Mastercard will participate as a sponsor of an XRP Ledger (XRPL) hackathon to be held in New York in October. The move comes amid an expansion in cooperation between Mastercard and Ripple over the past year.

On Aug. 26 (local time), blockchain outlet U.Today reported the event will run for 36 hours on Oct. 24 to 25. Developers will gather in New York to build and launch XRP Ledger-based projects. The schedule was set just before Ripple’s annual Swell event. Swell is set to be held the following week.

The hackathon consists of four tracks, including protocol innovation, agentic finance, and lending and borrowing. It also opened participation to teams already running projects, allowing them to join by adding XRP Ledger features. Mastercard’s sponsorship is seen as a move to widen touchpoints with the XRP Ledger development ecosystem beyond simple event support.

Cooperation between the two companies has already expanded across payments and digital asset infrastructure. Ripple announced in November 2025 a collaboration centered on its RLUSD stablecoin with Mastercard, WebBank and Gemini. Earlier, in August last year, Gemini launched an XRP edition of a Mastercard credit card. The card offers rewards of up to 4 percent in XRP on some purchases.

In June 2026, Mastercard also announced plans to support payment settlement using regulated stablecoins. RLUSD was included among the supported assets, and XRP Ledger was listed among the blockchain networks. This is meaningful in that Mastercard began treating XRP Ledger, at the payment network level, as an infrastructure candidate that can be directly connected.

The relationship predates RLUSD. Ripple was selected in 2023 as one of the early participants in Mastercard’s central bank digital currency partner program. It later appeared in the same projects involving tokenisation and institutional blockchain experiments.

A representative example is a pilot conducted in May. At the time, Ripple, JPMorgan, Ondo Finance (온도 파이낸스) and Mastercard completed a cross-border redemption for Ondo’s tokenised U.S. Treasury fund using XRP Ledger. It showed XRP Ledger was actually used in experiments for institutional asset transfer and settlement.

Ripple was also included in Mastercard’s crypto partner program unveiled early this year. As a result, the hackathon sponsorship can be seen as an extension of cooperation linking payments, stablecoins, tokenisation and the developer ecosystem rather than a one-off event.

A key question is whether Mastercard’s participation will lead, after the event, to actual services or expanded network integration. With the hackathon being held just before Swell, attention is also on the possibility of additional disclosures, such as new XRP Ledger-based projects or corporate collaboration plans.