Visa And Brale To Test Private Stablecoin Settlement On The Canton Network

Visa is working with stablecoin infrastructure company Brale to evaluate how privacy-enabled blockchain technology can be applied to institutional payment settlement. The proof of concept centres on SBC, a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin issued by Brale, running on the Canton Network.

The collaboration is designed to test whether blockchain-based settlement can be made practical for financial institutions that require both programmable payment flows and strict controls over who can see transaction data.

What The Proof Of Concept Involves

Visa and Brale plan to evaluate the use of SBC as a stablecoin option for institutional settlement. SBC is natively supported on the Canton Network, which provides the privacy architecture that distinguishes this initiative from stablecoin settlement conducted on public blockchain networks.

The Canton Network is designed to allow multiple participants to transact on shared infrastructure while limiting the visibility of sensitive transaction information to authorised parties. That architecture is intended to address a core concern among financial institutions considering blockchain-based settlement: the risk that transaction details could be visible to other participants on the same network.

Through the proof of concept, Visa and Brale will test how that privacy-preserving infrastructure performs when applied to real-world institutional payment flows, assessing whether it can meet the operational, regulatory and compliance requirements that govern how financial institutions move money.

Visa’s Existing Stablecoin Settlement Work

Visa first enabled stablecoin settlement in 2021 and has continued to expand those capabilities in the years since. The company currently allows VisaNet obligations to be settled using supported stablecoins, meaning that participating financial institutions can use stablecoins rather than traditional bank transfers to settle payments processed through the Visa network.

The collaboration with Brale represents an extension of that work into a new area: privacy-enabled settlement infrastructure. While Visa’s earlier stablecoin settlement initiatives demonstrated the speed and efficiency benefits of blockchain-based money movement, the Canton Network proof of concept is focused on whether those benefits can be delivered alongside the data privacy controls that institutional participants require.

Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto at Visa, outlined the objectives of the collaboration.

“Stablecoin settlement has shown how blockchain infrastructure can improve the speed and efficiency of money movement,” Sheffield explained. “Through our work with Brale, we’re exploring how SBC on the Canton Network can support institutional settlement use cases that require both programmability and privacy controls.”

“This collaboration helps us evaluate what it takes to bring these capabilities into production environments.”

Why Privacy Matters For Institutional Settlement

The privacy question is central to the broader debate about whether blockchain technology can be adopted at scale by regulated financial institutions.

On public blockchain networks, transaction data is typically visible to all participants. While this transparency is a feature in some contexts, it creates challenges for financial institutions that are subject to regulations governing the confidentiality of client transaction information. A bank settling obligations on a public blockchain could, in theory, expose details about its settlement volumes, counterparties and timing to competitors and other network participants.

The Canton Network addresses this by design. Its architecture allows participants to share infrastructure and interoperate without exposing their transaction data to other parties on the network. Each participant sees only the transactions they are directly involved in, rather than the full ledger of activity.

For Visa, testing settlement on this type of privacy-preserving network is a step toward understanding whether stablecoin-based settlement can be extended to use cases where data confidentiality is a prerequisite rather than an option.

Brale’s Position

Brale, the issuer of the SBC stablecoin, is positioning itself as an infrastructure provider for financial institutions that want to use stablecoins but need the surrounding systems to meet enterprise-grade requirements around privacy, compliance and operations.

Ben Milne, Founder and CEO of Brale, pointed to growing institutional demand for stablecoin infrastructure that goes beyond basic token issuance.

“Financial institutions are increasingly looking for stablecoin infrastructure that meets their operational, regulatory and privacy requirements,” Milne noted. “Working with Visa to explore SBC on Canton is an important step toward making stablecoin-based settlement more practical and scalable for real-world payment flows.”

The Brale collaboration gives Visa a way to evaluate a stablecoin that has been purpose-built for the Canton Network’s privacy model, rather than adapting an existing public-chain stablecoin to a new environment.

Implications For The Payments Industry

Visa has framed stablecoins as a potential next-generation settlement layer for global payments. The company’s view is that blockchain-based settlement can offer speed, programmability and cost advantages over traditional correspondent banking settlement, provided the infrastructure can meet the privacy, compliance and interoperability standards that financial institutions and payment networks require.

The proof of concept with Brale is one piece of that evaluation. If the Canton Network’s privacy architecture proves viable for institutional settlement at scale, it could open a pathway for stablecoin-based settlement to move beyond early adopters and into the mainstream of institutional payments infrastructure.

That outcome is not guaranteed. The proof of concept is explicitly an evaluation exercise, and the gap between a successful test and production deployment across a global payment network involves significant technical, regulatory and commercial considerations.

But the fact that Visa is actively testing privacy-enabled stablecoin settlement signals that the company sees the technology as sufficiently mature to warrant serious evaluation, and that the privacy question is now the primary barrier to broader institutional adoption rather than the underlying capability of blockchain-based money movement.

Last Updated on June 4, 2026 by Nick Ross