USD Coin is a stablecoin whose value is pegged directly to the US Dollar.

In a move that sent a powerful signal in favor of the adoption of cryptocurrencies, Visa (NYSE: V), the card giant and multinational financial services corporation, said it will accept the cryptocurrency USD Coin (USDC) for payment settlement on its global network later this year. (Reuters)

In a pilot transaction conducted jointly with partners Crypto.com and Anchorage, Visa used USDC to settle a transaction over the Ethereum blockchain. The company plans a move to strip out the intermediate step of converting cryptos to fiat in its payments processing workflow. This will reduce complexity, transaction time, and costs.

Crypto settlement

Visa said in a statement that it has created a “pathway for digital currency settlement” inside its existing treasury infrastructure. It said the pilot would “allow Crypto.com to send USDC to Visa to settle a portion of its obligations for the Crypto.com Visa card program.”

“The ability to settle in USDC can ultimately help Crypto.com and other crypto native companies evaluate fundamentally new business models without the need for traditional fiat in their treasury and settlement workflows,” Visa said.

“We see increasing demand from consumers across the world to be able to access, hold and use digital currencies and we’re seeing demand from our clients to be able to build products that provide that access for consumers,” Cuy Sheffield, head of crypto at the card giant, told Reuters.

The full-scale deployment of USDC payments will also be a precursor to Visa’s ability to process central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), as and when they launch.

Visa CEO AL Kelly

In a podcast earlier this month, Al Kelly, CEO of Visa, speculated that bitcoin could potentially become “extremely mainstream” within five years.

“Is it going to be extremely mainstream? I’m not smart enough to know but what I am smart enough to do is make sure that our company is in the middle of it today so that if it takes off, we are in the middle of helping move that money.”

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