Mastercard’s payment system will allow cardholders to purchase NFTs. For this, the company signed agreements with Immutable X, Candy Digital, The Sandbox, Mintable, Spring, Nifty Gateway and MoonPay.
Cardholders will be able to purchase non-fungible tokens on platforms owned by the new partners, without needing to acquire cryptocurrency in advance.
“We are working with these companies to enable people to use Mastercard cards to buy NFTs on partner marketplaces or through their cryptocurrency services. With 2.9 million cards worldwide, this change could have a greater impact on the NFT ecosystem,” said Raj Dhamodaran, the company’s vice president.
He also noted that a survey conducted by the payments system among more than 35,000 people in 40 countries shows user interest in non-fungible tokens. 45% of respondents said they have purchased NFTs or intend to do so.
Since January 2022 Mastercard has partnered with Coinbase — their joint initiative aims to simplify NFT purchases on Coinbase’s marketplace. The beta version of the latter was launched in April.
Earlier in the same month the payments system filed applications to register trademarks related to the metaverse. The documents refer to “multimedia-enabled NFTs, a digital goods marketplace, and the processing of payments and software for e-commerce in the metaverse.”
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