Yesterday, January 4th 2018, all Visa (prepaid) Card issuer linked to BTC or cryptocurrency (Xapo, Wave crest holdings, Bitwala etc...) was instructed by Visa to close all cards of its Visa programs ( effective immediately )
Unfortunatly, all those card issuers companies did not receive any anticipated notice to prepare for the cancellation of card program !
All card has been desactivated, and nobody will be able to use it for further payments or withdrawals since yesterday ...
Note also that they cannot continue to provide cards until they will find any alternative solution.
In my opinion, centralised payment system corp. ( VISA & Mastercard & AMEX ) are scared of the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
They may also have been pressurized by centralized economy and/or governments to enter in a prohibition mode.
You have to take in consideration now that if the move (volume/market cap increase) will continue like this, it will necessary will raise some sovereignty problematic to government.
We may consider this instant ban as the preliminary of more arbitrary, restrictive, real offensive, regulation and prohibition law.
My first expectation is that central banks & credit card payment operators (visa, mastercard, amex) are really scared about the decentralization, because in the first hand, they probably understand that cryptos are actually and will continue to draw a future where they may probably lose the lead on the payment system and in the second hand too much innovation is sometimes considered a dangerous thing by the establishment.
The second expectation - more pessimistic - is that global centralized economy is starting to declare a (real) war to the crypto world.
You have to consider that now, the only method in our hand to withdraw some crypto to fiat is using centralised exchange withdrawal (which required to get approved and verified on the exchange)
The January 4th, could appear as the start point of the economic war between decentralized and centralized economy, inducing that we may expect new active regulation law and a continuation of the global crypto prohibition.
What do you think or feel about this ?