Mastercard uses a BlockChain for its Transactions
Mastercard says its newly released API can help banks and other institutions make payments across international borders faster at less cost.
One big difference, though: Mastercard’s system won’t involve any cryptocurrency. It will handle the “clearing” of financial transactions—the process by which account balances are updated to reflect new transactions—and will register these updates on a distributed ledger. (See “Why Bitcoin Could Be Much More Than a Currency.”) The actual transfer of money, known as the settlement, will use Mastercard’s conventional system, based on local fiat currencies.