In a recent PJ article where Visa announced a program to assist artists around NFTs, I said “I’d like to see Visa utilize its technical and regulatory capabilities to develop a ‘NFT Certified by Visa’ program.” Now it appears Mastercard has done just that, but doesn’t make clear if they will stand behind these sites with Zero Liability or Purchase Protection:
“We’ve been innovating over the past year to make these improvements happen. As part of this work, we’re happy to announce we’re working to enable NFT commerce with Immutable X, Candy Digital, The Sandbox, Mintable, Spring, Nifty Gateway, and Web3 service provider MoonPay.
We’re working with these companies to allow people to use their Mastercard cards for NFTs purchases, whether that’s on one of these companies’ marketplaces or using their crypto services. With 2.9 billion Mastercard cards worldwide, this change could have a big impact on the NFT ecosystem.
Buy the NFTs you want on the marketplace of your choice. No need to buy crypto first.
These NFT marketplaces represent a huge breadth of the burgeoning NFT space — which generated more than $25 billion in sales in 2021 — from art to sports to video games to collectibles to metaverse platforms. These marketplaces also host sales for some of the biggest names in NFTs.
With the help of these companies, Mastercard’s expanding adoption of Web3 — a new version of the internet based on blockchain — adds to our existing work bringing our payment network to Coinbase’s new NFT marketplace, which opened to all Coinbase users in May. Overall, these integrations are designed to make crypto more accessible and help the NFT ecosystem keep growing, innovating and bringing in more fans.”
Overview by Tim Sloane, VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group