On November 5, 2025, at Ripple's Swell conference, Ripple announced a collaboration with Mastercard, WebBank, and Gemini to pilot settling fiat credit card transactions with RLUSD — Ripple's dollar stablecoin — on the XRP Ledger. According to Ripple's press release and CoinDesk's coverage, the pilot targets settlement flows for the Gemini Credit Card, issued by WebBank, replacing the one-to-three-day batch settlement between issuer and network with on-chain transfers that finalise in seconds.
The announcement was described as one of the first instances of a regulated U.S. bank using a regulated stablecoin on a public blockchain for traditional card settlement. RLUSD, issued under a New York Department of Financial Services trust charter and fully backed by cash and equivalents, had grown past $1 billion in circulation since its late-2024 launch.
Seconds vs 1–3 days — Settlement time for card transactions using RLUSD on the XRP Ledger versus traditional interbank batch processing (Ripple press release / CoinDesk, November 5 2025)
Settlement is the invisible plumbing of payments: when you pay with a card, the merchant is made whole through batched interbank transfers that take days and tie up capital. The Mastercard–Ripple pilot tests whether a public blockchain can carry those flows for a regulated U.S. bank — with all the compliance obligations that entails. If it works for card settlement, the same rails work for remittance settlement, treasury flows, and payout pre-funding.
November 2025 marked a shift in who was experimenting. Earlier in the cycle, stablecoin settlement pilots came from crypto-native firms. By Q4 2025 the initiators were Mastercard, Visa (whose stablecoin settlement volume reached $3.5 billion annualised the same month), Western Union (USDPT, announced October 28), and Zelle's bank-owned operator. Regulatory clarity from the GENIUS Act — signed in July 2025 — was consistently cited as the unlock.
For the XRP Ledger specifically, the pilot was validation of a network that RemitRoutes has long tracked as a remittance rail: XRP's native transfer path appears in our corridor data where off-ramp exchanges support it, alongside Stellar, Solana, and Lightning.
By November 2025, the landscape looked like this: Tether (USDT) dominated offshore liquidity with roughly 58% of a $300+ billion stablecoin market; Circle (USDC) anchored regulated-market flows including Visa and Stripe integrations; and a new cohort of bank-issued and network-issued tokens — RLUSD, Western Union's planned USDPT, PayPal's PYUSD — competed for institutional settlement niches. The Mastercard pilot put RLUSD in the most regulated slot of all: interbank card settlement.
The through-line for consumers is cost. Every hour of settlement delay and every dollar of pre-funded float in the legacy system is ultimately priced into consumer fees. Networks do not run pilots like this for fun; they run them because on-chain settlement is cheaper, and competitive dynamics eventually pass some of that saving through.
| Provider | Type | All-in vs mid-market | Recipient gets (MXN) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Xoom | Traditional | −1.08% (beats mid-market) | 17,675 |
| Bitso (Stellar rail) | Crypto | −0.22% (beats mid-market) | 17,524 |
| Binance P2P | Crypto | +0.24% | 17,443 |
| Instarem | Traditional | +0.97% | 17,315 |
| Wise | Traditional | +1.41% | 17,239 |
A card-settlement pilot will not change what you pay to send money home this month. But it is part of the same Q4 2025 pattern documented across our news coverage: Visa, Mastercard, Western Union, and Zelle's owner all committed to stablecoin settlement within roughly six weeks. When the settlement layer gets faster and cheaper for institutions, the sustainable floor for consumer pricing drops.
Senders can already access blockchain-settled economics directly. On corridors like USD → MXN, USD → PHP, and USD → INR, crypto rails tracked by RemitRoutes deliver at or better than mid-market rates with settlement in seconds. Comparing all rails — cards, apps, and crypto — before each transfer is how you capture the benefit today rather than waiting for institutions to pass it through.
Compare live rates across 360+ corridors on RemitRoutes · methodology.