Visa’s ‘Ambitious Crypto Roadmap’ Includes Stablecoin

Visa has begun hiring for what an executive calls the company’s “ambitious roadmap for crypto products.”

Cuy Sheffield, who oversees the payments giant’s cryptocurrency operations, said on Twitter on Monday (April 24) that the company had just posted new openings for senior software engineers “to help us drive mainstream adoption of public blockchain networks and stablecoin payments.”

He added that Visa is particularly interested in candidates with a background in Github Copilot and other AI-assisted engineering tools used to write and debug smart contracts.

“The Visa crypto team is building the next generation of products to facilitate commerce in everyone’s digital and mobile lives,” the job posting said.

“We are hiring experienced software engineers who are skilled programmers, have experience building highly available and scalable backend systems, and are passionate about the Web3 stack of technologies.”

It adds that Visa is seeking applicants who can help “improve engineering productivity, efficiency, effectiveness and quality of software; write good quality code across different programming languages; and document design trade-offs and long-term architecture decisions.”

This is happening against a backdrop of increased debate about stablecoins and cryptocurrency. As mentioned here earlier this week, it may be tokenized instances that end up gaining ground in that debate.

These deposits are tied to existing bank deposits, “the digital representations of existing bank liabilities held by licensed depository institutions and recorded on distributed ledgers,” PYMNTS wrote.

The tokenized deposit is gaining ground worldwide. Speaking at the Innovate Finance Global Summit last week in the UK, Bank of England Deputy Governor Sir Jon Cunliffe said stablecoins-as-payments may need limits.

He argued: “It is extremely unlikely that any of the current offerings will meet the standards of robustness and uniformity we currently apply both to commercial bank money and to the existing payment systems.”

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote on Wednesday (April 26) that stablecoins could help chart a way forward to regulate cryptocurrency.

Republican lawmakers on the House Financial Services Committee unveiled their version of a new draft stablecoin bill this week after a heated debate on April 19 over an earlier proposal.

The GOP document makes several changes, including giving state regulators more power to charter stablecoin issuers, something that New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) Superintendent Adrienne A. Harris had advocated.

It also narrows the bill’s focus, including the exclusion of algorithmic stablecoins. The original bill required stablecoin issuers, banks and non-banks, to register with the Federal Reserve even if they had received government approval. The new version still allows the Fed to take final enforcement action against issuers whose states fail to do so as recommended.