Mastercard (MA) is launching a new software tool that will offer protection against crypto fraud, according to the latest crypto news about the global payments provider.

The new tool is dubbed Crypto Secure, and debuts today, 4 October, to bring to banks and other users a secure system by which they can identify and protect against fraudulent transactions and schemes on crypto exchanges within the Mastercard payment ecosystem.

Crypto Secure powered by CipherTrace

Crypto Secure is powered by CipherTrace, the California-based blockchain security platform Mastercard acquired in 2021.

Leveraging similar technology that helps trace illicit crypto-related activity, Crypto Secure will tap into artificial intelligence algorithms to provide risk ratings to banks and other users. The system uses on-chain as well as off-chain transaction data to rate the risk an activity poses – from ‘red’ for high risk to ‘green’ for low risk.

According to Ajay Bhalla, President of Cyber and Intelligence Business at Mastercard, the launch of Crypto Secure across bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is aimed at ensuring compliance in a complex regulatory environment.

Noting that the broader crypto market has rapidly grown, Bhalla told CNBC:

“The idea is that the kind of trust we provide for digital commerce transactions, we want to be able to provide the same kind of trust to digital asset transactions for consumers, banks and merchants.”

The anti-fraud tool will not make risk judgements on behalf of the banks though, with this left to the individual banks and card holders.

There has been an increase of hacks and other crypto-related cyberattacks, with millions of dollars worth of assets lost. The total percentage of illicit transactions, though low at less than 1% of gobal numbers, still accounts for huge amounts of money stolen according a recent CipherTrace report.

Elsewhere, Mastercard added support for NFTs and Web3 to its payments network in June this year, announcing collaborations with multiple platforms as it looked to enable NFT commerce. 

Among crypto protocols it added to its network were Immutable X, The Sandbox, Mintable, and Candy Digital. It also started working with MoonPay- a Web3 infrastructure provider.

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