Payment giant MasterCard plans to hire 175 new employees, some of whom will work on Blockchain-related projects for the company.

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MasterCard is looking to hire 175 people with IT experience for a variety of functions, including blockchain specialists, according to a press release on April 12.

The new employees will be based in Ireland, where MasterCard Labs, the firm's research and development arm, is headquartered. That branch of the company, along with others, will be condensed into a single body known as the "Product and Innovation Team" at the time of the recruitment wave.

The team will work to develop "new innovative payment methods" by exploring AI and other technologies, in addition to blockchain.

On the day of the announcement, the US Patent and Trademark Office. UU published a MasterCard patent application for a "identity and credential protection and verification system through blockchain" in which a public key would represent an "associated identity value".

According to Alexei Malinovsky, director of the Russian Representative Office of MasterCard, the company has submitted applications for more than 30 patents related to DLT.

At the end of 2017, a few months after joining the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, the company revealed that it had launched a cross-border business-oriented payment service that used a distributed ledger to transmit fiduciary currency.

In February, it was discovered that MasterCard had stopped allowing customers to purchase cryptocurrencies from credit exchanges and, instead, had started using cash advances to support these purchases.

Source: ETHNews