After MasterCard, VISA Announces Plans Around Crypto Development

After MasterCard’s recent announcement on expanding support to cryptocurrencies, VISA has laid out a similar press release willing to keep up with the competition. VISA is planning to make it quicker and easier to spend digital currency worldwide. 

According to their announcement, around the world, more than 25 digital currency wallets have linked their services to Visa and they wish to extend it to 61 million existing VISA customers. Mastercard’s primary engagement is with Wirex which will enable direct crypto access to customers.

Like Mastercards’ Accelerate Program, VISA has deployed the FastTrack program. This helps Fintechs, including those in the digital currency space, integrate quickly with Visa’s global network. It plans to extend support to digital currencies and blockchain networks in accordance with client and customer demand.

It has also called upon the central banks in exploring the concept of Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).

The research team at the organization is into on-chain blockchain research which includes smart contract capabilities, privacy and security improvement on Bitcoin and Ethereum. It introduced two novel projects, FlyClient (to improve the process of validation via nodes). It is a novel transaction verification light client for chains of variable difficulty.

The second project is Zether, a payment mechanism which will implement privacy for the execution of smart contracts. The elaborate research papers of the two projects can be found on the links.

The goals and values set by the two FinTech giants are remarkably similar and plan on adding new partners soon. They are also in touch with leading regulatory agencies and organizations of the world to comply with anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist funding guidances.

How do you these announcements changing the institutional and retail view of crypto? Please share your views with us.