Visa Partners With Anchorage to Offer Crypto Trading, Custody
- Visa will be testing out a new suite of crypto APIs to expand its offering.
- Digital neobank First Boulevard will be the first one to test out the APIs, with custody services provided by Anchorage.
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Visa will be partnering with digital neobank First Boulevard and digital asset bank Anchorage to test out a new suite of crypto APIs.
According to the company’s announcement, the pilot will serve as a first step in launching new capabilities that allow customers to purchase, custody, and trade digital assets.
First Boulevard, a digitally native neobank, will be the first to test out Visa’s new suite of APIs. The custody service will be provided by Anchorage, a federally chartered digital asset bank. The official product offering is anticipated to launch later this year, the company said.
“With this pilot program, we want to extend the value of Visa to our neobank and financial institution clients by providing an easy bridge to crypto assets and blockchain networks,” said Jack Forestell, the chief product officer at Visa.
Forestell also revealed there are currently 35 cryptocurrency platforms that have chosen to issue with Visa, making their products available to Visa’s network of 70 million merchants worldwide.
Diogo Monica, the president and co-founder of Anchorage, said Visa’s crypto API pilot program is a significant step for the crypto industry and traditional finance services. Introducing a new crypto-focused product suite will help proliferate cryptocurrencies as an asset class and enable better inclusion in payments and financial services, he explained in the release.
- The payments giant has proposed the creation of new self-custodial wallets, called “delegable accounts”, using the “account abstraction” (AA) method.
- As Ethereum does not yet support AA, Visa implemented its new wallet type on layer 2 scaling solution StarkNet, and successfully enabled automated recurring payments.
Close up of VISA sign at global headquarters in Silicon Valley, Foster City, CA, 24 August 2019. Sundry Photography/Shutterstock
- The “Visa Global Back to Business Study – 2022 SMB Outlook” revealed that 73% of small businesses thought new digital payments were important to their growth.
- 24% are already planning to accept crypto as payments, while 82% said they would implement “some” form of digital payments in 2022.
- Visa’s Universal Payment Channel (UPC) will connect multiple blockchain networks.
- Once launched, the new concept will allow for a quick and seamless transfer of CBDCs and stablecoins between various networks.