XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) broke above $1.50 this week after spending over a month stuck below $1.45, and a wave of new Ripple partnerships is getting credit for the move. The biggest one is Mastercard launching a new Crypto Partner Program on March 11, adding Ripple to a network that processes over $9 trillion in payments every year across more than 200 countries.
Ripple joining a $9 trillion payment network should be bullish for the XRP price, but Ripple has landed major partnerships before without the token moving much. The real question is whether this deal puts XRP to work inside Mastercard’s ecosystem, or whether it’s another win for Ripple’s network that doesn’t reach the token.
What Mastercard’s Crypto Partner Program Actually Is
Mastercard’s Crypto Partner Program brings together more than 85 crypto firms, payment providers, and financial institutions to build blockchain-based payment products on top of Mastercard’s existing card network. The program launched on March 11, 2026, and gives participants direct access to the infrastructure behind $9 trillion in annual payments across more than 200 countries.
The focus is on use cases where blockchain can already do something useful: cross-border transfers, B2B payments, global payouts, and settlement. Participants work with Mastercard’s teams on product development and get access to forums where they collaborate with banks, merchants, and other partners across Mastercard’s network. Part of the motivation is defensive—stablecoins are increasingly being touted as alternatives to traditional card rails, and Mastercard would rather bring crypto firms inside its ecosystem than watch them build around it.
Ripple is one of 85+ companies in the program, alongside names like Binance, Circle, PayPal, Gemini, Paxos, Coinbase, JPMorgan Chase, and Stripe. This shows it’s a broad industry initiative rather than an exclusive Ripple deal. Ripple’s role in the program is focused on cross-border settlement, which is what the company has been building around the XRP Ledger for years.
This isn’t Ripple’s first time working with Mastercard either. In November 2025, Ripple, Mastercard, Gemini, and WebBank announced a pilot to test RLUSD settlement on the XRP Ledger for credit card payments through the Gemini XRP credit card. That pilot is still in its testing phase, but the Crypto Partner Program brings Ripple deeper into Mastercard’s payments ecosystem.
Does the Mastercard Deal Actually Use XRP?
The Crypto Partner Program itself doesn’t use XRP. It’s a collaboration framework where Ripple and the other 85+ companies work with Mastercard’s teams on building future payment products, and none of the announcements mention XRP as a settlement asset.
The closer connection to the XRP price is the RLUSD pilot that Ripple, Mastercard, Gemini, and WebBank announced in November 2025. That pilot would settle credit card payments using RLUSD, Ripple’s dollar-backed stablecoin, on the XRP Ledger.
But institutions using RLUSD is not the same as them adopting XRP. Settlement through RLUSD puts activity on the XRP Ledger without requiring anyone to buy or hold XRP directly. Every transaction on the XRP Ledger does burn a small amount of XRP in fees, so more RLUSD activity on XRPL means more XRP destroyed. But the burn amounts are tiny—roughly 0.00001 XRP per transaction, which is a fraction of a cent—and even at Visa or Mastercard-level daily volume, the total annual burn would only reduce XRP’s supply by about 0.0075%.
The bigger issue for the XRP price is where RLUSD actually lives. Around 88% of RLUSD’s supply sits on Ethereum, not the XRP Ledger. So, RLUSD transactions on Ethereum don’t touch XRP at all. This has been the main divide between Ripple’s success and the XRP price for years. The company keeps winning partnerships and building infrastructure, but much of that activity doesn’t flow through XRP the token in a way that moves the price.
XRP Price Prediction: What Would It Take for Mastercard to Actually Move XRP?
Mastercard’s own research has identified XRP as a “bridge currency” for cross-border payments. It’s a model where funds convert into XRP, move across the network in seconds, and convert into the destination currency. SBI Remit in Japan already uses this setup through Ripple’s payment infrastructure.
If Mastercard’s cross-border settlement starts routing transactions through XRP as the bridge asset instead of just using RLUSD, that creates direct buy-and-sell pressure on XRP with every payment. And that’s when the Mastercard deal starts showing up in the XRP price.
For that to happen, RLUSD activity also needs to shift onto the XRP Ledger. If the Mastercard pilot scales and more of that settlement volume runs through XRPL instead of Ethereum, XRP benefits through higher fee burns and stronger network activity. But that shift hasn’t happened yet, and there’s no guarantee it will as Ethereum is where most of the stablecoin infrastructure already exists.
Regulation is the other piece. Banks won’t use XRP directly for settlement without federal commodity classification, because their compliance teams can’t sign off on an asset that doesn’t have clear legal status under U.S. law. That’s why the RLUSD pilot uses a regulated stablecoin instead of XRP itself. Until the CLARITY Act passes and XRP is classified as a digital commodity, the Mastercard relationship stays at the RLUSD and Ripple infrastructure level—close to XRP, but not close enough to move the price.
Even with regulatory clarity, the current pilot is one credit card through one bank. For the Mastercard deal to actually move the XRP price, it would need to expand to dozens of card issuers across multiple countries—and the global credit card market processes over $20 trillion a year. That’s the long-term opportunity, but it’s measured in years, which could take a while for the XRP price to catch up.
Could Mastercard Move the XRP Price?
If we’re being realistic, the answer is not yet. The Crypto Partner Program is a collaboration framework, and the settlement pilot running through it uses RLUSD rather than XRP itself. What the Mastercard collaboration does is put Ripple inside the infrastructure of a $9 trillion payment network—but that infrastructure isn’t touching the XRP token directly right now.
Where it gets interesting for the XRP price is if the CLARITY Act passes and banks get the green light to use XRP as a bridge currency for cross-border settlement. At that point, Ripple wouldn’t need to build a relationship with Mastercard—it would already have one. The plumbing would be in place, and XRP would be the asset flowing through it.
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