American payments giant Visa is not slowing down its cryptocurrency plans despite last year’s bear market, according to a series of tweets on Tuesday from the firm’s crypto head Cuy Sheffield.
See related article: Bitcoin surpasses Visa’s market cap to be 11th largest asset in the world
Fast facts
- Sheffield said that a Reuters story claiming both Visa and fellow payments company Mastercard were slowing their crypto push was “inaccurate” regarding Visa.
- “Despite the challenges and uncertainty in the crypto ecosystem, our view has not changed that fiat-backed digital currencies running on public blockchains have the potential to play an important role in the payments ecosystem,” added Sheffield.
- Visa began to offer crypto-linked Visa cards in partnership with several major exchanges in the first half of 2021. The company had plans to roll out the cards to 40 new countries as part of a “long-term global partnership” with Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX before the cryptocurrency exchange collapsed in November.
- Visa also filed two trademark applications in October that hinted at plans to launch a metaverse-related product and crypto wallet used to store digital assets and make payments.
- According to Sheffield, Visa continues to partner crypto companies to improve transactions between fiat money and cryptocurrency and build products that can facilitate digital payments in a compliant and convenient way.
- While prices of Bitcoin have declined since Visa began its crypto integration projects in 2021, amid high-profile collapses such as FTX, Bitcoin recently surpassed Visa in market capitalization for the third time in history.
See related article: Visa explores auto payments on Ethereum
