Visa-FTX partnership ‘a big deal’ for the crypto industry, Visa’s crypto head says

Visa Head of Crypto Cuy Sheffield joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the company's partnership with crypto exchange FTX and the outlook for decentralized finance.

Video transcript

JARED BLIKRE: All right, sticking with the crypto space, FTX is expanding its partnership with Visa globally by tapping into 40 new markets. For more on that, let's bring in Visa's head of crypto, Cuy Sheffield. Cuy, tell us about this partnership now that you have with FTX, please.

CUY SHEFFIELD: Thanks for having me. And so we think this is a big deal for the crypto industry, really moving from just speculation and trading to utility, when you have one of the leading global exchanges in FTX working with Visa to make it easy for consumers to spend from a balance held on their platform at any of the 80 million merchants across the world that accept Visa. So we're incredibly excited to work with them.

JARED BLIKRE: All right, and let me ask you about the price of Bitcoin itself. It seems like it's been floundering around $20,000 here. I'm not asking you for a one-year prediction or an end of year prediction, but just in general, with the price of crypto assets depressed, as we've seen them, maybe perhaps in a crypto winter, how has Visa been using this space to maybe institutionalize, build out its institutional base here for its customers?

CUY SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think regardless of the price of any asset on any day, we're seeing continued interest from consumers, as well as from entrepreneurs and builders and developers that are coming into the space. And we think increasingly, it's developers that are going to build the future of payments. And so we're using this time to really look at how can we help partner with them and help them access our network to build new payment products on top of these technologies.

JARED BLIKRE: And Cuy, I'm going to play devil's advocate here because when we think about crypto and the original whitepaper going back to 2009, I believe it was, and the DeFi movement-- that is decentralized finance-- it was huge. It seems a year or two ago, everybody was becoming a Bitcoin maximalist or a DeFi maximalist. And there was supposed to be a new regime. And yet, we've seen a lot of traditional finance take over roles here. We're talking about Visa, a traditional finance company here. How does crypto fit into the trad-fi space? And has anything fundamentally changed over the last few years?

CUY SHEFFIELD: Yeah, we see decentralization as more of a spectrum, rather than a binary. And we think it takes both worlds coming together for payment products to be built that can serve mainstream consumers. And so a lot of the consumers and merchants, they don't have an ideological bent around the underlying technologies that they use. They just want seamless convenient experiences to store the value that-- and spend the value that they have. And so we think that this is really the next phase that the industry is having, traditional networks working together with leading platforms like FTX.

JARED BLIKRE: And when it comes to the actual use of crypto as payments and the traditional payment system, we haven't really seen full adoption just yet, even in countries like El Salvador, where there's a huge government push. Just, how do you see this rolling out in the adoption cycle?

CUY SHEFFIELD: We see a lot of opportunity for stablecoins. And I think when you combine stablecoins with global networks like Visa, it really opens up a number of new payment flows, like remittances and cross-border payouts, where now you can have a consumer that can receive a remittance cross-border, but then they can offer it by spending it at any merchant down the street. So we think you kind of have to have both. But there's clear demand for these dollar digital currencies. And we think we can make them as easy to spend as any other currency that consumers use today.

JARED BLIKRE: And you're going to get some guidance by the Federal Reserve probably by 2030 or less-- a little bit of a joke there. I want to move on-- go back, actually, to your rollout. Now this is a program that is being rolled out in 40 countries across Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Latin America's first. We've seen big adoption there for various reasons. I don't think it's surprising or coincidental that there are huge inflation rates in a lot of these countries. But what's your experience and what's your decision at Visa? Why Latin America first?

CUY SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think FTX has been excited about opportunities to bring-- they have a card program live today in the US. They want to bring it to new markets and markets that are growing very quickly for them. And I think it's very clear that there is a demand for dollars outside the United States. And stablecoins can become a way that people can access dollars. Now through the FTX card, they have a way to spend those dollars. And so we're seeing a lot of interesting growth in that market across the Latin American region.

JARED BLIKRE: All right, we're going to leave it there. Visa's head of crypto Cuy Sheffield, thank you for showing us your face today.