- Mastercard has announced an institutional crypto trading suite
- Financial institutions will be able to offer safe and regulated crypto trading
- The plan will see Paxos used as custodian
Mastercard yesterday announced Crypto Source, a platform that enables financial institutions to bring secure crypto trading capabilities and services to their customers. The payments giant, which has said recently that it plans to bring crypto to the masses, will work with regulated and licensed crypto custody providers such as Paxos to grant financial institutions access to a comprehensive suite of trading services.
Mastercard’s Latest Crypto Endeavour
Mastercard has been one of the most forward thinking payment giants when it comes to crypto adoption, realising the potential in both use case and demand. Discussions over crypto integration began back in 2020 and accelerated last year when it announced tie-ins with a raft of crypto companies including Circle, Paxos, Uphold and BitPay. It wasn’t immediately clear what form the fruits of these partnerships would take, but yesterday’s announcement helps clarify matters.
Mastercard’s new suite of products will allow financial institutions access to buy, hold and sell services for select crypto assets, with its recently announced Crypto Secure protocol bringing additional security to the crypto ecosystem and supporting card issuers in their compliance with increasingly complex regulations.
Paxos to Provide Custody
Ajay Bhalla, President, Cyber and Intelligence at Mastercard, called the plan “a connected approach to services that will help bring users safely and securely into the crypto ecosystem” with Mastercard’s recent developments offering it “a unique set of capabilities to help provide our customers and consumers with the most technically advanced solutions available in the market.”
The suite will see Mastercard expanding its partnership with Paxos, which will provide crypto-asset trading and custody services on behalf of the client banks, while Mastercard will leverage its technology to integrate those capabilities into banks’ interfaces.
A pilot program is currently being prepared, and Mastercard has not released an ETA for the final product.
