Apart from Mastercard, a lot of its competitors like Visa and American Express are too entering into multiple partnerships with crypto firms.
The burgeoning NFT popularity over the last year has made sure mainstream payment giants and intermediaries are in the pursuit of bettering their consumer’s experience. Amidst a wave of several crypto partnerships, the announcement made by Mastercard and Coinbase is just another feather in the cap for the crypto economy. This deal will ensure you can buy NFTs with fiat currency through your credit or debit card. NFTs are unique digital assets that can be traded on the blockchain and where their ownership is tracked.
Apart from Mastercard, a lot of its competitors like Visa and American Express are too entering into multiple partnerships with crypto firms to bring blockchain technology into the mainstream. Visa, for example, is already a party to at least 60 different deals in the crypto space.
How will the Mastercard and Coinbase Deal Help People?
The partnership will enable the interested parties to purchase NFTs on Coinbase’s upcoming NFT marketplace with their Mastercard credit and debit cards. This is a big step to make the NFT ecosystem inclusive as several NFT marketplaces require the purchaser or seller to own cryptocurrencies and a crypto wallet. This tedious process leaves out most of the people, especially the ones uncomfortable dealing with the digital asset. Coinbase wants to simplify this process by enabling more people access to this NFT economy.
By working towards categorizing NFTs as ‘digital goods’, Coinbase aims to expand the payment choice for consumers and give its access to a broader group of people. Mastercard, in their announcement about the cooperation with Coinbase, also focused on their cybersecurity capabilities to ensure consumer data protection and privacy is always maintained while at the same time guaranteeing the security of the NFTs they purchase. It will employ the competencies of the recently acquired CipherTrace to boost the NFT safeguards. Besides these novel innovations, the executives also believe it could expand the NFT technology to more than just art and collectibles. An inclusive NFT marketplace will not just help individual enthusiasts but also spur innovation, catalyze economic growth and spoil the consumer with multiple choices.
About Coinbase NFT marketplace
Coinbase described its upcoming NFT marketplace as a platform where people can purchase, sell, mint and trade NFTs. Though the platform is not up and running yet, they do have a waitlist to help provide early access to interested individuals. As per a report by Verge, the Coinbase NFT will support Ethereum based ERC-721 and ERC-1155 standards during the launch. It also said that the NFTs will be on-chain initially but there are plans for multi-chain support post the launch.
However, there has been no clarity on how the company would reduce its ecological footprint considering the vast environmental concerns NFTs pose due to the electricity they consume.
The world is no stranger to Mastercard as it has been empowering a digital economy that is inclusive and connecting people, businesses, institutions and governments to make transactions smart and safe. It is a pioneer in the area of payment innovation and a leader in related technology and has been revolutionizing the payment space since 1966. It provides sophisticated payment solutions, with its primary role being enabling the payments between the banks of merchants or the card-issuing banks and credit unions of the purchasers who use the “Mastercard” debit, credit and prepaid cards.
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