Instilling trust in the blockchain ecosystem is a critical step toward realizing its full potential.

In recent years, crypto and blockchain have seen significant innovations contributing to a more scalable and resilient systems. At the same time, a lack of proper protections has created vulnerabilities in security and compliance, eroding the trust of consumers, businesses and governments. 

In response, regulators have worked to establish meaningful regulations for the industry, while central banks and regulated financial institutions have developed a variety of solutions on public chains. But to fully implement these rules and build scalable use cases, we need a way for trusted, compliant and verifiable interactions to take place on public blockchain networks.  

That’s why we created Mastercard Crypto Credential. Mastercard Crypto Credential will establish a set of common standards and infrastructure that will help attest trusted interactions among consumers and businesses using blockchain networks. There are several use cases that Mastercard Crypto Credential can unlock, as consumer and business verification needs vary widely based on market and compliance requirements. 

For example, the Mastercard Music Pass NFT, which we launched as an extension of the Mastercard Artist Accelerator, requires different verification criteria than does our work with Immersve, which offers consumers the ability to use crypto from their Web3 wallet to pay for everyday goods and services. Simply put, the level of verification needed for someone to receive an NFT differs greatly from the authentication required of someone to transfer digital assets from or receive assets to crypto wallets. 

With Mastercard Crypto Credential, we can help ensure that those interested in interacting across Web3 environments are meeting defined standards for the types of activities they’d like to pursue. Mastercard Crypto Credential will not only define verification standards and levels, but also provide necessary enabling technology to help bring more use cases to life. We’re thinking about it in a few key ways:  

• Providing easy-to-remember, straightforward aliases to help consumers share wallet addresses with one another, improving the consumer experience and reducing the potential for errors.
• Bringing richer information to blockchain transactions through metadata, helping to define attributes of a wallet to help ensure that transactions are completed as intended (such as network type or assets supported).
• Tapping into Ciphertrace’s suite of services — including Ciphertrace Traveler — to help verify addresses and support Travel Rule compliance for cross border transactions.

Joining us on this journey are crypto wallet providers Bit2Me, Lirium, Mercado Bitcoin and Uphold, which are working with us on an initial project to enable transfers between the U.S. and Latin America and the Caribbean corridors. We’re also teaming up with public blockchain network organizations Aptos Labs, Ava Labs, Polygon Labs and The Solana Foundation, who will help bring Mastercard Crypto Credential to the application developers in their ecosystems. Together, we’ll collaborate to enhance verification in NFTs, ticketing, enterprise and other payments solutions. 

Setting up and scaling trusted ecosystems to enable commerce is not new to Mastercard. We’ve done this for years in payments — pioneering innovation in identity verification and global standards. We look forward to bringing decades of experience to this space to enhance trust and work with the broader industry and governments to enable further innovation.

To learn more about Mastercard Crypto Credential, please contact [email protected].