Mastercard Explores Settling RLUSD on XRP Ledger

BroadChain has learned that at 14:16 on April 18, according to Bitcoinist, Mastercard is exploring the settlement of card transaction flows through its network using Ripple USD (RLUSD). This move could bring the stablecoin infrastructure associated with the XRP Ledger closer to one of the world's largest payment systems. In an interview shared by XRPL Commons on April 16, Christian Rau, Senior Vice President of Digital Assets and Blockchain at Mastercard, stated that the company is collaborating with Gemini to explore use cases for RLUSD settlement and aims to launch it in the first half of this year. Speaking at the XRPL and Global Digital Finance Stablecoin Roundtable in Paris, Rau emphasized that this initiative is part of Mastercard's broader effort to integrate stablecoins into existing payment rails rather than parallel systems. He highlighted the company's commitment to a "payments-first" perspective, noting that stablecoins have entered the mainstream of financial services and can improve the efficiency of cross-border and inter-institutional fund flows. Rau pointed out that leveraging stablecoins as an additional settlement layer within the existing network, utilizing its scale of 150 million acceptance points and 3.8 billion cards, is more effective in accelerating adoption than waiting for wallet-to-wallet systems to replace existing rails. He revealed that collaborating with Gemini to explore settling its card transaction flows with RLUSD is a specific case, with Gemini being one of the company's primary crypto partners in the United States. As of press time, XRP is trading at $1.4766.