Global payments giant Mastercard has officially joined the XRP Ledger Hackathon in New York as a major sponsor, placing a traditional finance heavyweight at the center of a 36-hour builder competition. The event, hosted by XRPL Commons, will run October 24–25, 2026, immediately before Ripple’s Swell conference, and is designed to bring together developers, investors, institutions, and financial leaders.
Participants will compete across four tracks: Protocol Innovation, Agentic Finance, Lending & Borrowing, and Why Not. The competition focuses on payments, stablecoins, artificial intelligence, tokenized assets, and onchain lending. Agentic Finance will examine how autonomous AI agents can transact securely onchain, including machine-to-machine payments and automated settlement. The Lending & Borrowing track will test XRPL’s developing credit infrastructure, including the XRP Ledger Lending Protocol, XLS-66, and Single Asset Vaults under XLS-65, which are progressing through validator voting. A Core Dev Bootcamp is scheduled for October 20–22 ahead of the main event.
Mastercard’s sponsorship extends an existing relationship with Ripple and the XRP Ledger. In November 2025, Ripple announced a collaboration with Mastercard, WebBank, and Gemini involving the RLUSD stablecoin. Gemini had already introduced an XRP edition of its Mastercard credit card in August 2025, offering eligible customers up to 4% back in XRP. In June 2026, Mastercard expanded its blockchain settlement plans to include several regulated stablecoins, including Ripple’s RLUSD, and listed the XRP Ledger as a supported blockchain network.
Ripple and Mastercard also share a longer history through central bank digital currency work and institutional tokenization. Mastercard selected Ripple as an initial participant in its CBDC Partner Program in 2023. In May, Mastercard joined Ripple, JPMorgan, and Ondo Finance in a cross-border redemption pilot that used the XRP Ledger to complete the redemption of Ondo’s tokenized United States Treasury fund. Ripple has also joined Mastercard’s Crypto Partner Program.
The hackathon could give promising developer projects a direct bridge to the established payments and financial services industry. With only 36 hours to transform ideas into working products, participants will present in New York while major financial and blockchain players are already gathering for the surrounding conference calendar. The initiative highlights an expanding push beyond conventional payments, where AI agents, stablecoins, tokenized assets, and decentralized lending may operate across shared financial rails.
