The volume of transactions settled in stablecoins reached $28 trillion in 2025, according to the Bank for International Settlements’ latest annual economic report, a figure that underscores how programmable money on distributed ledgers is moving from experiment to infrastructure. In parallel, Colombia’s interoperable instant-payment system Bre-B crossed 1 billion transactions in its first nine months of operation, backed by nearly $2.9 trillion in digital-transformation investments by the country’s banking sector. Viewed from Basel, the combination of programmability and shared ledgers promises to collapse the sequential messaging, clearing and settlement chains that make cross-border payments slow and costly; in Bogotá, the same logic is already reducing reliance on cash and cheques across a domestic economy of 52 million people.

The mechanism in both cases is a shift from siloed proprietary ledgers to architectures that allow direct, real-time value transfer. Bre-B connects existing low-value payment networks and digital wallets through a centralised directory and an issuer settlement mechanism, enabling any registered user to send or receive funds via aliases such as national ID numbers or mobile phone numbers. The Bank for International Settlements highlights that distributed-ledger technology can offer tamper-proof records and instant settlement via smart contracts, operating 24 hours a day. Visa is building on this principle: it is expanding stablecoin settlement capabilities—volumes in the Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa region have risen nearly 60-fold in a year—and developing tokenised deposits that allow banks to keep funds on balance sheet while matching the speed of stablecoins.

The impact is visible across both consumer and business segments. In Colombia, BBVA alone has registered more than 6 million Bre-B keys and processed over $22 trillion in transactions since launch; small merchants using the Bold platform saw QR-code payments through Sono QR jump 76 per cent month on month in May 2026, with gastronomy and retail leading the growth. The travel economy is being reshaped too: Visa Destinations, now live in 10 global cities, uses a mobile-first platform to connect cardholders with curated experiences, while anchor partners Global Blue, Star Alliance and Trip.com Group embed payments into the trip itself. Behind these front-end experiences, firms such as 2innovate are launching intelligence layers like FrameIQ, which analyses more than 20 billion annual transactions across Latin America to convert raw payment flows into credit and marketing signals—a move that reflects the industry’s pivot from executing transactions to interpreting them.

Risks accompany the speed of change. The Bank for International Settlements warns that widespread adoption of dollar-denominated stablecoins could erode the role of local currencies such as the Mexican peso as units of account and weaken monetary-policy transmission. Compliance gaps persist: public blockchains’ pseudonymity complicates anti-money-laundering controls, though regulated providers in markets like Mexico already apply identity verification and transaction monitoring. The next factual milestone to watch is the Visa Payments Forum in Paris on 1 July, where the company is expected to detail how artificial intelligence and stablecoin infrastructure will underpin the next phase of agentic commerce.