Ajay Banga, the CEO of global credit card powerhouse Mastercard said in a Fortune interview with Alan Murray that he was less interested in Bitcoin and gave preference to both CBDC’s and Stablecoins. It’s not the first time Banga has come out against BTC, in October 2020 he said that the king crypto was too volatile, and could not be used as a tool for financial inclusion, and in 2017 he called Bitcoin, and other similar cryptocurrencies ‘Junk’ due to what he described as their ‘mercurial nature’ and ‘illicit use cases’. Clearly nobody has educated Mr Banga to the fact that, whilst it’s true that Bitcoin has been used in some criminal activity, so has every other currency out there, and few of them have ever achieved the sort of meteoric rise that BTC has had.
Can you imagine someone who is financially excluded trading in a way to get included through a currency that could cost the equivalent of two Coca-Cola bottles today and 21 tomorrow? That’s not a way to get them [included]. That’s a way to make them scared of the financial system.
Ajay Banga, Mastercard CEO
In a blogpost published in February 2021, Mastercard said it would consider supporting certain cryptocurrencies on it’s network, but to date that only seems to extend to fiat-pegged stablecoins.
