Chainlink is teaming up with Mastercard to bring direct onchain cryptocurrency purchases to cardholders worldwide.
The partnership between Chainlink (LINK) and Mastercard will enable over 3 billion Mastercard users to make offchain payments for direct onchain crypto purchases, the two companies announced in a press release.
According to the announcement, the collaboration is a key step toward advancing decentralized finance adoption, offering users secure fiat-to-crypto conversions.
“This is the type of traditional finance and decentralized finance convergence that Chainlink was built to make possible,” Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov said.
“I’m excited about Chainlink’s ability to enable this critical connection between the traditional payments world and the over three billion cardholders in the Mastercard user base, directly into the next generation trading environments of onchain decentralized exchanges,” he added.
Bridging onchain commerce and offchain transactions
Several major players in both crypto and traditional finance are also involved in this multilayered collaboration. One of them, ZeroHash, a provider of crypto, stablecoin, and tokenized services, will support the initiative by offering access to onchain infrastructure and liquidity.
The other integrations include with Shift4 Payments, Swapper Finance, and XSwap, which taps into Uniswap (UNI) for decentralized app experience.
Mastercard’s payment network spans over 200 countries globally. The company has formed multiple high-profile partnerships with crypto platforms as it continues expanding into the digital assets space.
Stablecoins is one of these key areas to see a notable Mastercard foray via partnerships. The company has teamed up with MetaMask, OKX, Crypto.com and Kraken among others to bring stablecoin payments to millions of merchants.
“There’s no doubt about it – people want to be able to easily connect to the digital assets ecosystem, and vice versa. That’s why we continue to leverage our proven expertise and global payments network to bridge the gap between onchain commerce and offchain transactions,” Raj Dhamodharan, executive vice president of blockchain & digital assets at Mastercard, said.
According to Dhamodharan, the collaboration with Chainlink is intended to further accelerate digital asset adoption in onchain commerce.
This partnership is the latest milestone for Chainlink, the decentralized oracle network that has become a core infrastructure provider across DeFi, banking, and tokenized real-world assets. Chainlink’s other partnerships include major institutions such as Swift, Fidelity International, UBS, Euroclear, and ANZ.
