Mastercard Partners The Sandbox, MoonPay, Others to Widen NFT Access With Card Payments

Mastercard has inked deals with a total of seven new partners in order to open NFT access via traditional card payments. Mastercard's new partners include metaverse player The Sandbox along with Immutable X, Candy Digital, Mintable, Spring, Nifty Gateway, and MoonPay. With these deals, Mastercard aims to help drive NFT commerce. The sector of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is seemingly garnering more interest from the Web3 community, especially with the metaverse industry on the rise.

NFTs or non-fungible tokens are digital collectibles that are built on blockchain and are traditionally purchased via cryptocurrencies. Mastercard is now looking to expand payment options for these digital collectibles.

“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,” Raj Dhamodharan, an executive vice president at Mastercard wrote in a blog post.

The 56-year-old financial services corporation Mastercard is aiming to eliminate the need for NFT buyers to first own cryptocurrencies.

The credit and debit card provider recently surveyed over 35,000 people in 40 countries. The results from this finding show that 45 percent people had purchased an NFT or would consider doing so.

The same study also claimed that buyers interested in purchasing NFTs wish to be able to pay for these digital collectibles using a credit or debit card.

“These latest efforts are intended to build on the enormous potential of the NFT market, growing payment choices for consumers and expanding NFT communities,” Dhamodharan noted.

Mastercard has already been working with Coinbase in order to support cash payments on the crypto exchange's recently-launched NFT platform.

The sales of NFTs reached $25 billion (roughly Rs. 1,84,700 crore) in 2021 as the speculative crypto asset exploded in popularity, data from market tracker DappRadar showed.

Amid the explosive demand for NFTs in the market, more marketplaces are cropping up very regularly.

Earlier this week, Salesforce, the US-based software company has announced its own NFT platform to enable trading and purchases of NFTs.