Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Wednesday, September 6th, and today we're talking about big news from Visa.

Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it,

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So yesterday's episode started with a very brief discussion of a nominally big thing for Solana

that didn't push the price at all. What we're going to do today is talk about that thing,

which is much bigger than just Solana, and also talk about what it says about the general state

of the cycle that we're in.

The specific news was that Visa has announced an expansion of their stable coin settlement

to include the Solana network. Visa will now settle some cross-border payments using

USC on Solana. The payments company began experimenting with USDC for treasury operations in 2021.

The pilot began with Crypto.com's crypto-linked visa cards issued in Australia. Visa set up a cross-border settlement

channel with Crypto.com, which allowed the exchange to finalize customer purchases using

USDC over Ethereum. The expansion of the USDC settlement pilot is being done in collaboration

with merchant acquirers, World Pay, and Nuve. This will allow merchant customers to select USDC Settlement Pilot is being done in collaboration with merchant acquirers, World Pay, and Nouve.

This will allow merchant customers to select USDC Stablecoin settlement as an option instead

of receiving fiat currencies.

Now, the upgrade to Visa Systems is entirely a back-end improvement, and it's designed to cut

settlement times and costs.

...