Institutional finance in the U.S. has recently doubled down on crypto. After BlackRock submitted an application for a Bitcoin spot ETF in mid-June, a slew of other asset managers followed suit, including WisdomTree and Invesco. Now, Mastercard has joined the fray.
On Wednesday, in perhaps one of its most ambitious crypto-related announcements yet, the payments giant said it was planning to launch a beta in the U.K. over the summer to test what it calls the Multi Token Network, or an “app store powered by blockchain technologies for building regulated financial applications,” Raj Dhamodharan, a Mastercard executive vice president and the firm’s head of crypto and blockchain, told Fortune.
Like Apple’s app store, which provides developers with tools to help them create applications to run on, for example, an iPhone, Mastercard’s Multi Token Network, or MTN, will give developers access to tools the payments company has steadily built out in the past few months, including a private version of the Ethereum blockchain on which Mastercard will encourage developers to build new applications.
“A lot of the things people cover and talk about these days in crypto are the regulatory aspects of it and all the technology and investment as an asset and so forth,” Dhamodharan told Fortune. “We actually think the underlying technology that powers many of the innovations that have happened over the years is actually quite useful.”
Mastercard’s unveiling of MTN follows its prior crypto announcements, including its forays into non-fungible tokens, crypto-linked credit and debit cards, and crypto infrastructure. (It recently released Crypto Credential, a developer tool that lets users from one crypto wallet easily find users on another wallet, along with other pertinent information.)
“It is a natural evolution that demonstrates Mastercard’s commitment to offering a wider range of payment solutions,” Dhamodharan wrote in a blog post announcing the beta.
A MTN of tools
As part of its blockchain “app store,” Mastercard unveiled a number of tools developers can use to build new “regulated” financial applications.
Dhamodharan told Fortune that programs on top of Mastercard’s private instance of the Ethereum blockchain can be written in Solidity, the programming language native to Ethereum, or accessed through any programming language that can connect to an API, a gateway for developers to access data from an organization or individual.
Developers will be able to plug into Crypto Credential to verify users’ identity and know whether their wallets, for example, can receive NFTs. And Dhamodharan told Fortune that Mastercard will let developers enrolled in the beta play around with tokenized commercial bank deposits, or records on the blockchain that state how much cash someone has in their bank account.
Perhaps the simplest application a programmer can build, Dhamodharan told Fortune, is one that lets two consumers send money to each other. “But we’re really hoping that it will be a lot more than that,” he added. “For example, you could build an application for making a payment for an NFT, and an NFT could represent any asset.”
While this sounds a lot like existing applications on, for example, the public version of Ethereum, Mastercard’s intervention is that, as opposed to the Wild West of crypto where developers often pay little attention to existing laws and regulations, the payments firm hopes to create a new financial network that plays by the rules. Ultimately, it wants to do what it’s done for traditional payments—but for crypto.
“If the technology has promise,” Dhamodharan told Fortune, “we should find a way to make that work.”
