There’s a great article today by Yessi Bello Perez at Coindesk which lays out what the payment behemoths are doing in the Blockchain space.
Banks have publicly embraced blockchain technology and prominent figures from traditional finance have also lauded its potential. But how exactly are payment giants such as MasterCard interacting with the world of crypto?
Be it through direct investment, partnerships with companies in the space or public comments on bitcoin and its underlying technology, here’s a round-up of some of the most notable interactions between payment giants and the world of crypto.
A taste of some of the reporting work… but for full article head off to Coindesk and ingest the whole piece.
Mastercard:
MasterCard filed a patent application to be able to incorporate bitcoin into the design of a proposed online shopping cart which would be rolled out to its global customers. Despite this, MasterCard insisted the filing should not be perceived as the company’s support of bitcoin.
Visa:
Visa CEO Charlie Scharf spoke about bitcoin in January last year. “There are certainly some interesting things about bitcoin and other things like it, but there are also a great deal of complexities,” he said.
Schartf went on to suggest that Visa was not actively monitoring the bitcoin space: “We feel quite comfortable with the business we have here.”
American Express:
Similar to his contemporaries, Chenault said he saw more potential for bitcoin’s underlying blockchain technology than the digital currency itself.
“The protocol of bitcoin is going to be important,” he said.
Paypal:
Online payments leader PayPal announced its first partnerships in the bitcoin space in September 2014.
At the time, the company’s senior director of corporate strategy Scott Ellison, said the company was “proceeding gradually, supporting bitcoin in some ways today and holding off on other ways until we see how things develop”.
Bitcoin payment processors BitPay, GoCoin and Coinbase told CoinDesk the partnership had been months in the making.
For full article head off to Coindesk and ingest the whole piece.
