Mastercard Backs XRP Ledger Hackathon Amid Expanded Ripple Partnership
Mastercard has announced its participation as a sponsor for an XRP Ledger (XRPL) hackathon to be held in New York on October 24-25. This event is part of an expanding collaboration between Mastercard and Ripple, which extends beyond their previous work on card rewards and stablecoin settlement.
The hackathon will consist of four tracks: protocol innovation, agentic finance, lending and borrowing, and allows teams already running projects to join by adding XRP Ledger features. This move is seen as a way for Mastercard to widen its touchpoints with the XRP Ledger development ecosystem beyond simple event support.
The cooperation between Mastercard and Ripple has expanded across payments and digital asset infrastructure over the past year. In November 2025, they announced a collaboration centered on RLUSD stablecoin, followed by Gemini's launch of an XRP edition of a Mastercard credit card in August last year, offering up to 4 percent rewards in XRP.
In June 2026, Mastercard announced plans to support payment settlement using regulated stablecoins, including RLUSD and listing XRP Ledger among the blockchain networks. This marks a significant development as Mastercard began treating XRP Ledger as an infrastructure candidate that can be directly connected at the payment network level.