Visa to Boost Auto Payments for Self-Custodial Wallets with Ethereum L2 Starknet

On December 19, 2022, a post by Andrew Beams, Catherine Gu, Srini Raghuraman, Mohsen Minaei, and Ranjit Kumaresan was published on Visa’s Crypto Thought Leadership blog. Regarding “auto payments for self-custodial wallets,” Visa’s subject brief demonstrates that it is possible to use Ethereum to carry out auto payments from a self-custodial wallet solution. Account abstraction, a feature that Ethereum core developers are currently debating, is used in the concept, though.

According to the Visa blog post, “Account abstraction (AA) is a proposal that aims to combine user accounts and smart contracts into a single Ethereum account type by making user accounts behave like smart contracts.”

In order to get around the problem that AA is currently not possible using Ethereum’s layer one (L1), Visa cryptocurrency researchers have summarized how they can achieve auto payments for self-custodial wallets with AA via the L2 scaling solution Starknet. According to Visa, “Starknet’s account model allowed us to implement our delegable accounts solution, enabling auto payments for self-custodial wallets. The blog post from the company adds:

We see auto payments as a core functionality that existing blockchain infrastructure lacks.

The research paper that served as the basis for the Visa blog post on the topic was released in August 2022. The news comes after Visa applied for trademarks covering a wide range of cryptocurrency products, including a wallet, at the end of October 2022. Visa, one of the biggest payment networks in the world, stated that the company wants to “make money and payments programmable.”

In addition to Visa, Mastercard, the world’s second-largest payment processor and Visa’s rival, is also working to increase the accessibility of cryptocurrency solutions. Mastercard announced: “We’re welcoming a new cohort of startups to ease access to digital assets, build communities for creators, and empower people to innovate for the future through Web3 technologies” during the first week of November 2022.

Similar concepts can be found in Visa’s statements, and a self-custodial wallet solution’s auto-payments may offer a variety of concepts. The blog post from Visa concludes, “We shared a novel solution that leverages the concept of account abstraction to give self-custodial wallets with automatic recurring payments capability.” “Other real-world applications beyond recurring payments could be brought to the blockchain using the approach we have introduced,” the authors write.