VISA has approved Coinbase’s membership for payments via the Coinbase Card.
As revealed by Coinbase itself, this is the first time ever that the credit card giant has granted membership to a crypto company.
Back in 2019, the company launched its Coinbase Card in the UK as a VISA debit card allowing customers to spend cryptocurrencies using the US giant’s payment system, but obtaining membership is something else.
According to Coinbase, their card has already achieved significant success, and it may be precisely for this reason that VISA has agreed to grant them membership.
In reality, it seems as though it was granted in December, as reported by Forbes, but it has only recently been revealed to the public. Thanks to the membership, the expensive intermediary is eliminated from the card-issuing process, and Coinbase will be able to issue debit cards for others, including crypto companies.
The company has actually revealed that it is not willing to issue any cards for other crypto companies. What they were interested in was reducing costs and increasing profits.
CEO of Coinbase UK, Zeeshan Feroz, said:
“Your Bitcoin holdings have never been liquid because you have to sell them, you have to go through a process, withdraw the money, and then spend it. It’s never been an instant, “Oh, I’ll buy this cup of coffee with bitcoin”. What the card is trying to change is the mindset that crypto is tucked away, takes two days to access, and can actually now be spent in real time”.
The card will be available in 29 countries, including Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the UK, but will not be available to US residents, even though both companies are American.
In addition to Bitcoin and Ether, it will also support Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, BAT, REP, ZRX and XLM.
A Coinbase Card had previously been issued on the VISA circuit by the financial services company Paysafe Group Holdings Limited. Now, however, Coinbase itself can issue it directly and cut fees for the service – Coinbase currently charges a 2.49% commission on domestic transactions.
VISA’s global manager for Fintech, Terry Angelos, commented:
“Our work with fintechs, such as Coinbase, includes helping them scale, partnering with them on issuance and giving them access to APIs so they can build new products on our network”.