Mastercard Invites Traditional Banks to Cryptocurrency Trading

Mastercard, one of the biggest payment providers, introduced Crypto Source a software that enables financial institutions to offer cryptocurrency trading and services to their clients.

To launch the new program, Mastercard has teamed up with Paxos, a leading regulated blockchain infrastructure platform. The partnership aims to provide Paxos crypto-asset trading and custody services on behalf of the banks, while Mastercard will concentrate on integrating the functionality into banks' interfaces and create a seamless experience for the consumer.

Paxos, by the way, is already used by PayPal to offer a similar service. Paxos Trust Company offers cryptocurrency brokerage service, allowing companies to give access to the cryptocurrency market for their clients. In total, the infrastructure of the company reaches more than 400 million users. With the Mastercard project, this figure may increase by six fold.

The competitive advantage of Mastercard’s Crypto Source is handling crypto compliance rules and regulations, verifying transactions, and monitoring anti-money-laundering cases.

"We're excited to build on our long-term partnership with Paxos - co-innovating to bring safe and secure technology to financial institutions. Our crypto product innovations will provide choice at scale and continue to bring one-of-a-kind opportunities to financial institutions as they seek to offer new, advanced services to their customers," - Jorn Lambert, Chief Digital Officer at Mastercard.

Although this year was not fruitful for many cryptocurrencies, Jorn Lambert, Chief Digital Officer at Mastercard noted that their research revealed sound demand for digital assets.

Pilot programs of the Mastercard Crypto Source project will be launched in the first quarter of next year. The participants of the pilot are undisclosed as yet. If everything goes smoothly, crypto exchanges will have to face a serious rival represented by a leading payments provider with about 2.4 billion cards already in circulation.

Along with it, several large banks have independently launched crypto services for their customers within the last month. It shows that the bear market is only bear for speculative purposes, while corporate sector makes large investments into this area.

It is also odd, that the idea of cryptocurrency lies in providing remittances without intermediaries, and now an international payment giant enters the game and brings together countless traditional institutions.

Get the popcorn, the show is assured!