Swipe-issued Visa cards use the SXP utility token to process payments
Swipe
SXP, the native token of Visa
V
The cryptocurrency reached an intra-day high of $2.02 before pulling back to $1.91 at 23:00 GMT.
Its strong performance defied sluggish activity in the wider cryptocurrency market, with top-ten coins bitcoin, Ethereum, BNB, XRP and Polkadot all moving less than 0.5% over the past 24 hours.
Binance acquired most of Swipe’s shares in July 2020 before deploying the SXP network to power its cashback-earning Binance Visa Card, which works like a debit card but allows users to fund purchases with their digital assets.
The exchange announced its intention to buy the remaining shares in Swipe via a statement without explaining what the move will mean for SXP tokenholders or Swipe-powered cardholders.
Swipe also runs a white-label B2B program that aims to make it easier for crypto companies to issue their own debit cards. Derivatives exchange FTX became its most high-profile client in February, though the FTX Visa card has not yet launched.
Following the completion of the share purchase, Swipe founder and chief executive Joselito Lizarondo “will step down and leave Binance”.
However, Lizarondo said he will remain active as a key stakeholder in the Swipe blockchain – soon to be rebranded Solar – by acquiring a sizable governance position through his proof-of-stake SXP holdings, and by launching the “Solar Ecosystem Growth Fund to invest in projects building on Solar”.
“Solar will become an energy efficient payments blockchain powering decentralized commerce applications,” he explained in a blogpost. “Solars value proposition enables plugins to be developed in Javascript and Typescript and built in Layer 1 formats so that all scalability and smart contract like features will be developed natively. Side chains will enable other features.”
Lizarondo acknowledged that Swipe’s original vision of a becoming a retail-focused card issuer like Crypto.com had been dropped after Binance became a majority shareholder, with the company shifting its attention to corporate partnerships.
“Due to shareholder and senior leadership decisions, Swipe shifted its focus of products to more b2b commercial products with fees paid in SXP,” he noted. “This lead to products being created that were focused on Swipe, the company’s growth, and in turn removed some key products that were available.
“With this resignation, I will have the ability to focus on SXP as a community member.”
SXP is up 42% year-to-date but remains significantly below the all-time-high of $5.87 it reached in May.