Mastercard Links Stablecoins to Everyday Banking and Card Payments

Mastercard is making it easier for businesses to use stablecoins (digital currencies designed to always be worth the same as a regular currency, like $1 per coin) in everyday banking and card payments.

The company just launched a new service called the Global Money Platform. It lets businesses plug stablecoins into normal financial services — without having to build the complicated technology themselves.

This is Mastercard's first big project using BVNK, a stablecoin infrastructure company (a firm that builds the behind-the-scenes tech for moving digital money) that Mastercard bought in August.

What can businesses actually do with it?

• Hold and swap between regular money (called fiat — government-issued currency like dollars or euros) and stablecoins
• Offer cards linked to stablecoin balances, so customers can spend digital money like normal cash
• Send payments straight from stablecoin balances into someone's local bank account

The platform connects to Mastercard Move, the company's global money-transfer network. This network can send money to more than 17 billion destinations, including bank accounts and cards around the world. It also links stablecoins to Mastercard's huge network of shops and merchants.

Who's using it first?

Fintech companies (businesses that mix finance with technology) Nuvei and Marqeta are among the first to adopt the platform.

This move is important because it turns Mastercard into a kind of behind-the-scenes toolkit. Other financial companies can use it to offer stablecoin services under their own brand names, rather than Mastercard's.

It also heats up the rivalry with Visa, which launched a similar stablecoin platform in July that lets banks hold, create, and move stablecoins.

The bigger picture: Research from Standard Chartered shows stablecoin activity is growing, even though the total supply of major coins like USDt and USDC has stayed fairly flat this year. In short, people are using stablecoins more actively — and big payment giants like Mastercard want to be part of that growth.

This is an AI-generated summary. Read the original article at: https://cointelegraph.com/news/mastercard-bvnk-global-money-platform-stablecoins?utm_source=rss_feed&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss_partner_inbound