Today in Crypto: Mastercard, Mercado Libre Team on Crypto Security in Brazil; Coinbase CFO Points to Evolving Crypto ‘Tailwinds’

Mastercard and Mercado Libre announced Wednesday (June 8) that they are working together to make Mercado Libre’s crypto program in Brazil more secure.

Mastercard’s CipherTrace tech will let Mercado Libre “monitor, identify and understand risks,” according to the press release. It will also be able to look at regulatory and compliance concerns.

Last December, Mercado Libre initially announced that both Mercado Libre and Mercado Pago customers in Brazil were able to buy and sell crypto. CipherTrace comes with advanced digital intelligence to help assign risks ratings to virtual asset service providers.

In other news, Credit-Card-as-a-Service FinTech Liquidity Financial has partnered with Zero Hash, which works in business-to-business-to-consumer (B2B2C) digital assets infrastructure solutions.

Liquidity Finance will use Zero Hash’s crypto rewards application programming interface (API)-driven infrastructure to offer customers a way to earn crypto rewards on credit or debit card purchases, according to a Wednesday press release.

Zero Hash powers rewards for community cards, which Liquidity Financial offers, and Liquidity will now offer crypto rewards for various actions like sign-up, spending and referrals.

Furthermore, San Diego-based startup Edge has put out a new bitcoin Mastercard that is “confidential,” meaning it doesn’t require know your customer (KYC) data, a company blog post said.

The company site said there’s “no name or address” associated with the card, which offers greater privacy.

Meanwhile, Coinbase Chief Financial Officer Alesia Has recently said that crypto is facing big challenges like inflation and rising interest rates, Seeking Alpha reported Wednesday.

Has said the company sees “lots of tailwinds evolving.” Has said bitcoin’s recent drops aren’t really new, with at least four similar-sized contractions since the inception of the coin.

However, Has said this was different, due to the “broader macro environment” of the aforementioned challenges.

Finally, Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chief Rostin Behnam is pleased with a purported new bill to make the CFTC a big crypto regulator in the U.S., CoinDesk wrote Wednesday.

The bill comes from Sens. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., which will be a possible foundation for industry oversight. Behnam said it might give the CFTC a way to write rules and regulate stakeholders.

He said it did a “very good job” and that one of the more difficult things that would come up if it passed was deciding what constitutes a commodity versus a security.