Visa’s Blockchain Based Innovations Can Take Small Businesses to the Next Level
9.5.2023 07:00:00 EEST | Business Wire | Press release
Visa (NYSE: V), a world leader in digital payments, was one of nine finalists tasked with exploring innovative blockchain-based use cases for the Real Digital (Brazil’s central bank-issued digital currency, or CBDC) as part of the most recent LIFT Challenge. The company partnered with Agrotoken, Microsoft, and Sinqia to develop its submission.
After months of collaborative work between each company’s world-class researchers and engineers, Visa and its team are excited to share the results of their LIFT Challenge participation — a programmable finance platform for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), particularly farmers, that is designed to enable greater access to global capital markets, facilitate interoperability between currencies, improve operational processes, and uncover new growth opportunities.
Small Businesses Drive Global Economies
SMEs are often beholden to localized market structure in negotiating favorable contracts. For example, factoring is a well-known financing method today where a farmer can sell their future receivable at a discount to receive money today to purchase supplies and pay wages. This process routinely leads to a sizable percentage loss of the farmer’s receivable to the entity providing financing.
Visa’s prototype is designed to provide local farmers with more timely and greater access to a global pool of investors for financing, allowing the SMEs to get the best price discovery for their goods. By empowering SMEs with additional options to finance their businesses in a secure and frictionless way, Visa’s prototype platform aims to improve existing money movement operations and alleviate pain points caused by inaccessibility to traditional services.
“Small businesses are essential contributors to our local economies, such as in Brazil where they employ over half the population and contribute to nearly a third of the country’s GDP. At Visa, we are committed to help them grow, exploring new technologies that will empower them to more easily maintain and expand their business operations,” said Catherine Gu, Global Head of CBDC for Visa.
“Brazil is one of the world’s leading markets for innovation,” she continues. “By contributing our expertise, scale, network, and cutting-edge technologies in this market, we are able to help advance real-world applications of digital currencies — in this case making it possible for a soybean farmer to create and globally auction a tokenized contract on a permissioned version of the Ethereum blockchain, while utilizing different forms of money and interoperating between them.”
How Visa can Enable Programmable Finance in CBDCs
With many of the world’s central banks exploring the value of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), Visa and its partners have demonstrated how CBDCs can enable new cross-border payments programmatically, as well as provide international investment resources to SMEs. The programmable aspects of digital currencies, which allow delivery and payment of assets and currencies to be automatically settled only when certain conditions are met, open the door for more efficient capital usage and reduced counterparty risks, while leveraging the security, stability, and safety of a central bank liability via CBDC as a reliable settlement currency.
The prototype platform brings existing financial processes and assets on-chain, allowing farmers to tokenize traditional financing contracts. To achieve this, Agrotoken brought its agriculture-based tokenization expertise from their existing solutions in Brazil and Latin America and Visa delivered a tokenization process for turning existing Brazilian legal documents into an on-chain tradeable NFT.
“Agrotoken has a mission to democratize agribusiness by making transactions with soy and corn more accessible. To achieve this, we have chosen solid partners, such as Visa, to join us in our journey towards this goal," said Anderson Nacaxe, Director of Agrotoken in Brazil.
Combined with tokenization, Visa implemented a new onchain sealed-bid auction mechanism through smart contracts to enable a global pool of investors on the blockchain to participate in the financing process, achieving competitive price discovery. Additionally, the platform leverages a Visa technology called Universal Payments Channel (UPC) , which can interconnect between the Real Digital (CBDC) and other CBDCs, stablecoins or tokenized deposits, to help ensure future interoperability between digital currencies across different markets and networks.
This year’s LIFT Challenge Real Digital sought innovative tech research projects within the financial sector to assess use cases for the Digital Brazilian Real. Visa developed this Proof of Concept as part of the company’s ongoing efforts to work with industry partners, lead exploratory work and apply emerging technologies to creatively solve for well-known real world problems.
Visa works with Central Banks around the world and other players of the payment ecosystem to identify compelling CBDC opportunities that can be scaled and executed through secure, innovative, convenient, and reliable technologies, with the goal of developing innovative digital payment solutions that can help individuals, businesses and governments participate in the digital economy and ultimately thrive.
To learn more about Visa’s work with CBDC, visit our Digital Currency Innovation Hub. In addition, we have co-published an in-depth final report on the LIFT platform with the Brazilian Central Bank available here.
About Visa Inc.
Visa (NYSE: V) is a world leader in digital payments, facilitating payments transactions between consumers, merchants, financial institutions, and government entities across more than 200 countries and territories. Our mission is to connect the world through the most innovative, convenient, reliable, and secure payments network, enabling individuals, businesses and economies to thrive. We believe that economies that include everyone everywhere, uplift everyone everywhere and see access as foundational to the future of money movement. Learn more at http://visa.com/
To view this piece of content from cts.businesswire.com, please give your consent at the top of this page.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230508005774/en/
Contact information
Allee McDermott
amcdermo@visa.com
About Business Wire
For more than 50 years, Business Wire has been the global leader in press release distribution and regulatory disclosure.
