key takeaways
- Visa believes that automatic payments on Ethereum are possible.
- The company shared a whitepaper arguing that account abstraction would allow self-custody wallets to conveniently set up automatic payments.
- The account abstraction could also enable new forms of multi-owner accounts and public accounts.
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Visa is trying to get automatic payments on Ethereum by creating a new type of wallet, a process the company calls “account abstraction.”
Combination of wallets and smart contracts
Visa is looking for ways to help the development of the Ethereum ecosystem.
Today the payments giant published a technical document in which he explored the possibility of developing an automatic payment system for self-custody wallets on Ethereum.
“Online bill pay is growing rapidly, and customers, especially younger ones, expect to be able to set up recurring payments and take advantage of other benefits associated with using their Visa cards,” the newspaper states, before stating that the ease of payment is the main reason why customers tend to change payment methods.
Enabling automatic payments for self-custodial wallets is challenging, as the idea possibly involves giving access to one’s private keys to a smart contract in charge of making payments on their behalf. Indeed, automatic payments can potentially threaten the security provided by self-custody.
According to the Visa team, the solution to that problem comes in the form of account abstraction, which means a combination of user wallet and smart contracts in one Ethereum account. This would reportedly give more flexibility to the process of validating a transaction on the blockchain: among other things, Visa believes it would enable multi-owner accounts (via multi-signatures) and public accounts from which anyone could make a transaction. transaction.
In practical terms, users could whitelist pre-approved automatic payments in a “delegable account,” which would not require the owner’s signature each time a payment is made.
It remains to be seen if account abstraction is all that Visa is aiming for. The team claimed that “because (an automatic payment contract) is a smart contract, a user can be sure that it (cannot) be executed in any other way than as written,” a phrase that may sound a bit awkward. little naive for cryptonatives. having seen their wallets drained when they accidentally signed a malicious smart contract.
Disclaimer: At the time of writing, the author of this article owned BTC, ETH, and various other crypto assets.
