Mastercard tests stablecoin settlements

Mastercard and SoFi are testing a new way to settle card payments: moving the money between financial institutions with SoFi’s dollar stablecoin instead of only through standard bank rails. (mastercard.com) The companies said on March 3 that SoFiUSD will become a settlement option across Mastercard’s global payments network, and SoFi Bank, N.A. is expected to settle its own Mastercard credit and debit transactions in the token. Galileo, SoFi’s payments technology platform, is also expected to offer the option to client banks and card programs. (mastercard.com) A stablecoin is a digital token designed to hold a fixed price, usually $1, and settlement is the back-end step where banks and acquirers square up after a customer taps a card. In this setup, shoppers still use ordinary cards, while issuers and acquirers can use SoFiUSD to move funds after the purchase. (mastercard.com) SoFi describes SoFiUSD as a fully reserved U.S. dollar stablecoin issued by SoFi Bank, N.A., and says it is the first stablecoin from a U.S. nationally chartered and insured deposit bank on a public, permissionless blockchain. The companies said that structure is meant to support faster settlement, including 24/7 money movement. (investors.sofi.com) Mastercard has been building toward this for more than a year. In April 2025, it said merchants working with Nuvei and Circle would be able to receive payments in stablecoins such as USDC, even when consumers paid in other ways. (mastercard.com) That push puts Mastercard in a race with Visa, which said in September 2023 that it was expanding USDC settlement pilots with merchant acquirers Worldpay and Nuvei on Solana and Ethereum. Visa said those pilots had already moved millions of USDC to settle fiat-denominated payments on VisaNet. (visa.com) The practical pitch is speed and timing. Traditional card settlement runs on banking schedules and clearing windows, while stablecoins can move around the clock on public blockchains, which gives banks, acquirers, and treasury teams another way to manage liquidity. (mastercard.com) Mastercard says its Multi-Token Network, or MTN, is the layer meant to connect ordinary money with digital assets such as stablecoins and tokenized deposits. SoFiUSD is expected to be supported on that network as the two companies test card settlement, cross-border remittances, business-to-business transfers, and programmable treasury uses. (mastercard.com) The immediate change is invisible at checkout. The test is about the plumbing behind the swipe, and whether card networks can make regulated stablecoins part of everyday settlement without asking cardholders or merchants to change how they pay. (mastercard.com)