Visa introduces auto payments feature for non-custodial Ethereum wallets

Payment giant Visa considers offering its users automated on-chain crypto payments. The feature will use Ethereum’s Account Abstraction solution.

Visa has released a technical paper detailing plans to make it possible for its customers to make seamless recurring payments via their non-custodial Ethereum-based wallets. The proposed system will utilize Ethereum’s Account Abstraction feature and smart contacts to enable automated programmable payments. 

Recurring payments for self-custody wallets

In the traditional financial ecosystem, debit/credit card holders can easily set up recurring payments on their cards via their mobile banking apps and automatically send funds to another entity at a set date and time. Visa is looking to introduce automated on-chain payments for crypto users.

Per a blog post released by Visa on Dec. 19, the company explored the concept of automated on-chain crypto payments during its last Crypto Hackathon held earlier in the year. 

To make it possible for non-custodial wallet holders to create automated, recurring payments, Visa explored Ethereum’s Account Abstraction (AA) solution. This proposal aims to make automatic on-chain payments possible via smart contracts.

Despite the usefulness of AA, the feature is yet to be supported by Ethereum. As such, Visa has chosen StarkNet, a permissionless ZK-Rollup-based layer-2 network on Ethereum, to bring its delegable accounts solution to life.

“Because Ethereum does not support AA yet, we implemented our delegable accounts solution on StarkNet. With StarkNet’s account model, we were able to implement our delegable accounts solution thus enabling auto payments for self-custodial wallets.”

Visa’s press release

While Visa’s on-chain auto payments ‘ experiment’ for non-custodial Ethereum wallets was hugely successful, the company has not stated when this feature will be made available to users.