SafePal, a Singaporean fintech company, has made an investment in Swiss bank Fiat24 and together they have introduced a crypto Visa card and in-app banking service. The default deposit currency for this service is US Coin (USDC).
The announcement, made on March 7, states that this feature will be available on version 4.5.0 of the SafePal mobile wallet, pending approval from the Apple App Store and Google Play. Yang Lan, co-founder of Fiat24, explained that unlike typical Visa cards, transactions made using USDC Arbitrum provide a transparent and immutable ledger. Faulty transfers can be reversed through their banking system.
Veronica Wong, CEO and co-founder of SafePal, stated that users can send the funds from their USDC mobile wallet to traditional financial institutions. Additionally, users can exchange cryptocurrencies across more than 40 blockchains into their bank accounts and use fiat money, such as the U.S. dollar, euro, or Swiss Franc, for transactions and expenses. The developers further added that SafePal currently operates as a self-custody wallet and has approximately 10 million users worldwide.
After the crypto winter of 2021-2022, Veronica Wong expressed to Cointelegraph that the malpractice of centralized platforms has driven the adoption of self-custody solutions. She believes that this surge of interest will not be temporary, but will instead strengthen the adoption of self-management for assets.
Self-custody wallets have gained popularity since the collapse of centralized finance entities like FTX and Celsius. On December 7, 2023, Jack Dorsey’s Block introduced a self-custody wallet solution available in over 95 countries. Similarly, on August 10, 2023, BitKeep, a cross-chain wallet, changed its name to Bitget Wallet after receiving a $30 million investment from the exchange to expand its multichain swap platform.
For more information on how to set up and create an Ethereum wallet, please refer to the related article.