Visa to develop Brazilian blockchain-powered CBDC project

Payments giant Visa has unveiled a new blockchain and central bank digital currency (CBDC) project in Brazil.

According to Brazilian media Livecoins, the firm was chosen by the Brazilian central bank to “explore” “innovative” blockchain technology-driven “use cases” for the digital real prototype.

The bank hopes to debut its coin later this year.

It has also claimed that the mint’s will is designed with the aim of helping local businesses.

Visa’s offer was created in collaboration with Agrotoken, Microsoft and Sinqia.

The firm’s solution is a financial platform designed for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Visa said the solution will be of particular interest to small-scale farmers and agribusinesses.

The platform includes an interoperability solution, a Visa innovation called the Universal Payment Channel (UPC).

Using the UPC, the firm claims that traders and companies “can create a connection between” the Brazilian CBDC and “other CBDCs, stablecoins or tokenized deposits.”

This, the four firms claimed, will allow agricultural industry players to use digital reality “in different markets and networks.”

And the firms said the platform would help “expand the funding options available to SMEs to fund their business securely and frictionlessly.”

It will also “reduce the disadvantage caused by a lack of access to traditional services,” they said.

Visa’s blockchain-powered CBDC project – Will it take off in Brazil?

Catherine Gu, the global head of CBDC at Visa, gave the example of “enabling a [Brazilian] soybean producer to create and auction – globally – a contract that has been tokenized on an authorized version of the Ethereum blockchain, using different interoperable forms of money.

The platform, the developers claim, brings existing financial processes and assets into the blockchain protocol.

This move, they say, will “allow farmers to symbolize traditional contracts.”

To do this, Visa said it had tapped into the “agricultural commodity tokenization expertise” of Agrotoken.

Visa claimed this allowed it to transform existing Brazilian legal documents into “onchain, tradable non-fungible tokens (NFTs).”

The payments company added that it had developed a “sealed bid auction solution”.

This solution uses smart contract technology, Visa said.

This, Visa claimed, will allow a pool of global blockchain investors to “participate in the funding process” for SME funding.