Why your credit card company wants to give you crypto – Vox

Cryptocurrency was first created as an alternative to traditional financial institutions.

Banks and financial institutions that offer Mastercard credit and debit cards can now enable customers to pay down their balance and earn loyalty points with bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that the Bakkt platform supports.

This will give the holders of more than 2.8 billion Mastercards in circulation a potential on-ramp into the crypto investment world.

Mastercard debit and prepaid cards offered by the platforms Uphold and BitPay allow people to quickly convert their cryptocurrency holdings into traditional currency, while a Mastercard credit card offered by the crypto company Gemini allows customers to earn rewards in cryptocurrency based on their spending activity.

Now, Mastercard’s decision to integrate support for bitcoin throughout its payments network means even more people will not just be exposed to cryptocurrency, but rewarded with it.

In the first half of 2021, Visa customers spent more than $1 billion in cryptocurrency with credit cards that the company offers through partnerships with three different crypto platforms: Circle, BlockFi, and Coinbase.

In April, Coinbase— a platform for buying and selling cryptocurrencies — became the first crypto company to go public — which effectively allows people to invest in cryptocurrency without having to actually buy any particular coin.

Just days before announcing its cryptocurrency expansion, Mastercard bought CipherTrace, a cryptocurrency firm backed by the Department of Homeland Security that advertises itself as the “world’s first blockchain forensics team.” Paypal has also sought to hire cryptocurrency experts to focus on security issues like money laundering and counterterrorism.

Cryptocurrency has become so popular, including among criminals, that the US Marshals Service, the government branch that manages seized assets, hired a cryptocurrency bank to store all the seized cryptocurrency that it holds after criminal investigations.

Still, most cryptocurrency holders don’t seem to be complaining that some of the biggest financial services are slowly becoming more friendly to crypto.

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