The Mastercard payment system will allow cardholders to purchase NFTs. For this, the company signed deals with Immutable X, Candy Digital, The Sandbox, Mintable, Spring, Nifty Gateway and MoonPay.

Mastercard plastic holders will be able to purchase non-tradable tokens without having to pre-purchase cryptocurrency on new partner-owned platforms.

“We are working with these companies to enable people to use Mastercard to purchase NFT from partner markets or via cryptocurrency services. With 2.9 million cards worldwide, this change could have a greater impact on the NFT ecosystem,” said Raj Damodaran, vice president of the company.

He also noted that a survey conducted by the payment system among more than 35,000 people in 40 countries showed users’ interest in non-tradable tokens. 45% of respondents said they have purchased or will buy NFT.

Since January 2022, Mastercard has partnered with Coinbase in a joint venture to facilitate the purchase of NFTs on the cryptocurrency exchange market. The beta version of the latter was released in April.

Recall that in the same month, the payment system applied for registration of trademarks related to metaverses. The documents talk about “a media-enabled NFT, digital goods marketplace and payment transaction processing and e-commerce software in a media data warehouse.”