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
Bending Spoons S.p.A. announces closing of initial public offering2.7.2026 21:35:00 EEST | Press release
Bending Spoons S.p.A. (“Bending Spoons”), a leading technology company, today announces the closing of its initial public offering of an aggregate of 57,971,015 of its ordinary shares, at an initial public offering price of $29.00 per share. The offering consisted of 34,398,640 shares sold by Bending Spoons and 23,572,375 shares sold by certain selling shareholders (the “Selling Shareholders”). The gross proceeds from the offering to Bending Spoons, before deducting underwriting discounts and commissions and other offering expenses, was approximately $953,917,285.50. Bending Spoons did not receive any proceeds from the sale of shares by the Selling Shareholders. Bending Spoons’ ordinary shares began trading on the Nasdaq Global Select Market on July 1, 2026 under the ticker symbol “BSP”. Goldman Sachs International, J.P. Morgan, and Allen & Company LLC are acting as joint lead book-running managers for the offering. Wells Fargo Securities, BofA Securities, Jefferies, Evercore ISI, BNP
Strategic Partnership Between Record Asset Management and Admicasa2.7.2026 20:00:00 EEST | Press release
RAM Swiss Holding AG is a subsidiary of LSE-listed Record Financial Group (Record) and part of the Record Asset Management (RAM) group of companies. The partnership is a milestone in the growth of Admicasa and marks an important step in the continued expansion of Record’s private markets platform. Subject to regulatory approval, the agreement, signed on 1st July 2026, provides RAM Swiss Holding AG with a 50% participation in the Admicasa Fondsleitung AG, part of Admicasa, and establishes a long-term partnership to develop investment opportunities in the Swiss and Global real estate market with a plan to expand into other asset classes in the medium term. RAM is the European asset management arm of Record, the LSE-listed specialist investment group managing USD 115 billion of assets on behalf of institutional clients worldwide. Record's client base comprises pension funds, foundations, sovereign institutions and other asset managers, with whom it has built long-standing relationships th
IQM Quantum Computers Becomes First European Quantum Computing Company Listed on a Major U.S. Exchange2.7.2026 17:47:00 EEST | Press release
IQM Quantum Computers (Nasdaq: IQMX) (“IQM”, “IQM Quantum Computers” or the “Company”), a global leader in full-stack superconducting quantum computers, today became a publicly traded company following the completion of its business combination with Real Asset Acquisition Corp. (“RAAQ”). This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260702960460/en/ IQM Quantum Computers Becomes First European Quantum Computing Company Listed on a Major U.S. Exchange The company’s American Depositary Shares begin trading today on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol “IQMX”. The listing marks a major milestone for IQM establishing the company as the first European quantum computing company listed on a major U.S. stock exchange. Due to the proceeds of the transaction, IQM maintains a strong pro forma cash position of EUR 337 million. IQM enters the public markets with strong commercial momentum and a rapidly expanding globa
GigaDevice Launches First GD24CL Series I²C EEPROM, Further Expanding Its Non-Volatile Memory Portfolio2.7.2026 17:00:00 EEST | Press release
GigaDevice, a leading semiconductor company specializing in Flash memory, 32-bit microcontrollers (MCUs), sensors, and analog products, announced today the launch of its new GD24CL series I²C EEPROM. The series delivers outstanding performance, comprehensive security protection mechanisms, and excellent reliability that addresses the stringent requirements for stable and long-term storage of critical configuration data. These offered features will benefit applications in industrial, energy, Internet-of-Things (IoT), data centers, and networking. As GigaDevice’s first EEPROM product series, the launch further enhances the company’s non-volatile memory portfolio and provides customers with more dynamic storage solutions. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260702394554/en/ GigaDevice Launches First GD24CL Series I²C EEPROM, Further Expanding Its Non-Volatile Memory Portfolio. The GD24CL series is designed with high
Medical University of Graz Enrolls First Patient in DEEPER CHALLENGE Trial Evaluating Spur ® Peripheral Retrievable Scaffold System in a Select CLTI Cohort2.7.2026 14:00:00 EEST | Press release
Reflow Medical, Inc. announces that the Medical University of Graz has enrolled the first patient in the DEEPER CHALLENGE clinical trial. This investigator-initiated, single-center, single-arm, prospective study, supported by a grant, investigates early vessel recoil following below-the-knee treatment using the Spur® Peripheral Retrievable Scaffold System in combination with a commercially available drug-coated balloon. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260701995624/en/ The study investigates early vessel recoil following below-the-knee treatment using the Spur® Peripheral Retrievable Scaffold System in combination with a commercially available drug-coated balloon. The study plans to enroll up to 40 patients with chronic limb-threatening ischemia (CLTI) across two distinct cohorts: patients with diabetes and patients with end-stage renal disease receiving hemodialysis for at least six months, with women comprisi
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