Financial Giant VISA Details Concept Using Ethereum (ETH) for Automatic Payments

A team of researchers at the financial giant VISA has come up with a concept that would enable automatic payments for Ethereum (ETH) self-custodial wallets.

Catherine Gu, the head of CBDC and protocols at VISA, says the company has been “closely tracking the development of the crypto ecosystem” and doing deep dives into Web3 infrastructure.

Gu and a team of researchers released a technical paper explaining how an Ethereum developer proposal known as “account abstraction” could enable automatic payments on the blockchain.

ETH account abstractions aim to enable a contract to be the top account that pays fees and initiates the execution of a transaction.

Explain the VISA researchers,

“Account abstraction (AA) is a proposal that attempts to combine user accounts and smart contracts into just one Ethereum account type by making user accounts function like smart contracts… More generally, the motivating rationale behind AA is quite simple but fundamental: Ethereum transactions today have several rigid requirements hardcoded into the Ethereum protocol.

For instance, transactions on the Ethereum blockchain today are valid only if they have a valid ECDSA [elliptic curve digital signature algorithm] signature, a valid nonce and sufficient account balance to cover the cost of computation.

AA proposes having more flexibility in the process for validating a transaction on the blockchain:

• It enables multi-owner accounts via multisig signature verification.
• It enables the use of post-quantum signatures for the verification of transactions.
• It also allows for a so-called public account from which anyone could make a transaction, by removing signature verification entirely.”

Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin earlier this year named account abstraction as one of his key goals for the project in 2023.

Read VISA’s full research paper here.

Featured Image: Shutterstock/optimarc/Spyro the Dragon