Credit card and finance company Mastercard Inc. today introduced a new system that will enable banks and card issuers to identify and stop crypto asset transactions that may put their customers at risk for fraud.

According to a report exclusively shared with CNBC, the new service is called Crypto Secure and will use artificial intelligence and blockchain data powered by CipherTrace Inc., a crypto monitoring firm acquired by Mastercard in September 2021.

Using Crypto Secure, banks and card issuers will be able to view incoming transactions with color-coded ratings and representations of potentially dangerous activity. The risk of fraud occurring on any given crypto exchange is displayed with a number and a color code with a spectrum from green for “safe” and red for “dangerous.”

The platform itself does not take action against transactions. Instead, that’s up to the card issuers and banks themselves to decide to decline or accept.

According to a report from blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, through July 2022, $1.9 billion in cryptocurrency has been through hacks compared to just under $1.2 billion over the same period in 2021. The same report concluded that this trend would not be changing anytime soon.

“The whole digital asset market is now a pretty large, substantial market,” Ajay Bhalla, Mastercard’s president of cyber and intelligence business. “The idea is that the kind of trust we provide for digital commerce transactions, we want to be able to provide the same kind of trust to digital asset transactions for consumers, banks and merchants.”

According to Bhalla, the platform would also provide a way for Mastercard’s partners to remain compliant as crypto regulations begin to solidify globally.

Compliance has become an important focus for many banks and other services working with crypto assets as governments around the world have begun to pay increased attention to the industry. Examples include a report from the Financial Stability Oversight Council released today calling for Congress to pass multiple laws strengthening regulations on cryptocurrency assets and officials in the European Union setting out a new regulatory proposal to tame the “Wild West” of crypto markets by targeting fraud, money laundering and other criminal activities.

Mastercard said it already offers a similar service for traditional financial transactions and this new service extends them to crypto assets such as bitcoin and Ethereum.

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