Visa and Nium Pilot 7-Day Stablecoin Settlement Under Singapore's BLOOM Program

Visa on August 25 announced it had joined BLOOM, a programme led by Singapore's central bank, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and selected cross-border payments company Nium as its first partner to pilot a new form of stablecoin settlement. The pilot will explore whether tokenised, regulated stablecoins denominated in U.S. dollars and euros can settle payment obligations between financial institutions seven days a week — including weekends and public holidays — when traditional payment networks do not operate. The project signals that stablecoins are now being discussed as a potential settlement layer underneath mainstream card networks.

Why the Settlement Gap Matters

Traditional settlement operates on business days. Banks have cut-off times, and transactions submitted on a Friday evening may not be processed until Monday. Public holidays create further delays. Time-zone differences between countries mean financial institutions are rarely open at the same time. These gaps create liquidity drag — vague periods when money is technically owed but has not yet moved — and require laborious reconciliation to match records across institutions. MAS launched BLOOM in October 2025 to explore solutions to these problems; BLOOM stands for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency.

Nium's Role

Nium will become Visa's first partner under BLOOM. The pilot is designed to address specific pain points: weekend cut-offs, time-zone delays, and slow reconciliation windows. By moving settlement from legacy batch-processing systems to blockchain-based rails using regulated stablecoins, Visa and Nium aim to reduce friction and improve how quickly financial institutions can access funds. The pilot will support regulated stablecoins denominated in major currencies including US-dollar and euro-denominated tokens. Neither company disclosed which specific stablecoins would be tested, and the focus remains on the settlement process rather than on how customers initiate payments.

Industry Context

The BLOOM pilot lands alongside a wave of stablecoin infrastructure launches. Standard Chartered on August 24 became the first conventional bank to distribute Hong Kong's HKDAP stablecoin through controlled institutional beta access. Venmo on August 25 began rolling out PYUSD support to its more than 67 million users, expanding the largest single mainstream U.S. payments app integration of a PayPal-backed stablecoin. And LayerZero on August 25 unveiled ATLAS, a blockchain exchange built for institutions with Citadel Securities and DTCC as partners and a target of approximately 2 million transactions per second on the Zero Layer-1 chain.

What to Watch Through Year-End

Three checkpoints follow. The first transaction settled under BLOOM during a weekend or public holiday, expected before year-end 2026, will be the first operational proof point that regulated stablecoins can move funds when bank rails are closed. Whether additional financial institutions join the BLOOM pilot beyond Visa and Nium, and whether the second wave of stablecoin issuers (Circle, Paxos, Societe Generale-Forge) is named as participants, will determine the breadth of the test. And MAS's eventual regulatory framework for tokenised settlement, expected to follow the pilot in Q1 2027, will set the template for how other Asian and G20 jurisdictions approach weekend and cross-border stablecoin settlement.