An overview of the Visas Crypto team

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Visa, one of the largest digital payment platforms in the world, is digging deep into the cryptocurrency space.

In an interview with Blockworks, Head of Visas CBDC and Protocols, Catherine Gu discussed the company’s current exploration of blockchain protocols and consensus mechanisms. She highlighted Visas’ strong interest in the field, saying it aims to better understand the underlying fundamentals of blockchains and assess its potential role in shaping the future of payments.

The payments giant recently released a technical paper that showed how digital transactions could be transformed using account abstraction (AA).

The Ethereum mainnet currently sees around one million transactions every day. By comparison, Visa averages 707 million transactions per day, the newspaper notes.

The team is currently researching ways to possibly abstract user gas fees and allow users to pay transaction fees using ERC-20 tokens instead of the blockchain’s native cryptocurrency.

The ultimate question is, what is the main pain point? What’s the main use case for really getting blockchains mainstream, Gu told Blockworks.

Gu explained that the team came across the account abstraction during an internal hackathon. She then began to descend down a rabbit hole as they learned deeper details about the space.

There were many things we didn’t fully appreciate, such as simply understanding the basic distinction between a [Externally Owned Account] against one [Contract Account]what this involvement means and how it feeds into UI and UX, Gu said.

Using ready-to-use open source code, the Visa team experimented with the 4337 payer contract to see how users can use it to delegate payments to the payer. The group has also started researching ways to allow gas fees to be paid using any generic ERC-20 token.

Since crypto technology is still fairly new to the Visa team, Gu and his team are working out the interactions between the different contracts and learning the roles of each participant in the network.

Most of what Visa does on the blockchain today is considered an experiment, Gu commented.

I would still consider what we’ve done purely as research because it’s a far cry from how we thought our eventual product roadmap should look like, she said.

Become an SME and work with the largest crypto community

As the Visas crypto team is still in its infancy, Gu explains that there is no clearly defined roadmap that exists today.

Despite this, she noted that the collective goal for her and her team is to become subject matter experts and discover concrete developments from there.

We really need to understand the technology in depth, that’s the main focus of the product team once we get to that stage, we’ll be looking for ways to contribute back, we want to share these ideas with the crypto community and encourage other companies and developers to come and give us feedback, Gu said.

Much of the visa research can be found on their Crypto Thought Leadership website. In addition to examining abstraction, Gu and his team are also exploring themes of interoperability, scalability, and privacy.

As blockchain technology matures, we’re really thinking about different user cases, whether it’s consumers, institutions, and even central banks exploring CBDCs, privacy is going to be a big area of ​​focus , she said. So for us, I think it will be important to understand both the implications but also the design of privacy in the future.

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