Visa records over $1bn crypto spending in six months

Visa has said more than $1bn was spent with its crypto-linked cards in the first half of 2021.

The company said in a statement on Wednesday that the value of crypto assets held in regulated digital wallets was in the hundreds of billions.

It said, “We are partnering with 50 of the leading crypto platforms on card programmes that make it easy to convert and spend digital currency at 70 million merchants worldwide.

“With more than $1bn spent on crypto-linked Visa cards in the first half of 2021, it’s clear that the crypto community sees value in linking digital currencies to Visa’s global network.”

Visa added, “We are seeing digital wallets and crypto platforms build payment products entirely with digital currency. For example, the fast-growing FTX platform, a new Fintech Fast Track member we’re announcing today, is paying 50 per cent of their remote employees in USDC.

“We are making our network more accessible to this growing ecosystem with capabilities like USDC settlement and through our partnership with Circle. As we look to the future, stablecoins are on track to become an important part of the broader digital transformation of financial services, and Visa is excited to help shape and support that development.”

According to the company, there are more than $100bn worth of stablecoins in circulation and hundreds of billions exchanged each month on public blockchains, making stablecoins starting to live up to the promise of a digital fiat.

In a related development, Cointelegraph reported on Wednesday that bitcoin miners’ daily revenue had surged by over 50 per cent.

As miners relocate from China, those unaffected have seen half their competitors disappear overnight, causing a spike in profitability.

“We have a very interesting dynamic where approximately 50 per cent of the power is currently offline and incurring a great number of costs due to logistics and just simply not hashing, having hardware that’s not currently working, and the other 50 per cent has essentially seen half their competition drop off the network,” an analytics firm, Glassnode, said.

Glassnode also added that average block time had hit their highest levels ever over the past week. According to Investopedia, block time is the time required to create the next block in a chain. It is essentially the amount of time it takes for a blockchain miner to find a solution to the hash, the random series of characters that are associated with the block.