Mastercard and MoonPay Team to Promote Stablecoin Payments

Mastercard has launched a stablecoin-focused partnership with cryptocurrency payments FinTech MoonPay.

The collaboration will allow consumers and businesses to send and receive stablecoin payments across global markets, according to a Thursday (May 15) news release. Companies and FinTechs will be able to employ Mastercard-branded cards linked to users’ stablecoin balances, allowing cardholders to spend their stablecoins, which will simultaneously be converted to fiat currency, at more than 150 million locations where Mastercard is accepted around the world.

“By providing solutions that unlock stablecoin utility and ubiquity, we are redefining how money moves globally and driving a shift in payments as we know it,” Scott Abrahams, executive vice president, Global Partnerships at Mastercard, said in the release.

“Together with MoonPay, we’re building innovative and secure connectivity between crypto and mainstream finance ecosystems, grounded by trust and driven by scale.”

According to the release, the partnership will leverage the API-driven stablecoin infrastructure from Iron, acquired by MoonPay in March, to facilitate stablecoin transactions, turning “crypto wallets into new digital bank accounts for seamless global transactions.”

This will let businesses, neobanks, and other payment participants manage payouts and disbursements more efficiently, improving cross-border money transfers, the release said, and help businesses offer stablecoin-based payouts to gig workers, contractors and creators.

The partnership is happening amid what PYMNTS recently described as “the rise of stablecoins as financial infrastructure” following two other Mastercard partnerships centered around digital assets.

One of them involved teaming with OKX, merging that company’s expertise in crypto trading with Mastercard’s payment network to promote the wider adoption of stablecoins.

That adoption is happening amid a tumultuous time for global affairs, Konstantin Anissimov, chief executive at Currency.com, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster earlier this week.

“There’s been a big shift in terms of adoption of stablecoin payments that is being driven by uncertainty in geopolitics,” Anissimov said. “I am personally seeing a big increase of small to medium enterprises utilizing stablecoin payments because banking rails are harder and harder to use.”

Digital assets like stablecoins have become a needed tool to navigate a fragmented financial world, he added.

“If the payment gets there quicker, faster, in a more definitive way, then a lot of these businesses are limited less in their working capital requirements,” Anissimov said. “The faster the payment, the more goods they can buy.”