Visa and Mastercard Drive Crypto Adoption with New Services

Payment giants Visa and Mastercard are speeding up the crypto revolution with a series of collaborations and initiatives. 

Visa is launching a new tokenized platform while Mastercard aims to widen its range of cryptocurrency payment cards by partnering with more crypto firms.

Mastercard Continues Crypto Card Expansion

The company has already partnered with cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance, Nexo, and Gemini, to offer cryptocurrency-linked payment cards. 

“We have dozens of partners around the world who offer crypto card programmes, and they continue to expand,”

Raj Dhamodharan, Mastercard’s head of crypto and blockchain, told Reuters.

On Thursday, the payment-processing network announced the launch of Mastercard Crypto Credential. It will provide a common standard and infrastructure for verifying interactions between consumers and businesses on blockchain networks. Lirium, Bit2Me, Mercado Bitcoin, and Uphold are partners.

The pilot will focus on enabling transfers between corridors in Latin America, the Caribbean, and the U.S. In addition, Mastercard is also collaborating with public blockchain networks such as Aptos Labs, Ava Labs, Polygon, and Solana.

Each will assist in bringing the Mastercard Crypto Credential to developers in their own ecosystems.

Visa Offers More Good News for Crypto Market

On the other hand, Visa, together with Agrotoken, Microsoft, and Sinqia, joined forces to develop a programmatic financial platform designed for farmers and small-to-medium-sized businesses.

The platform will use existing financial processes and assets, allowing farmers to tokenize traditional contracts, by transforming Brazilian legal documents into an on-chain tradable NFT. Visa’s Universal Payment Channel (UPC) connects Real Digital Future (CBDC) and other CBDCs, stablecoins, or tokenized deposits, ensuring cross-currency interoperability.

The prototype platform could enable a maize producer, for example, to create and auction a contract tokenized in an authorized version of the Ethereum blockchain, using different interoperable forms of money, thereby expanding their reach beyond local markets.

Visa and Mastercard’s latest moves within the market are welcome news for further crypto adoption. Banks and auditors have become wary of interacting with the crypto world in recent months.

Last December, Mazars, the firm that audited Binance, announced it was parting ways with the company. Banks have certainly not embraced the idea of crypto adoption in recent months following a tumultuous 2022.