Visa customers spend $1bn worth of cryptocurrencies in first half of 2021

More than $1 billion was spent by Visa users on products and services through cards linked to cryptocurrencies globally in the first six months of the year, the company said.

The global payments technology business also said it is joining forces with more than 50 cryptocurrency companies to let users frictionlessly convert and spend their digital currencies through its card programmes.

This agreement will give cryptocurrency holders with Visa cards the ability to spend at nearly 70 million merchants globally, even at those that do not accept digital currencies.

“Visa’s strategy to support digital currencies is simply to serve as a bridge between the crypto ecosystem and our global network of 70 million merchants and 10,000 financial institutions,” Akshay Chopra, vice president and head of innovation and design at Visa for Central Europe, Middle East and Africa told The National.

“We just crossed the $1bn mark in spending on various crypto-linked programmes. Of course, that is only a small fraction of the total Visa card spend but considering these programmes didn’t exist in any significant way a year ago, it is an indication that they are slowly gaining traction.”

Some of Visa’s partners in the cryptocurrency market include Circle, BlockFi and Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange that floated on the Nasdaq market in April. These agreements help Visa card holders spend from their cryptocurrency wallets at merchants.

Visa is also working closely with central banks to help them with considerations on how Central Bank Digital Currencies should be designed and how they could be integrated into the payment ecosystem.

“Cryptocurrencies have started to look like an evolution of money,” said Cuy Sheffield, vice president and head of crypto at Visa. “We want to ensure that our processes, products and solutions keep up with this evolution so that these new forms of money can be used in a safe, secure and reliable manner.

“Crypto is not just one thing, it is a general-purpose technology that is leading to new innovations such as bitcoins, stablecoins, NFTs [non-fungible tokens] and CBDCs.”

Stablecoins allow users to convert their dollars into crypto dollars which can then be transferred easily to someone else’s crypto wallet. They make public blockchains useful as payment networks.