Cuy Sheffield, the Head of Crypto at Visa has responded to a news story that hit the decentralized finance market hard in the last days of February about the payment processing company pausing its crypto push due to a meltdown across the industry.
In the early hours of Tuesday, February 28, journalist Manya Saini of Reuters reported that Visa and its competitor Mastercard have paused their crypto push with regards to the forging of new partnerships with crypto firms.
Reuters said that Visa was slowing down its crypto development due to a string of high-profile collapses with an eye on Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX and other lending firms such as Three Arrows Capital (3AC), BlockFi, and Voyager in 2022.
While Mastercard and Visa have pushed back the launch of certain products related to the new financial market amid a lack of regulatory clarity, Cuy Sheffield has made it known that Reuters has gotten the facts wrong.
Using his Twitter profile, Sheffield said, “This story is inaccurate as it pertains to Visa” as he referred to Reuters’ story. According to the executive, here is the reality.
“We continue to partner with crypto companies to improve fiat on and off ramps as well as progress on our product roadmap to build new products that can facilitate stablecoin payments in a secure, compliant, and convenient way.”
Although crypto winter has made it difficult for all centralized financial institutions aiming to branch into the new market, Visa is still holding on firmly.
“Despite the challenges and uncertainty in the crypto ecosystem, our view has not changed that fiat-backed digital currencies running on public blockchain have the potential to play an important role in the payments ecosystem. This is the time to build! Anyone at the intersection of crypto and payments please reach out. We would love to work with you!” he added.
The positive response from Cuy Sheffield is great news for JPEX as the exchange is a major partner of Visa. In January 2023, JPEX finally launched its Visa Card with Simplex by Nuvei for users in the United Kingdom (UK) and European Economic Area (EEA).
Visa remains the go-to processing company for many business organizations as it continues to process around 24,000 transactions per second.