What exactly is claimed. The money is debited directly from a supported wallet at the moment of purchase. Mesh handles the exchange of digital assets into fiat (regular money - dollars, euros), and the merchant receives the payment like any other Visa transfer. This covers both cryptocurrencies and stablecoins - coins whose rate is pegged to the dollar.
Why this is not just another crypto card. Until now, the scheme was like this: you deposit crypto onto a separate card or a service account, sell it inside, then spend. Here there is no intermediate step and no separate plastic card, and the merchant changes nothing at all - neither the terminal, nor the equipment, nor the payment acceptance process.
Scale. 175 million locations - this is not a pilot in one country, but almost the entire Visa acceptance network. For crypto, this means going beyond exchanges and transfers: an asset that a trader holds in a wallet becomes a means of payment in an ordinary store.
What is still unknown. The launch timeline, the list of supported wallets and the available regions were not disclosed by the companies. That is, the announcement has been made, but the details on which the real coverage depends are not yet available - we await them separately.
Do you hold crypto in a wallet, and not only in a terminal?
The wider crypto enters ordinary payments, the more money and movement there is in it - and the more often it is traded by those whose position size does not come from personal savings. Only prop companies have vastly different lists of available coins: somewhere it is the entire liquid crypto market, somewhere it is a couple of BTC and ETH, and altcoins are outside the rules. You need to check whether your instrument is even traded before paying for the selection. Selection by market and instruments filters out programs in which you simply have nothing to work with.