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Payment technology company Visa announced on Monday that it has purchased a CryptoPunk as it enters the world of non-fungible token (NFT) trading.
Visa bought CryptoPunk 7610, one of 3,840 female punks, for around $ 150,000 last week. CryptoPunks are considered the original NFTs, launched in 2017 by Larva Labs. This is a collection of 10,000 pixel art images of misfits and eccentrics. Each CryptoPunk has its own personality and a unique combination of features.
“We felt that CryptoPunks would be a great addition to our collection of artifacts that can represent and celebrate the past, present and future of commerce,” Cuy Sheffield, Visa Crypto Manager, told The Block in a brief. interview.
Visa has several vintage trade-related pieces as part of its art collection, including early paper credit cards and knuckle busters, a device used by merchants to record credit card transactions before the advent. electronic point-of-sale terminals, Sheffield said.
When asked why Visa added a CryptoPunk to the collection, Sheffield said that CryptoPunks “pioneered NFT technology and the NFT trade wave”, so Visa wanted to own a punk. He said the decision was less about individual punk and more about CryptoPunks in general, given that this is a historic NFT project.
Visa worked with Anchorage Digital to buy the CryptoPunk, which means Anchorage facilitated the transaction and is keeping the NFT for Visa, Sheffield said. “We bought it in Anchorage using fiat,” he said. Visa first partnered with Anchorage earlier this year to settle payments in the USDC stablecoin on Ethereum.
NFT in commerce
Visa believes that NFTs will play an important role in the future of commerce.
NFTs can help individual content creators and small and medium-sized businesses in new ways, Sheffield said. “NFTs are an intersection of culture and commerce,” he added.
Sheffield compared NFTs to the early days of e-commerce, saying e-commerce allowed a small business to sell online and reach customers around the world. But they still have to produce and ship physical goods, which can have high upfront costs. So, NFTs allow a small business to tap a public blockchain to create digital goods, which can be instantly delivered to a crypto wallet anywhere in the world, Sheffield said. “We can envision a future where a crypto address becomes as important as your mailing address,” he said.
Visa is seeing “quite a bit” of interest from merchants, brands and content platforms looking to participate in the NFT space. “So now we are committed to start helping clients find ways to participate in the NFT commerce ecosystem,” Sheffield said.
Visa has also published a white paper on NFTs to help businesses understand how they can integrate NFTs into their platforms and how Visa can help them.
As Visa’s lead role, the company wants to help consumers buy NFTs, and merchants accept NFTs as easily as they do for traditional products and e-commerce, Sheffield said.
Visa is currently “actively engaged” with a number of its customers, helping them understand ways to participate in the NFT ecosystem, Sheffield said, declining to provide specific names.
Visa set up its in-house crypto team in 2019 and has taken several initiatives in the space since then. Visa recently became the first major payments network to use a stablecoin to settle a transaction. It has also set itself the goal of facilitating payments in digital currency from the central bank or CBDC, as The Block recently reported.
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© 2021 The Block Crypto, Inc. All rights reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial or other advice.
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