Coinbase Teams with Mastercard to Democratize NFT access

On Tuesday of this week Coinbase announced a strategic collaboration with one of the largest payment protocols on the planet, Mastercard. In its announcement, the crypto trading platform stated as part of its mission to “increase economic freedom in the world” it wants to expand access to the creator economy and enable more people to profit from their work.

Both Coinbase and Mastercard agree that promoting access and trade of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) is a step toward fulfilling that objective. However, both organizations acknowledge that the current process for purchasing an NFT is complex, clunky, and confusing for the average user. 

The announcement goes on to state that Coinbase plans to simplify the NFT acquisition process and improve the user experience to allow more people to join the NFT community. 

“Just as we helped millions of people access Bitcoin for the first time in an easy and trusted way, we want to do the same for NFTs. That’s why we’re working with Mastercard to classify NFTs as “digital goods,” allowing a broader group of consumers to purchase NFTs. And, coming soon we’ll “unlock” a new way to pay using Mastercard cards,” Coinbase said in its statement.

As a precursor to this newly announced joint venture with Mastercard, Coinbase recently launched its Coinbase NFT project, a peer-to-peer marketplace that will make minting, purchasing, showcasing, and discovering NFTs easier. Coinbase NFT currently has a waitlist of more than 2 million people to access its platform, which will initially launch on Ethereum, supporting the gold standard in NFT transfer protocols – ERC-721; as well as the best protocol for batch NFT transfers using the ERC-1155 standard.

As background, ERC stands for “Ethereum request for comment” and is the shorthand prefix assigned to various technical standards for smart contracts that are compatible with the Ethereum blockchain. Coinbase states on its blog that it plans to ultimately support NFTs across multiple blockchains.

Coinbase further stated that through its work with Mastercard, the joint venture will be able to provide a better customer experience on the Coinbase NFT platform. The tandem also pledged to find ways to broaden access to the NFT ecosystem through Mastercard’s scale and global network.