According to the Visa CEO, this entails “enabling consumers to purchase these currencies or bitcoin.” “We're working hard with wallets and exchanges to just make sure we're facilitating acceptance in people's ability to use their Visa cards to buy,” he added.

​Kelly defined “enabling digital-currency cash-outs to fiat” as “converting a digital currency to a fiat on a Visa credential, which then makes those funds available for shopping at any one of the 70 million Visa merchants and gives the digital currency immediate utility.”
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Visa's focus in the crypto space is on enabling financial institutions and fintech partners to offer a crypto option to their customers.

Kelly stated that Visa has "created APIs that enable financial institution customers to purchase, custody, or even trade digital currencies held by Anchorage, the first federally chartered digital asset bank in the United States."

​Here’s another major priority “settlement,” according to the CEO: “We've upgraded our infrastructure to allow a financial institution to settle with these in a digital currency using stablecoin, beginning with USDC.” “The last area of opportunity in the cryptocurrency space is simply working with central banks,” Kelly concluded.

The Alonzo testnet, which can bring smart contracts to the Cardano (ADA) blockchain, could go live as soon as April, Charles Hoskinson, CEO of the network’s developer IOHK, revealed during the Cardano360 virtual conference yesterday.

The team the revealed rollout plan, the Alonzo upgrade will available for a hard fork this spring. Initially, smart contracts are going to be available for testing purposes only, with the complete mainnet launch slated for August.

The New York Times ran a piece called “Buy This Column on the Blockchain!”

​An image of the column — titled “Buy This Column on the Blockchain!” — was turned into a nonfungible token, or NFT, and sold in a heated auction that brought in more than 30 bids on the NFT marketplace website Foundation.

A picture of it was programmed to an NFT.

It just sold for 350 ETH, or around $560,000.

Cardano has been added to the Bloomberg Terminal, a platform used by professional traders, during a move that would expose the cryptocurrency to a reinstatement wave of potential investors.