IN BLOCKCHAIN THEY TRUST

Crypto is in crisis, but many of the world's biggest financial institutions are still banking on the underlying tech as the best way to build confidence with customers-and with one another.

- NINA BAMBYSHEVA AND MICHAEL DEL CASTILLO

Middleman Moves Mastercard chief executive Michael Miebach wants to use blockchain tech selectively for things like speeding up cross-border-payments. "It's not an either-or," he says.

"THERE WILL ALWAYS BE NEW PAYMENT TECHNOLOGY," says Michael Miebach, chief executive of Mastercard, the world's second-largest credit card 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."

In late January, the 55-year-old Miebach told analysts and shareholders that his company had surpassed 2 billion "tokenized" transactions per month, up 38% in a year, and that Mastercard was enabling digital payments in 110 countries. The big benefit? Less fraud.

Today, tokenization at Mastercard means replacing the 16-digit number on your plastic credit card with a supersecure unique digital record for every transaction, without ever leaving behind your identity in the form of a credit card number. It's not yet on a blockchain, but Mastercard is currently working with banks and merchants to tokenize a variety of assets, including deposits, which will be tracked on multiple public and private blockchains.

"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."

Opportunity Headknocker Derivatives trading and tokenizing bonds are just two of the crypto profit centers CEO David Solomon envisions for Goldman Sachs.