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Coinbase is teaming up with Mastercard on NFTs

The Coinbase logo, with coins.

Coinbase is teaming up with Mastercard to make NFTs accessible to clients.

Photo: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Coinbase is teaming up with Mastercard to make it easier for users to buy NFTs, the two companies said Tuesday.

Coinbase announced three months ago that it planned to make NFTs available to its customers, a big move aimed at a fast-growing market whose value rose to more than $40 billion in 2021. The Mastercard deal aims to make the process of buying an NFT simpler and easier, especially for new customers.

“Today, if you want to buy an NFT — such as a digital art piece — you first need to open a crypto wallet, buy crypto, then use it to purchase an NFT in an online marketplace,” Raj Dhamodharan, Mastercard’s executive vice president for Digital Assets and Blockchain Products, said in a blog post. “Cryptocurrency enthusiasts are used to this process. But for most people, it's not simple, it’s not intuitive. We think it should be much easier.”

Though in theory blockchain technologies promise to simplify payments and reduce costs, many NFT buyers and sellers have been surprised by high transaction costs.

The deal marked an expansion of Mastercard’s partnership with Coinbase, which already lets users pay with the payments giant’s debit cards.

Benjamin Pimentel

Benjamin Pimentel ( @benpimentel) covers crypto and fintech from San Francisco. He has reported on many of the biggest tech stories over the past 20 years for the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch and Business Insider, from the dot-com crash, the rise of cloud computing, social networking and AI to the impact of the Great Recession and the COVID crisis on Silicon Valley and beyond. He can be reached at bpimentel@protocol.com or via Google Voice at (925) 307-9342.

nftblockchainmastercardcoinbasecryptocurrency
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