MasterCard Looks at Speeding Up Crypto Payments, Wins Patent

The international payment processing giant MasterCard is reportedly working on a solution to speed up crypto transactions to make them more feasible for merchants to accept from consumers.

According to a document published by the US Patents and Trademark Office on Tuesday, cryptocurrencies are currently at a “disadvantage” to conventional currencies due to longer processing times that are required for blockchain-based transactions.

The document further states that “it often takes a significant amount of time, around ten minutes, for a blockchain-based transaction to be processed,” adding that fiat transactions “often have processing times that are measured in nanoseconds.”

The document goes on to say that for this reason, “[…] merchants, retailers, service providers, and other purveyors of goods and services, may be wary of accepting blockchain currency for products and participating in blockchain transactions.”

MasterCard’s solution to the problem described in the document is to develop a new type of user account that would be able to make transfers of cryptocurrency from one party to another using the same systems as are already in place for fiat currencies.

The proposed system would make use of the same security features and payment method as for fiat currencies, but the transaction would represent a cryptocurrency rather than a conventional fiat currency.

MasterCard has also expressed interest in cryptocurrencies in the past, filing a separate patent application last year where they described a proposed solution for building a refund service for cryptocurrency transactions.