The Visa executive in charge of the payments giant’s crypto department says the company is looking at a future where it has several types of blockchain technology under its scope.
Visa just expanded its stablecoin settlement capabilities to the Solana (SOL) blockchain, launching new cross-border money system using Circle’s USDC.
In a new blog post, the company’s head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield, references the early days of the internet and says that crypto is going through its “broadband moment” of its history where it finds its footing and advances as a technology.
“Blockchains today share some parallels with the early internet — particularly more than their fair share of skeptics, hecklers and critics. It’s hard not to hear echoes of the past’s self-certainty whenever an analyst says something like, ‘blockchains are too slow! Too hard to use! Too expensive!’ or ‘they don’t have any use cases!’
Sure, blockchains have been all of those things, and some use cases are more obvious than others. But the internet was once slow, expensive, and hard to use — and today, it’s fast enough to stream live video from space, cheap enough to be free in a lot of places, and easy enough for a six-year-old to use.
At Visa, we’ve been on the forefront of payments technology for more than six decades. We saw the potential for the internet in its early days and played a major role in helping it scale and support new forms of commerce. Today, we see significant potential for blockchain networks — and many possible futures.”
Sheffield says Visa, which processes nearly four out of every 10 transactions in the world on a daily basis, envisions a future where its networks include crypto technology like stablecoins, and also government-run central bank digital currencies (CBDCs).
“Going forward, we imagine a future where Visa’s network of networks involves more than just multiple currencies and bank settlement rails, but also multiple blockchain networks, stablecoins, and CBDCs or tokenized deposits. We expect traditional fiat and legacy settlement rails to co-exist with tokenized fiat running over global 24/7 real time blockchain networks for a long time. And we see our role as a bridge to meet our clients where they are regardless of preferred currency, settlement network, or form factor.”
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