Visa to use USDC stablecoin to settle transactions over Ethereum

Multinational financial services company Visa today announced that it will start using a stablecoin backed by the United States dollar to settle transactions on its payments network. 

As part of its pilot program for which the company has partnered with the world-famous cryptocurrency and payment platform Cyrpto.com, Visa will use USD Coin of which the value is pegged to the U.S. dollar, to settle transactions over Ethereum. 

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Visa’s move follows the announcements of other major finance companies such as Mastercard Inc, BNY Mellon and BlackRock which recently introduced support for cryptocurrencies on their networks.

“Crypto-native fintechs want partners who understand their business and the complexities of digital currency,” Jack Forestell, Visa’s chief product officer, said in the statement. “The announcement today marks a major milestone in our ability to address the needs of fintechs.”

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While Visa’s existing settlement process requires its business partners to convert their coins into traditional currency, they will soon be able to settle their transactions directly in USDC. As reported by Forbes, the company has already partnered with 35 cryptocurrency platforms including Crypto.com, Coinbase, BlockFi and Bitpanda, which have over 50 million active users in total.

“We’ve found that many of our crypto partners are building on top of and are using USDC, with many of them paying their employees and vendors with the stablecoin’’, said Cuy Sheffield, who is the head of crypto at Visa. “It was a natural fit.”