This Tuesday, a New Zealand web3 company Immersve revealed its partnership with the payment giant Mastercard. The partnership will enable customers in New Zealand and Australia to make payments using their cryptocurrency wallets wherever Mastercard is accepted.

Immersve and Mastercard Bring Crypto Payments to New Zealand and Australia

Immersve, a web3 company from New Zealand, recently announced it had partnered with the payment giant Mastercard. The partnership will enable New Zealanders and Australians to use their cryptocurrency wallets to make payments everywhere where Mastercard itself is accepted.

The US dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC will be used to settle all payments. The partnership uses decentralized protocols to settle the transactions and, according to its website, Immersve supports both centralized and decentralized experiences. Jerome Faury, the company’s CEO stated that the partnership with the payment giant “is a big step towards mainstream adoption of web3 wallets”.

He added that the aim of his firm—a principal member of the Mastercard network—is “to bring the best of web3’s technology and values” while still offering traditional guardrails for users. Mastercard’s Sandeep Malhotra stated that the partnership with Immersve is an important part of the firm’s effort to make “simple, safe cryptocurrency transactions, and even payments in the metaverse, easily accessible to billions of consumers.”

Visa and Mastercard Continue Expanding Crypto Offering

The two payment giants, Visa and Mastercard, have maintained a keen interest in digital assets for several years now. Already in early 2021, Mastercard announced its plans to start supporting the cryptocurrency sector. Later that same year, both companies chose to disregard the regulatory issues their partner exchange—Binance—was facing at the time.

Throughout the “crypto winter” of 2022, both companies continued working on bridging the gap between digital assets and TradFi by working with both cryptocurrency companies and traditional banks. The autumn of the last year in particular saw Mastercard actively working with banks on crypto adoption.

At the very beginning of October, the payment giant launched a new AI tool intended to help banks detect suspicious cryptocurrency-related transactions. Later that same month, Mastercard announced a pilot project meant to enable banks to offer cryptocurrency trading to their clients.

Visa was particularly active with regard to digital assets around the New Year. In early January, it was reported that the firm is exploring the future of stablecoin settlements. Furthermore, the company announced the results of a hackathon it held and offered a solution for setting up automatic payments from self-custody wallets of Ethereum’s StarkNet.

This article originally appeared on The Tokenist

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