Blockchain transactions need more trust. A crypto credential can help.

Creating trust in the blockchain ecosystem is a critical step towards realizing its full potential.

In recent years, crypto and blockchain have seen significant innovations that contribute to a more scalable and resilient system. At the same time, a lack of proper protection has created vulnerabilities in security and compliance, and weakened trust in consumers, businesses and authorities.

In response, regulators have worked to establish meaningful regulations for the industry, while central banks and regulated financial institutions have developed a range of public chain solutions. However, to fully implement these rules and build scalable use cases, we need a way for reliable, compatible and verifiable interactions to take place on public blockchain networks.

That’s why we created the Mastercard Crypto Credential. The Mastercard Crypto Credential will establish a set of common standards and infrastructure that will help verify trusted interactions between consumers and businesses using blockchain networks. There are multiple use cases that the Mastercard Crypto Credential can unlock, as consumer and enterprise verification needs vary widely based on market and compliance requirements.

For example Mastercard Music Pass NFT, which we launched as an extension of Mastercard Artist Acceleratorrequire different verification criteria than we work with Immersive, which offers consumers the ability to use crypto from the Web3 wallet to pay for everyday goods and services. Simply put, the level of verification required for someone to receive an NFT is very different from the authentication required of someone to transfer digital assets from or receive assets to crypto wallets.

With the Mastercard Crypto Credential, we can help ensure that those interested in interacting across Web3 environments meet defined standards for the type of activities they wish to engage in. The Mastercard Crypto Credential will not only define verification standards and levels, but also provide the necessary enabling technology to help bring more use cases to life. We think about it in a few key ways:

• Provides simple, easy-to-remember aliases to help consumers share wallet addresses with each other, improving the consumer experience and reducing the potential for error.
• Bringing richer information to blockchain transactions through metadata, helping to define attributes of a wallet to ensure that transactions complete as intended (such as network type or assets supported).
• Taps in CipherTrace’s package of services – included CipherTrace Traveler — to help verify addresses and support travel compliance for cross-border transactions.

Joining us on this journey are crypto wallet providers Bit2Me, Lyrium, Mercado Bitcoin and maintain, which is working with us on an initial project to enable transfers between the United States and Latin America and the Caribbean corridors. We also collaborate with public blockchain network organizations Aptos Labs, Ava Labs, Polygon Labs and The Solana Foundation, which will help bring the Mastercard Crypto Credential to the application developers in their ecosystems. Together, we will work together to improve verification in NFTs, ticketing, corporate and other payment solutions.

Setting up and scaling trusted ecosystems to enable commerce is not new for Mastercard. We’ve been doing this for years in payments – pioneering innovation in identity verification and global standards. We look forward to bringing decades of experience to this area to increase confidence and working with the wider industry and government to enable further innovation.

To learn more about the Mastercard Crypto Credential, please get in touch [email protected].