Visa dreams up plans to let you auto-pay bills from your crypto wallet
Crypto-users may one day be able to automatically pay their electricity and telephone bills through their self-custodial crypto wallets, according to payments giant Visa.
In a Dec. 20 blog post, Visa’s crypto thought leadership team proposed a solution that would allow providers to automaticall “pull” funds from users’ Ethereum-powered crypto wallets, without requiring the user to manually sign off on every transaction.
Auto-payments for recurring bills are commonplace in the traditional banking world, giving users the ability to permit certain service providers to draw from their chosen bank accounts to pay off bills — such as a Netflix subscription or a monthly telephone bill.
Such a mechanism isn’t possible for owners of self-custodial wallets, said Visa, noting that automated programmable payments that pull payments from a user's account at recurring intervals "requires engineering work."
This is because in self-custodial wallets the user is the only person in control of the private keys, meaning they need to manually sign off on transactions as “a smart contract cannot initiate transactions on its own.”
In its technical piece, Visa said automatic recurring payments via crypto would be possible through a new type of self-custodial wallet called “delegable accounts,” which is based on the “Account Abstraction” (AA) concept.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Butering put forward the concept in 2015, which essentially allows for Ethereum-based wallets and smart contracts to be combined into a single account, among other use cases.
Through an AA-based self-custody wallet or delegable account, the Visa team states that user accounts would “function like smart contracts,” meaning that people can schedule transactions without signing
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