Mastercard opens its global settlement network to stablecoins

Mastercard is expanding its settlement infrastructure to support regulated stablecoins alongside traditional fiat currencies, a move that brings on-chain finance further into the mainstream of global card payments and signals a new phase in how money moves between banks and merchants.

The company announced plans to enable stablecoin-based settlement across its network, allowing issuers and acquirers — the banks on either side of a card transaction — to settle using digital assets rather than waiting for conventional banking windows.

The enhancements also include intraday, weekend, and public holiday settlement options in fiat, addressing a longstanding friction in cross-border payments and treasury operations where timing gaps create liquidity problems.

Supported stablecoins will include Circle’s USDC, Paxos-issued tokens PYUSD, USDG and USDP, Ripple’s RLUSD, and SoFi’s SoFiUSD. Settlement will run across eight blockchain networks — Arbitrum, Base, Canton, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Tempo and XRPL — giving partners flexibility over which infrastructure they use. Crucially, these options will sit alongside, not replace, existing settlement processes.

Among the first institutions expected to go live are ARQ, CBW Bank, Cross River, Lead Bank and Nuvei, initially covering the United States and Latin America, with broader rollout planned through 2026.

“The next phase of stablecoin adoption is about real-world utility, especially in settlement, where timing and liquidity matter most,” said Raj Dhamodharan, EVP Blockchain & Digital Assets, Mastercard.

The move is significant less for the technology — stablecoin settlement has been piloted in various forms for years — than for the scale and trust of the infrastructure it is now embedded in.

Mastercard’s network processes billions of transactions globally, and attaching on-chain settlement to that rails system gives regulated stablecoins a use case that goes far beyond crypto-native platforms.

Partners retain Mastercard’s existing fraud safeguards, security standards and dispute processes, removing a key barrier that has slowed institutional adoption of blockchain-based payment flows.

For markets like Nigeria and other emerging economies where cross-border payment costs and settlement delays are persistent pain points, the practical implication is real: transactions that once sat in overnight or weekend clearing queues could settle within hours, at any time, using programmable digital rails.

The expansion is subject to regulatory approval by region and will continue rolling out through the year as additional partners and stablecoins are added to the network.