Visa Direct Puts USDC Prefunding Into Commercial Production With Inyo Global

The significance is less about USDC's payments use case than about where it sits in the stack: prefunding, the liquidity buffer that sits ahead of settlement, is back-office plumbing rather than a consumer-facing feature. That is where stablecoins can quietly displace correspondent banking float, and a card network putting it into commercial production — not a pilot — is the tell. The open question is whether prefunding becomes the default for more corridors and enablers, since no volume, value or timeline was disclosed to gauge how real the production label is.