Cryptocurrency users may one day be able to automatically pay their electricity and phone bills through their self-custodial crypto wallets, according to Visa.
Visa’s crypto thought leadership team proposed a solution in a blog post on December 20 that would allow providers to automatically “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 common in traditional banking, allowing users to authorise certain service providers to withdraw funds from their designated bank accounts to pay bills such as a Netflix subscription or a monthly phone bill. According to Visa, such a mechanism is not possible for owners of self-custodial wallets because automated programmable payments that pull funds from a user’s account at recurring intervals “require engineering work.”
