Mastercard is looking to bring the traditional world of banking and crypto together by making it easier for the former to get involved with the latter. The company has announced a new program that will allow banks to offer crypto trading.
Mastercard: A Crypto Savior?
This is huge news in that it blurs the lines between two arenas that have long been at war with each other. Traditional finance is all about getting third parties and prying eyes involved, whereas crypto is trying its hardest to give its users financial autonomy.
Banks have often fought crypto claiming that there are security issues involved with the latter, while crypto has often said that banks are too selective in who they do business with, and the number of unbanked persons in the world is dangerous for operations and for the global economy.
Mastercard is serving as a bridge between Paxos – a crypto platform – and PayPal, which offers similar services as banks and traditional financial institutions, and Mastercard is set to handle all the regulatory compliance and security.
Despite the huge step forward for crypto, there are some retail consumers that aren’t too keen on getting involved in the market or in their merchant provider opening the door to the crypto space. Chief digital officer of Mastercard Jorn Lambert explained in an interview that digital currency trading is still somewhat taboo, and thus there are some consumers out there that feel somewhat nervous or worried about it. He said:
There’s a lot of consumers out there that are really interested in this and intrigued by crypto but would feel a lot more confident if those services were offered by their financial institutions. It’s a little scary to some people still.
He says one of the reasons some people are reluctant to get involved in crypto is because the space has spent the last year tanking and falling to perdition. The price of bitcoin, for example, has lost more than 70 percent since last November, when it achieved its new all-time high of about $68,000 per unit. The entire crypto space has also lost more than $2 trillion in valuation.
Things Could Still Work Out
Also, he says billions of dollars have been stolen from the crypto space over the past several months alone, and this makes some people think twice about stepping in. Still, Lambert is confident that with more transactions, the industry could withdraw from its bearish conditions. He said:
It would be shortsighted to think that a little bit of a crypto winter heralds the end of it. We don’t see that. As regulation comes in, there is going to be a higher degree of security available to the crypto platforms and we’ll see a lot of the current issues getting resolved in the quarters in the years to come.
