Mastercard Partners With a Myriad of NFT Marketplaces

Mastercard has announced a partnership between them and multiple NFT marketplaces, giving users the ability to buy NFTs with a credit or debit card instead of the traditional crypto.

The marketplaces in question are Immutable X, Candy Digital, The Sandbox, Mintable, Spring and Nifty Gateway, and the Web3 framework provider Moonpay, according to a blog post.

The partnership will give users an "easier and safer" way to purchase NFTs with the use of their cards instead of crypto.

Collectively these marketplaces have “generated more than $25 billion in sales in 2021—from art to sports to video games to collectibles to metaverse platforms,” according to Mastercard.

“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’ NFT marketplaces or using their crypto services,” said Raj Dhamodharan, Executive Vice President of Digital Asset Blockchain Products & Partnerships at Mastercard.

If Dhamodharan is to be believed there are 2.9 billion Mastercard cards worldwide, and “this change could have a big impact on the NFT ecosystem.”

According to Mastercard, the company is just giving “exactly what people want” with its new feature of directly buying NFTs.

This is not Mastercard's first foray into crypto, specifically NFTs, as back in May the banking corporation teamed up with Coinbase to help simplify the purchasing process on its newly minted NFT marketplace.

They also partnered with Bakkt to provide crypto services to its customers and provide custody for any upcoming products.

This is quite the shift from the Ethereum-only classification of NFTs I remember, but change is needed. We may even need an evolution for this technology to thrive, and the easing of the process will only help boost its waned popularity.