“Over the last 50, 60 years we’ve been constantly innovating on how payments can be safe, simple, secure,” Rau said. “And if you then fast forward to five years back or two years back, you will realize that stablecoins arrived in the financial services mainstream. And we believe that the benefits that they bring in terms of settlement cycles, money moving globally freely, they can definitely add to further driving sustainable innovation in the financial services and payment ecosystem.”
Rather than pitching stablecoins as a replacement for the card model, Rau described them as an additional settlement layer inside Mastercard’s existing network. He pointed to the scale of that network as the core advantage: roughly 150 million acceptance locations and 3.8 billion cards. In Mastercard’s view, plugging stablecoins into that infrastructure offers a more immediate path to adoption than waiting for wallet-to-wallet systems to replace incumbent rails.
“We however believe that the power of the network that we bring in terms of 150 million acceptance location, 3.8 billion cards, plugging in stablecoins into this system is the best of both worlds in that sense,” Rau said. “So think about stablecoins just another settlement currency within our network. That again brings certain benefits that fiat currencies do not allow today.”
A conversation about the future of payments.
At press time, XRP traded at $1.4766.
