Mastercard Applies for Public Blockchain Patent 🚨 This article is 7 years old...
Mastercard Applies for Public Blockchain Patent
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Updated: Jun. 10, 2018 at 1:16 am UTC
Photo by Zachary Spears on Unsplash
Disrupting industries worldwide, blockchain integration is finally making its way into the mainstream – attracting even the most established companies as a solution to structural inefficiencies. Announced on June 8th, 2018, Mastercard applied for patents to use a public blockchain.
Industry Giants Can’t Resist Blockchain
As a solution to payment friction, network validation, and peer-to-peer exchange, blockchain technology has proved a powerful application to countless industries.
With cryptocurrency and decentralized technology becoming mainstream, more and more companies founded in traditional tech are moving to integrate blockchain into their existing infrastructures.
Samsung and Maersk are just a few industry leaders turning to blockchain for supply-chain and data storage solutions.
Mastercard Looks to Blockchain Solutions
Payments giant Mastercard applied for patents to use a public blockchain for payment card validation and a travel itinerary bidding system.
Facing the $2 billion issue of stolen credit card payments, Mastercard aims to reduce susceptibility to “skimming” – using a counterfeit card reader to steal payment credentials – through the integration of a public blockchain.
Released on June 8th, the patent application filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) reveals Mastercard’s potential plan to store encoded payment credentials on a public blockchain and use conveyance and retrieval methods to validate each payment card upon the point of sale.
Outlined on the USPTO website, the patent states:
“A method for retrieval of payment credentials from a third party data source, comprising: reading, by an input device of a point of sale device, a machine-readable code displayed by a computing device; decoding, by a decoding module of the point of sale device, the machine-readable code to identify at least a public key… wherein the publicly accessible data source is a blockchain network.”
In addition to payment card verification, Mastercard also won a patent for a system of itinerary bidding based on a blockchain network.
In application, the system allows travelers to submit their itineraries to a public blockchain where the information is broadcast to hotels, airlines, and other travel services that can then respond to travelers with bids for reservation requests.
On the USPTO website, the patent outlines the benefits of blockchain to Mastercard’s new systems:
“The use of a blockchain can ensure that a traveler’s desired travel itinerary is publicly accessible to each merchant that is capable of bidding on the itinerary… As a result, travelers save both time and money with respect to their travel itinerary, and travel providers are provided with greater opportunities to earn and increase revenue.”
Posted In: Adoption, Technology
