Inside Mercuryo’s Visa Partnership
Updated
January 29, 2026 1:34 PM
Close up of Visa credit cards. PHOTO: ADOBE STOCK
Mercuryo is a fintech startup that builds the infrastructure to enable money to move seamlessly between crypto and traditional banking systems. In simple terms, it works on the problem of turning digital assets into usable cash.
As more people hold crypto through wallets and exchanges, one practical issue keeps arising: how do you actually withdraw that money and use it in the real world? For many users, converting tokens into local currency is still slow, confusing or expensive. That gap between “owning” crypto and being able to spend it is where Mercuryo operates.
The company’s latest step forward is a partnership with Visa to improve what is known as “off-ramping” — the process of converting crypto into fiat currency like dollars or euros. Until now, this has often been slow, expensive and confusing for users. Mercuryo is using Visa Direct, Visa’s real-time payments system, to make that process faster and more direct.
With this integration, users can convert their digital tokens into local currency and send the money straight to a Visa debit or credit card. The transaction happens through systems that already power global card payments, which means the money can arrive in near real time instead of days later.
Technically, this connects two very different worlds. On one side is blockchain-based crypto, which moves value on decentralised networks. On the other side is the traditional payment system, which runs on banks, cards and regulated rails. Mercuryo’s platform sits between the two and handles the conversion and movement of funds.
Instead of users leaving their wallet or exchange to cash out, Mercuryo allows the conversion to happen inside the apps and platforms they already use. The user does not need to understand the plumbing behind it. They just see that crypto becomes spendable money on their card.
This matters because access is what makes any financial system usable. If people cannot easily move their money, they treat it as locked or risky. Faster off-ramps make digital assets more practical, not just speculative.
Mercuryo’s work is not about creating new tokens or trading tools. It is about building the pipes that let money move smoothly between Web3 and the traditional financial world. The Visa partnership strengthens those pipes by using a global, trusted payments network that already works at scale.
Visa also framed the partnership as a bridge between systems. Anastasia Serikova, Head of Visa Direct, Europe, said: "By leveraging Visa Direct's capabilities, Mercuryo is not only making converting to fiat faster, simpler and more accessible than ever—it's building bridges between the crypto space and the traditional financial system. This integration empowers users to seamlessly convert digital assets into fiat in near real time, creating a more connected and convenient payment experience".
Over time, this kind of infrastructure is what determines whether crypto remains niche or becomes part of everyday finance. Not through headlines, but through systems that quietly reduce friction.
Mercuryo’s direction is clear: make digital assets easier to use, easier to exit and easier to connect to the money systems people already rely on.
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Can SPhotonix’s optical memory technology protect data better than today’s storage?
Updated
January 8, 2026 6:32 PM
SPhotonix's 5D Memory Crystals™. PHOTO: SPHOTONIX
SPhotonix, a young deep-tech startup, is working on something unexpected for the data storage world: tiny, glass-like crystals that can hold enormous amounts of information for extremely long periods of time. The company works where light and data meet, using photonics—the science of shaping and guiding light—to build optical components and explore a new form of memory called “5D optical storage”.
It’s based on research that began more than twenty years ago, when Professor Peter Kazansky showed that a small crystal could preserve data—from the human genome to the entire Wikipedia—essentially forever.
Their new US$4.5 million pre-seed round, led by Creator Fund and XTX Ventures, is meant to turn that science into real products. And the timing aligns with a growing problem: the world is generating far more digital data than current storage systems can handle. Most of it isn’t needed every day, but it can’t be thrown away either. This long-term, rarely accessed cold data is piling up faster than existing storage infrastructure can manage and maintaining giant warehouses of servers just to keep it all alive is becoming expensive and environmentally unsustainable.
This is the problem SPhotonix is stepping in to solve. They want to store huge amounts of information in a stable format that doesn’t degrade, doesn’t need electricity to preserve data and doesn’t require constant swapping of hardware. Instead of racks of spinning drives, the idea is a durable optical crystal storage system that could last for generations.
The company’s underlying technology—called FemtoEtch™—uses ultrafast lasers to engrave microscopic patterns inside fused silica. These precisely etched structures can function as high-performance optical components for fields like aerospace, microscopy and semiconductor manufacturing. But the same ultra-controlled process can also encode information in five dimensions within the crystal, transforming the material into a compact, long-lasting archive capable of holding massive amounts of information in a very small footprint.
The new funding allows SPhotonix to expand its engineering team, grow its R&D facility in Switzerland and prepare the technology for real-world deployment. Investors say the opportunity is significant: global data generation has more than doubled in recent years and traditional storage systems—drives, disks, tapes—weren’t designed for the scale or longevity modern data demands.
While the company has been gaining attention in research circles (and even made an appearance in the latest Mission Impossible film), its next step is all about practical adoption. If the technology reaches commercial viability, it could offer an alternative to the energy-hungry, short-lived storage hardware that underpins much of today’s digital infrastructure.
As digital information continues to multiply, preserving it safely and sustainably is becoming one of the biggest challenges in modern computing. SPhotonix’s work points toward a future where long-lasting, low-maintenance optical data storage becomes a practical alternative to today’s fragile systems. It offers a more resilient way to preserve knowledge for the decades ahead.