Chainlink & Mastercard Collab Goes Live: 3B Cardholders Can Now Buy Crypto Onchain

Banks tremble as Chainlink and Mastercard flip the switch—onramping 3 billion credit cards directly to blockchain. No more clunky exchanges, no more KYC purgatory. Just tap-and-go crypto for the masses.

The backend? Chainlink’s CCIP doing the heavy lifting, stitching together TradFi rails with DeFi’s wild west. Mastercard’s compliance team probably needed extra espresso.

Watch for the ‘institutional adoption’ narrative to spike—again. Meanwhile, your local hedge fund manager just upgraded from ‘crypto is a scam’ to ‘we’ve always been blockchain curious.’

Chainlink Opens Door For Millions to Buy Crypto

According to the release, the deal will be conducted with the collaboration of zerohash, Swapper Finance, Shift4 Payments, and XSwap. The partners will use the Uniswap protocol to settle the payments allowing over 3 billion cardholders to directly buy crypto from a fully decentralized platform. The press release claims:

This breakthrough is powered by Chainlink’s secure interoperability infrastructure and Mastercard’s trusted global payments network, removing long-standing barriers that have kept mainstream users from accessing the onchain economy.

While one of the partners, zerohash, will provide liquidity and onchain services to settle the legacy payments into the Uniswap smart contract; the others, Shift4 Payments, Swapper Finance, and XSwap, will provide a ‘next generation app experience.’

Part of the Chainlink ecosystem, XSwap uses this protocol’s standard for data and interoperability, the release continues, to provide core compliance, custody, and transaction infrastructure. In that way, it is easy for the cardholders to convert fiat into crypto without the usual barriers between the two sectors.

Sergey Nazarov, Co-Founder of Chainlink, stated the following while thanking the Mastercard team for their ‘innovative implementation’ and the rest of the partners for achieving a ‘complex’ task in collaboration with the Chainlink community:

This is the type of traditional finance and decentralized finance convergence that Chainlink was built to make possible. I’m excited about Chainlink’s ability to enable this critical connection between the traditional payments world and the over three billion cardholders in the Mastercard user base, directly into the next generation trading environments of onchain decentralized exchanges (…).

On the other hand, Raj Dhamodharan, executive vice president, Blockchain & Digital Assets at Mastercard, believes that the product will satisfy a demand from the cardholders allowing them to connect to the crypto market with ease.

The collaboration with Mastercard will ‘unlock’ bridge between crypto users, including merchants, and potentially boost the growth and adoption of cryptocurrencies. Drew Turchin, Head of Business Development at Uniswap Labs also added:

The Uniswap protocol has become foundational for onchain markets, enabling developers around the world to build new tools for a wide range of users. It’s exciting to see this Swapper leverage the protocol and is another great example of how the protocol continues to serve as critical infrastructure in the financial stack.

Cover image from Unsplash, LINKUSDT chart from Tradingview