Visa and cryptocurrency: the payment system creates problems for the cryptocurrency world

At the end of January, Geektimes published the news that the Visa payment system stopped supporting debit bitcoin cards. The decision of the company's management affected the clients of such services as BitPay, TenX, Bitwala and Wirex. Then Visa said that the measures taken were not in relation to cryptocurrency assets, as such, the problem lies in the issuer of all these cards, the WaveCrest bank.



As it turned out, this organization does not comply with the membership rules of the Visa Europe payment service, which is why it was punished. In fact, holders of debit cryptocurrency cards turned out to be innocent victims. Yes, their funds returned to the accounts from where the money was sent, but there was little consolation in this - it was difficult to remove money earned by sweat and blood for several days.

In most cases, no one has blocked the funds, which can already be perceived positively.

But the disaster did not end there. In early February, many cryptoinvestors noticed strange commissions in their bank statements, which appeared only in transactions involving the purchase of cryptocurrencies. Similar statements began to receive MasterCard cardholders. Competitors, as far as can be understood, have come to the consensus that you can take additional percentages from bitcoin investors - they say, “they earn a lot and that’s enough for life”.

At the moment, the most convenient way to buy cryptocurrency is to use a bank card. Yes, the account can also be used, but it can take several days to work with it, until the funds are credited to the user’s account on one of the cryptographics. The meaning of carrying out fast operations designed to buy / sell cryptocurrency is simply lost.

Therefore, most users continue to work with plastic cards, not accounts. But payment systems decided to receive up to 5% from each such transaction, in addition to the few percent that are already being withdrawn by various kinds of exchanges. If a cryptoinvestor has decided to invest, for example, $ 5,000 using his plastic card, then he (well or her) will have to pay about $ 500 in the form of commissions. Well, a commission of 10%, provided the cryptorink is very slow to recover, is a lot.

Mastercard and Visa created a new type of cryptocurrency purchase transaction, which equated to quasi-cash type transactions. As a result, the conditions for forming a commission for the purchase of cryptocurrencies have changed. True, this commission is set by issuing banks.

In an official address to its users, the same resource, Coinbase, stated that the commission had really risen, and something must be done with this. In response to the incident, journalists of some technological resources expressed the idea that payment systems do all this in order to reduce the amount of investment in the cryptocurrency sphere. Of course, it sounds a bit naive, but this opinion is becoming increasingly popular.



Moreover, many "cryptocurrency" strengthened in this wash in connection with another recent event. Last week, dozens of Coinbase users started complaining about unforeseen debit card debit cards that were used to buy cryptocurrency. A number of users because of this incident were completely without money on the card - repeated withdrawals "ate" everything that was there.

“The money was debited four times from my card and now my account is empty,” one Reddit user said. Initially, Coinbase was blamed for extra write-offs. Over the past year, the exchange has become one of the largest and has begun to be less attentive to its customers. Therefore, many of its users and decided that the problem lies in the company itself. But no - after a while it turned out that Coinbase had nothing to do with it.

Then the management of the exchange accused Visa of what had happened, to which the payment system replied that the problem was not on its side. In a joint statement by both companies, it was pointed out that Coinbase was not to blame for what happened. But Visa, it seems, still did something wrong. The fact is that not long ago, large credit card networks began to change the transit account code (MCC). And just as a result of these changes, transactions began to be written off several times. True, the payment system believes that the MCC has nothing to do with it.

Coinbase has already stated that the funds of most users of the exchange should already be returned to customer accounts. Whatever it was, but the reason is still unclear - experts are trying to find out why what happened, but it still cannot boast of success. Visajustified by the fact that changes in the MCC purely technologically should not lead to double withdrawals. But how everything is in fact, still to be found out.


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