The CEO of masterCard, Michael Miebach has through an earnings call with investors and stakeholders discussed his positive outlook on the cryptocurrency industry.
The company has not only seen sizable volume growth in consumers who use their MasterCard to purchase crypto assets, rather has also secure a number of partnerships with cryptocurrency companies.
Miebach made his view point during a discussion regarding Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC).
His comment says thus:
“We are saying at this point in time, the most likely chance for this kind of technology to work for payments is if it’s issued through a government in form of a CBDC.
We said that on a couple of calls before, and we said that we will make our network ready to do that as and when a government is ready to put out a CBDC that will exist alongside the dollar or the euro as a settlement currency in our network.”
Miebach however, remains confident on MasterCard’s role in the matter, stating,
“We can provide safe space banks to figure out how that will actually work.”
Talk of CBDC has continued to rapidly gain traction over the past year. On October 21, the Bahamas became the first country in the world to issue a CBDC known as the “Sand Dollar.” Just a few days later, Nigerian President Muhammad Buhari announced plans to unveil its own eNaira CBDC in the country.
Following a report by Statista, MasterCard processed 113 billion transactions across the globe last year, just a little behind Visa’s 118 billion and Union Pay’s 151 billion.
The world’s third largest payment processor has shown interest immensely in cryptocurrency space in recent time. Recall that MasterCard recently announced it will partner with cryptocurrency marketplace Bakkt to enable its U.S. customers to trade digital currencies.
In September it declared that it would acquire blockchain analytics firm CipherTrace to track illicit transactions across 900 different cryptocurrencies.
However, the CEO of MasterCard Miebach has taken a more risk-averse approach to the industry, as stated in the company’s third-quarter earnings calls.
“Questions like the last mile- how do you bring utility into the hands of your citizens if you put out a CBDC.
Acceptance questions and so forth, so, facilitating investments as an asset class, we do that, and we get ready for CBDCs.
Should there be a private sector stablecoin? We might also do that. But we have very strict principles on when to do this and when not.”
The CEO concluded.
