In an announcement on its website, Mastercard stated that it is ready to launch a service for the purchase of NFTs.
Mastercard’s project
The project that the company has been working on for months would now be in the home stretch and would allow the approximately 2.9 billion users to make purchases directly with their card, without first having to make a digital currency purchase.
“These integrations are designed to make crypto more accessible and help the NFT ecosystem keep growing, innovating and bringing in more fans”.
Mastercard said it has partnered with several NFT marketplaces, namely Immutable X, Candy Digital, The Sandbox, Mintable, Spring, Nifty Gateway and Web3 infrastructure provider MoonPay.
“We’re working with these companies to allow people to use their Mastercard cards for NFTs purchases, whether that’s on one of these companies’ NFT marketplaces or using their crypto services. With 2.9 billion Mastercard cards worldwide, this change could have a big impact on the NFT ecosystem”,
reads the company statement.
In recent months, the company had surveyed countries around the world on the use and awareness of NFTs. According to the survey, about 45% of the sample said they were interested in buying NFTs, or had already done so.
Mastercard and NFT patents
In May of this year, Mastercard filed around 15 NFT-related and metaverse patents in the US. Last year, a project was launched to offset carbon emissions with NFTs.
Visa, Mastercard‘s big rival in the electronic payments sector, has also been working for months on NFT-related projects, such as the program launched at the beginning of the year to support independent artists and small businesses to increase their revenue through NFTs.
“We believe the process of buying an NFT needs to be easier and safer. When that happens, customers get the things they want with less stress and uncertainty. For NFT creators, these changes grow their potential customer base to millions more people all over the world”,
reads the Mastercard website.
The project will also see the implementation of the company’s full suite of capabilities to strengthen customer security, giving people similar protections to those they enjoy when they transact in a shop or online with a Mastercard card.
“We’re using our cybersecurity tools to boost safety and protect user data for purchases people make using a Mastercard card”.
