Global payment network Visa has shifted its focus toward mainstream adoption and stablecoins.
Yesterday, Visa announced that the company is hiring senior software engineers to work on an “ambitious crypto product roadmap”. Writing on Twitter, Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto at Visa, stated that the openings are to help drive “mainstream adoption of public blockchain networks and stablecoin payments.”
A follow up tweet stated that the company is particularly interested in engineers with experience in Github Copilot and other AI assisted tools to “write and debug smart contracts”.
The job description omits specific details, but it appears that the product roadmap will be Ethereum-based. Prospective engineers are expected to have a good understanding of layer-1 and layer-2 solutions, alongside experience writing smart contracts using Solidity.
What is Solidity?
Solidity was developed by the Ethereum Foundation and is used for writing smart contracts for a variety of purposes, including decentralized applications (Dapps), initial coin offerings (ICOs), and other blockchain-based use cases.
Further alluding to Ethereum, the description requires a good understanding of ERC-4337 – a new Ethereum standard that achieves account abstraction without changing the consensus-layer. ERC-4337 means that contracts can be created in a single contract account, making crypto wallet designs more user-friendly.
Mass adoption seems to be a major goal of the new initiative.
The posting states: “the Visa Crypto Team is building the next generation of products to facilitate commerce in everyone’s digital and mobile lives. Our focus is to build intuitive features that expose profound new value for our customers.”
Visa has never been one to shy away from crypto, particularly from stablecoins.
In 2021, Visa announced that it would allow the use of USD Coin (USDC), a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar, to settle transactions on its payment network. This means that Visa can use USDC to facilitate payments without the need for traditional fiat currencies.
The payment giant has also partnered with several cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets including crypto.com, Coinbase and BlockFi to offer Visa debit cards that allow users to spend their cryptocurrencies at millions of merchants worldwide.
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