AUSTIN, Texas – Mastercard (MC) is bringing additional trust to the cryptocurrency space with a service that ensures transactions between users’ wallets are verifiable and compliant, beginning with transfers of digital assets between countries.
In this first cross-border use case, the Mastercard Crypto Credential service, announced Friday at Consensus 2023, allows wallets to be identified and that transactions are compliant with things like the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) travel rule.
Mastercard Crypto Credential, a set of common standards for attestation of interactions, uses technology from the CipherTrace, the well-known blockchain analytics platform Mastercard agreed to acquire in late 2021.
Read full coverage of Consensus 2023 here.
“If two people want to transfer value from one country to another country, the level of compliance and verification needed is complex,” said Raj Dhamodharan Head of Crypto and Blockchain at Mastercard. “So how do you identify those wallets, and how do you exchange enough information about the other party?"
Cross-border transactions have been a focus of blockchain tracker CipherTrace, the creator of a cryptocurrency travel rule solution.
To roll out the service, Mastercard partnered with wallet providers Bit2Me, Lirium, Mercado Bitcoin and Uphold. The firms are working with us on an initial project to enable transfers between U.S. and Latin America and the Caribbean corridors.
More use cases like NFT transactions will follow Dhamodharan added. To this end, Mastercard is also teaming up with public blockchain network organizations Aptos Labs, Ava Labs, Polygon and the Solana Foundation.
Edited by Stephen Alpher and Margo Beller.