Visa proposes Ethereum auto-payment scheme

Visa has proposed a blockchain account architecture that would enable Ethereum users to set up auto-payments from their own wallet.

The payments giant described its approach in a blog post on Monday, Dec. 19. That post summarized an earlier research paper that was published in August.

To accomplish automatic payments, Visa suggests leveraging Account Abstraction, an Ethereum feature that is presently being considered by core developers.

According to the corporation, this allows consumers to set up recurring bill payments. At the most basic level, Ethereum does not permit this since automated smart contracts cannot request transactions. User accounts must instead start and send transactions manually.

Although bank accounts and custodial crypto wallets can be easily utilized to set up auto-payments, Visa warned that this form of payment is “not as straightforward to execute on a blockchain.” As a result, implementing the feature in a self-custodied wallet — one where the user has entire authority over their cash — is difficult.

The company revealed that it studied a possible solution as part of its internal Crypto Hackathon challenge this year.

Visa claimed that it was able to merge the functionality of user accounts and smart contracts into a single type of Ethereum account by employing account abstraction. The resulting account was dubbed a “delegable account” by the corporation.

A merchant can use this method to deploy an automatic payment smart contract. A merchant can trigger a payment by invoking the charge function of the automatic payments contract when a user with a delegable account authorizes permission. The user's delegable account also puts the auto-payment contract to a whitelist for future payments.

Visa pointed out that Ethereum has yet to implement Account Abstraction, which is part of many proposals such as EIP-4337. In light of these constraints, Visa created delegable accounts on StarkNet, an Ethereum layer-2 network that extends the functionality of the basic blockchain to allow the feature.

Although Visa appears to have developed a functional auto-payments solution, it has not indicated that it will make the capability available to its customers.

It appears unlikely that the capability will be included in Visa's extensive range of cryptocurrency payment cards, which are frequently tied to custodial exchanges. The capability could, however, be employed in Visa's merchant- and bank-oriented settlement services, which may need to connect with non-custodial Ethereum wallets.

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