Global payments giant Mastercard is forming a central bank digital currency program with initial partners, including Ripple and blockchain development firm Consensys.

Mastercard announced Thursday that it is convening a group of blockchain and payment services providers to participate in the program. The new CBDC program is designed to “foster collaboration with key players in the space,” Raj Dhamodharan, Mastercard’s head of digital assets and blockchain, said in the statement.

“We believe in payment choice and that interoperability across the different ways of making payments is an essential component of a flourishing economy,” Dhamodharan added.

The initial partners of the program include Ripple, Consensys, Fireblocks and Fluency, a tokenized assets service provider.

Dhamodharan told The Block in a podcast interview published this month that if a government wants to build a CBDC and wants it to be available to businesses and consumers to use, “you need to have day one flexibility built into it in terms of production, consumer protection and privacy.”

While Mastercard did not detail its plan for the new program, the payment giant noted that CBDCs shouldn’t be adopted in a vacuum, and the work of its CBDC Partner Program will “help central banks understand how to develop a CBDC that adds something new and valuable to the economy.”

As early as September 2020, Mastercard launched a testing platform for central banks to evaluate CBDC systems. In February 2021, the company started to issue prepaid cards in the Bahamas, allowing users to convert the Sand Dollar, the country’s CBDC.

© 2023 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。