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Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and other major cryptocurrencies posted new all-time highs last year as crypto adoption for both institutional and retail investors surged. Unsurprisingly, Visa reported a spike in the usage of its crypto-linked cards for the fiscal quarter ended December 31, 2021.
Visa users of crypto-linked cards made $2.5 billion in payments during the company’s first quarter for fiscal 2022, which ended December 31, according to Coindesk. The announcement was made by CEO Al Kelly during the company’s earnings call on Thursday.
What’s surprising is that the first quarter 2022 figure is almost three-fourths of the crypto volume for the entire fiscal year of 2021, which ended on September 30. This shows the rapid growth in the usage of crypto-linked cards for payments.
“This quarter, Visa credentials and crypto wallets had more than $2.5 billion in payments volume, which is already 70% of the payments volume for all of fiscal 2021,” the CEO said, according to Bitcoin.com.
.To make it easier for owners of crypto-linked cards to pay using digital currencies, the company has partnered with more than 60 crypto platforms and exchanges. “We've partnered with more than 60 of the leading crypto platforms, like FTX, BlockFi, Crypto.com, Coinbase, and Binance, to launch card programs that make it easy for consumers to convert and spend digital currency at 80 million merchant locations worldwide,” Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s head of crypto, said in December.
At the moment, more than 100 million vendors in the Visa network are now accepting Visa crypto payments. The company vows to “lean into the crypto space” and improve on connectivity, reliability, scale, consumer value propositions, and security for crypto offerings.
Visa’s payments volume for the first quarter fiscal 2022 increased by 20 percent year over year to $2.966 billion, Yahoo!Finance reported. Meanwhile, the volume of process transactions rose by 21 percent year over year to 46.6 billion, driven by increases in both domestic and international transactions.
