Visa and MasterCard have agreed to lower the interchange fee they charge retailers in Canada for credit card transactions to under one per cent. The government announced a deal that will reduce interchange fees for in-store transactions by 27% on average, saving retailers about $1 billion over five years. Businesses with annual Visa sales volume below $300,000 will qualify for the lower fee, as will those who do less than $175,000 from MasterCard. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business called the deal a "significant accomplishment" but wishes that the timeline to implement the new fee structure could be moved up from its current target of fall 2024.

Major payment providers Visa and Mastercard are propelling the cryptocurrency adoption with a series of new partnerships and initiatives, responding to the increasing demand for digital assets and the growing interest in blockchain technology.

Binance, FTX plans to restart Japanese exchange; PayPal subsidiary Venmo to introduce cryptocurrency transfers; Visa to develop Brazilian blockchain-powered CBDC project; step-by-step guide to asset tokenization.

Visa to Develop Brazilian Blockchain-powered CBDC Project; PayPal Extending Crypto Transfers to More Than 60 Million Venmo Customers

The payments giant Visa has unveiled a new blockchain and central bank digital currency (CBDC) project in Brazil. Per the Brazilian media outlet Livecoins, the firm was selected by the Brazilian central bank to “explore” “innovative” on blockchain technology-powered “usage cases” for the prototype digital real.

Mastercard is planning to expand its cryptocurrency payment card initiative with new partnerships with crypto businesses. The company's head of crypto and blockchain, Raj Dhamodharan, stated that Mastercard is "really quite enthusiastic" about the underlying blockchain technology that powers cryptocurrencies.

South Korea is reportedly moving closer to launching a central bank digital currency (CBDC), with a new draft law set to create legal terminology for CBDCs.

Visa is reportedly hiring senior software engineers to help build scalable Web 3.0 products and drive mainstream adoption of public blockchain networks and stablecoin payments. The company is searching for engineers with a good understanding of public and permissioned distributed ledger technology (DLT) networks, security protocols, and private key custody, as well as Layer 1 and Layer 2 solutions and experience writing smart contracts using the Solidity programming language. Visa is likely to tap the Polygon network to scale its Ethereum smart contract capabilities in Web 3.0 development. The company has already made investments in the NFT and stablecoins market and is working with central banks to help scale the adoption of CBDCs. Visa's CBDC Payments Module is designed to provide an on-ramp for CBDC to existing payment networks.

Visa is seeking to hire a software engineer with experience in using AI-assisted engineering tools to write and debug smart contracts, according to a tweet by Cuy Sheffield, Visa's Head of Crypto. The company is specifically interested in engineers with experience using GitHub Copilot and other AI tools.

Fresh data from Glassnode demonstrates that Bitcoin's (BTC) Lightning Network is significantly cheaper to use than legacy payment networks.  The median fee rate, or the cost of sending value across the Lightning Network, is 0.0029%, 1,000 times cheaper than that of MasterCard of Visa payment processors.