Mastercard’s cryptocurrency partner program includes Ripple as well as more than 85 companies including Binance, PayPal and Coinbase, but the program does not directly use XRP for settlement.
About 88% of Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin supply is on Ethereum rather than the XRP Ledger, meaning most RLUSD activity does not involve XRP at all.
Mastercard’s own research has identified XRP as a “bridge currency” for cross-border payments, but banks will not use XRP directly until the CLARITY Act classifies it as a digital commodity under federal law.
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XRP (CRYPTO: The biggest of these is the launch of Mastercard’s new cryptocurrency partner program on March 11, adding Ripple to the network that processes more than $9 trillion in payments annually in more than 200 countries.
Ripple’s addition to the $9 trillion payments network should be a boon for XRP prices, but Ripple has had major partnerships before and the token hasn’t changed much. The real question is whether this deal gives XRP a role in Mastercard’s ecosystem, or whether this is another win for an untouched token by the Ripple network.
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Mastercard’s Cryptocurrency Partner Program brings together more than 85 cryptocurrency companies, payment providers and financial institutions to build blockchain-based payment products on top of Mastercard’s existing card network. The program launches on March 11, 2026, giving participants direct access to the infrastructure behind $9 trillion in annual payments in more than 200 countries.
The focus is on use cases where blockchain can already do useful things: cross-border transfers, B2B payments, global payments and settlements. Participants work with Mastercard teams on product development and have access to forums to collaborate with banks, merchants and other partners in the Mastercard network. Part of the motivation is defensive — stablecoins are increasingly being touted as an alternative to traditional card rails, and Mastercard would rather bring cryptocurrency companies into its ecosystem than watch them build around it.
Ripple is one of more than 85 companies participating in the program, including Binance, Circle, PayPal, Gemini, Paxos, Coinbase, JPMorgan Chase and Stripe. This suggests this is a broad industry initiative and not an exclusive deal for Ripple. Ripple’s role in the initiative focuses on cross-border settlements, a business the company has built around the XRP Ledger over the years.
This is also not the first time Ripple has partnered with Mastercard. In November 2025, Ripple, Mastercard, Gemini, and WebBank announced a pilot to test RLUSD settlement on the XRP Ledger for credit card payments via the Gemini XRP credit card. The pilot is still in the testing phase, but the cryptocurrency partnership program will allow Ripple to be more deeply integrated into Mastercard’s payments ecosystem.
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The Cryptocurrency Partner Program itself does not use XRP. It is a collaborative framework where Ripple and more than 85 other companies work with the Mastercard team to build future payment products, and no announcements have mentioned XRP as a settlement asset.
More closely tied to the XRP price is the RLUSD pilot announced in November 2025 by Ripple, Mastercard, Gemini and WebBank. The pilot will use RLUSD, Ripple’s USD-backed stablecoin, to settle credit card payments on XRP Ledger.
But the institutions using RLUSD are not the same as those using XRP. RLUSD settlement places activity on the XRP ledger without requiring anyone to directly purchase or hold XRP. Each transaction on the XRP Ledger consumes a small amount of XRP as a fee, so more RLUSD activity on XRPL means more XRP is destroyed. But the amount burned is so small — about 0.00001 XRP per transaction, less than a penny — that the total annual burn would only reduce the supply of XRP by about 0.0075%, even at Visa or Mastercard-level daily transaction volumes.
The bigger issue with XRP price is where RLUSD actually exists. Approximately 88% of the RLUSD supply is on Ethereum, not the XRP ledger. Therefore, RLUSD transactions on Ethereum do not involve XRP at all. This has been the main divide between Ripple’s success and the price of XRP over the years. The company continues to win partnerships and build infrastructure, but much of this activity is not flowing through the XRP token in a way that affects the price.
Mastercard’s own research has identified XRP as a “bridge currency” for cross-border payments. In this model, funds can be converted into XRP, moved across the network in seconds, and then converted into the target currency. Japan’s SBI Remit already uses this setup through Ripple’s payment infrastructure.
If Mastercard’s cross-border settlements start trading through XRP as a bridge asset, rather than just using RLUSD, then every payment will create direct buying and selling pressure on XRP. This is when Mastercard transactions started showing up in the XRP price.
To do this, RLUSD activity also needs to be transferred to the XRP ledger. If the Mastercard pilot scales up and more settlement volume runs through XRPL rather than Ethereum, XRP will benefit through higher fee consumption and stronger network activity. But that shift hasn’t happened yet, and there’s no guarantee it will, as Ethereum is where most stablecoin infrastructure already exists.
Regulation is another part. In the absence of federal commodity classification, banks will not use XRP directly for settlement because their compliance teams cannot approve an asset that has no clear legal status under U.S. law. This is why the RLUSD pilot uses a regulated stablecoin rather than XRP itself. Before the CLARITY Act passed and XRP was classified as a digital commodity, Mastercard’s relationship remained at the level of RLUSD and Ripple infrastructure – close to XRP, but not enough to affect the price.
Even if regulations are clear, the current pilot is to issue one credit card through one bank. For Mastercard transactions to truly impact the price of XRP, it would need to scale to dozens of card issuers in multiple countries, and the global credit card market handles more than $20 trillion annually. This is a long-term opportunity, but it is measured in years and it may take a while for XRP price to catch up.
If we’re being realistic, the answer is not yet. The Cryptocurrency Partner Program is a collaborative framework whose settlement pilot uses RLUSD rather than XRP itself. What the Mastercard partnership does is put Ripple into the infrastructure of the $9 trillion payments network, but that infrastructure does not currently have direct exposure to the XRP token.
Where things get interesting for XRP prices is if the CLARITY Act passes and banks get the green light to use XRP as a bridge currency for cross-border settlements. At that point, Ripple won’t need a relationship with Mastercard — it already has one. The pipeline will be in place and XRP will be the asset flowing through the pipeline.
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