Mastercard and Binance Set End Date for Four Crypto Card Programs

Mastercard and Binance confirmed on August 24, 2023, that four co-branded crypto-card programs would end in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Bahrain. A Mastercard spokesperson told Reuters that the programs would terminate on September 22, while Binance said affected customers could use their cards through September 21.

The decision removed a prominent consumer link between cryptocurrency held on a centralized exchange and Mastercard’s conventional payment network. It did not close Binance accounts, disable the exchange globally or end Mastercard’s other cryptocurrency-card partnerships.

What was being withdrawn

The Binance Card operated as a prepaid payment product rather than a direct cryptocurrency settlement system for merchants. Customers selected supported assets in their Binance accounts; when they made an eligible purchase, the product converted the necessary value into fiat currency. The merchant continued to receive ordinary fiat payment through the card network.

Mastercard’s January 30, 2023, announcement for Brazil described a card issued by Dock that supported real-time conversion at the point of purchase. It said customers could use 14 supported currencies and reach more than 90 million Mastercard merchants worldwide. Those figures described the network access and product configuration promoted at launch, not the number of active cardholders or transactions.

Brazil had become the second Latin American market for the product after Argentina. Colombia was subsequently included, while Bahrain represented the active Middle Eastern pilot identified by Mastercard in contemporaneous reporting. The August 24 wind-down therefore reversed a regional expansion that had been presented only months earlier as a practical route for spending exchange-held assets.

Binance’s customer-support account said the card would no longer be available in Latin America and the Middle East. It claimed that fewer than 1% of Binance users in the referenced markets would be affected. That percentage was a company assertion: Binance did not disclose the underlying user count, the number of active cardholders, transaction volume or its definition of an affected user. It should not be read as an independently verified adoption measure.

A partnership ends amid regulatory pressure

Neither company publicly identified the party that initiated the termination or gave a specific reason for it on August 24. Mastercard declined to explain the decision to Reuters. The available evidence therefore does not establish that any particular lawsuit, compliance finding or commercial metric caused the programs to close.

The institutional backdrop was nevertheless material. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission had sued Binance entities, founder Changpeng Zhao and former compliance chief Samuel Lim on March 27, 2023, alleging violations of federal commodities law and deliberate regulatory evasion. On June 5, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed 13 charges against Binance-related entities and Zhao, including allegations involving unregistered trading functions, customer-asset controls and Binance.US market surveillance. Those were unresolved civil allegations on August 24, not adjudicated findings.

Reuters reported that Mastercard’s other crypto-card programs were unaffected. That distinction matters: the development was a counterparty-specific pullback, not evidence that Mastercard had abandoned digital-asset payment products as a category.

Why the cutoff mattered

Crypto cards were designed to make volatile or dollar-linked digital assets usable through familiar payment infrastructure without requiring merchants to accept cryptocurrency directly. Their operation depended on several centralized layers: the exchange holding the assets, an issuer, conversion services and the card network.

The September cutoff demonstrated how quickly that access could narrow when one commercial relationship ended. It also separated two ideas often grouped together as “crypto payments.” Binance Pay remained available where supported, according to Binance, but the Mastercard-linked card programs—and their connection to conventional card acceptance—were being withdrawn. For customers in the four markets, the practical consequence was a defined final-use window rather than a disruption to the underlying Binance account.