Visa, the credit card giant, has joined with Circle to connect 60 million merchants to the US Dollar Coin (USDC), a coin on the Ethereum blockchain. This is yet another sign that cryptocurrencies are integrating even further with mainstream payment currencies.
Although Visa won’t have custody itself of the USDC, it is going to work with Circle to select Visa credit card issuers and integrate the USDC software with their platforms, so that it can be used for payments. What this means is that businesses will soon enough be able to make international payments in USDC to other businesses supported by Visa. The funds will then be converted into national currencies when they are spent anywhere that accepts Visa.
Circle is a part of Visa’s Fast Track program, and when it completes the course next year, that is when this new USDC program will begin, with the issuance of a new credit card that allows users to spend USDC. Visa’s head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield, said, “This will be the first corporate card that will allow businesses to be able to spend a balance of USDC. And so we think that this will significantly increase the utility that USDC can have for Circle’s business clients.”
The partnership between Visa and Circle, helped by the $40 million investment Visa made in another firm developing a platform for holding similar assets issued on a blockchain, “is the latest evidence that the credit card giant sees the technology first popularized by bitcoin as a crucial part of the future of money,” Michael de Castillo writes at Forbes.
Sheffield said, “Blockchain networks and stablecoins, like USDC, are just additional networks. So we think that there’s a significant value that Visa can provide to our clients, enabling them to access them and enabling them to spend at our merchants.”
Currently, according to Visa’s data, “$120 trillion in payments annually are made using checks and instant wire transfers, costing as much as $50 each.” By contrast, since USDC settles on the ethereum blockchain, transactions can close in a little a[s] 20 seconds and, importantly, can be done for nearly free.
Visa has been making strong moves in the cryptocurrency sphere this year. In February 2020. Coinbase became the first company granted principal membership status by Visa. This means that Coinbase, one of the biggest crypto exchanges globally, can in turn issue cards to others.
Circle has done some rethinks of its own in regard to cryptocurrency. In 2019 it had a fire sale of its assets including Poloniex, Circle Invest and Circle Pay. It also rebranded its home page with a focus exclusively on stablecoins and central bank digital currencies. The attraction of the USDC is that it is built on the Ethereum block chain and only tiny amounts of the cryptocurrency ETH are used as “gas” to pay for the transactions.
Jeremy Allaire, the CEO of Circle Internet Finance, says of the new partnership and its probable outcome: “Imagine a capital marketplace that is for anyone who needs capital, or anyone who needs to offer capital that has the same efficiency that Amazon has for e-commerce, the same efficiency that YouTube has for content, effectively, capital markets with the efficiency of the internet, which is essentially zero.” He added, “And that will ultimately return trillions of dollars in value back to the economy, it will reduce costs for every business in the world, it will accelerate the way in which individuals can participate in commercial activity and commerce activity, in conducting their labor and interacting with businesses around the world.”