Cryptocards facilitate payment rate from 2021 – Visa exec

According to a Visa executive, the integration of traditional payment cards with cryptocurrency exchanges is playing an important role in the adoption of digital assets.

Akshay Chopra, Visa's Vice President, Head of Innovation and Design, highlighted the role Visa cards have played in recent years as a bridge between fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies, speaking to Cointelegraph's Ezra Regera at the Blockchain Economy Dubai Summit.

According to Chopra, using cryptocurrency as a payment method for everyday items like a cup of coffee in a cafe is still not ubiquitous. To address this challenge, Visa will allow Visa cards to be issued with 75 of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges by 2021.

This opens up a network of approximately 80 million Visa merchants that can by extension serve customers who prefer to use cryptocurrency as a means of payment. Chopra tells Regera:

In the year By 2021, building that bridge alone, and those numbers aren't exactly public, will facilitate $3 billion in tolls.

Chopra highlighted this as one of many opportunities for mainstream financial institutions to leverage the wider Web3 ecosystem.

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Payment settlement between financial institutions is another avenue for the disruptive and innovative process of blockchain-based solutions. According to Chopra, protocols like the SWIFT payment system still have limitations, including not being fully functional 24 hours a day.

“At the end of the day, banks have trillions of dollars trading with each other, but there's a cutoff point where you can't trade globally. That's a huge pain point, and it's expensive and inefficient.”

Akshay highlights a pilot with Cirque using USD Coin (USDC) that enabled multiple cryptocurrency exchange partners to make payments with USDC at the end of a day.

“It's cheaper than traditional methods, it happens 24/7, and it's innovative. You send the USDC balance, and Visa deposits the funds on the back end of the Ethereum blockchain.

Regulations remain barriers to the proper use of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency-based payments for major financial institutions. However, Akshay believes that progressive regulatory environments in states like the United Arab Emirates have benefited industry participants more than regressive regulations like the United States.

“When developing regulatory frameworks, they invite the industry to talk about what it wants, but also what the future might look like in a few years, so that regulations can be set early.”

Visa made headlines in April 2023 with the launch of a crypto product roadmap to accept stablecoin and public blockchain payments by major financial institutions.

The company is set to invest $100 million through Visa Ventures to explore innovative artificial intelligence-enabled products and solutions focused on payments and commerce.

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