Visa engineers are designing an automatic payment app for the Ethereum blockchain

Important and good news for ETH and the entire cryptocurrency world. Crypto-winter does not interfere with the tycoons’ planned ventures.

A team of Visa researchers and engineers have outlined a smart contract application for a self-service wallet on the Etherum blockchain that could enable programmable payment instructions, such as automatic bill payments through a bank account.

 

 

Visa announced the new look of the app in a blog post on Monday.

“To help our customers and partners innovate, we need to dive deeper into technologies that can bring real value to the payments ecosystem,” said Catherine Gu, director of CBDC and protocols at Visa.

“We are focused on developing our core competencies in the Web3 infrastructure layers and blockchain protocols that power cryptocurrency development.”

Visa has published details of the automatic payment app in a new whitepaper that explains how to write a smart contract application for a self-service wallet:

“A wallet that is controlled solely by the user and the associated private key.”

 

This application would allow a user to set up “a programmable payment instruction that can automatically transfer funds from one self-service wallet account to another at recurring intervals, without the need for the user’s active participation each time.”

The app is built around account abstraction (AA), “a developer proposition currently being explored in the Ethereum ecosystem.” Account abstraction makes user accounts in Ethereum act more like smart contracts, allowing users to configure programmable features on their wallets.

In the white paper, Visa engineers demonstrate “a new type of account contract that can delegate the ability to initiate payments from a user’s account to a pre-approved automatic payment smart contract, mimicking the process you use today to set up a recurring card payment.”

 

 

“Our solution for automatic payments is to use AA and create a new type of account agreement – ​​a delegated account,” they write.

“Our main idea is to extend programmable transaction validity rules with a pre-approved list of allowed transactions. Essentially, AA allows us to delegate the ability to instruct a user account to initiate a push payment to a pre-approved autopay smart contract.

 

According to the article, the merchant would first implement an automatic payment smart contract on their website.

 

“When a user with a delegated account visits the merchant’s site, they will see a request to approve automatic payments – similar to Visa approval for payers today,” they wrote.

“Here the user can see the actions that the autopay agreement will perform on the user’s behalf.”

 

The user could then choose to be charged only once a month and could also limit the maximum top-up amount. When a user approves automatic payments, their wallet will add the address of the automatic payment agreement to the list of allowed agreements in the user’s delegated account.

Once concepts like AA are incorporated into the Ethereum blockchain, Visa said their proposal “could help bring familiar payments like automated payments to the blockchain ecosystem.”

“While blockchain technology and digital assets are still in their infancy, we are delving deeper into these emerging innovations to determine how they may impact the flow of money today and in the future,” they wrote.

“Visa will continue to explore these evolving technologies and concepts – including common consensus mechanisms, privacy and scaling solutions, and other possible blockchain use cases – to create a bridge between the crypto ecosystem and our global network of customers and trading locations.”

 

Last month, Visa was forced to end its highly publicized partnership with FTX four days after the exchange filed for bankruptcy. The plan, which was announced in early October, would introduce FTX Visa debit cards in 40 countries, with a focus on Latin America, Asia, and Europe.