Mastercard’s recent outage stirs up crypto enthusiasts

One of the major players in the credit card duopoly suffered a severe outage last week that held up millions of payments around the globe.

It’s no surprise that the credit card industry is in desperate need of a makeover having held its stake in the payments sphere for over 40 years and counting. Both Mastercard and Visa have long dominated the payments space and have come to be adopted by the masses all over the world. However, with the advent of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and countless other altcoins, the game is quickly changing.

While credit cards have a slew of benefits, such as trust, regulation, instanteity, and user-friendliness, they come with high fees and are not supported everywhere around the world, especially as it concerns the nearly two billion unbanked population. Adding insult to injury, credit card leviathan Mastercard recently experienced a major outage across North America and Europe, which had customers voicing their distaste across social media.

While Mastercard quickly addressed frustrations and resumed its services thereafter, the crypto community’s interest was naturally piqued. Crypto enthusiasts and companies chimed into the conversation, waving the crypto flag sky-high and touting the benefits of digital currencies and blockchain technology.

 

Although there’s a clear need to revamp current payment standards, most cryptocurrencies around just don’t make the mark. Cryptocurrencies were the first revolutionary technology to disrupt traditional payments, but have failed to be mass adopted due to scalability challenges, volatile prices, lack of buyer-seller protections, a complicated user experience and the absence of regulation. What’s more, the public at large doesn’t trust cryptocurrencies.

Mastercard has demonstrated efforts to curtail its shortcomings as an outdated payment method by ramping up its plans to integrate blockchain technology into its services. However, it faces major competition from nascent cryptocurrencies that are quickly gaining traction, particularly DAG-based payment systems.

DAGs (directed acyclic graphs) take blockchain to the next level by providing a sustainable solution to common problems experienced by blockchain-based digital currencies. In COTI PAY’s DAG-based payment network, for starters, there is high scalability, buyer-seller protections, regulation, complete decentralization, price stability and ease of use, which is unheard of with many other DAG-based payment systems like IOTA, Ripple and Nano. There is also no costly mining involved and low energy consumption, unlike Bitcoin’s mining pools, which consume enormous amounts of electricity and computing power to validate blockchain transactions.

 

The question on whether the likes of Mastercard and Visa will maintain their foothold in a booming crypto market looms large. With a myriad of other cryptocurrencies offering an unbeatable value proposition, such card networks will need to act fast to meet the demand.

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