Cardano Foundation joins Mastercard’s Crypto Partner Program for global payments

Strategic partnership for global finance

The Cardano Foundation, which oversees development and promotion of the Cardano blockchain, will participate in Mastercard’s Blockchains track alongside other companies focused on payments, stablecoins, cross-border money movement, business-to-business transactions, and settlement solutions.

This partnership enables Cardano to work directly with Mastercard and industry peers to explore integrating public blockchain infrastructure with global finance systems. The Cardano Foundation described the collaboration as a key step toward making blockchain-based payments more accessible worldwide.

Integration with Mastercard and technical advancements

Mastercard’s Crypto Partner Program brings together select blockchain projects and payment innovators to accelerate research and experimentation in digital asset settlements and related services. Cardano’s inclusion in this initiative is part of the company’s ongoing drive to expand the real-world utility of its platform.

In addition to the Mastercard partnership, Cardano’s agentic economy has advanced through the full integration of its native blockchain with the x402 repository via Masumi. This technical update allows AI agents to execute transactions across Cardano networks, encompassing mainnet as well as test environments such as preprod and preview testnets. The implementation builds on Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson’s focus on “agentic finance”—a model where AI agents autonomously manage on-chain transactions for users and applications.

Mini dictionary: x402, an open-source repository and technical standard for cryptographically-secure payments by autonomous agents, is designed to facilitate peer-to-peer payments between AI or software agents across multiple blockchains and payment platforms.

With this update, x402 payments are now possible natively on Cardano, opening new possibilities for automation and smart transactions in the blockchain’s ecosystem.

Performance gains and roadmap for Leios

Developers are also preparing to showcase major throughput improvements with the Leios node, which reached a transaction processing rate of 250 TxkB/s in local cluster tests—equal to approximately 1,000 simple 250-byte transactions per second. This represents a significant increase compared to Cardano mainnet’s current maximum of 4.5 TxkB/s.

Charles Hoskinson, who leads Input Output Global and created the Cardano blockchain, praised the potential of Leios and outlined expectations that the technology could reach Cardano’s mainnet by the end of 2026.

Product manager Carlos Lopez de Lara at Input Output Global stated the system’s enhanced throughput has already been demonstrated, though further refinement is necessary. He noted the next phase involves tuning and optimizing the network stack to ensure that these laboratory results can be replicated in live internet conditions:

The throughput is there; the work ahead sits in the network stack, where tuning and optimisation will carry these numbers out of the lab and into real internet conditions. Cardano, beast mode enabled.

Cardano’s recent progress in network scalability, AI integration, and institutional collaboration comes as the platform seeks to establish itself among leading blockchain projects focused on financial use cases.