Visa has supported a partnership by Huobi and Solaris to permit their European users to make payments from their crypto account using Visa-backed debit cards.
Creating diverse payment options (with each fiat and digital currencies) as Blockchain innovations evolve has turn into a part of the mission of many financial institutions. Visa, a trusted leader within the digital payment industry, can also be a part of this vision.
More About The Debit Card
Crypto exchange Huobi recently announced a brand new partnership project with European Financial services provider Solaris. The partnership would launch a debit card powered by Visa to permit users to initiate crypto-to-fiat currency payments.
Users inside the European Economic Area (EEA) may have access to the debit card in Q2 of 2023. The EEA includes all of the countries that make up the European Union.
Andrea Ramiono, chief strategy officer at Solaris, commented on the partnership. He said the event is step one within the Solaris Huobi partnership, hinting at the potential of more innovations from their collaboration. This development marks a milestone in Huobi’s efforts to make virtual assets accessible to everyone.
The Huobi Visa card shouldn’t be the primary within the EU. In 2020, Binance launched a Visa-backed crypto-to-fiat card that permits European residents to withdraw funds from their Binance wallets.
Visa has supported many crypto innovations and pioneered several crypto-fiat gap-bridging projects. For instance, on October 22, Visa partnered with Blockchian.com to supply a crypto debit card to U.S. residents.
Visa also collaborated with ZELF, a fintech company, to launch an anonymous debit card with a crypto recharge like Huobi. The debit card allows users to open a USD-based checking account with only their names, email, and phone number.
Visa Proposes Self-Custodial Wallet For Automated Crypto Payments
Via a blog post on December 20, 2022, Visa proposed a brand new crypto solution. The project would allow service providers to drag funds from users’ Ethereum wallets without constant manual authorizations on every transaction. It’s synonymous with recurring subscription billings in the standard banking industry, where users can authorize monthly auto-billing on some services like Netflix.
Based on Visa, automated recurring payments in crypto could be possible via a brand new self-custodial wallet called “delegable accounts.” The self-custodial wallet would base on the Account Abstraction (AA) concept. Users can transfer funds mechanically from their self-custodial wallet account at recurring intervals by establishing a programmable payment instruction.
The AA-based self-custody wallets would allow user account functions like smart contracts. It implies that individuals can schedule transactions while not having authorization every time.
In 2015, Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s cofounder, proposed this idea to permit ETH-based wallets and smart contracts to mix into one account. The post noted that “AA” was a part of many Ethereum Improvement Proposals in previous years. But it surely failed resulting from implementation difficulties, similar to the necessity to satisfy several protocol changes and security guarantees.
Based on the Visa team, it is less complicated to integrate the auto-payment system through wallets hosted on third parties like crypto exchanges. Nonetheless, the danger involved is that users must trust their funds within the care of those third parties. Considering the experience with bankrupt exchange FTX and others, entrusting funds to 3rd parties has proven dangerous.
The Visa team confirmed that the delegable accounts pilots on a non-public chain from StarkNet, a layer-2 scaling solution, were successful. With the success rate of Visa’s previous crypto payment projects, we are able to only expect more innovations in the longer term.