Mastercard users will be able to spend stablecoins via traditional cards
Photo Credit: Pixabay/ Alina Kaptsova
Mastercard has announced a payment ecosystem allowing buyers and merchants to make and receive payments using stablecoins. The US-based card payment giant teamed up with Seychelles-headquartered OKX crypto exchange to launch a new card, while another partnership with Canadian payment processing firm Nuvie will allow businesses to accept stablecoin payments. Stablecoins are crypto assets that derive their values from underlying reserved assets like a fiat currency – which shields them from extreme market volatility and makes them usable for day-to-day payments.
Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC) are examples of stablecoins, both of which are pegged to the US dollar and maintain their values in a 1:1 ratio with the US dollar. Mastercard says through its new system, stablecoin settlements will be made available at over 150 million merchant locations globally.
Mastercard said that stablecoins are bringing efficiency and programmability to payments, disbursements, and remittances. It also said that banks and fintech firms are increasingly ramping up their efforts to explore stablecoin-related services.
As part of this ecosystem development, Mastercard users will be able to spend stablecoins via a new OKX card for day-to-day purchases. Users will also be able to convert and withdraw their stablecoins into fiat currencies.
The company also said that through its collaboration with Nuvei and Circle, merchants will be able to receive their payments in stablecoins, “regardless of how a consumer chooses to pay”.
In the past, Mastercard has teamed up with multiple crypto players like MetaMask, Kraken, Gemini, Bybit, Crypto.com, Binance, Monavate, Bleap, and Paxos. Users of all these platforms will be able to tap into this stablecoin ecosystem to explore potential use cases. The aim is to make the use of stablecoins as convenient as the use of cash stored in any bank account, the firm noted.
Earlier this month, Mastercard said it was working with the Kraken crypto exchange to scale up card-based crypto spending across Europe and the UK. In December 2024, the company partnered Floki Inu to launch a debit card enabling crypto spending via cards.
Swoo Pay and 1inch are other Web3 firms that Mastercard has collaborated with in recent years to explore crypto-centric service offerings.
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