On a recent episode of “The Future Is On” podcast produced by Global Custodian and Chainlink, Mastercard Executive Vice President, Blockchain & Digital Assets Raj Dhamodharan and Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov discussed how Mastercard’s trusted global payments network and Chainlink’s secure interoperability infrastructure are driving the next phase of digital asset adoption.
This week, Mastercard and Chainlink announced their partnership to give three billion cardholders the ability to purchase crypto directly onchain via the new Swapper Finance platform.
“Until today, there was no simple way for cards to really purchase assets onchain directly,” Dhamodharan said. “We wanted to find a simple way to unlock that value for the billions of cards and consumers to be able to purchase any asset onchain.”
Swapper Finance leverages XSwap, a leading DEX that uses the Chainlink standard for data and interoperability, via an integration between infrastructure provider zerohash and integrated payment processor Shift4 Payments, as well as onchain liquidity sourced from Uniswap. Together, these technologies create a unified, compliant, intuitive interface that bridges the gap between crypto-native and real-world user experience through secure fiat-to-crypto conversion.
Nazarov has long maintained that the digital asset industry’s success hinges on its ability to connect with legacy finance.
“If you can get the traditional world’s users to interact with crypto in a frictionless, efficient, secure, risk-managed way, then you can get many more users from the traditional world than you get just from people having wallets,” he said.
Dhamodharan described the partnership between Chainlink and Mastercard as a “perfect alignment” in terms of providing secure, seamless connectivity between onchain asset exchange and offchain transactions.
“If security isn’t there, then you lose money,” Nazarov agreed. “We also found a lot in common on the quality and the level of security that you folks provide and the quality and the level of security that Chainlink can provide in these transactions for them to work together successfully.”
Having enabled more than $22 trillion in transaction value, Chainlink provides the most widely adopted set of protocols powering a spectrum of stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) that represent traditional assets such as cash, debt, securities, commodities, and real estate onchain. Nazarov believes benefits such as fractionalization, programmability, and atomic settlement will ultimately drive RWA adoption.
“That base of assets will, I think, become so popular because of all of its better properties that people will be finding various frictionless paths to get to it,” he said. “If you reduce the friction and the complexity of buying the real-world asset, then you make the real-world assets more successful.”
Dhamodharan emphasized that as more assets come onchain, securing the payment leg is critical.
“The missing link is, no pun intended, the Chainlink assurance to be able to make sure that indeed happens,” he said.
Watch the full episode.