Visa and Mesh have announced a strategic partnership designed to make crypto and stablecoin balances spendable across Visa’s global acceptance network of 175 million merchant locations in more than 200 countries. The deal targets what Mesh describes as the last-mile problem in digital-asset payments: the friction between owning crypto and actually spending it.

The mechanics are straightforward in principle. Mesh provisions a Visa credential behind the scenes when a consumer wants to pay. The user taps or checks out online as normal; the merchant receives a standard card payment with no new hardware or workflow changes required. Mesh handles the funding, conversion and, where required, KYC and user onboarding, acting as programme…