Visa just announced it will provide data services to blockchain lenders who issue stablecoin-linked cards. Read that sentence again. Blockchain lenders. Stablecoin-linked cards. This is what happens when a payments company gets bored processing actual transactions.
The premise works like this: you hold magic internet money that promises to be worth exactly one dollar. You want to spend it like a normal person. But instead of converting it to dollars, you get a card linked to the magic money, then borrow against that magic money, then Visa helps the lender decide if you're good for it. Four steps where one used to work. Progress.
Visa calls this "expanding data offering for blockchain lenders." They could have called it "helping people spend money in the most complicated way possible" but that probably tested poorly with focus groups. The demand is surging, apparently. Which means somewhere right now a guy is explaining to his wife why he needs to take out a loan against his stablecoins to buy groceries instead of just using the f*cking debit card.
The beautiful part is Visa positioning itself as the bridge between traditional finance and crypto. They looked at blockchain's whole pitch about cutting out middlemen and thought yeah, but what if we added ourselves back in. Twice. And charged fees both times.
This is the future of finance: taking dollars, turning them into not-dollars that are definitely still dollars, putting them on a blockchain, linking them to a card, borrowing against them, then buying coffee. Every step designed by someone who got paid to make simple things complicated.
The retail traders loading up on stablecoin card debt to chase the next Solana shitcoin will be shocked to learn that borrowing money to gamble with borrowed credibility scores ends badly, but Visa will have already collected its processing fees and moved on to the next innovation nobody asked for.
Photo by Oberon Copeland @veryinformed.com on Unsplash
Leave a Comment