Spotlight: Migrating the Largest User of Mastercard Provenance to Hedera with Fresh Supply Co (FSCO)

Sabrina Tachdjian (Head of Fintech & Payments) discusses Fresh Supply Co (FSCO), the company that migrated from Mastercard Provenance to Hedera.

In late March, we announced that Fresh Supply Co (FSCO), the largest user of Mastercard Provenance (MP)  and a technology partner to multiple Australian banks, had migrated from the private Mastercard blockchain to the public Hedera network. 

Last week, FSCO announced that it had integrated Continuity, the payment trigger API connecting Hedera to the Mastercard network. This enables legacy users of MP, and any other companies building event-based payment automation into their supply chain, to seamlessly migrate across.

Payment triggers marked a big milestone in our relationship, with the Continuity Sandbox already including some of the major players that were on MP alongside FSCO. 

In just one use case with FSCO, we’re actively demonstrating three facets of Hedera’s even broader utility – supply chain, Real-World Asset (RWA) tokenization, and payments.  

Excitingly, this only marks the beginning of what we expect to be a long and prosperous relationship with the team. So, let’s jump into how it all started.

Establishing the Relationship

We were originally introduced to FSCO by Rob Allen. David Inderias immediately stood out as one of those rare CEOs who not only showed a deep understanding of his business’ pain points, but would also get very technical, and could articulate his vision with laser focus. 

Towards the end of last year, I met David in person in Singapore and we had a meeting with Tony Murphy (VP, Enterprise Architect) at the Mastercard APAC headquarters. Tony was concerned about providing uninterrupted service for the clients of the soon-to-be sunset Mastercard Provenance and gave FSCO the opportunity to take over. His team was essentially advising David on how to rebuild the system in a way that would be the least disruptive to their existing client base. 

As a long-time and major user of Mastercard Provenance, David had a deep understanding of the system, the motivation to engineer a more efficient solution on Hedera, and the ambition to realize Mastercard’s roadmap.  

Why Hedera

It was obvious from the get-go that FSCO had done a great deal of research and testing across multiple blockchains, none of which had met the standards the team needed to scale out their vision.

The team needed a DLT that was fast, affordable, and reliable. Crucially, the team would need to cost forecast, and Hedera’s fixed fee model was the best solution on the market to enable this. 

The energy efficiency of Hedera also made a big difference for FSCO, with David actually saying: “You discredit yourself if you capture ESG data, on an L1/L2 with high energy usage.”

Alongside the hashgraph itself, the Hedera Governing Council approach to governance was also deeply attractive for a use case in the finance space, ensuring FSCO’s partners the utmost stability and security.

Fintech & Payments Strategy

This use case leverages both payments and tokenization, two themes that are at the core of our fund strategy laid out in 2022. Through the deep integration of their Continuity API with Mastercard’s network, and soon MPGS and other forthcoming Mastercard web3 and digital asset products, they are building some of the necessary infrastructure to bridge the TradFi and digital asset worlds.  

Payment triggering alone is a valuable tool for a number of industries. The MPGS and later integrations will also likely open up new opportunities for Continuity to facilitate online and stablecoin payments respectively. 

Expected Usage

Writing all supply chain-related events to the ledger and taking in IoT data streams means FSCO will scale to become a high throughput use case on the Hedera network.

As a matter of fact, when uploading the entire MP transaction history to the ledger, they really pushed their initial mirror node setup to a point where they had to level up with a commercial one - Arkhia.

Maturing Payments Ecosystem on Hedera

The industry as a whole is in a phase where a lot of DLT-based payment infrastructure is being built and FSCO is a prime example of that. 

Recently, we have really started to see the payments ecosystem on Hedera mature beyond that of other networks. For many institutions including partners like Shinhan and Standard Bank and other financial giants like eftpos, Hedera is proving itself as the most robust public network to build on. 

The stablecoin market is also maturing, graduating from being limited to crypto trading and P2P payments use cases, to being used in a TradFi setting. Integrating stablecoins with the existing payment infrastructure is key to adoption, and the work that FSCO is doing is really laying the foundation for that.

Shout Outs

So far this relationship has had multiple teams across multiple organizations come together to get to where we are now.

In particular, I’d like to shout out Michael Bennet andPathorn Tengkiattrakul from Swirlds, Niko Leontakianakos from The HBAR Foundation, Rob Allen from The Hashgraph Association, Tony Murphy from Mastercard, and of course, the full dozen of team members from FSCO that we have worked with throughout.