Rain Joins Mastercard as Principal Member to Issue Stablecoin Cards

Stablecoin payments startup Rain is now a Mastercard Principal Member, giving the company the ability to issue stablecoin-powered credit and prepaid cards on the world's second-largest card network across more than 210 countries and regions. Rain disclosed a $250 million Series C in January at a $1.95 billion valuation and already runs a parallel program with Visa, putting the startup in the unusual position of issuing against both major global card rails from a single stablecoin-native infrastructure stack.

Why it matters

Mastercard's Principal Member status is not a marketing badge — it lets an issuer sit directly on the network rather than sponsor through a bank, which means Rain can move new card programs into new markets through a single integration rather than rebuilding market by market. The startup was explicit about the design choice: its stack was purpose-built for stablecoin card programs, not retrofitted from a fiat model. That matters for the broader stablecoin sector because it shortens the path between a regulated stablecoin issuance and a card a consumer can swipe at any of Mastercard's hundreds of millions of accepting merchants.

Market impact

The deal lands inside Mastercard's wider stablecoin push, which includes the pending acquisition of payments infrastructure firm BVNK and the Crypto Partner Program — a vehicle for collaboration with more than 85 crypto-native companies. Rain and Mastercard said they will also explore settling select program flows onchain using regulated stablecoins, a step that targets the capital intensity of card-program settlement. With Rain already issuing on Visa, the card-network duopoly is now effectively underwriting the same stablecoin-native issuer from two sides, a structural validation point for the $USDT and regulated-stablecoin rails that flow into those programs.