Visa to Facilitate Automated Payments on the Ethereum Blockchain
Reports have surfaced that Visa (NYSE: V ) is working to facilitate automatic payments using users’ personal Ethereum (ETH) crypto wallets. In the future, subscribers’ video-on-demand, phone and electricity bills can be paid directly from their self-storage crypto wallets.
Thanks to automated systems, customers will be able to initiate payments quickly. Automated bill payments are routine in the conventional financial sector; Visa seeks to merge this idea with blockchain technology.
Today, @Visa announced a major industry first: the use of USD Coin (USDC) to settle a transaction with Visa over @Ethereum public #blockchain: pic.twitter.com/GVVGrzuBgo
— VisaNews (@VisaNews) 29 March 2021
How Visa-Ethereum’s automatic payment systems work
Visa claims that a new form of self-deposit wallet called “delegable accounts” could make the automatic payment plan a reality. This wallet design rests on Account Abstraction, which can open the door to new types of shared and public wallets.
A user of this software can schedule automated money transfers between two self-service wallet accounts on a regular basis without having to do it manually each time.
In addition, user-created whitelists of pre-approved automatic payments will be possible with the delegable accounts. The owner’s signature will no longer be required for any payments.
However, the firm admitted in its technical paper that intensive engineering work is required to support the technology behind the delegable accounts. The user’s account should work in the same way as a smart contract if the technology is to be useful.
When it comes to Ethereum accounts, Visa claims that delegable accounts are the most versatile since they act as user accounts and smart contracts.
Visa aims to utilize Blockchain to its full potential
Visa’s proposed use of blockchain technology for automatic payments is one component of the company’s larger initiative to develop blockchain-based innovations using Ethereum’s robust computing capacity. The payments giant has been studying innovative ways to circumvent the strict restrictions of Ethereum transactions for some time now.
According to Visa’s head of central banks’ digital currencies and protocols, the primary need is for the technology to perform as efficiently as today if payment facilitation is a significant use case for blockchain.
Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin mentioned Account Abstraction before, back in 2015. The computer programmer at the time advocated researching and creating a system that merged Ethereum-based wallets with smart contracts.