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Cu Sheffield, Head of Cryptocurrency at Visa, a global payments company operating in over 200 countries, confirmed that they have deployed their first payer smart contract on the Goerli testnet of the Ethereum smart contract platform.
Visa is experimenting
In a May 17, 2023 tweet, Sheffield said that Visa will continue to research and experiment with account abstraction and EIP-4337 in the coming days.
His comments were echoed by a team member who said the payment company is actively exploring the potential of smart contracts and the future of programmable money and payments.
As part of its Goerli testnet experiment, Visa will look at how it can further leverage the benefits of EIP-4337 to deploy a functional payer smart contract to evaluate its usefulness.
A payer is a smart contract account that Visa says sponsors transaction fees for contract accounts. These trials are being conducted on Goerli, a public testnet on Ethereum where users can test decentralized applications (DApps) without gas fees.
In particular, a payment technology company will focus on how best to deploy a payer smart contract to serve its customer base. Interestingly, Visa will consider whether its customers can pay fees with alternative tokens like USDT rather than ETH.
According to Visa, this will help solve real problems and improve the user experience when publishing transactions online.
Ethereum Price May 18 | Source: ETHUSDT on Binance, TradingView
EIP-4337 May Open More Opportunities for Ethereum
EIP-4337 is an improvement proposal recently approved by the Ethereum developers for integration into the mainnet. The proposal defines an account abstraction standard for the Ethereum blockchain.
Account abstraction is the idea of separating the logic of deployed decentralized applications from account management.
The implementation of this proposal introduces a “smart account” that is entirely code-driven. This code manages, for example, the social recovery of private keys or the addition of multi-wallet signatures.
Thus, more possibilities can be opened up, improving the usability. Subsequently, this can speed up adoption by releasing features such as passwordless login or one-click transactions.
Analysts say the ideas proposed by EIP-4337 will provide flexibility for organizations or individuals developing Ethereum wallets and tokens. Developers will also be allowed to be more creative when launching wallets that don’t compromise security or ease of use.
This is not the company’s first foray into blockchain, as Visa is actively developing Ethereum-based products and even investing in blockchain companies.
In March 2023, the payment company launched a cryptocurrency advisory service for its clients. The service is designed to advise companies on the benefits and risks of cryptocurrencies, helping them make informed decisions.
In February 2023, Visa invested in Anchorage Digital, a cryptocurrency custodian.
