Mastercard and Kima have taken a step closer to the ‘DeFi credit card’.

Kima, a peer-to-peer remittance and payment protocol, has taken a significant step forward in the fintech landscape by joining the FinSec Innovation Lab. This Mastercard-led accelerator focuses on advancing fintech and cybersecurity. Kima has also secured a grant from the Israel Innovation Authority (IIA) to support an ambitious project aimed at linking decentralized finance (DeFi) applications with existing fiat systems.

Kima’s collaboration with FinSec seeks to address a critical challenge for the DeFi ecosystem: lack of integration with mainstream financial instruments such as bank accounts and credit cards.

Currently, DeFi protocols often operate in silos, fragmenting liquidity and complicating user experience. Kima and FinSec aim to create a seamless connection that improves accessibility and usability for the average user by connecting traditional financial products with DeFi platforms.

The initiative, scheduled to launch in late 2024, will leverage Kima’s existing payment protocol to facilitate direct fund transfers over the blockchain without relying on smart contracts. This infrastructure will play a critical role in developing new ways to connect bank accounts and credit cards to a variety of DeFi tools, making these innovative financial products more accessible to more people.

As part of this groundbreaking project, FinSec will operate Kima nodes and become a key stakeholder in the evolving cross-ecosystem network. This participation is expected to strengthen Kima’s payment protocol and settlement layer ahead of the expected token and mainnet launch in Q2 2024. Kima’s payment layer includes cross-border transfers, cryptocurrency payment rails, DeFi borrowing and lending, gaming, real-world asset (RWA) marketplaces, wallets, and exchanges.

Eitan Katz, CEO and co-founder of Kima, said: “Kima and FinSec are embarking on an exciting journey together, which we are confident will lead to groundbreaking advancements in the way people interact with DeFi.”

“The only way blockchain and DeFi will become fixtures outside of the niche world of Web3 is if there is an easily accessible, secure and inexpensive way to connect blockchain networks with traditional financial instruments,” Katz said.

Sidney Gottesman, CEO of FinSec, emphasized the transformative potential of collaboration. He said, “We are excited to have Kima as a startup in the FinSec Lab and support its initiatives to seamlessly connect decentralized finance (DeFi) applications with fiat systems. We are excited to see the progress of Eitan and his team and excited to see their innovative solutions succeed.”

This partnership marks a significant milestone for the fintech and DeFi sectors, promising to deliver more integrated and user-friendly financial solutions that bridge the gap between decentralized and traditional finance.

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