Visa to Test Stablecoin Payments
Payment giant Visa sees blockchain's potential and seeks to integrate the revolutionary technology into its system.
Visa’s goal is to create a new service that will allow clients to convert digital assets into fiat, similar to how it converts foreign currencies, according to the company’s crypto division head Cuy Sheffield.
. @cuysheffield and @visa have fell into the rabbit hole of Account Abstraction!
This is huge! pic.twitter.com/CFniLLBq5C
— Starknet-Ecosystem.com ✨ (@StarknetEco) February 5, 2023
“The same way that we can convert between dollars in euros on a cross-border transaction, we should be able to convert between digital tokenized dollars and traditional dollars,” he said.
At the Ethereum-focused conference, StarkWare Sessions 2023 Sheffield in Tel Aviv, Sheffield stated:
“We’ve been testing how to actually accept settlement payments from issuers in USDC starting on Ethereum and paying out in USDC on Ethereum. So, these are large value settlement payments.”
Although Visa is exploring the integration of blockchain technology into its network to facilitate faster money transfers, transactions are currently processed through the SWIFT system.
READ MORE: Bitcoin: Trader Warns of Imminent Correction
“We set all over Swift, so we can’t move money as frequently as we’d like because there are a number of limitations that exist in those networks, and so, we’ve been experimenting. We’ve been testing how to actually accept settlement payments [with stablecoins].”
In 2021 Visa announced using USD Coin (USDC) for settlement with the Ethereum network.
During last year’s Visa shareholder meeting, former CEO Al Kelly also discussed the company’s plans for CBDCs and private stablecoins like Tether. He stated that these currencies have the potential to impact the payments industry significantly and that the company already has several initiatives in the works.
Alexander Stefanov
Reporter at CoinsPress
Alex is Editor-in-Chief of Coinspress and co-founder of Millennial Media Group, with nearly a decade of experience covering financial markets - crypto first, then everything else. It started in 2016 with Bitcoin. Like most people at the time, he didn't fully understand it - so he kept digging. Blockchain, tokenomics, the projects, the cycles. That curiosity never stopped, and eventually pulled him into traditional markets too: equities, commodities, macro. Not because he left crypto behind, but because you can't properly understand one without the other. What drives him is straightforward: he wants to know why something is happening, not just that it's happening. Most market coverage stops at the headline - price up, price down, here's a chart. Alex finds that kind of reporting actively unhelpful. If you walk away from an article without understanding the mechanism behind the move, what did you actually learn? He holds a degree in Tourism from New Bulgarian University - not the most obvious path into financial markets, but markets have a way of pulling in people who are simply too curious to stay out. He has authored over 200 in-depth analyses and more than 10,000 articles across crypto and traditional finance. He still thinks every day in markets teaches him something new. That's probably why he hasn't stopped.
