Mastercard Opens Its Blockchain Network API’s For Developers

Payments giant Mastercard has opened up its Blockchain technology network for being accessed by developers thus allowing merchants and financial institutions to test their exclusive blockchain-based solutions on a selective basis.

The blockchain framework was initially prepared by Mastercard for catering to business-to-business (B2B) space and addressing challenges posed by transparency, speed and highly expensive cross-border payments. Ken Moore, the executive vice president of Mastercard Labs recently pointed out that:

“By combining Mastercard blockchain technology with our settlement network and associated network rules, we have created a solution that is safe, secure, auditable, and easy to scale. When it comes to payments, we want to provide choice and flexibility to our partners where they are able to seamlessly use both our existing and new payment rails based on the needs and requirements of their customers.”

Also Read: MasterCard ponders Over Capitalizing On Blockchain Technology

In a recently published video under the Mastercard brand umbrella, Ricardo Sota, the manager of Payments Innovation Mastercard Labs stated that the company has decided to come up with its very own technology to test whether the dynamic blockchain architecture can bring upon a paradigm change in the method of transferring and sharing value among themselves. The permissioned Mastercard blockchain will assist participants in maintaining their distributed ledger without having to cut down on the performance scalability. Sota explained in the video that the payment gateway is based on a transparent ledger, details of which can be clearly perceived by its participants. “Our blockchain technology can be used for clearing in near real-time card payment transactions eliminating consolidation and improving settlement,” he said.

Mastercard claims that its technology shall pump up privacy, scalability, flexibility and the spread of the settlement network of the company. The Mastercard blockchain ensures optimum privacy wherein participants get to share transaction details which can be audited in the later stage. However the payment magnet is allowing its partners to make use of blockchain API’s apart from other Mastercard API’s.

Designed specifically for commercial processing speed, the Mastercard blockchain can scale up to greater heights wherein users can reach unprecedented boundaries powered by the Mastercard network. The strong payment network of the company backed by 22000 financial institutions shall have a considerable role to play in writing its success story.

Also Read: SBI Holdings and Wirex collaborates to work on Japanese cryptocurrency payments card solution

Apart from card transactions, the supply chain, payments gateway and trade finance operations can also make use of its application programming interface (API). Sota is hopeful that developers will soon start researching on non-payment transactions such as proof of authenticity or purchase. He was quoted as saying that, “ It should be fairly simple as they do not have the extra cost of hosting their own … so they can focus on the use cases and once it’s a proven solution they can scale it out.”

Mastercard is trying to give a new makeover to the commerce ecosystem by making it faster, easier and safer with this new blockchain. The technological stride is expected to work in perfect sync with the existing offerings of the company such as Mastercard Send, virtual cards, and Vocalink for supporting all types of account-based, cross-border, card-based or blockchain-based B2B payments.

Much has been brewing under the Mastercard banner off late with 35 patents already filed in the Blockchain spectrum. They have also invested in Digital Currency Group which builds, incubates and seeds various Bitcoin and Blockchain companies. Mastercard has also joined hands with Enterprise Ethereum Alliance for exploring the possibilities of Ethereum blockchain overlapping areas which are not currently under Mastercard’s traditional payment environment scope. Ownership of digital currency will be tracked using Bitcoin blockchain. However a custom built Ethereum blockchain shall be used to run the decentralised application’s programming code.

Also Read: Ethereum Founder Believes the Ethereum Technology May Soon Compete With Visa

Miners are much more interested in earning ether which fuels up the network rather than the traditional mining of bitcoins. A similar EEA initiative was previously launched by Linux Foundation for developing an open-source, enterprise-grade distributed ledger framework which can identify and address features of utmost importance which are missing in the cross-industry open standard meant for distributed ledgers.

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