The news: Mastercard is reportedly nearing a deal to acquire Zerohash for as much as $2 billion, per Fortune.

Zerohash provides infrastructure to connect fiat payment systems with crypto and stablecoins. In the US, it has a money transmitter license and also operates a subsidiary that offers liquidity services.

It’s unclear whether Zerohash Liquidity Services would be part of Mastercard’s acquisition.

How we got here: Mastercard really wants to make a splashy crypto acquisition.

Just two weeks ago, Fortune reported that Mastercard and Coinbase were in the running to acquire BVNK, another crypto infrastructure provider. Coincidentally, that deal price was also valued at about $2 billion. Those talks seem to be shifting toward Coinbase’s favor, leaving Mastercard with a multibillion-dollar check burning a hole in its pocket.

Mastercard is no stranger to making big acquisitions to either reinforce its own services or to neutralize threats to its dominance from budding sectors. It bought open-banking provider Finicity for $825 million in 2020, account-to-account payments company Nets for $3.19 billion in 2021, and last year agreed to acquire cybersecurity firm Recorded Future for $2.65 billion.

Why this matters: The deal would be the largest crypto acquisition by an incumbent financial services provider to date—and it’s one of the strongest signals yet that the payments industry wants to steer crypto’s path into the mainstream.

Mastercard has already embarked on several crypto projects.

• It has partnerships with Paxos’ USDG, Fiserv’s FIUSD stablecoin, PayPal’s PYUSD, and Circle’s USDC.
• It operates the Start Path Blockchain and Digital Asset program, which supports crypto startups.
• Mastercard also offers its own Multi-Token Network, a credentialing protocol, and a crypto card program.

What this means for card networks: We can expect Visa to pursue a big crypto acquisition in short order.

Visa and Mastercard have a habit of making tit-for-tat acquisitions and product launches.

• Mastercard’s Recorded Future acquisition came less than a month after news broke that Visa was mulling a nearly $1 billion fraud prevention deal.
• Less than a year after Mastercard bought Finicity, Visa closed a deal on open banking player Tink for $2.1 billion.
• And the two networks launched competing subscription management platforms within weeks of each other last year.

Whether they see it as an existential threat or not, networks are waking up to the fact that crypto is here to stay—and they need to prove to investors and stakeholders that they’re taking it seriously.