Mastercard Adds Stablecoin Settlement (MC 6/4)

Welcome to another edition of the Money Code newsletter (fka The Weekly Stable), the essential source of stablecoin news coverage for global fintech professionals, brought to you by This Week in Fintech and Stablecon.

This week we cover:

Want to master stablecoins and programmable money? Subscribe to our podcast for breakdowns, lessons and insights from the top builders in the space.

For feedback or suggestions, reply to this email, find Chuk and Stablecon online, or join the Stablecon community on Telegram. P.S. Get your tickets for Stablecon 2026

A Message from our Partner

Scaling card programs gets messy fast when every new market means new partners, new rules, and more operational drag. Rain gives you one platform to launch, operate, and expand globally without starting from scratch.

Want to sponsor a newsletter? See our sponsorship information here.

Mastercard announced plans to expand its settlement options to include regulated stablecoins, giving issuers and acquirers a path toward intraday, weekend, holiday, fiat, and onchain settlement through infrastructure they already use. ARQ, CBW Bank, Cross River, Lead Bank, and Nuvei are expected to be among the first supporters, with the initial rollout focused on the U.S. and Latin America. Mastercard named support for USDC, PYUSD, USDG, USDP, RLUSD and SoFiUSD across chains including Ethereum, Solana, Base, Polygon, Arbitrum, Tempo, XRPL and Canton.

Why it matters:

Mastercard is responding to a settlement use case Visa has already been validating at scale. Visa has highlighted growth in stablecoin settlement volumes over recent earnings calls, and Mastercard’s announcement confirms that always-on settlement is becoming a competitive priority for card networks.

The operational pain points are familiar: weekends, holidays, cross-border cutoffs, and liquidity timing all create cost for issuers, acquirers, and PSPs. Mastercard is positioning itself as a connectivity layer across regulated stablecoins, which explains the broad list of supported assets and networks. The bigger implication is the market-standard shift once stablecoin settlement becomes normal inside card-network workflows: merchants may expect faster access to funds, acquirers may compete on settlement speed, and issuers may become more capital efficient.

MoneyGram launched MGUSD, a native U.S. dollar stablecoin on Stellar, with Bridge as issuer, M0 providing mint and burn infrastructure, and Fireblocks wallets holding MGUSD before distribution into the MoneyGram app. The product starts in the U.S., with global scaling planned through MoneyGram's digital app and nearly 500,000 retail locations.

Why it matters:

The key to MoneyGram’s MGUSD launch is the sequence. Western Union’s USDPT started with treasury settlement and agent payouts, with consumers coming later. MoneyGram is starting with the consumer balance: a digital dollar in a wallet that can sit after the remittance lands. That changes the prize from the transfer fee to the customer relationship. A recipient who trusts MoneyGram’s cash network is more likely to hold dollars digitally, because they know they can turn them into local cash when needed. If that balance becomes sticky, MoneyGram gets a path toward neobank-like economics: float, card interchange, and eventually credit. In competitive remittance corridors, the next leg of growth may go to whoever banks the recipient first.

Deel launched a stablecoin wallet for contractors, starting with early access in Argentina and a broader LATAM rollout planned next. The product lets eligible contractors receive earnings in DLUSD, a closed-loop dollar balance inside Deel, with Stripe, Bridge, Privy, and Tempo providing the infrastructure stack.

Why it matters:

Deel’s DLUSD wallet turns payroll from a payment transaction into an entry point for consumer finance. Deel can keep the worker inside a dollar balance that can earn rewards and eventually spend through a card, creating neobank-like economics from a flow it already controls. This rhymes with the MoneyGram announcement.

The Tempo choice is also important because this is a closed-loop product: money enters the Deel wallet on Tempo, stays there while the worker holds or spends it, and only needs Bridge-style conversion when the user exits to local fiat or an external wallet. That means Deel does not need to support every chain for the core experience. It needs one stack that handles issuance, wallets, privacy, predictable fees, cards, and compliance well enough for an enterprise customer. The lesson for payment chains is that a clear path to distribution is from providing the complete operating stack. It's no surprise that payment chains are verticalizing (e.g. Polygon's payment company acquisitions).

Most merchants have spent 30 years blocking bots. AI agents look like automated traffic, and today's security stack often cannot tell the difference. Enabling “good agents” to break through ends up being a big problem blocking agentic commerce today.

Amir Sarhangi spent four years at Ripple as VP of Product, then founded Skyfire to build agent-to-agent payments. He moved toward agent identity and verification after concluding that anonymous agents would not pass enterprise and merchant trust checks.

Skyfire’s solution is KYA (Know Your Agent), and it’s a critical aspect of agentic commerce you should know about if you have an interest in the future of online payments.

We decode

Give it a listen and share your feedback by sending me a DM or replying to this email.

Money Code is presented by Stablecon and Powered by BVNK

Subscribe on Apple, Spotify and YouTube, or search Money Code wherever you get your podcasts. Don't forget to follow Money Code on X (@moneycodepod) and LinkedIn.

Read on for a roundup of this week's news:

Thursday 4 June, Amsterdam: Stablecon Salon Happy Hour Powered by Gravity Team

Monday 15 June, Ciudad de México: Stablecoin Exclusive Cocktail

Thursday 25 June, Johannesburg: Stablecon Salons - Johannesburg Edition

Search 1,000+ jobs across 60+ stablecoin related companies. Filter by stage, category, region and remote.

https://www.stablecoin-jobs.com/