Visa announces acceptance of Crypto

American multinational financial services corporation Visa Inc. has announced it will permit the use of the crypto in settling transactions on its payment network, the latest sign of growing acceptance of Crypto assets by a major financial player.

Visa is the world’s second-largest card payment organization (debit and credit cards combined), after being surpassed by China UnionPay in 2015, based on annual value of card payments transacted and number of issued cards.

In a report credited to Reuters the crypto asset being used is the USDC stablecoin crypto whose value is pegged directly to the greenback.

“We see increasing demand from consumers across the world to be able to access, hold and use digital currencies and we’re seeing demand from our clients to be able to build products that provide that access for consumers,” Cuy Sheffield, head of crypto at Visa, said.

Recall some weeks back, Visa’s Chief Executive Officer, Al Kelly, revealed 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 “digital currencies running on public blockchains as additional networks just like RTP or ACH networks.”

On February 3, 2021, Visa announced a partnership with First Boulevard, a neobank focused on building generational wealth for the Black community. First Boulevard will be first to pilot Visa’s new suite of cryptocurrency APIs, which will enable their customers to buy, sell, hold, and trade digital assets held by Anchorage, a federally chartered digital asset bank.