Subscribe to releases from Business Wire
Subscribe to all the latest releases from Business Wire by registering your e-mail address below. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Latest releases from Business Wire
ILiAD Biotechnologies Expands Board of Directors and Appoints Chief Business Officer11.8.2026 15:30:00 EEST | Press release
ILiAD Biotechnologies, Inc. (ILiAD), an advanced clinical stage biotech company focused on the prevention and treatment of disease caused by Bordetella pertussis, today announced the appointments of Jim Wassil, currently Chief Operating Officer at Vaxcyte; Suha Jhaveri, former Strategic Advisor at Cidara before its acquisition by Merck; and Bill Warren, former Global Head of Antigen Design at Sanofi Vaccines, as independent members of ILiAD’s Board of Directors. The Company also announced the appointment of Antony Blanc, former VP, Head of Global Marketing and Global Strategic Pricing at GSK Vaccines, as Chief Business Officer. “Our recently appointed colleagues bring an extraordinary depth of experience in vaccine development, global commercialization, and strategic growth,” said Keith Rubin, MD, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of ILiAD. “As we advance BPZE1 to the next pivotal phase of ILiAD’s growth, the insights and leadership of Antony, Bill, Jim and Suha will be invaluable in
TEC reduces pressure on support teams with proactive outage communications powered by Adtran and GOCare11.8.2026 15:15:00 EEST | Press release
Adtran and GOCare today announced that Telephone Electronics Corporation (TEC) has improved outage responses and reduced inbound support tickets using GOCare’s OutageIQ solution integrated with Adtran’s outage notification API and Mosaic One. Serving communities across Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, TEC delivers fiber broadband services built on a foundation of community investment and reliable service. By combining proactive notifications with real-time network insights, the service provider can now inform customers as issues are detected while equipping support teams with immediate context. This transparency helps build subscriber trust and streamlines operations. “Reliable connectivity is essential for the communities we serve, and clear communication during an outage makes a real difference,” said David Freytag, VP of integration at TEC. “Before this integration, service disruptions could quickly lead to high call volumes, putting pressure on our teams and leaving subscribers
Kinaxis-Sponsored Study Identifies Supply Chain AI Accountability Gap Amidst Rapid Adoption Expectations11.8.2026 15:07:00 EEST | Press release
Kinaxis® (TSX:KXS), a global leader in supply chain orchestration, today announced the findings of new independent research from IDC. The IDC InfoBrief, sponsored by Kinaxis, “Making Supply Chain AI Accountable,” reveals a growing chasm between organizations’ aggressive ambitions for autonomous AI adoption and their readiness to hold these advanced systems - which we believe underscores the need for a disciplined approach to AI investment and deployment to prevent costly failures and deliver measurable business value. What This Means for Supply Chain Leaders The IDC InfoBrief, which surveyed more than 2,000 supply chain leaders across nine global markets, found that while AI adoption is nearly universal - only 2% of respondents report no AI-enabled capabilities, and just 12% consider themselves AI leaders. Over half (52%) cite trust in AI-driven decisions as a top barrier to faster adoption, and just 12% say AI planning governance is fully embedded within their operations. The research
One in Four Executives Say AI Errors Have Reached External Audiences or Boards, According to New Research From Workiva11.8.2026 15:00:00 EEST | Press release
Workiva Inc. (NYSE: WK), a leading, audit-ready platform for trust, transparency, and accountability, today released findings from its 2026 Midyear Executive Benchmark Survey. Although 84% of surveyed executives say they are at least somewhat confident in the accuracy of AI output without human review, one in four (26%) say internal audits have detected AI errors that reached external audiences or board members. This data suggests there is a disconnect between what executives believe and what evidence shows. As AI reshapes the enterprise at unprecedented speed, a new risk is emerging: transformation could be outpacing the instincts of the leaders tasked with overseeing it. "Confidence in AI without control over data quality is a liability, not a strategy. CFOs need platforms that connect AI to trusted, auditable data so every output is one they can verify and every disclosure is one they can defend," said Barbara Larson, Chief Financial Officer at Workiva. "Getting this right is about
Altasciences Continues to Expand North American Bioanalytical Footprint11.8.2026 15:00:00 EEST | Press release
Altasciences today announced a major expansion of its North American bioanalytical laboratory footprint, reinforcing its commitment to helping sponsors accelerate drug development through increased capacity, advanced automation, and harmonized scientific operations. The expansion includes a 4,000-square-foot addition to the company’s laboratory in Greater Montréal, which is expected to be fully operational by the end of Q3 2026. The company has also announced a new 13,000-square-foot purpose-built laboratory in Harleysville, Pennsylvania. Construction will proceed in phases, with Phase 1 scheduled for completion in Q1 2027. These investments significantly increase Altasciences' ability to support the growing demand for late-stage clinical bioanalysis while providing sponsors with greater flexibility, scalability, and operational resilience. Designed to support increasingly complex development programs, the expanded laboratories will result in increased capacity to conduct larger studie
In our pressroom you can read all our latest releases, find our press contacts, images, documents and other relevant information about us.
Visit our pressroom