Raj Dhamodharan, EVP, Mastercard

Episode 76 of Season 5 of The Scoop was recorded with The Block's Frank Chaparro and Mastercard EVP of Blockchain/Digital Asset Products & Digital Partnerships Raj Dhamodharan.

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On this episode of The Scoop, The Block's podcast, Frank Chaparro talks with Raj Dhamodharan, Mastercard's executive vice president of blockchain and digital asset products and digital partnerships, about how the payments giant is positioning itself for a future in which value moves seamlessly across public and private tokenized assets, including stablecoins, tokenized bank deposits, and central bank digital currencies.

Outline:

1:00 Mastercard's Multi Token Network

6:00 MTN Applications

10:13 KYC & Crypto Credential

12:46 Public/Private Transactions

14:09 Tokenized Bank Deposits

21:20 The Multichain Future

24:25 Central Bank Digital Currencies

29:16 Closing Thoughts

Dhamodharan details Mastercard's Multi Token Network, a platform designed to let banks and other financial institutions experiment with and eventually deploy blockchain-based settlement rails without building the underlying infrastructure themselves, and he explains how early pilots on the network are testing use cases such as carbon credits, cross-border payments, and programmable transactions. He also discusses Mastercard Crypto Credential, a framework the company has been rolling out to bring familiar know-your-customer verification standards to blockchain wallets and exchanges, aiming to make peer-to-peer crypto transfers as safe and predictable as traditional card payments.

Much of the conversation centers on Mastercard's broader CBDC strategy, an area where the company has partnered with firms like Ripple and Consensys to help central banks test and pilot their own digital currencies, and Dhamodharan lays out why he believes interoperability between public blockchains, private bank ledgers, and eventual CBDC systems will be essential for tokenization to reach mainstream adoption. He frames Mastercard's approach not as a bet on any single blockchain or token but as an effort to build a neutral, bank-grade layer that can plug into whichever combination of tokenized assets ultimately wins out, drawing on the company's decades of experience building interoperable payment rails across currencies and jurisdictions.

The episode offers a detailed look at how one of the world's largest payments networks views its own role in a tokenized financial system, and it captures Mastercard's thinking at a moment when banks, fintechs, and regulators were all racing to figure out how stablecoins and tokenized deposits would coexist with traditional money movement, a debate that has only intensified in the time since the episode aired.