During Blockworks’ Permissionless IV event in Brooklyn, New York, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov and Mastercard’s SVP of Blockchain Products, Izzy Iliev-Wolitzer, sat down to discuss how Mastercard and Chainlink are transforming the way billions of consumers interact with the digital asset economy.
A new Chainlink and Mastercard partnership gives more than three billion cardholders the ability to purchase crypto directly onchain via the Swapper Finance platform. The use case demonstrates a unified, compliant, intuitive interface that bridges the gap between crypto-native and real-world user experience through secure fiat-to-crypto conversion.
“This is quite revolutionary because this is the first step, but you can imagine how this technology or this partnership can be used for other onchain payments like payment of gas fees, payment or smart contracts, etc.,” Iliev-Wolitzer said.
“3.5 billion cardholders represent a lot of liquidity,” added Nazarov, who has long maintained that the digital asset industry’s success depends on its ability to integrate with legacy finance. Decreasing friction and increasing convenience are key to bringing everyday consumers onchain.
In Iliev-Wolitzer’s view, growing crypto’s user base is about broadening access through both old and new payment methods.
“As a new payment method comes in, it gets added to the payment stack but it doesn’t necessarily displace the old payment method,” he explained.
“Consumers are creatures of habit, and to really reach the next billion consumers, the next five billion consumers, you want to make sure that you tap into those habits and make it easy for them to interact with the blockchain in a way they’re familiar with.”
While the initial collaboration enables small and medium-sized retail transactions, the Mastercard Multi-Token Network (MTN) platform, designed to facilitate larger institutional transactions, offers future opportunities to integrate with Chainlink, which provides the most widely adopted set of protocols for a spectrum of stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) across more than 58 distinct networks.
“At the end of the day, you really need a mechanism where you can connect to those chains, and through Chainlink we can connect to the Multi-Token Network just like we did with cards to enable that mechanism,” Iliev-Wolitzer explained.
“It’s very exciting, because what I’m seeing is much more liquidity and purchasing power going towards our industry, which means that there’s a bigger market for RWAs and digital assets and tokenized funds, and that market is what’s going to drive our industry’s growth and success,” Nazarov agreed.
When it comes to the next phase of digital asset adoption, Iliev-Wolitzer said the synergy between Mastercard’s trusted global payments network and Chainlink’s secure interoperability infrastructure is essential.
“When you combine these two things together, you get a very, very powerful system where everybody feels safe; everybody feels compliant, both in terms of payment but also in terms of how the smart contract is executed and verified.”
Watch the full conversation.