Hours ago, Coinbase made the groundbreaking announcement that its forthcoming NFT platform / OpenSea competitor will accept debit and credit Mastercards. I know right? You’ll be able to use legal tender to purchase goods in an online marketplace? What is the metaverse coming to? 

Jokes aside, this is a pretty huge deal in terms of mainstream adoption of web3. Currently, the path to enter the space is complex: set up an account with a crypto exchange platform, link it to your bank account, set up a crypto wallet, link it to your exchange account, buy currency in the latter, transfer it to the former, spend it on a PNG, rinse, repeat.

On top of that, exchanges on different chains require different wallets. (MetaMask for Ethereum / OpenSea; Phantom for Solana / SolSea; Temple for Tezos / OBJKT; etc.) The inertia to take the sheer amount of steps required for adoption has surely stopped many consumers who otherwise would embrace web3.

It will be massive for Coinbase and its new marketplace — before the announcement, the waitlist for their platform was already around 2.5m people. It’s also big for Mastercard, the first major credit card company to classify NFTs as digital goods. (To date, most crypto buys are only supported by debit.)

But, without a doubt, it’s biggest for us, as we’ve been touting custodial wallets and web2-friendly exchanges as the only fuel that can spark the widespread adoption necessary to blast web3 to the moon. Of course, now our little bootstrap operation is competing with a $1b corporation, but it’s cool. We’ll accept validation in any form.