In just over a decade, the cryptocurrency industry has experienced many booms and busts. It's also reached heights that seemed unimaginable at the recent peak in early 2021. Of course, this seems in the distant past given the recent carnage and devastating bear market in the industry.
There are a couple of major obstacles for the industry to continue growing and exceed these lofty levels. For one, there continues to be no major, easy-to-use, consumer-facing app that would compel people to start using cryptocurrency or adjacent services in their daily life. Think about how websites like Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) or Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) iTunes were many of the first widespread applications that were used by millions of people and kickstarted the Internet economy's growth.
Another obstacle for the crypto industry is the lack of integration and support from banks and other traditional financial institutions. This is also a hindrance to growth and widespread adoption. So, it's certainly a positive development that Mastercard (NYSE: MA) is launching a program to help banks offer crypto trading services to clients.
Mastercard will act as a bridge between Paxos, a crypto trading platform, and banks. It will be an intermediary and take on regulatory compliance and security risks which are two of the major reasons that crypto has been slow to be adopted by banks.
Paxos is a major crypto trading platform used by PayPal (Nasdaq: PYPL) for its crypto trading offering.
Mastercard believes that there is a major pool of people who would be potential buyers of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets but would only participate if they could access these through the traditional financial system.
Of course, it's uncertain how much demand in the short term will be affected by the price action and defaults of certain crypto companies. But in the longer term, Mastercard sees activity increasing in the sphere and the company is well-positioned to take advantage.
It continues a trend as Mastercard partnered with Coinbase (Nasdaq: COIN) on NFTs. Its competitor, Visa (NYSE: V), partnered with FTX to offer crypto debit cards and is exploring the use of stablecoins on its cards and network.