Visa Expands USDC Settlements on Solana Blockchain in Partnership with WorldPay, Nuvei
Date: 2023-09-05 Author: Karina Ziganova Categories: BLOCKCHAIN, IN WORLD
Visa expanded the settlement capabilities of USD Coin (USC) to the Solana blockchain with merchant acquirers Worldpay and Nuvei, according to a September 5 announcement.
The move suggests that some merchants who are affiliated with WorldPay and Nuvei are now able to receive payments in USDC directly rather than the traditional fiat currency when customers make purchases with their Visa cards.
Cuy Sheffield, the head of Visa Crypto on the X thread (formerly Twitter) gave an explanation of the meaning of this. According to him, Visa has been testing USDC as a treasury option since 2021 when it only partnered with Crypto.com for a live pilot.
The program enabled the payment company to make settlements with the Crypto.com card program in Australia using the Ethereum network through a Visa-managed Circle account.
The company plans to implement the same program on Solana, as well as use its dedicated Circle account to make payments on the WorldPay and Nuvei online payment networks. This enables service providers to make payments directly in stablecoins rather than using fiat money.
Cryptocurrency is currently penetrating the traditional system of finance as well.
Although there is still regulatory uncertainty around cryptocurrencies, stablecoins have become more attractive to traditional players due to their similarity to central bank digital currencies (CBDc).
In its recent past, PayPal has announced that it will release a stablecoin based on Ethereum PYUSD called "PAXOS". According to the company, US dollar deposits and treasury bonds fully support the stablecoin.
Mastercard has announced a CBDC partnership program with several crypto companies, including Ripple and ConsenSys, to jointly develop CBDS.
To experiment with the tokenization of another traditional payment infrastructure, Swift has partnered with Chainlink.
But the interest of traditional players is due not only to the novelty of blockchain technology. This is also related to the fact that most of them recognize the possibility that the technology may become a serious competitor.
The London-based hedge fund Brevan Howard Brownship reported that in 2022, stablecoins that are pegged to the US dollar had $1 trillion worth of transactions. This is about ten times the cost of transactions that PayPal processes. And only $0.6 billion less than Visa operations.
