SafePal announces strategic investment in Swiss bank Fiat24 and the launch of an in-app banking gateway and virtual crypto Visa card.
The new offering aims to accelerate the bridging of crypto to real-world utilities.
Crypto hardware wallet provider SafePal on Thursday announced a strategic investment in Swiss bank Fiat24, opening a banking gateway for users to pay for expenses with digital assets and transfer funds to other compliant banks.
CoinDesk learned in a release that the firms launched a crypto-focused Visa card and in-app banking services with the dollar-pegged stable coin USD Coin (USDC) as the default deposit currency. Users can swap their coin holdings into USDC via Arbitrum. The USDC can then be stored in USD, EUR, and CHF to be used in transactions and expenses.
Users can set up individually owned, fully compliant bank accounts after completing the KYC and onboarding process by Fiat24 in the SafePal mobile wallet app without any account creation or management fees.
“While this seems to be an unorthodox move for a decentralized wallet suite, inaccessibility is a pressing issue plaguing crypto users that needs to be solved for better onboarding and adoption,” said Veronica Wong, CEO and co-founder of SafePal, said in a message to CoinDesk.
“This will be the first truly crypto-friendly banking experience for retail users that eliminates the excessive scrutiny and restriction of traditional banks, as the accounts created via the mobile wallet will support transfers to accounts in other banks under their name in a seamless and compliant manner,” Wong added.
After creating the bank accounts in the SafePal mobile wallet, the credentials are minted as NFTs on Arbitrum, an Ethereum-based network, ensuring all related transactions are securely and transparently recorded on-chain.
The crypto Visa cards are also linked to third-party payment platforms like Paypal, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and Samsung Pay.
The Visa card will be initially available in selected regions in Europe before it is rolled out over rest of the continent while the in-app banking gateway will be available outside of the United States and for all non-U.S. sanctioned countries.
SafePal’s SFP tokens are up 1.3% in the past 24 hours, CoinGecko data shows.