Mastercard taps Chainlink to provide direct, onchain fiat-to-crypto conversions for cardholders

Plenty of Visa and Mastercard partnerships aimed at making it easier for consumers to spend their crypto have been unveiled in recent years. On Tuesday, Chainlink said it's partnered with Mastercard to make it easier for users to buy crypto using their card, unlocking direct, compliant, and fully onchain fiat-to-crypto swaps.

Through the partnership cardholders across the globe will be able to "purchase crypto assets directly onchain through a secure fiat-to-crypto conversion," Chainlink and Mastercard said in a statement . The move is designed to remove "long-standing barriers that have kept mainstream users from accessing the onchain economy."

The vast majority of Visa and Mastercard's crypto partnerships to date have been designed around issuing a branded card that allows people to effortlessly spend the crypto they are holding in a particular digital wallet through fiat conversions. This includes recent crypto-card tie ups from Uphold and the Sam Altman-backed World project.

"People want to be able to easily connect to the digital assets ecosystem, and vice versa," said Mastercard Executive Vice President of Blockchain and Digital Assets Raj Dhamodharan in a statement. "We're unlocking a secure and innovative way to revolutionize onchain commerce and drive the broader adoption of crypto assets."

Over 3 billion cardholders

To make it possible for "over 3 billion cardholders in the Mastercard user base" to use their card to buy crypto, Chainlink is working with, or leveraging technology provided by Zerohash, Swapper Finance, Shift4 Payments, XSwap, and the Uniswap protocol, according to Tuesday's statement.

And it appears that Mastercard and Chainlink's initiative to allow cardholders to buy crypto directly has a lot going on under the hood. 

According to the statement, Swapper Finance will leverage XSwap, a decentralized exchange embedded in the Chainlink ecosystem, through an integration between Zerohash and Shift4 Payments. Zerohash will oversee the core compliance and custody features to ensure regulated fiat into crypto conversions while Shift4 will provide "seamless card processing" using Uniswap and other liquidity sources. 

Altogether, the "technologies create a unified, compliant, and intuitive user experience that brings crypto access directly to mainstream payment cardholders," the firms wrote. 

"This was a complex and multilayered collaboration," Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov said in a statement.