The world’s second-largest payment-processing corporation has jumped into the Web3 bandwagon, partnering with crypto payment platform MoonPay.
The collaboration was revealed in an announcement made on 25 October by MoonPay as well as on X (formerly Twitter). Its president, Keith Grossman, and Mastercard’s chief marketing and communications officer, Raja Rajamannar, officially unveiled the collaboration at Money20/20 in Las Vegas. It is a global fintech event enabling payments and financial services innovation for connected commerce.
Together, the two entities will explore how Web3 tools can enhance experiential marketing, including across Mastercard’s renowned sponsorship portfolio, to connect with consumers in new ways.
In a LinkedIn post, Grossman said: “Mastercard will take advantage of MoonPay’s entire Web3 portfolio, including auth to minting to ETHPass and more as well as work closely with our agency, Otherlife, for strategy, creative and front-end dev work for their experiential initiatives.”
Otherlife, a subsidiary of MoonPay that provides Web3 creative agency services, development, strategy, and experiential services.
MoonPay, on the other hand, will leverage Mastercard Crypto Credential, which is a set of common standards and infrastructure that helps to validate trusted interactions between consumers and businesses using blockchain networks. This was launched back in April this year April, along with Aptos, Polygon, Avalanche, Solana.
It also seeks to embed Mastercard products and solutions to “drive even more trust, compliance, and efficiency across the industry”. This includes incorporating Mastercard’s “Click to Pay,” Mastercard Send and Mastercard Crypto Credentials into its payment solutions.
Its co-founder and CEO, Ivan Soto-Wright, also commented on the news saying: “We’re excited to collaborate with Mastercard, a prominent supporter of Web3 and the digital economy, to redefine customer loyalty and engagement. Joining forces will create new opportunities to showcase blockchain’s potential in establishing unique connections and meaningful moments while broadening our industry’s overall reach.”
The leading credit card company has shown its keen interest in the blockchain and crypto industry through the various addition of products to its platform.
Last year, Mastercard enabled NFT commerce on the platform, tying up with Immutable X, Candy Digital, The Sandbox, Mintable, Spring, Nifty Gateway, and Web3 infrastructure provider MoonPay. The move was aimed at facilitating the use of Mastercard cards for NFTs purchases, whether that’s on one of these companies’ marketplaces or using their crypto services.
At the start of 2023, the payments giant launched the Mastercard Artist Accelerator. The Web3 and music education platform is aimed at encouraging musicians to create, collaborate and monetise their work using Web3 tools and resources.
Back in June, Mastercard also announced plans to launch a blockchain app store later this year. The app will enable developers to create applications using Mastercard’s blockchain technology. Called the ‘Multi-Token Network’ (MTN), the app store will be specifically designed for constructing financial applications. A report on the same described it as: “MTN represents one of Mastercard’s most ambitious projects in the digital asset space to date.
“It is a natural evolution that demonstrates Mastercard’s commitment to offering a wider range of payment solutions that are safe, easy to access and always on.”
