The post Inside the Quest at Colossus to Replace Visa and Mastercard With KYC-Less Crypto Cards appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

In brief Colossus is attempting to bypass Visa and Mastercard by building its own sovereign credit card rail using an Ethereum layer-2 network. The company is leveraging its interpretation of the GENIUS Act to operate without the traditional KYC or AML requirements. The startup’s launch follows the total collapse of UnCash, which was shut down by a “corporate guillotine.” Joseph Delong’s desk looks less like a developer’s workstation these days and more like an electronics repair shop, littered with technology that crypto was pioneered to replace. That’s because the veteran Ethereum developer and former SushiSwap CTO has accumulated what he describes as a “box of goodies” while building a stablecoin credit card network called Colossus—from point-of-sale test terminals to card readers and manufacturer sample books. “Trying to get my hands on the hardware, it’s like this arcane knowledge that nobody could get access to,” Delong told Decrypt from his home office in San Antonio, Texas.  Consisting of four employees, the company expects its Ethereum layer-2 scaling network to debut in March, and it’s designed in a way that replaces traditional bank settlement with a sovereign credit card rail that treats users’ account addresses as their sole identity. Colossus has raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding, according to documents shared with Decrypt. Those investments valued the startup at $10 million, Delong said. In theory, Colossus will enable users to “burn their cards from their home,” but Delong acknowledged that building a service enabling anyone to pay for things with crypto while circumventing incumbents like Mastercard and Visa has been no easy task. And those efforts may present unforeseen hurdles. Part of that has to do with disrupting longstanding relationships between businesses involved in the settlement process behind incumbent credit card networks, which weren’t built on the cypherpunk principles that Delong is…

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Filed under: News - @ March 7, 2026 6:03 pm