According to information from payment giant Visa, the firm has started deploying its first smart contracts on this altcoin.
Visa launches Paymaster trials on this altcoin network
Visa’s head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield, announced on Twitter that the company has launched the first Paymaster smart contract on the ETH Goerli testnet. In this way, Visa will continue to conduct research and experiments on ERC-4337 as part of its experiment.
“We continue to research and experiment with account abstraction and ERC-4337,” Sheffield said in the announcement. Meanwhile, I’m excited to see Visa implement our first Paymaster smart contract on testnet.”
Excited to see Visa deploy our first paymaster smart contract on testnet as we continue to research and experiment with account abstraction and ERC-4337https://t.co/JJNWH2W2Ki https://t.co/RLRDx4yPXS
— Cuy Sheffield (@cuysheffield) May 17, 2023
Visa has previously proposed a system known as “account abstraction” or AA, in which smart contracts can be used to enable automatic programmable payments on Ethereum.
Paymaster implemented today is a smart contract account sponsored by Visa. In particular, it covers the transaction fees of Visa’s contract accounts. These works allow users to test DApps on the Ethereum testnet Goerli. Additionally, Visa is exploring options for its customers to pay with tokens other than ETH. USDT is among the first choices at this point.
Visa plans to use the features of ERC4337
The company recently published a report on its experiments with ERC4337 (Computation Abstraction). ERC-4337 went into effect on the Ethereum network on March 1, 2023. Thus, the Ethereum network gained the ability to trade by username in smart contracts.
In this experiment, Visa put together two prototypes that illustrate potential use cases for a new Paymaster flow: first, using Paymaster to facilitate the use of ERC20 to pay gas fees, and second, fully covering gas fees for a transaction.
For the first experiment, the team created a paymaster contract that first gets the exchange rate of ETH to the ERC20 token (L110), and then transfers that amount of ERC20 tokens to itself (L112).
Contract link: https://t.co/aOlPXZGWUU. pic.twitter.com/vEr4Ul8XXp
— cygaar (@0xCygaar) May 17, 2023
In parallel, the Visa team deployed experimental Visa Paymaster contracts on Ethereum’s Goerli Testnet. It showed payment with ERC-20 using ERC-4337 Paymaster through initial Visa Paymaster contract. The company is also exploring whether it can pay transaction fees with stablecoins or tokens such as CBDC.
Visa and Mastercard uneasy about crypto bankruptcies
Payments giants decided in February to discontinue their crypto partnerships until the market situation improves. Specifically, Visa has over 70 partnerships with crypto-focused firms. The payments company also partnered with the bankrupt crypto exchange FTX in October 2022. cryptocoin.comAs we reported, FTX announced its bankruptcy in November 2022.
Press Release pic.twitter.com/rgxq3QSBqm
— FTX (@FTX_Official) November 11, 2022
On the other hand, Mastercard has also teamed up with Coinbase, a leading US-based crypto exchange. The partnership agreement focuses on processing NFT payments. It also allowed Coinbase users to use credit/debit cards to purchase NFT.
