Visa roll out auto-pay bills with your crypto wallet

Crypto users are able to automatically pay their electricity and telephone bills via their self-custodial crypto wallets. 

Visa's crypto thought leadership team expressed a solution that would allow providers to automatically pull funds from users of Ethereum-powered crypto wallets without requiring the user to manually sign off on every transaction.

According to Visa, a mechanism isn't possible for owners to sell custodial wallets noting that automated programmable payments that pull payments from a user's account at recurring intervals require engineering work.

In selling custodial wallets the user is the only person in control of the private keys, which mean they need to manually sign off on transaction as a smart contract can't initiate transactions on its own. 

Also, Visa expressed that automatic recurring payments via crypto would be possible via a new type of self-custodial wallet called 'delegable accounts' which is based on the Account Abstraction (AA) concept. 

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Butering put forward the concept in 2015 which essentially allows for Ethereum-based wallets and smart contracts to be combined into a single account among other use cases. 

Through an AA-based self-custody wallet or delegable account, the visa team said that user accounts would function like smart contracts mean that users' accounts would function like Smart contracts means that people can schedule transactions without signing off to initiate every transaction.

This application may allow users to set up programmable payment instructions that can push funds automatically from one self-custodial wallet account to another account at recurring intervals without requiring the user's active participation every time. 

The proposal is part of the crypto-friendly firm's broader research into new avenues for blockchain innovation and to work around rigid requirements hardcoded into Ethereum transactions. 

What is AA? The concept was first brought to life by @vitalik in 2015: https://t.co/X7fBFKnitr
Over the years this has become one of the most active EIP in the Ethereum developer community.

— Catherine Gu (@catgu_) December 19, 2022

The team does admit that while auto payment can be integrated relatively easily via wallets hosted by other parties this of course means the user would have to trust their funds will be managed appropriately by said parties. 

According to the Visa team that it has already successfully tried its delegable accounts on a private chain from the Layer two scaling solution StartNet as the network supports AA.

Furthermore, the post concludes that auto payments are not far away given it was able to implement delegable accounts within StarkNets account mode.

Related: Defrauding millions of investors due to 350 Scam Tokens Created everyday