Mastercard is piloting a way to settle card transactions using Ripple USD (RLUSD), a stablecoin tied to the XRP Ledger, potentially bringing XRP Ledger-linked settlement infrastructure into one of the world’s largest payments networks.
In an interview published April 16 by XRPL Commons’ Odelia Torteman, Christian Rau, Mastercard’s senior vice president for digital assets and blockchain, said the company is working with crypto exchange Gemini on an RLUSD settlement use case and hopes to roll it out in the first half of the year. Rau discussed the initiative at a stablecoin roundtable hosted by XRPL and Global Digital Finance in Paris.
Rau framed Mastercard’s approach as “payments first”: rather than positioning stablecoins as a rival to card rails, Mastercard wants to make them an additional settlement layer inside its existing network. He argued stablecoins have moved into the financial mainstream and can speed settlement cycles and ease cross-border money movement, while leveraging Mastercard’s global scale—about 150 million acceptance locations and 3.8 billion cards—could accelerate adoption far faster than waiting for new wallet-to-wallet rails to supplant incumbents.
“The power of the network that we bring…plugging in stablecoins into this system is the best of both worlds,” Rau said, noting that stablecoins could act as another settlement currency within Mastercard’s infrastructure and offer benefits fiat settlement doesn’t allow today.
The most concrete example is the work with Gemini: Mastercard is exploring settling Gemini card flows in RLUSD and aims to “bring this to life” in H1. Mastercard describes Gemini as one of its most prominent U.S. crypto partners.
If successful, the pilot would mark a notable step toward mainstream payments integration for XRP Ledger-based stablecoins and could serve as a blueprint for other tokenized settlement rails. At press time, XRP traded at $1.4766.
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