Ava Labs joins Mastercard program to transform global payments

The gap between traditional banking and the digital asset world is closing.

Ava Labs, the technology company building the Avalanche L1 blockchain, has officially joined the newly launched Mastercard Crypto Partner Program.

This initiative is designed to bring the efficiency of digital assets to global commerce.

According to Mastercard, digital assets are moving past their initial phase. Blockchain technology is increasingly being applied behind the scenes to solve practical needs.

By participating in this program, Ava Labs will collaborate with Mastercard teams to design future products that merge the programmability of digital assets with established global card networks.

A roster of digital heavyweights

Ava Labs is participating in this initiative alongside a broad group of financial institutions and payment providers.

Mastercard has united more than 85 companies, including Circle, Polygon, Ripple, and Solana, to create a forum for dialogue as the industry matures.

The goal for this coalition is practical execution. Mastercard stated it will continue to focus on “enabling trust, setting standards and connecting systems at scale.”

The Mastercard collaboration is the latest development for the team behind the Avalanche project.

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In April 2025, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group—which operates SMBC, the second-largest bank in Japan, announced plans to develop a stablecoin in collaboration with Ava Labs and the crypto security firm Fireblocks.

This project aims to use blockchain technology to streamline cross-border payments and reduce transaction costs for the bank.

Stablecoins offer an opportunity to move value more efficiently than the traditional SWIFT system, which often relies on a web of intermediaries that cause longer processing times and higher fees.

The technology driving the shift

Helmed by Cornell University professor Emin Gun Sirer, the team behind Ava Labs is dedicated to empowering organizations to build custom blockchains and decentralized applications.

Their primary focus is the Avalanche blockchain. Unlike older networks, Avalanche utilizes a unique architecture of interconnected blockchains to achieve massive scalability.

This design allows for fast transaction finality, making it a competitive infrastructure for enterprise and institutional use cases.

At press time, $AVAX, Avalanche’s native token, was up 0.98% over the past 24 hours, trading at $9.70.