SoFiUSD Stablecoin Goes Live on Mastercard Network
SoFi Bank N.A., an OCC-chartered institution, has launched its own stablecoin, SoFiUSD, on Mastercard's global payments network. This marks a significant milestone as SoFiUSD is the first bank-issued stablecoin to be used for production card-network settlement in the US.
The launch follows a six-month timeline from partnership announcement to production settlement, indicating that the infrastructure for bank-issued stablecoin rails is compressing toward commodity timelines. Visa has already built $20 billion in annualized stablecoin settlement volume using nonbank stablecoins, but SoFi's launch introduces a different asset class onto the same infrastructure.
Mastercard expanded its stablecoin settlement support to include USDC, PYUSD, RLUSD, and SoFiUSD side by side in June 2026. The scaling mechanism for SoFiUSD is Galileo, SoFi's technology platform, which will extend settlement to other issuing banks without requiring proprietary blockchain infrastructure.
The launch has significant implications for merchants, who can now enjoy 24/7 instant settlement at zero cost through SoFi's Big Business Banking platform, with no requirement to hold the stablecoin themselves. However, the OCC-chartered model carries regulatory overhead that nonbank issuers do not face.