Cody McGrath 
In January, Coinbase’s newest NFT marketplace announced support for card payments and Mastercard has also decided to expand its services.
Mastercard, the international payment processing giant, is expanding its payment network for nonfungible token (NFT) markets and Web3.
Over the last year, the financial services provider has been working on expanding their payment networks to include NFTs. The company has partnered with several leading NFT marketplaces to enable 2.9 billion cardholders to make direct NFT purchases without first purchasing crypto.
Users must currently purchase cryptocurrency to bid on and purchase NFTs. However, thanks to the latest Mastercard collaboration, billions of cardholders can now avoid the process of purchasing and transferring cryptocurrency to NFT marketplaces. According to the company:
“These integrations are designed to make crypto more accessible and help the NFT ecosystem keep growing, innovating, and bringing in more fans.”
Mastercard announced partnerships with several NFT marketplaces, including Immutable X, Candy Digital, The Sandbox, Mintable, Spring, Nifty Gateway, and Web3 infrastructure provider Monday.
In January of this year, the NFT card-purchase service was launched in collaboration with Coinbase, allowing users to buy NFTs directly with credit cards.
The decision to expand its payment network to the rapidly growing NFT ecosystem was also influenced by the company’s most recent survey of 35,000 respondents from 40 countries, which revealed that 45 percent of consumers have purchased or are considering purchasing an NFT. In addition, 50% of those polled expressed a desire for more flexible purchasing options.
The company also stated that it is working on providing customers with world-class security with its latest payment option, similar to “when making transactions in a store or online with a Mastercard card.”
Over the last few years, the payment processing behemoth has shown a keen interest in the crypto and NFT markets. Mastercard filed for 15 metaverse and NFT-related trademarks earlier this year.
Visa and Mastercard, the top two mainstream payment processing companies, have come a long way since their early days of blocking crypto transactions on their network, and are now competing to become the leading financial services providers in the decentralized space.
In March, Visa launched an immersion program to help creators build their businesses using NFTs.