Visa Suggests Design to enable Ether-based Auto Payments
- Visa has suggested a blockchain account design to help Ethereum (ETH) users set up auto-payments from a self-custodied wallet.
- The financial services company proposes using one of the leading Ethereum developer proposals called Account Abstraction.
- The newly-proposed feature could be added to Visa’s extensive range of crypto payment cards, which are related with custodial exchanges.
Institutional interest in crypto assets is on the decline, but there are companies that are still bullish on these blockchain-based assets and believe in their potential. The American multinational financial services company Visa has suggested a blockchain account design that could potentially help Ethereum (ETH) users set up auto-payments from a self-custodied wallet.
On Monday, the payment giant described the approach in a blog post that explained an earlier study that was published in August this year. Visa proposes using one of the leading Ethereum developer proposals called Account Abstraction, bringing a new solution towards a real-world implementation of auto payments.
The new account design would, according to the leading payment services company, allow users to set up recurring bill payments. Notably, because of the fact that automated smart contracts are unable to request transactions, Ethereum does not fundamentally support this. User accounts must manually initiate and transfer funds.
Although setting up automatic payments in bank accounts and custodial cryptocurrency wallets is simple, Visa observed that doing so on a blockchain is “not as straightforward to implement.” As a result, it can be challenging to implement the feature in a self-custodial wallet where the user has total authority over their funds.
Visa highlighted that it was able to merge the features of user accounts and smart contracts into a single type of Ethereum account by employing account abstraction. The subsequent account is called a “delegable account” by the company.
Account abstraction, which proposes having more flexibility in blockchain transaction validation process, enables multi-owner accounts via multisig signature verification and the use of post-quantum signatures for the verification of transactions. Furthermore, by doing away with signature verification entirely, the design permits the creation of a so-called public account from which anyone might complete a transaction. The blog post explains:
“Essentially, AA allows for programmable validity to verify and validate any blockchain transaction. This means that instead of hard-coding validity conditions into the Ethereum protocol that will apply to all transactions in a generalized way, validity conditions can instead be programmed in a customizable way into a smart contract on a per-account basis,” said Visa.
Interestingly, it appears unlikely that the newly-proposed feature will be added to Visa’s extensive range of cryptocurrency payment cards, which are closely related with custodial exchanges. However, the company could possibly use the functionality in its merchant and back-oriented settlement services, which may require some interaction with non-custodial Ethereum wallets.
Interestingly, Visa has struck numerous deals in the crypto world in order to gain an edge over competitors. The company recently struck a deal with crypto exchange, Crypto.com, to debut a new NFT collection that depicted the goals from legendary footballers: Jared Borgetti, Tim Cahill, Carli Lloyd, Michael Owen, and Maxi Rodriguez.
A crypto journalist with over 3 years of experience in DeFi, NFT, metaverse, etc. Parth has worked with major media outlets in the crypto and finance world and has gained experience and expertise in crypto culture after surviving bear and bull markets over the years.
