The infrastructure underpinning global commerce is undergoing a quiet but massive architectural shift. Traditional payment giants are no longer just looking at Web3 and artificial intelligence as future experiments; they are embedding them directly into the plumbing of global financial networks.
Visa has unveiled a major suite of capabilities across Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMEA), detailing a dual strategy designed to reshape how money moves. At the backend, the company is aggressively scaling its blockchain settlement infrastructure. At the frontend, it is preparing the rails for a world where software agents, rather than humans, initiate transactions.
The On-Chain Backbone: $7 Billion and Counting
For the blockchain industry, the most significant revelation lies in Visa’s rapidly scaling volume of on-chain settlements.
Visa announced that it has moved billions of dollars in stablecoins across VisaNet, hitting an annualised run rate of approximately $7 billion as of March 2026. This represents a substantial leap from the $4.5 billion run rate reported just a few months earlier in January.
In the CEMEA region specifically, on-chain settlement volumes skyrocketed, increasing nearly 60-fold over the last year. Currently, issuing banks use the network to settle transactions on-chain seven days a week, and Visa is working to extend these capabilities to merchant acquirers.
To further bridge traditional finance with programmable money, Visa plans to introduce Tokenised Deposits. This technology layer will allow commercial banks to issue their own programmable, always-on digital tokens while keeping the underlying funds securely on their existing balance sheets. Globally, Visa now has more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs either live or in active development.
The Frontend Shift: Preparing for Agentic Commerce
While stablecoins handle the backend settlement, Visa is simultaneously preparing for a fundamental shift in user behavior: the rise of autonomous AI assistants that buy goods on behalf of humans.
“Commerce is entering a new phase that is increasingly intelligent, programmable, and embedded into everyday experiences,” noted Tareq Muhmood, Visa’s regional president for CEMEA.
To support this evolution, the payments giant is expanding its Visa Intelligent Commerce platform. The framework introduces two critical tools designed to build trust and security in autonomous transactions:
- Agent Score: A system built in partnership with New Generation that allows digital merchants to test whether an AI agent can successfully navigate and complete tasks on their e-commerce sites.
- Agentic Directory: A secure registry designed to verify the legitimacy of both the AI agents initiating payments and the merchants receiving them.
This rollout coincides with Visa’s regional “Agentic Ready” program, which helps local commercial banks prepare their internal systems for autonomous payments. Visa has also deepened an ongoing partnership with OpenAI to embed payment capabilities directly into next-generation conversational AI interfaces.
Richer Tokens and the Trust Gap
The foundation for this automated future relies heavily on tokenization, the process of replacing sensitive card details with secure digital identifiers. Tokenization has already seen explosive growth in emerging markets; in the CEMEA region, tokenized transactions jumped from 26% in 2023 to 70% in 2026.
Visa is now enriching these tokens to carry advanced contextual metadata, including specific transaction types, geographic data, and verified user identities. A new “token assurance signal” will also monitor the token throughout its lifecycle to evaluate transaction risk in real time.
However, the technology is moving faster than consumer sentiment. According to data from Visa’s Stay Secure 2026 study, only 23% of consumers in key regional markets like South Africa currently trust an AI agent to make a purchase for them.
The Competitive Landscape
Visa’s aggressive push into stablecoin infrastructure and tokenized deposits intensifies its ongoing race against Mastercard, which is actively developing its own competitive Web3 and stablecoin frameworks.
By targeting the CEMEA region, where stablecoin adoption is growing at one of the fastest rates globally due to the need for efficient cross-border payments and inflation hedges, Visa is positioning its network to be the primary bridge between legacy banking and programmable, AI-driven commerce.
