Source: AdobeStock / images Visa has proposed that Ethereum users be able to perform automatic programmable payments without the intervention of any third party. According to a recent crypto thought leadership post, the company intends to achieve this goal by implementing a smart contract that acts as an intermediary between a user account and a contract account, resulting in the creation of a self-custodial wallet capable of making automatic recurring payments without the involvement of banks or other centralised entities. While such services are already available to bank account holders and customers of traditional financial institutions, they are not yet available through blockchain networks. Visa intends to be the first corporation to introduce such capabilities to the Ethereum network. "These sorts of transactions are not that easy on the blockchain," the business stated, adding that it wants to put the solution on the Ethereum layer 2 networks, StarkNet. Catherine Gu, Visa's head of central bank digital currencies and protocols, who co-wrote the proposal, stated: "If one of the key use cases of blockchain is for payments, then the basic need is that the blockchain performs just as well, if not better than it does now." Visa stated that this functionality was developed as a consequence of its Crypto Hackathon Challenge, 2022, a competition among the company's employees held in February to answer the challenge of how an ETH owner might pay a bill with crypto at a later date while momentarily disconnected from internet connectivity. On the Ethereum network, there are currently two types of accounts: Externally Owned Accounts (EOA), which are controlled by a private key, and Contract Accounts (CA), which are effectively smart contracts. CAS cannot start transactions, although EOAs may. However, it is feasible to design a smart contract that may start transactions on behalf of an EOA by using Account Abstraction (AA), the concept of combining a smart contract and a wallet into a single type of account on the Ethereum blockchain. One use for AA is the development of "delegable accounts," which enable payment automation through the use of smart contracts. Notably, the concept of AA was first presented in 2015 by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.
Ethereum Balance on Exchanges at Historical Lows
Large or "whale-styled" wallets have continued to remove money from exchanges in the aftermath of the recent implosion of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, worsening user faith in centralized platforms. According to Bitfinx researchers, 2022 will see the greatest historical fall in the amount of BTC and ETH stored on exchanges. Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange, experienced almost $3 billion in net withdrawals in one day last week, as previously reported. Bitfinix stated in a recent report: "BTC and ETH stored on controlled exchanges have had the greatest YoY percentage decreases in 2022, both falling by about 20%. The November percentage loss is the third-biggest in BTC history and the fifth-largest in ETH history, with both percentage declines being the greatest since 2017."
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