Mastercard to Offer Crypto Trading to Banks With Paxos

Payments giant Mastercard is offering to help traditional financial institutions get into crypto by providing the necessary fiat rails.

The project is a joint venture with Paxos, with Mastercard offering the bridge. Mastercard will handle regulatory compliance and security, two of the greater challenges that crypto faces when it comes to institutional adopters.

Mastercard offers to speed up institutional crypto adoption

Mastercard’s partner Paxos has already made a name for itself as the crypto trading platform used by PayPal. Now the company will make further progress with banks due to its partnership with Mastercard.

For its part, Mastercard has emerged as a strong proponent of crypto. The card issuer is pioneering various tools including AI technology to improve crypto security. 

According to Jorn Lambert, Mastercard’s chief digital officer, security is a major factor in whether institutions decide to adopt the technology or not.

“There’s a lot of consumers out there that are really interested in this, and intrigued by crypto, but would feel a lot more confident if those services were offered by their financial institutions,” Lambert told CNBC on Monday. The Mastercard chief went on to add, “It’s a little scary to some people still.”

Mastercard hopes that their involvement will help to assuage any lingering fears that banks might have.

Mastercard chief digital officer: crypto winter ain’t so bad

On CNBC Mastercard’s chief digital officer was further asked whether the recent crypto winter has slowed or stalled adoption, but he dismissed the idea. The Mastercard man is still very bullish on the wider industry.

“It would be shortsighted to think that a little bit of a crypto winter heralds the end of it. We don’t see that,” said Lambert. “As regulation comes in, there is going to be a higher degree of security available to the crypto platforms and we’ll see a lot of the current issues getting resolved in the quarters in the years to come.”

As Mastercard sees it crypto will form a central plank of its long-term strategy, with the industry now on the “cusp of really going mainstream,” according to Lambert.

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