Crypto Exchange Coinbase Gets Principal Membership for Issuing Direct Visa Cards

One of the leading developments of riding the gap between cryptocurrency sectors and the traditional financial sector, crypto exchange Coinbase has just received a principal membership from Visa.

With this, Coinbase becomes the first “pure-play” cryptocurrency company to become a Visa principal member. In its official blog post, Coinbase wrote: “Visa membership will enable us to further improve the customer experience, making it easier to spend cryptocurrency in everyday situations”.

Visa is the world’s leading and largest payments processor and provides network services to millions of services across the board. A partnership with Visa will possibly give Coinbase access to several other global customers as well as significantly enhance their customer services.

However, this is not the very first association of Coinbase with Visa. Last year in 2019, the two companies joined hands for bringing the Coinbase Card in the UK market. The Coinbase Card allows users to spend their crypto holdings at different merchant locations just like a debit card.

Soon after its success in the UK market, the Coinbase Card is available in 29 countries across the globe. The card allows to spend 10 different cryptocurrencies at different merchant locations.

Speaking about the latest principal membership, Coinbase wrote: “This membership will enable us to offer more features for Coinbase Card customers; from additional services to support in more markets — all elements that will help to evolve and enrich the cryptocurrency payment experience”.

Coinbase says that its Coinbase Card has the most usage in the UK followed by Spain, Italy, and France. Although Coinbase had a good success with its cards business in the UK market, it had to cut-ties with British banking giant Barclays in August 2019.

It partnership with Barclays earlier allowed British local to purchase cryptocurrencies on Coinbase against Sterling Pounds. While both the companies didn’t disclose the reason for this fall-off, sources familiar with the matter said that Barclay’s wanted to get away with the risks of being associated with the volatile crypto market.

The Visa partnership is certainly a good development for Coinbase, who has been constantly working on developing an entire ecosystem in the crypto market to service retail and institutional customers