Payments giant Mastercard enables NFT purchase without crypto

• Mastercard is collaborating with several NFT platforms to enable NFT purchases using fiat.
• The firm’s latest move increases its competition against rivals Visa, PayPal, and Stripe in terms of crypto ventures made.

Payments technology giant Mastercard has partnered with various players in the NFT industry to enable NFT purchases without crypto. Among those, it is working with Ethereum layer-2 NFT network Immutable X, and The Sandbox game. Others are crypto platforms include MoonPay and NFT platforms Candy Digital, Mintable, Spring, and Nifty Gateway.

With the new service, the company looks to enable NFT purchases in fiat. NFT buyers will benefit from diverse payment options; they don’t have to convert their money to crypto to have NFT access. 

Recently, Mastercard published the results of an NFT-related survey it conducted with 35,000 participants from 40 countries. Of the total respondents, 45 percent reported that they had purchased an NFT, or had plans to do so. Aside from high NFT popularity, the survey also showed that half of these respondents would like flexible payment infrastructures. Besides crypto, NFT buyers would not mind paying in credit or debit cards.

Other than purchasers, Mastercard’s project is also beneficial to NFT creators since the added exposure grows their customer base.

Mastercard enables NFT purchase without crypto

According to the announcement Mastercard made, the new service will be secured with similar measures to those guarding the firm’s payments system. This will likely do away with some of the uncertainty involved in NFT purchases, in addition to fraudulent activities.

Recently, CNF reported that an NFT holder got conned out of his 29 Moonbird NFTs (worth $1.5 million). A scammer posing as a buyer requested that they move the negotiations to a private platform. There, he took possession of the NFTs but never made payment. Similar scams were reported with crypto Twitter alerting NFT enthusiasts of an alleged fraudster.

Last year, the NFT industry generated over $25 billion in sales. Meanwhile, Mastercard has distributed a total of 2.9 billion cards all over the world. These figures show that the move by Mastercard could potentially contribute to further NFT adoption. Consequently, this could foster additional uptake of the metaverse and Web3.

Venturing into crypto and NFTs

At the beginning of the year, Mastercard partnered with Coinbase for a similar payment system for the exchange’s native NFT marketplace. Even more, the company filed for 15 trademark applications about two months ago. It aims to use these to develop its brand in crypto markets and NFT platforms. Mastercard also works alongside lending platform Nexo to allow clients to spend their debt using Nexo cards.

Visa, PayPal, and Stripe are some of Mastercard’s rivals in the payment industry. Like Mastercard, the three have also spread their wings to the crypto industry, increasing competition among themselves. Visa enables fiat transactions with USDC on Ethereum, PayPal supports crypto transactions while Stripe allows Twitter crypto payouts through Polygon.