Solana Foundation Joins Mastercard to Bolster Trust and Verification in Crypto Transactions

The Solana Foundation has announced its partnership with Mastercard to work on the Mastercard Crypto Credential project. This initiative aims to establish a set of common standards and infrastructure that will attest trusted interactions among consumers and businesses using blockchain networks, making transactions more secure and compliant.

In recent years, the crypto and blockchain sectors have seen significant advancements, leading to more scalable and resilient systems. However, security and compliance remain a challenge, with a lack of proper protections eroding consumer, business, and government trust. Regulators have been striving to establish meaningful regulations for the industry, and many solutions have been developed on public chains by central banks and regulated financial institutions.

The Mastercard Crypto Credential project is designed to address these challenges by providing a common standard for trusted, compliant, and verifiable interactions on public blockchain networks. This system will cater to various verification needs based on market and compliance requirements, enabling use cases such as the Mastercard Music Pass NFT and Immersve's Web3 wallet-based crypto payments for everyday goods and services.

Key features of Mastercard Crypto Credential include:

• Easy-to-remember, straightforward wallet address aliases to improve the consumer experience and reduce potential errors.
• Richer information through metadata to provide more context for blockchain transactions, ensuring they are completed as intended.
• Integration with CipherTrace's suite of services, including CipherTrace Traveler, to verify addresses and support Travel Rule compliance for cross-border transactions.

Mastercard has partnered with crypto wallet providers Bit2Me, Lirium, Mercado Bitcoin, and Uphold to enable transfers between the U.S. and Latin America and the Caribbean corridors. Additionally, Mastercard is collaborating with public blockchain network organizations Aptos Labs, Ava Labs, Polygon, and the Solana Foundation. This collaboration aims to bring Mastercard Crypto Credential to application developers in their ecosystems and enhance verification in NFTs, ticketing, enterprise, and other payment solutions.

Mastercard has a long history of setting up and scaling trusted ecosystems to enable commerce, as well as pioneering innovation in identity verification and global standards. The company looks forward to leveraging its decades of experience to enhance trust in the crypto space and work with the broader industry and governments to foster further innovation.