Ripple and Mastercard Unite For Stablecoin-Based Card Payments
Hey Payments Fanatic!
Ripple, Mastercard, WebBank, and Gemini are teaming up to test stablecoin-based settlement for credit card transactions.
Unveiled at Ripple’s Swell 2025 event, the pilot could be one of the first times a regulated U.S. bank (WebBank) settles fiat card payments with a stablecoin on a public blockchain.
How it works: instead of waiting days for card transactions to clear through legacy banking rails, the pilot explores near-instant settlement using RLUSD on the XRP Ledger, reducing costs, delays, and intermediaries.
RLUSD, launched by Ripple in 2024 and backed 1:1 by USD, already tops $1B in circulation and is regulated under New York's Trust Charter.
Ripple's President Monica Long called it "a meaningful step toward showcasing how regulated digital assets can enhance settlement."
Hidden Road, now officially part of Ripple, adds another institutional layer to this growing ecosystem. Stablecoins are officially going mainstream.
But no IPO yet. At the same event, Ripple made clear it has no immediate plans to go public. "We do not have an IPO timeline," Long told Bloomberg in an interview at the company's conference in New York.
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