Mastercard has announced the use of stablecoins to enable intraday and weekend settlement between card issuers and acquirers. It follows pilot programs involving Circle’s USDC in certain regions, but that is now expanding to other stablecoins, including those issued by Paxos (PayPal’s PYUSD, USDG and USDP), Ripple (RLUSD) and SoFi’s SoFiUSD.
The major benefit is more flexible settlement for use cases such as cross border payments, treasury and payouts. The settlement expansion follows Mastercard’s $1.8 billion acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK in March.
The announcement likely owes something to Mastercard’s receipt of a BitLicense from the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) last week. Previously Mastercard relied on Circle to handle USDC transfers on its behalf, as Circle held the necessary license. With its own license, Mastercard can now make the transfers itself and hence has more choice over which stablecoins to support.
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