Mastercard Pilots Ripple Stablecoin for Card Settlement

Mastercard is exploring ways to settle card transactions using Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin. The company has partnered with Gemini to test this new payment method, which aims to speed up cross-border flows.

The RLUSD settlement feature is expected to go live in the first half of the year, according to Christian Rau, Mastercard's senior vice president for digital assets and blockchain. He believes that stablecoins have entered the mainstream of financial services and can offer benefits that fiat currencies cannot match today.

Rau noted that Mastercard has roughly 150 million acceptance locations and 3.8 billion cards, making it an ideal platform to integrate stablecoins into existing rails rather than running a parallel system. This approach would allow users to settle transactions using RLUSD as just another settlement currency within the network.