Here will always be new payment technology,” says Michael Miebach, chief executive of Mastercard, the world’s second-largest payments company. “First there were cards using ISO 8583 [ISO numbers refer to international standards] messaging technology, which is 50 years old, then real-time payments became real with ISO 20022. And then came blockchain, and we said okay, what would that solve? There’s a whole set of real-life problems out there that blockchain can solve.
“You can tokenize anything,” Miebach says. “I think we’re going to have a world where everything will be tokenized and will be passed around in a safe fashion.”2023 Blockchain 50 list of billion-dollar companies putting distributed-ledger technology to real use. Mastercard is also a prototypical corporate middleman. It raked in $22 billion in revenue and $10 billion in profit last year from the fees it charges financial institutions to, essentially, help customers spend their own money.
Other “TradFi” CEOs are right alongside Miebach, beating the crypto drum. In December David Solomon, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, penned an opinion piece in theheadlined “Blockchain Is Much More Than Crypto,” in which the boss of Wall Street’s most iconic firm cautioned against dismissing the technology in the wake of the Sam Bankman-Fried/FTX fiasco. The crux of his argument? “Under the guidance of a regulated financial institution like ours blockchain innovations can flourish.
The nation’s oldest bank, 238-year-old BNY Mellon, already offers digital asset custody for U.S. asset managers and provides back-office services to 19 Canadian crypto ETFs and mutual funds.
Public blockchains can offer advantages in terms of speed and cost. Private equity pioneer KKR, whose funds manage $496 billion worth of assets, recently opened its $4 billion Health Care Strategic Growth Fund to distribution via Avalanche, a fast public blockchain that boasts 4,500 transactions per second . Other Avalanche users include CME Group, payments company FIS and Mastercard.
There's an easier way to protect yourself. It's called cash.