Digital payments company Visa is investing in building muscle memory that would help it provide global settlements with digital assets and fiat currencies. In a presentation made at StarkWare Sessions 2023, Visa’s Head of Crypto, Cuy Sheffield said the company is on course to let customers use its platform for converting digital assets into fiat currencies, media reports said.
“That’s been one of the areas where we want to build muscle memory. In the same way that we can convert between dollars in euros on a cross-border transaction, we should be able to convert between digital tokenized dollars and traditional dollars,” Sheffield explained.
StarkWare Sessions, a two-day event of Ethereum, StarkNet, and StarkEx communities on February 5-6 in Tel Aviv, Israel, attracted a large number of industry leaders, researchers, and developers who held talks, panels, roundtables, and more.
“We’ve been testing how to actually accept settlement payments from issuers in USDC starting on Ethereum and paying out in USDC on Ethereum. So, these are large value settlement payments,” Cuy Sheffield said at the event.
Recently, Visa’s CEO Al Kelly, while speaking at Visa’s annual shareholder meeting, said that stablecoin and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) have the potential to play an important role in global payments.
Visa uses SWIFT for global settlements but now it’s exploring ways to incorporate blockchain technology into its payments networks.
“We set all over Swift, so we can’t move money as frequently as we’d like because there are a number of limitations that exist in those networks. And so, we’ve been experimenting, we publicly announced. We’ve been testing how to actually accept settlement payments [with stablecoins],” Sheffield explained.
