While the Bank of America charge card had some early success in 1958, the missing piece that would allow it to scale was the communication layer (i.e., Visa). Once banks, merchants, and customers were all using the same communication layer that identified the context around the payments being made, card networks could scale and hit escape velocity.

I was inspired to do a little more writing on the history of card networks. Here is some weekend or plane reading if you're headed to Singapore 😉.
https://www.loopcrypto.xyz/blog/a-brief-history-of-card-networks

A little history on card networks to understand how we arrived at onchain payments today.