Visa to Partner With 50 Crypto Companies
- Visa is set to establish card programs with over 50 leading crypto companies, including FTX, Coinbase, and Crypto.com.
- The programs will enable users to spend cryptocurrencies with over 70 million Visa merchants.
Shutterstock
According to a Visa blog post from 7 July, the company is set to partner with 50 leading cryptocurrency platforms on card programs. Visa said that over $1 billion has been spent on crypto-linked Visa cards in the first half of 2021, showing that there is significant space to expand the offering to the crypto community.
Visa’s upcoming card programs will enable users to convert and spend digital currencies at over 70 million merchants worldwide. These programs won’t require merchants to directly accept cryptocurrencies at checkout, essentially removing the risk frequently associated with cryptocurrency payments.
Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s Head of Cryptocurrency, told Business Insider that the merchants won’t have to change anything, with all of the work being done on the Visa transaction backend.
“You have this growing number of consumers with assets on crypto platforms, trading crypto, holding crypto – and then you millions of merchants who don’t really understand crypto. They don’t want to have to update their point of sales and terminals and figure out what a blockchain is,” he explained.
A quarter of the companies in Visa’s Fintech Fast Track program are currently working to issue Visa cards linked to a crypto platform. The FTX exchange has become the latest member of the program, as have Coinbase, Crypto.com, and CoinZoom. Visa is also working on expanding existing partnerships with BlockFi and Circle, as well as adding new stablecoin settlement methods.
- The company said it will be suspending its crypto-backed debit card service in the Middle East on 25 August, and in Latin America by 21 September.
- Although no reason was given for the decision, the company noted that “less than 1% of users” in those regions will be affected by the change.
Shutterstock
- 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.
- 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.