Investing.com – Visa (NYSE: V) announced Monday that it will allow the use of the cryptocurrency USD Coin to settle transactions on its payment network, the latest sign of the growing acceptance of digital currencies by the mainstream financial industry. .
Visa has launched the pilot program with Crypto.com crypto and payment platform and plans to offer the option to more partners later this year, Reuters reports.
The USDC coin is a stablecoin cryptocurrency whose value is directly pegged to the US dollar.
Visa’s move comes as major financial firms, including BNY Mellon (NYSE: BK), BlackRock (NYSE: BLK), and Mastercard (NYSE: MA), have adopted some digital currencies, leading to predictions that cryptocurrencies will be they will become a regular part of investment portfolios.
Also read: Bitcoin breaks records: More financial giants ‘sign up’ to crypto
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) CEO Elon Musk said last week that customers can buy their electric vehicles with bitcoin, marking a major step forward for the use of cryptocurrency in commerce.
“We see a growing demand from consumers around the world to be able to access, maintain and use digital currencies and we are seeing demand from our customers to be able to build products that provide that access to consumers,” says Cuy Sheffield, head of crypto at Visa.
Traditionally, if a customer chooses to use a Crypto.com Visa card to pay for coffee, the digital currency found in a cryptocurrency wallet must be converted to traditional money.
Visa’s latest step, which will use the Ethereum blockchain, removes the need to convert digital currency to traditional money for the transaction to settle.
Visa has announced that it has partnered with digital asset bank Anchorage and completed the first transaction this month.
