- The initiative aims to bring together key industry players to explore innovations in CBDC.
- A Mastercard spokesperson said CBDC should be as easy to use as other forms of money.
Payments company Mastercard will form a central bank digital currency (CBDC) partnership program that will include the Ripple platform and Consensys.
Fluency, Idemia, Consult Hyperion, Giesecke+Devrient and Fireblocks are also among the first partners.
Mastercard’s head of digital assets and blockchain, Raj Dhamodharan, said the new CBDC program is designed to “foster collaboration with key players in the sector.”
“We believe in payment choice and that interoperability between different payment methods is an important component of the economy.
It is also important that CBDC be as easy to use as other forms of money,” Dhamodharan added.
Mastercard did not disclose details of the creation of the new program, but the company stressed that CBDC “should not be accepted in a vacuum.”
Raj Dhamodharan said the collaboration under the partnership program will help central banks figure out how to create a digital currency that will add something “new and valuable to the economy.”
Recently, U.S. presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy called the CBDC “the grave of American freedom.”