Mastercard is hiring a Director of Crypto Flows to lead stablecoin-linked card issuance, scale DeFi payment flows, and rewrite network rules for Web3 transactions.

The job posting, first surfaced by crypto journalist Frank Chaparro on Feb. 24, signals a structural push beyond the pilot-stage experiments the payments giant has run so far.

Days earlier, Citrini Research published “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis,” a doomsday scenario that rapidly went viral on Substack. The report maps a chain reaction in which AI agents progressively dismantle fee-based intermediaries — and payment networks sit squarely in the blast radius. Citrini specifically names Mastercard’s Q1 2027 earnings as a potential inflection point, the…