Mastercard Unveils Standards to Verify Interactions Using Blockchain Networks

Mastercard has unveiled standards and infrastructure that will help verify interactions using blockchain networks.

The new Mastercard Crypto Credential is meant to ensure that financial institutions, governments, brands and crypto organizations are meeting defined standards for the types of activities they would like to pursue in Web3 environments, the company said in a Friday (April 28) press release.

“Setting up and scaling trusted ecosystems to enable commerce is not new to Mastercard,” Raj Dhamodharan, executive vice president of digital asset and blockchain products and partnerships at Mastercard, said in a Friday blog post. “We’ve done this for years in payments — pioneering innovation in identity verification and global standards. We look forward to bringing decades of experience to this space to enhance trust and work with the broader industry and governments to enable further innovation.”

The first use case test of the Mastercard Crypto Credential will focus on enabling transfers between the United States and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) corridors. In this project, the firm has teamed up with Lirium, Bit2Me, Mercado Bitcoin and Uphold, according to the press release.

Other tests will aim to enhance verification in non-fungible tokens (NFTs), ticketing, enterprise and other payments solutions. For these, Mastercard is partnering with Aptos Labs, Ava Labs, Polygon and The Solano Foundation to extend the program to the developers in their ecosystems, the release said.

“Latin America and the Caribbean is among the top regions for digital assets adoption and remittances leveraging digital assets as means of value exchange,” Walter Pimenta, executive vice president of product and engineering for Latin America and the Caribbean at Mastercard, said in the release. “Mastercard Crypto Credential could help to address key challenges that have traditionally hindered mainstream usage of [these types] of use cases, driving more industry players to join this space in a meaningful way.”

Mastercard has found that 60% of consumers were interested in seeing their bank offer crypto services, Dhamodharan told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in an interview posted in October.

“Crypto is entering a maturity cycle where more and more consumers are interested in investing in it as an asset class,” Dhamodharan said at the time.