MasterCard Looking at Bitcoin

New patent filings from Mastercard show how the credit card giant is looking at blockchain as a possible means for easing payment settlement times.

In a patent application released last week by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the company describes a blockchain-based database capable of instantaneously processing payments, guaranteeing that merchants don't need to wait days before receiving funds for their products.Source

Further, the filings indicate that the tech would help the firm keep an ongoing record of these transactions, verifying that a vendor was actually paid after a particular sale.

The data being stored would include the transaction amount, a guarantee of payment, confirmation of the payment and account profiles for the parties involved. These account profiles will also store each users's balance information, according to the application.

This is a snippet of their approach;

“There is a need for a technical solution where a payment transaction can be guaranteed in a manner that is readily verifiable by an acquiring financial institution and/or merchant, and where the guarantee can be used in conjunction with multiple types of payment instruments as well as multiple transaction types, including e-commerce transactions.”

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