Visa Blog Post Hints at Future Digital Currency Projects

Hailing digital currency’s potential to democratize electronic payments, financial services giant Visa appeared on Wednesday to redouble its efforts to “shape and support” cryptocurrency’s place in the “future of money.”

• Three “key values” will now steer Visa’s digital currency playbook: maintaining robust data protection standards; remaining network and currency agnostic; and partnering with projects that align with the payments firm’s existing expertise, it wrote in a blog post.
• Already a crypto bridge for tens of millions of merchants, Visa cast its digital currency partnerships as critical to preserving what it said was six decades of innovation. “Extending this legacy into the decades ahead requires continuous innovation and collaboration with” the public and private sector, it said.
• The publicly traded firm cited its business collaborations with crypto exchange Coinbase and investment in the crypto custodian Anchorage. It also claimed that its research team influenced the Zether and FlyClient crypto projects.
• Visa said it is also working directly with policymakers and non-governmental organizations to “help shape the dialogue” around digital currencies, including the evolution of central bank digital currency, or CBDC.
• More announcements on the digital currency front are coming in the months ahead, Visa teased, but it did not explicitly announce anything Wednesday. Visa did not return requests for comment.