Mastercard Launches Mastercard Crypto Credential Bringing More Trust to the Blockchain Ecosystem

Miami, April 28^th – Today, Mastercard announced the introduction of Mastercard Crypto Credential, a set of common standards and infrastructure that will help verify interactions among consumers and businesses using blockchain networks. Mastercard Crypto Credential aims to provide a foundation for financial institutions, governments, brands, and crypto players, ensuring that those interested in interacting across web3 environments are meeting defined standards for the types of activities they’d like to pursue.

“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.”

There are several use cases that Mastercard Crypto Credential can unlock, as the types of consumer verification vary widely based on market and compliance requirements. Mastercard Crypto Credential will not only define verification levels but also provide necessary enabling technology to help bring more use cases to life. Some ways in which Mastercard Crypto Credential will work:

1. 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 

2. Bringing richer information to blockchain transactions through metadata, helping to define criteria for a wallet to help ensure that transactions are completed as intended 

3. Tapping into CipherTrace’s suite of services to help verify addresses and support Travel Rule compliance for cross border transactions 

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