Mastercard launches Mastercard Crypto Credential to increase trust in blockchain The Block
Mastercard has introduced the Mastercard Crypto Credential, a set of common standards and infrastructure that will help verify interactions between consumers and businesses using blockchain networks.
The Mastercard Crypto Credential aims to provide a foundation for financial institutions, governments, brands and crypto players, ensuring that those interested in interacting across web3 environments meet defined standards for the type of activities they wish to engage in.
Raj Dhamodharan, Executive VP, Blockchain and Digital Currencies at Mastercard, said: “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.”
There are multiple use cases that the Mastercard Crypto Credential can unlock, as the types of consumer verification vary widely based on market and compliance requirements. The Mastercard Crypto Credential will not only define verification levels, but also provide the necessary enabling technology to help bring more use cases to life. Some ways the Mastercard Crypto Credential will work:
1. Provides easy-to-remember, simple aliases to help consumers share wallet addresses with each other, improving the consumer experience and reducing the potential for error
2. Bringing richer information to blockchain transactions through metadata, helping define criteria for a wallet to ensure transactions complete as intended
3. Utilize CipherTrace’s suite of services to help verify addresses and support travel compliance for cross-border transactions
Lirium, Bit2Me, Mercado Bitcoin and Uphold are the first partners to join Mastercard on this journey, working on an initial project to enable transfers between the US and Latin America and the Caribbean corridors. Mastercard is also teaming up with public blockchain network organizations Aptos Labs, Ava Labs, Polygon and The Solana Foundation, which will help bring the Mastercard Crypto Credential to the application developers in their ecosystems. Together, Mastercard and these partners will work together to improve verification in NFTs, ticketing, enterprise and other payment solutions.
Walter Pimenta, executive VP, Product and Engineering, Latin America and the Caribbean, said: “Latin America and the Caribbean is among the top regions for the adoption of digital assets and remittances that leverage digital assets as a means of value exchange. The Mastercard Crypto Credential can help solve important challenges that have traditionally hindered the mainstream adoption of this type of use case, and get more industry players to join this space in a meaningful way.”
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