- Mastercard has announced partnerships with a number of companies in the cryptocurrency sector to help them build a crypto-fiat payment solution
- Mastercard announced such plans back in February
- Circle, Uphold, BitPay, and other crypto luminaries are helping create a Mastercard crypto card
Mastercard has added a raft of partners in its attempts to further integrate itself into the cryptocurrency space. The payment giant this week announced tie ins with Circle, Paxos, Evolve Bank & Trust, Metropolitan Commercial Bank, Uphold, BitPay, Apto Payments, i2c Inc., Galileo Financial Technologies and more as it aims to be the first global payments processor to allow simple and seamless conversion of crypto to fiat currency. The announcement comes five months after the company confirmed its interest in creating a seamless fiat-crypto experience.
Mastercard Making Good on Crypto Plans
Mastercard first announced its plans to integrate cryptocurrency payments into its network in February, although it has long been watching the progress of blockchain technology, filing several related patents in the process. Mastercard confirmed their interest in the cryptocurrency sector shortly afterward, and this week took a major step toward realizing that ambition by announcing a raft of new partners to help them do it.
Among the big names chosen to help Mastercard integrate cryptocurrency payments are Circle, creators of the USDC stablecoin that will be at the heart of Mastercard’s tests; crypto payment platforms Uphold and BitPay; and Paxos, creators of the PAX stablecoin. In a short press release on Tuesday, Mastercard revealed that a special cryptocurrency debit card is likely their way forward:
Mastercard and its partners will test this new capability to enable more banks and crypto companies to offer a card option to people wanting to spend their digital assets anywhere Mastercard is accepted.
A Streamlined Crypto-fiat Solution at Last?
Mastercard has been providing crypto debit cards to several blockchain firms in recent years, taking some of the market share from Visa, seeing it as a more viable solution that converting their payment terminals to accept cryptocurrency. As always with crypto debit cards, the hope is that the conversion will be done automatically at point of sale, which in this case it seems it will.
