Mastercard's master plan

Mastercard is leaning into a stablecoin-enhanced future for payments.

Why it matters: The company manages over a billion payment cards all over the world, enabling transactions in well over 100 currencies.

• It recently joined the roster of players competing to establish territory in the stablecoin "Game of Thrones."

The big picture: With Washington, D.C., looking more favorably on the digital asset industry, "you're going to find a lot more entities and companies looking at the overall positive regulatory outlook in the U.S., looking to enter the U.S.," Raj Dhamodharan, the company's executive vice president for digital assets, tells Axios.

• "We think we can play a very constructive role in tapping into the power of the technology."

Mastercard is focusing on the immediate opportunities: remittances, payments and business-to-business transactions, Dhamodharan explained.

• For people deep in cryptocurrency, Mastercard has been making it easier for them to unlock money made through trading, and using that money for day-to-day transactions.
• For example, users of applications like MetaMask, Kraken and OKX can get debit cards issued against their cryptocurrency holdings. If they use the card to make a payment, their account will be debited the appropriate amount of stablecoin, while the merchant will be paid the corresponding amount of local currency.

The latest: Just today, Mastercard announced its latest crypto industry partnership with MoonPay, a crypto payments app, to enable stablecoin payments by consumers.

• Mastercard previously announced plans to enable merchants to receive payments in Circle's USDC and stablecoins issued by Paxos.

Zoom in: Remittances has been a topic in the cryptocurrency space for a long time — sending money earned in one country to families or friends in another country. It's a giant use case.

• For decades, payment processors have shaved a lot of money off global workforces remitting their earnings. Crypto has always promised a route around that, but it hasn't been as big as blockchain believers hoped.

• The problem has been at the edges. How can a worker turn cash, a check or a payment card into cryptocurrency? Then how can their family back home receive it and turn it into spendable money?
• Mastercard is stepping in with on-chain identity products that allow people to register things — like email or phone numbers — as points to send or receive digital money. (We've reported on an email-like payment system that runs over the Lightning network.)

Reality check: Dhamodharan tells us Mastercard still imagines money will typically begin as traditional money, get transmitted as stablecoin, and end up as regular money again, at least in part.