticipation of the launch, hiring Michael Batuev, formerly Visa's digital solutions lead, as Global Head of Payments last November.

Visa Has Been Building One of the Most Ambitious Onchain Strategies in Finance

The WeFi deal is one piece of a much larger move Visa has been making into onchain infrastructure. Last December, the company launched USDC settlement over the Solana blockchain with Cross River Bank and a16z-backed Lead Bank as initial participants. It simultaneously became a design partner for Circle's Arc Layer 1 blockchain, intending to run a validator node once the network goes live and use it for USDC settlement across its global network. In January 2026, Visa launched a stablecoin advisory practice to help banks and corporates work through issuance, custody and onchain payments strategy.

"This collaboration demonstrates how Visa's global network interacts with onchain models, while operating within established regulatory frameworks and the reliability consumers and merchants expect."

— Mathieu Altwegg, Head of Product & Solutions, Europe, Visa

Taken together, the moves suggest Visa is positioning itself not just as a card network that touches crypto at the edges, but as core settlement infrastructure for the onchain financial system. The GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025, gave US stablecoin issuers a clear federal framework for the first time and removed the regulatory ambiguity that had kept many traditional financial institutions on the sidelines. Since then, the stablecoin sector has grown to over $300 billion in combined market cap, with projections from multiple banks placing it at $2 trillion by 2028.

1.4 Billion Adults Still Have No Bank Account

The financial inclusion angle is where WeFi's model diverges most sharply from Visa's existing institutional partnerships. Cross River Bank and Lead Bank are US regulated entities serving sophisticated financial clients. WeFi's target users are the 1.4 billion adults worldwide that the World Bank estimates remain entirely unbanked, predominantly in Sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia and parts of Latin America, where geography, documentation requirements and minimum balance thresholds lock people out of conventional financial services.

The deobank model attempts to solve that problem by collapsing the traditional banking stack. Instead of a core banking system, a card processor, a compliance layer and a correspondent banking network, WeFi wraps those functions into a single onchain infrastructure that can be deployed in any jurisdiction where it can obtain a licence. Collins said the long-term goal is to partner with more banks and institutions as the platform scales, using Visa's acceptance network to make onchain balances spendable anywhere in the world.

Whether a startup built on DeFi rails can navigate the compliance complexity of operating across dozens of regulatory regimes remains the central challenge, but the Visa partnership at least confirms the payments industry's most powerful network is willing to bet it can.

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