Michael Miebach, CEO of Mastercard, said on Thursday (29) that the company needs to be in the cryptocurrency market. At a results press conference, Miebach spoke about central bank digital currencies and cryptocurrencies.

“We need to be in the cryptocurrency market”, says Mastercard CEO

Given Visa’s recent actions in the cryptocurrency sector, Mastercard has also entered the sector. In its plans for 2021, Mastercard intends to enable payments with cryptocurrencies to more than 30 million merchants.

In addition, one of the payments giant’s actions is to accelerate fintechs in the cryptocurrency sector.

Miebach’s speech is consistent with Mastercard’s actions. Earlier in the year, a card with support for CBDCs (the digital currencies of banks) was announced.

Even China’s digital currency, called the E-CNY, entered the company’s plans. The purpose is to allow E-CNY to be traded and converted into other fiat currencies.

Mastercard’s entry into the cryptocurrency sector also involves investments in companies in the sector. In April of this month, together with JPMorgan, Mastercard participated in an investment round at ConsenSys.

ConsenSys is known for developing infrastructure for the Ethereum network. Thus, Visa and Mastercard are heavily invested in the cryptocurrency market.

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Based on the number of users of each of these processors, there are 6.1 billion cards issued. In other words, a considerable number of users can enter the cryptocurrency market.

A recent study by Crypto.com revealed that the number of cryptocurrency users jumped from 100 million in January this year to 221 million.

In addition, one of the points indicated by specialists that “stops” the adoption of cryptocurrencies is the unfriendly interface of some projects.

Thus, considering that credit and debit cards are already used worldwide, the inclusion of Visa and Mastercard users could represent an even more significant leap in the number of users.