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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.<\/p>\n
In a Dec. 20 blog post, Visa\u2019s crypto thought leadership team proposed a solution that would allow providers to automaticall \u201cpull\u201d funds from users\u2019 Ethereum-powered crypto wallets, without requiring the user to manually sign off on every transaction.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 such as a Netflix subscription or a monthly telephone bill.<\/p>\n
Such a mechanism isn\u2019t 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.” <\/p>\n
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 \u201ca smart contract cannot initiate transactions on its own.\u201d<\/p>\n
In its technical piece, Visa said automatic recurring payments via crypto would be possible through a new type of self-custodial wallet called \u201cdelegable accounts,\u201d which is based on the \u201cAccount Abstraction\u201d (AA) concept. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
Through an AA-based self-custody wallet or delegable account, the Visa team states that user accounts would \u201cfunction like smart contracts,\u201d meaning that people can schedule transactions without signing off to initiate each transaction.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis application could allow a user to setup a programmable payment instruction that can push funds automatically from one self-custodial wallet account to another at recurring intervals, without requiring the user’s active participation each time,\u201d the post reads.<\/p>\n
The proposal is part of the crypto-friendly firm\u2019s broader research into new avenues for blockchain innovation and to work around rigid requirements hardcoded into Ethereum transactions.\u201d <\/p>\n
\nAA has many potential use cases, especially on how the user experience on a digital wallet may be substantially enhanced with more flexibility embedded into user account to function more like smart contract.<\/p>\n