Mastercard and Visa to Form Blockchain & Cryptocurrency Team
Last month, Visa declared that it is planning to invest around $40 mln to a startup firm working on custodian storage development for about $4.2 bln. Last year alone, Mastercard had over 170 blockchain engineers, and is now trying to recruit executives for cryptocurrency wallet development.
The Libra Association
The executives and the current engineers will work together to develop payment instruments and other crucial wallet solutions. Meanwhile, Mastercard is a registered and active associate of The Libra Association, an autonomous nonprofit body made up of around 27 firms such as PayPal, Kiva, USV, Vodafone, PayU, Stripe, ebay, and many other companies including Anchorage, BisonTrails, Coinbase, Xapo, etc. that manage Libra, a cryptocurrency owned by the giant social networking service provider Facebook.
Then again, Libra wants to employ specialists who manage Calibra, that offers digital wallets, and will have to dedicate the wallet development and operation task specifically to its known members. Although Bitcoin card payments is considered as a high-risk, most payment service providers including Mastercard, PayPal, Visa, etc. are considering to join the free completion because of the Libra’s wallet initiative.
Blockchain-based B2B Connect
In June 2019, Visa announced the launch of its new blockchain initiative worth $125 trillion, that will be competing with SWIFT. The cross-border business-to-business (B2B) transactions based on blockchain is also underway, as we reported. B2B Connect considers to design a cross-border payment service with Hyperledger Fabric for specifically corporate clients.
However, as per the data by blockchain and digital asset startup BlockData, Cryptocurrency is becoming a major threat to credit card firms, existing Traditional salable payment processing corporations including Visa and MasterCard are slowly looking inferior to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ether, Ripple, Litecoin, and others.
Traditional Giants are Turning to Blockchain
More and more companies from the traditional finance sector are turning to blockchain as they realise the importance and potential of the technology. According to Anton Makarchuk, the CMO of CryptoUniverse, the Eurasian largest multifunctional cloud mining service, who has been working in the company from the beginning and has strong knowledge in mining processes, the reason why large financial corporations started to pay attention to different crypto and blockchain technologies is explained by simple economic causes. He told Coinidol:
“First of all, this is cheaper. Second of all, this is more secure.
On one hand the emergence of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies allowed us to introduce payments between countries and different systems bypassing the various restrictions which exist now for both Visa and Mastercard both from legislative and technological points of view. On the other hand blockchain technology allowed us to increase the level of confidence in these operations; also it can be used to build an alternative evaluation system for borrowers, to speed up scoring process, to build credit systems based on smart contracts and tokenization.
All of this together is very interesting for our classic financial institutes. That is why there are no options that they will stop there and stop moving in this direction. We will see how Visa and Mastercard will start accepting crypto payments and working on smart contracts.”