Visa to allow Bitcoin (BTC) buying and payments

Another payments giant will soon be adding crypto functionality to its platform. Visa announced that users to purchase Bitcoin and allow them to use BTC as a payment option at the 70 million merchants affiliated with the network.

Visa CEO Al Kelly said in the Leadership Next podcast published Tuesday that crypto could become “extremely mainstream” within the next five years, according to Bitcoin.com. In view of cryptocurrency’s increasing popularity, the payments giant is adding more crypto features in its platform.

According to Kelly, Visa’s cryptocurrency strategy can be divided into two categories. One is where crypto is viewed as a speculative asset or digital gold that people can access via the platform.

The company plans to add a feature that will allow users to invest in Bitcoin by directly purchase it using Visa cards. “In that category, we are trying to do two things,” the Visa CEO said. “One is enable the purchase of bitcoin on Visa credentials.”

The company is also planning to integrate BTC wallets into its network so it can automatically convert Bitcoin to fiat and use them to pay for purchases. Visa is “working with some bitcoin wallets to allow bitcoin to be translated into a fiat currency and therefore immediately be able to be used at any of the 70 million places around the world where Visa is accepted,” Kelly said.

The second category is on cryptocurrency backed by fiat. “The other category of crypto is digital currencies,” the CEO said. “There, we see a strong potential for those to become a new payment vehicle. In fact, it could be an accelerant in some of the emerging markets as we look around the world,” Kelly added.

At the moment, Visa is already working with 35 fiat-backed cryptocurrency projects, which suggests that the company is interested in stablecoins, according to cryptobriefing.com. In fact, the company is already working with Circle USD, a digital stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar.

The Visa CEO noted that the company does not know whether crypto will eventually go mainstream or fail as “we don’t pick winners and losers” as the company is all about moving money globally. “Today we made the company a company all about money movement globally so any kind of funds that are going to flow, we want to be in the middle of that,” Kelly said.

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