Visa, the payment processing giant has finally joined the highly popular NFT mania with its first-ever purchase. Visa has reportedly bought one of the popular CryptoPunk NFTs, many of which have fetched over a million dollars in the auction. The payment processing giant has spent $150,000 for the digital  CryptoPunk 7610. Visa didn’t directly pay for the avatar and did so in partnership with Anchorage. During the process, Anchorage also became the first-ever US bank to custody an NFT art.

CryptoPunk is considered a blue-chip NFT investment collection as total sales have reached $752 million.

Buy Sheffield, head of the crypto at Visa said,

“We think that NFTs are going to play a really important role in the future of retail and social media, entertainment and commerce. So we wanted to understand firsthand what it takes to acquire, custody, and interact with an NFT. We’ve worked with Anchorage to do this so that we can build the expertise and be better positioned to help clients navigate this space.”

The CryptoPunk collection consists of 10,000 24×24 pixel images of automatically generated avatars. Visa’s CryptoPunk avatar is characterized by a lady with a mohawk and large green eyes.

Over the last 60 years, Visa has built a collection of historic commerce artifacts – from early paper credit cards to the zip-zap machine. Today, as we enter a new era of NFT-commerce, Visa welcomes CryptoPunk #7610 to our collection. https://t.co/XoPFfwxUiu

— VisaNews (@VisaNews) August 23, 2021

Visa Plans to Play a Key Role in Metaverse

The craze around NFTs has only touched higher this bull season as every other brand and celebrity is doing some form of NFT promotion or purchase. The payment processing giant revealed its plans to become the key part of the metaverse. Visa said it aims to become the engine of the Metaverse and plans to buy more NFTs.

“We envision there could be a future where your crypto address becomes as important as your mailing address,” Sheffield says. “In the same way Visa’s been here through shifts of commerce before, we’re excited to help drive this new shift of commerce in the future.” The company also plans to purchase more NFTs.”

About Author

Prashant Jha

An engineering graduate, Prashant focuses on UK and Indian markets. As a crypto-journalist, his interests lie in blockchain technology adoption across emerging economies.