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Mastercard is exploring a way to settle card payment flows in Ripple USD (RLUSD) using its payments network, an effort that could extend XRP Ledger-linked stablecoin infrastructure into one of the world’s largest card systems. In an interview shared April 16 by XRPL Commons’ Odelia Torteman, Mastercard senior vice president for digital assets and blockchain Christian Rau said the company is working with Gemini on an RLUSD settlement use case and aims to bring it live in the first half of the year.
Speaking at an XRPL and Global Digital Finance stablecoin roundtable in Paris, Rau described the initiative as part of Mastercard’s broader push to integrate stablecoins into existing payment rails rather than treat them as a separate parallel system. He said Mastercard continues to take a “payments first” perspective, arguing that stablecoins have moved into mainstream financial services and can improve cross-border and inter-institution money movement.
“Over the last 50, 60 years we’ve been constantly innovating on how payments can be safe, simple, secure,” Rau said. “And if you then fast forward to five years back or two years back, you will realize that stablecoins arrived in the financial services mainstream. And we believe that the benefits that they bring in terms of settlement cycles, money moving globally freely, they can definitely add to further driving sustainable innovation in the financial services and payment ecosystem.”
Rau said Mastercard is not positioning stablecoins as a replacement for the card model, but as an additional settlement layer within its existing network. He cited the network’s scale as a key advantage, pointing to roughly 150 million acceptance locations and 3.8 billion cards. In Mastercard’s view, integrating stablecoins into that infrastructure could accelerate adoption compared with waiting for wallet-to-wallet systems to replace incumbent rails.
“We however believe that the power of the network that we bring in terms of 150 million acceptance location, 3.8 billion cards, plugging in stablecoins into this system is the best of both worlds in that sense,” Rau said. “So think about stablecoins just another settlement currency within our network. That again brings certain benefits that fiat currencies do not allow today.”
Rau highlighted Gemini as the most concrete example. He said Mastercard is working with the exchange to explore settling Gemini card flows in RLUSD, describing Gemini as one of Mastercard’s most prominent US crypto partners. He said the company plans to bring the effort to life in the first half of the year.
“The XRP example is we work with Gemini,” he said. “We explore with them to settle their card flows in RLUSD. So we look at bringing this to life still in the first half of this year and we are very excited about that.”
At press time, XRP traded at $1.4766.
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