Chainlink, Mastercard Tie-Up to Let Nearly 3B Cardholders Buy Crypto On-Chain

Chainlink and Mastercard have linked their networks so more than three billion Mastercard holders can purchase cryptocurrencies directly on-chain.

The service folds several players into a single flow. Shift4 processes the card payment, zerohash custodies fiat currency and delivers crypto liquidity, while XSwap and Uniswap execute the final token swap on decentralized markets.

Chainlink’s interoperability protocol stitches those steps together, passing transaction data between the card network and multiple blockchains, according to an announcement shared with CoinDesk.

Raj Dhamodharan, who leads blockchain efforts at Mastercard, said the firm wants to “bridge the gap between onchain commerce and offchain transactions.”

The deal helps enable a “critical connection between the traditional payments world and the over three billion cardholders in the Mastercard user base,” according to Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov.

Mastercard has been slowly moving deeper into the cryptocurrency space. Just last month, the firm partnered with MoonPay to let users spend stablecoins at more than 150 million merchants worldwide. Similarly, back in April Kraken and Mastercard teamed up to introduce cryptocurrency debit cards.

Read more: MoonPay Mastercard Launch Crypto Card, Allowing Users to Make Merchant Payments With Stablecoins