Visa’s Chief Executive Officer, Al Kelly, recently disclosed that in order to make Bitcoin and other crypto-assets safer, useful, and applicable, Visa might add them to the company’s payments network.
During Visa’s fiscal first-quarter 2021 earnings call, the CEO of Visa described crypto assets like bitcoin as “digital gold” which are “not used as a form of payment in a significant way at this point.”
“Our strategy here is to work with wallets and exchanges to enable users to purchase these currencies using their Visa credentials or to cash out onto our Visa credential to make a fiat purchase at any of the 70 million merchants where Visa is accepted globally,” Kelly said.
The payments executive also said stablecoins could be used for “global commerce” and that “digital currencies running on public blockchains as additional networks just like RTP or ACH networks.”
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Al Kelly added:
“Today, 35 of the leading digital currency platforms and wallets have already chosen to issue Visa, including coin-based Crypto.com, BlockFi, Fold, and BitPanda. These wallet relationships represent the potential for more than 50 million Visa credentials.
“The next leading network has a fraction of that. And it goes without saying, to the extent a specific digital currency becomes a recognized means of exchange, there’s no reason why we cannot add it to our network, which already supports over 160 currencies today.”
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Recall many months ago, Visa disclosed that it had been working closely with licensed and regulated digital currency platforms like Coinbase to provide a bridge between digital currencies and its existing global network of 61 million merchants.
- In addition, Visa applied for a patent for a digital currency on a blockchain using possibly the ETH protocol, with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
- The multinational payment juggernaut could have just sealed its position as the major global partner in the shift to monetary digitalization that is bound to happen very soon.
Around the world, more than 25 digital currency wallets have already been linked to Visa, giving users an easy way to spend from their crypto balance using a Visa debit card.
