- During the first fiscal quarter of 2022, crypto payments with Visa cards amounted to $2.5 billion, which represented approximately 70% of all the volume made in fiscal year 2021.
- Crypto card users use them to pay for retail goods and services, as well as restaurants and travel.
- During the first month of 2022, the amount spent by crypto cardholders nearly doubled.
Bitcoin came to the economic world, at a certain point, to “combat” the traditional finance system. However, as the popular saying goes, if you can’t beat them, join them, and this was the case with Visa who joined the cryptocurrency market and is seeing very good results.
The launch of crypto cards was a success for the world’s second largest payment processing company (behind only China’s UnionPay). Since its adoption, the offer has increased significantly and more and more merchants are accepting them. The data released during the earnings call most recent prove it.
“Its numbers in the first fiscal quarter of 2022 amounted to $2.5 billion as adoption grows around the world”, communicated Bitcoinist. Furthermore, in the first month of 2022 alone, the amount of dollars spent for crypto cards doubled from what happened before.
Crypto card payments grow
The 2.5 billion dollars of the first fiscal quarter by the company represents 70% of all the volume made in fiscal year 2021, which gives a small idea of the growth of the sector. What do users spend on? Visa CFO Vasant Prabhu provided details on this issue.
“Looking at the broad categories of spending, we don’t see volume concentrated in a specific business vertical with these programs. People are using their crypto-linked cards to spend in a variety of ways: retail goods and services, restaurants, travel. Increasingly treated as a general purpose account”, he assured.
Although January has been a difficult month for the cryptocurrency ecosystem, losing a lot of value, with Bitcoin having a huge setback, price volatility has not affected the consumption of crypto cards. The company even announced that the use was higher in these times. It is worth remembering that these cards work under the same system as a debit card: they must have money in the account in order to be used.
Visa and its crypto associations
This is not the only approach Visa with digital assets, but has also already made partnerships with more than 65 crypto platforms and centralized exchanges. Marketing and advertising is an important leg for the California-based company founded in 1970.
This was communicated by the CEO of the company, Al Kelly, in charge of presenting the strategy for the future of the company. This will be closer and closer to cryptocurrencies.
“We are providing on-ramps for cryptocurrency players creating connectivity with fiat economies“, said the authority.
Visa is getting more and more into digital assets and it would not be surprising if it adds them to its balance sheet in the medium term. At the moment they have not commented on it, although everything seems to indicate that it would be one of the next steps to be taken by a company with such weight in the economic industry.
Crypto cards, these that mix the above with the modern, have become a great adoption tool worldwide. Users and traders take advantage of these, which is very good news for the health of the cryptocurrency market.
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