Mastercard (NYSE: MA) announced that thousands of banks and millions of merchants on its payments network can soon integrate crypto services into their products last week.
The crypto additions include Bitcoin (BTC) wallets, credit and debit cards that earn rewards in crypto and enable digital assets spending, and loyalty programs where airline or hotel points can be converted into Bitcoin.
The financial services giant is partnering with Bakkt (NYSE: BKKT), the crypto firm recently spun off by Intercontinental Exchange (NYSE: ICE), which will provide custodial services for customers.
Sherri Haymond, Mastercard's executive vice president of digital partnerships, said: "Our partners, be they banks, fintechs or merchants, can offer their customers the ability to buy, sell, and hold cryptocurrency through an integration with the Baktt platform."
Mastercard manages one of the most dominant global payments networks, and enjoys relationships with over 20,000 financial institutions, and has 2.8 billion cards in use, so the partnership could lead to a significant expansion in the ways regular people earn and spend cryptocurrencies.
Here is the rest of the week in review:
Alchemy announced it has raised a $250 million Series C funding round that boosts the blockchain and web development software services startup to a new valuation of $3.5 billion. Andreessen Horowitz led the latest round, with participation from new investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint, and several existing backers. CEO and cofounder Nikil Viswanathan said Alchemy is "very profitable." The firm aims to do for blockchain and the web protocols what Amazon Web Services (NASDAQ: AMZN) did for the Internet. Alchemy's goal is to be the starting place for developers considering building a product on top of a blockchain or mainstream applications, and it offers developer tool aims to reduce the complexity and costs of building infrastructure. The firm now powers transactions worth over $45 billion across nearly every blockchain vertical, including financial institutions, exchanges, decentralized finance projects, and multinational organizations. Alchemy plans to use the fresh capital to hire more developers, invest in creating a community, and further boost the construction of blockchain products.
Amazon Web Services is looking to hire a new specialist who will foster digital asset underwriting, transaction processing, and custody in the cloud, according to a recent LinkedIn job posting. The tech giant's cloud unit is searching for a Financial Services Specialist to work with global financial institutions and innovative fintech firms and "transform the way they transact digital assets (ex. cryptocurrencies, CBDCs [central bank digital currencies], stable coins, security-backed tokens, asset-backed tokens and NFTs [non-fungible tokens]) from price discovery to execution, settlement and custody." The job advertisement reads: "Working hand in hand with our sales teams, solution architects, ISVs and systems integrators you will help deliver the solutions that move customers towards end-to-end digital asset underwriting, transaction processing, and custody in the cloud." Amazon's highly anticipated move into digital assets could even include some kind of payment token, a so-called "Amazon coin," based on recent speculation. Also, AWS is customizing its infrastructure to areas like cryptocurrency transaction processing and custody, following in competitor IBM's (NYSE: IBM) footsteps.
Crypto prices rose to $2.60 trillion this week. For the majors, all except Cardano (ADA) ended in the green. The biggest decliners were OKB, down 18%, Stacks (STX), down 17%, and Revain (REV), down 13%. The biggest gainers were Dogelon Mars (ELON), up a whopping 327%, Decentraland (MANA), up 305%, and The Sandbox (SAND), up 97%. Next week traders will watch if crypto's bull run continues.
The author owns a small amount of BTC.