In wake of fast crypto currency adoption in traditional finance, financial transaction giant Visa plans to provide the infrastructure to traditional banks that will enable them seamlessly offer crypto currency products and services to their customers.
This means that, as part of the usual customer banking experience, customers will be able to buy and sell crypto currencies and stable coins as investments through their favorite banks. Visa plans to do this by providing an application programming interface (APIs) that banks will use to connect to the infrastructure of its partner Anchorage, a federally chartered digital asset bank.
This comes in the wake of several letters from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency giving banks the green light to custody crypto and the ability to conduct payments and other activities with stable coins.
Digital bank First Boulevard is the first bank involved in the pilot; Visa has issued a wait list for other banks. First Boulevard, the first firm to join the Visa pilot, is a digital bank that is building tools to help African Americans passively build wealth and will launch sometime in early 2021. The bank plans on using the Bitcoin services and its partnership with Visa to educate its customers about bitcoin as a way to close the general wealth disparities faced by Black communities, said Donald Hawkins, president and CEO of First Boulevard.
What does this mean to you?
If this movement makes it way in to the Nigerian banking space, you will be able to make your crypto currency transactions through your favorite Nigerian banks, instead of going through a wallet. This is indeed a welcome development because of the lack of trust that can come with using a digital wallet to trade and store your crypto assets.
Victor Nnadi is an Independent Economics Researcher and a Securities Trader.
