MASTERCARD on Friday announced the introduction of Mastercard Crypto Credential, a set of common standards and infrastructure that will help verify interactions among consumers and businesses using blockchain networks. Mastercard Crypto Credential aims to provide a foundation for financial institutions, governments, brands, and crypto players, ensuring that those interested in interacting across web3 environments are meeting defined standards for the types of activities they’d like to pursue. Web3 incorporates concepts such as decentralisation, blockchain technologies, and token-based economics.

“Setting up and scaling trusted ecosystems to enable commerce is not new to Mastercard,” said Raj Dhamodharan, executive vice-president, blockchain and digital currencies, at Mastercard.

“We’ve done this for years in payments — pioneering innovation in identity verification and global standards. We look forward to bringing decades of experience to this space to enhance trust, and work with the broader industry and governments to enable further innovation.”

There are several use cases that Mastercard Crypto Credential can unlock as the types of consumer verification vary widely based on market and compliance requirements. Mastercard Crypto Credential will not only define verification levels but also provide necessary, enabling technology to help bring more use cases to life. Some ways in which Mastercard Crypto Credential will work:

– Providing easy-to-remember, straightforward aliases to help consumers share wallet addresses with one another, improving the consumer experience, and reducing the potential for errors;

– Bringing richer information to blockchain transactions through metadata, helping to define criteria for a wallet to help ensure that transactions are completed as intended;

– Tapping into CipherTrace’s suite of services to help verify addresses and support travel rule compliance for cross-border transactions.

Lirium, Bit2Me, Mercado Bitcoin and Uphold are the first partners to join Mastercard in this journey, working on an initial project to enable transfers between US and Latin America and the Caribbean corridors. Mastercard is also teaming up with public blockchain network organisations Aptos Labs, Ava Labs, Polygon and The Solana Foundation, which will help bring Mastercard Crypto Credential to the application developers in their ecosystems. Together, Mastercard and these partners will collaborate to enhance verification in non-fungible tokens (NFTs), ticketing, enterprise and other payments solutions.

“Latin America and the Caribbean is among the top regions for digital assets adoption and remittances, leveraging digital assets as means of value exchange. Mastercard Crypto Credential could help to address key challenges that have traditionally hindered mainstream usage of this type of use cases, driving more industry players to join this space in a meaningful way,” says Walter Pimenta, executive vice-president, product and engineering, Mastercard Latin America and the Caribbean.