In 2023, Aptos Labs announced a major partnership with Mastercard to launch the Mastercard Crypto Credential.
This initiative aimed to bring more trust, compliance, and verification standards to blockchain transactions — a crucial step to unlocking real-world adoption.
Aptos was among the first blockchains selected for this program, thanks to its combination of high-speed performance, strong security guarantees, and developer-friendly Move programming language.
The Mastercard Crypto Credential focused on verifying interactions between users, ensuring transactions could meet regulatory requirements like Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) standards, without sacrificing decentralization or user experience.
For Aptos, this marked a significant validation of its infrastructure as “enterprise-ready” — trusted by one of the largest payment networks in the world.
Fast forward to April 2025:
Mastercard has now unveiled an even bigger move — an end-to-end stablecoin transaction network, designed to allow users to move stablecoins from wallets to merchants seamlessly at checkout.
This new initiative is a natural evolution of the work started with Crypto Credential, now expanded to create a full payments flow anchored in compliance, security, and real-world usability.
Stablecoins are poised to become a key bridge between traditional finance and blockchain-based value transfer, but until now, friction around trust, wallet interoperability, and on/off ramps have held broader adoption back.
Mastercard is tackling these gaps head-on, and the infrastructure laid down by projects like Aptos is critical for making this real at scale.
Aptos’ blockchain architecture — with its ability to handle thousands of transactions per second, low finality times, and secure smart contract execution — makes it an ideal layer for this next-generation global payment network.
It offers the speed, reliability, and flexibility needed to support real-time stablecoin settlement at a consumer scale, something very few blockchains can claim today.
In short:
- In 2023, Aptos and Mastercard built the trust layer (Crypto Credential).
- In 2025, Mastercard is building the transaction layer (stablecoin payments).
- Aptos provides the speed, scalability, and security to power this vision globally.
This is a major milestone — not just for Aptos, but for blockchain adoption worldwide.
As the rails connecting Web2 financial giants and Web3 native ecosystems solidify, Aptos is positioning itself as one of the core infrastructures powering the future of payments.