Visa CEO, Alfred F. Kelly Jr, recently claimed that blockchains and cryptocurrencies will not be useful to the credit card company and Visa is already a great fintech accomplishment.
Kelly added during his speech at Boston College Executives’ Club in the United States that blockchains and cryptocurrencies were designed to handle low-volume and high-value transactions. Kelly then argued that Visa provides the exact opposite of these types of transactions and said that cryptocurrencies and blockchains are “an interesting technology…[but] [i]t isn’t really at its core, for us, a good technology.” He also added that he believed that cryptocurrencies could never reach the level of transactions that Visa currently handles.
Nevertheless, Kelly did still admit that there was room for innovation at Visa, especially in the B2B department. Visa has a dedicated team of 275 experts in California, United States working on Visa B2B Connect, which is inspired from blockchains and cryptocurrencies. Kelly went on to describe how nearly half of the company’s 17,000 employees work in a technology division as engineers or cybersecurity specialists.
Dash is being used for fast, everyday transactions
The Visa CEO took a heavy-handed negative stance towards cryptocurrencies, which is partially to be expected from a business stand point since cryptocurrencies are direct competition to his business and hopes to make the industry obsolete. However, some of his comparisons were misleading of the true potential and capabilities of cryptocurrencies, and in particularly, Dash.
Dash is able to confirm transactions of any price level super quickly for super low fees; 2.5 minute blocks for a median transaction fee around $0.0005 USD or 1-2 second confirmations for $0.01-$0.02 USD with InstantSend. Dash has been able to offer this to consumers without congesting the network and has conducted stress tests to show that the network can easily scale to much larger levels without affecting its already rapid confirmations and low fees. In addition, Dash conducted research in partnership with ASU’s Blockchain Labs to show that Dash can easily scale up to 10 MB blocks, which would mean Dash could at least handle 120 transactions per second, which is about half of what another payment processor, PayPal, currently handles. This is what allows Dash to be used in fast, cheap, and secure everyday transactions around the world. All of these facts stand in direct contrast to when Visa’s CEO claimed that cryptocurrencies could not get near the efficiency levels of Visa.
Dash funds its own development
Visa’s CEO also brought up the fact that almost half of all Visa’s employees, which also means a significant chunk of the money merchants and consumers pay, goes towards funding research and development. This significant funding has appeared to yield relatively little results when compared to the advancements that cryptocurrencies have developed in less than ten years. To contrast, Dash has been able to fund its own development via the DAO Treasury, which has made the accomplishments above possible. The Dash DAO has funded the Dash Core Group, the main development team behind Dash, community outreach groups, and others that are aiming to better the interests of the Dash network. This has allow Dash to pursue both B2C strategies by targeting consumers directly for adoption and also B2B strategies by targeting exchanges, businesses, independent merchants, and others for adoption to provide the network with more usability scenarios.
The revolutionary features of the Dash’s DAO has enabled Dash to innovate quickly and begin to pose a threat to the traditional payments industry just as it is doing to fiat currency. Dash’s rate of growth has been much larger for much less money over its few years of existence than the same timeline of Visa’s, which actually gives Dash more potential to take over Visa and other payment processors than the CEO describes.
