Visa is making strategic efforts to include more basic use cases for cryptocurrencies. The world’s largest payments company may soon launch a feature that allows customers to pay for their phones and electricity using self-custodial cryptocurrency wallets.
Visa stated in a report:
“As blockchain adoption increases, there will be a greater need for products with a superior user experience and core functionality that support real use cases.”
Many banks today enable their customers to link their accounts with subscription services. This maintains the cycle by automatically deducting monthly utility costs. Visa is attempting to launch similar services with cryptocurrency as the primary focus.
According to a plan proposed in a blog post by Visa’s thought leadership team on cryptocurrencies, users’ Ethereum-powered crypto wallets could be automatically withdrawn from by providers without the user having to manually approve each transaction.
It is difficult to enable auto-payments for self-custodial wallets because doing so would require granting access to one’s private keys to a smart contract in charge of processing the payments on one’s behalf. In essence, auto-payments pose a risk to the security offered by self-custody.
The Visa team believes that account abstraction, which combines a user wallet and smart contracts in a single Ethereum account, is the solution to that situation.
According to a statement by Visa:
“This solution taps into a concept known as “Account Abstraction” (AA)1, a developer proposal currently being explored within the Ethereum ecosystem. The idea behind Account Abstraction is to make user accounts on Ethereum function more like smart contracts by allowing a user to have programmable features embedded into their wallets.”
According to reports, this would apparently increase the flexibility of the blockchain transaction confirmation process. Visa, for example, thinks it would permit multi-owner accounts and public accounts from which anybody can make a transaction.
Visa added:
“This application could allow a user to setup a programmable payment instruction that can push funds automatically from one self-custodial wallet account to another at recurring intervals, without requiring the user’s active participation each time.”
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