Lloyds and Visa complete $750,000 USDC settlement pilot

Lloyds Banking Group and Visa have completed a seven-day live pilot using USDC to settle $750,000 in cross-border obligations, with funds reaching Visa in under an hour, including over a weekend, the companies said. The test examined settlement between the financial institutions, rather than changing how customers make payments. The companies described the exercise as a live trial of stablecoin settlement across different blockchain environments. Lloyds obtained USDC through Archax, a UK-regulated digital asset exchange, and booked the obligations through its Corporate Markets branch in Jersey before transferring the funds to Visa in the United States. Lloyds operated a node on the Canton Network, while Visa supported settlement on a separate public blockchain. The arrangement tested whether institutions using different networks could settle obligations with USDC without operating on the same blockchain. The companies did not identify Visa’s network in the supplied accounts. The reported transfer time included activity over a weekend, when conventional cross-border settlement can be constrained by banking hours.