Visa Using Stablecoin To Settle Transactions in Lure To Fintechs (bloomberg.com) 18
Visa said its payments network will use a stablecoin backed by the U.S. dollar to settle transactions, as cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology gain more acceptance in the established financial system. From a report: As part of a pilot program, Visa is using USD Coin to settle transactions over Ethereum, with the help of the Crypto.com platform and Anchorage, a digital-asset bank, according to a statement Monday by the San Francisco-based payments giant. Visa will offer the service to more partners later this year. Traditional financial companies are beginning to embrace cryptocurrencies and blockchain projects more than a decade after the creation of Bitcoin in 2009. Jack Forestell, Visa's chief product officer, said the firm's move is partly an effort to serve financial-technology companies.
So a gift card program? (Score:5, Interesting)
And yeah, I know the stable coin networks don't necessarily burn electricity like BTC does (I think they're all proof of stake) but they're not free either.
Finally as others have pointed out Visa isn't really doing Crypto payments, they're too high risk. What they're doing is acting as an exchange. E.g. they do the exchange for cash, pay the merchant in cash, and pocket their fees (making sure they're high enough to cover their spread of risk).
Seems like a whole lot of work for not much in return. Except the ability to buy illegal drugs, which shouldn't be illegal in the first place.
Re: So a gift card program? (Score:2)
More like a prepaid credit card program, but with far less money laundering provisions.
The regulatory regime is light to non existent, that's why asset backed cryptocurrencies are so interesting.
Re: (Score:2)
The regulatory regime is light to non existent, that's why asset backed cryptocurrencies are so interesting.
They're probably inviting SEC ire if they're not registered as securities... since units of an "Asset-backed" cryptocurrency sounds a lot like another name for shares in a Fund or Unit Trust, ETF. The public being offered the ability to get shares backed by an asset or group of assets = within SEC regulatory purview.
Re: So a gift card program? (Score:3)
I mean USDC isnâ(TM)t a gift card, it is backed by coinbase and can be transferred from ethereum wallet to ethereum wallet. I canâ(TM)t split a 50 dollar giftcard, 30 to you and 20 to the guy who hates cremier, whereas USDC that would take two transactions (and I would need to pay a bit of ether to make it go).
The article doesnâ(TM)t say what Visa plans to DO with this though, or how much will be involved. A lot of crypto folks have noticed that the more stablecoims are minted, the higher B
Re: (Score:2)
What they are describing is not a gift card. They are describing a distributed ledger for US currency that doesn't require a central authority for reconciliation. This actually is a very good use for blockchain (assuming the computational cost isn't excessive) for tracking currency exchange in a network of authoritative entities (aka, the world banking system).
Re: (Score:2)
> They are describing a distributed ledger for US currency that doesn't require a central authority for reconciliation
That's not accurate either though. They are saying that they will use USD Coin (that's the stablecoin of Coinbase and Centre: https://www.coinbase.com/usdc [coinbase.com] ), specifically.
This means that while there will be a distributed ledger for what they plan to use, that ledger is specifically the ethereum blockchain (because USDC is an ERC20 token). And that there IS, in fact, a centralized sour
Re: (Score:2)
You are misconstruing the use of "centralized" here. Yes, it's tied to a real currency with an authority for the conversions to USD. But reconciliation of transactions within this network does not require a centralized clearing house. It's a truly distributed ledger which is a valuable thing for banking and why every large bank is researching blockchain. Imagine 10 large banks all sending each other hundreds of thousands (or millions) of daily transactions. At the end of each day they have to track across a
Re: BTC removes counterparty risk| Stablecoin does (Score:2)
Monero is not designed to be decentralized?
Keep in mind, this is the cryptocurrency whose algorithm is ASIC resistant (theyâ(TM)ve gone through a couple iterations), such that it is almost entirely mined on CPU, with decentralization being the explicit goal.
How is it not decentralized? How is is not designed for that?
Re: BTC removes counterparty risk| Stablecoin doe (Score:2)
How is Monero not designed to scale?
I guess another way of asking is, how is Monero not designed to scale but, say, bitcoin and ethereum are?
Re: BTC removes counterparty risk| Stablecoin doe (Score:2)
Ok so the argument is that Monero transactions are five times bigger than bitcoin transactions on the blockchain. I doubt that means much at all- if your ledger already grows without limit, you will need a solution whether or not it is five times faster growth or not.
I also guess that if you want like some sidechain, like liquid, it could be applied to any of the blockchains?
Anyway if Monero does not scale, then bitcoin does not either, and vice versa.
A dollar-pegged stablecoin (Score:4, Informative)
So the features of this coin will be: no hoardable value because it's simply USD, but with the slow costly transaction processing of blockchain. Got it.
Re: (Score:2)
Blockchain doesn't have to be slow and costly. BitCoin is, and Proof of Work implementations tend to be more costly than Proof of Stake, but nothing implicitly necessitates high computational costs for a blockchain.
Luring Fintechs? (Score:3)
I wasn't aware the tech market was that big in Finland. Visa must know something I don't.