Visa is looking for ways to enable automatic recurring payments over a blockchain like Ethereum.
According to a technical article released on the Visa website, while blockchain use is expanding, setting up regular recurring payments is difficult since certain digital wallets require engineering work to support pull payments.
That’s a problem that has to be addressed since customers demand the ease of regular repeating payments – so much so that 30% of people have altered the way they pay bills in the previous two years, with many citing convenience as the reason, according to the paper.
While making that adjustment on a banking app is straightforward, it is more complicated with other digital wallets, according to the report.
The authors investigated the usage of smart contracts for self-custodial wallets in order to reduce the need for the user to actively engage and push payments each time, instead allowing the smart contract to automatically extract cash.
According to the study, account abstraction (AA) suggests that user accounts be made to work like smart contracts and that more flexibility be permitted in authenticating transactions on the blockchain.
“Essentially, AA enables programmable validity to check and validate any blockchain transaction,” said the authors. “This implies that, rather than hard-coding validity constraints into the Ethereum protocol that apply to all transactions in a broad manner, validity conditions may instead be written in a customizable manner into a smart contract on a per-account basis.”
The authors advocated using AA to establish a new sort of account contract, dubbed a “delegable account,” with a pre-approved permission list.
This approach might enable all types of pull payments in addition to recurring payments, according to the authors.
Because Ethereum currently does not allow AA, the authors built their delegable accounts solution on StarkNet and discovered that it enabled auto payments for self-custodial wallets.
“At Visa, our objective is to assist in the creation of improved user experiences by utilizing both existing and new payment rails,” the authors said. “As a result, we feel that programmable money and programmable payments are an attractive possibility.”
