News, data and analysis on tokenized assets, market design and digital economic systems.
Card network operating in more than 200 countries and territories, which on 3 June 2026 extended settlement with issuers and acquirers to stablecoins including Circle's USDC and the Paxos-issued PYUSD, USDG and USDP.
Card network operating in more than 200 countries and territories, whose corporate line runs back to the Interbank Card Association formed by seventeen banks in 1966, renamed MasterCard in 1979 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2006. On 3 June 2026 it extended settlement with issuers and acquirers to stablecoins (Circle's USDC, the Paxos-issued PYUSD, USDG and USDP, Ripple's RLUSD and SoFi's SoFiUSD) across Arbitrum, Base, Canton, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Tempo and the XRP Ledger, with ARQ, CBW Bank, Cross River, Lead Bank and Nuvei among the first participants in the United States and Latin America. Settlement is the leg on which the network moves funds between issuing and acquiring banks, so putting it onchain extends card clearing into weekends and holidays and places token issuers inside the settlement chain of a major payment network.
Developments in which Mastercard Incorporated is a named party, newest first.
Eleven institutions will secure the stablecoin issuer's own layer-one network before its 16 September mainnet, and the DTCC will make Arc a supported chain for tokenizing the assets it custodies from the second half of 2027.
Mastercard and the African digital-asset platform Yellow Card announced a partnership on 7 May 2026 to build stablecoin-based payment and settlement rails across Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
BlackRock, the DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation and Visa will run validators on Arc, Circle's layer-one network, ahead of a public mainnet set for 16 September 2026. BlackRock is expected to deploy BUIDL on it, and the DTCC to make it a supported blockchain for its tokenization service in the second half of 2027.
What issued, what settled, what the supervisors changed, with the numbers behind it and a note on what the numbers do not show. One email, Thursday mornings.
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