Cryptocurrency users may soon be able to automatically pay everyday utility bills through their self-custodial crypto wallets, according to payments giant Visa. In a blog post, Visa’s crypto team has proposed a solution that would allow providers to automatically “pull” funds from users’ Ethereum wallets without requiring manual approval for every transaction. It will do this via a concept that dates back to 2016 – Account Abstraction (AA) – and could open up the door to a whole new area of crypto adoption.
Delegable Accounts Could Unlock the Door
Currently, it is not possible for owners of self-custodial wallets to set up auto-payments as they are the only ones in control of the private keys, meaning they must manually sign off on transactions.
Visa’s proposed platform will use “delegable accounts,” a new type of self-custodial wallet based on the AA concept first proposed as EIP-86 in 2017 to implement “Abstraction of transaction origin and signature”. However, the origins of the idea go back even further to early 2016. Delegable accounts would allow users to schedule transactions without having to sign off on each one.
Visa Has Successfully Tested its Theory
While auto-payments can be integrated relatively easily through wallets hosted by other parties such as exchanges, this requires users to trust that their funds will be managed appropriately by these parties. This has been a major risk, especially in light of the bankruptcies of FTX, Voyager, BlockFi, and Celsius.
AA has not been implemented due to the difficulty of doing so, with multiple protocol changes and “security guarantees” required. However, the Visa team successfully tested delegable accounts on a private chain using the layer two scaling solution Starknet, which supports AA. As such, the team believes that auto payments are not far away.
