SoFi Bank has become the first national bank chartered by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to move live transaction volume onto blockchain-based settlement, the company said September 22. Debit and credit card transactions across SoFi's card programs are now settling through SoFiUSD, a dollar-backed stablecoin, on Mastercard's global payments network.
"In six months, SoFi and Mastercard took stablecoin settlement from an idea to a live product," SoFi CEO Anthony Noto said in the companies' joint announcement. SoFi said its entire card program is migrating to the new settlement rail, describing the program as processing more than $25 billion in annualized volume. That figure is company-reported and has not been independently verified.
SoFiUSD is a stablecoin issued by SoFi Bank, redeemable 1:1 for US dollars and backed primarily by cash reserves. The companies said transactions are already live on the blockchain, and that merchants require no changes to accept payment — cardholders and merchants do not need to hold or interact with stablecoins directly to use the new rail.
The deployment is among the most prominent examples yet of a regulated US bank routing core card-payment infrastructure through stablecoin settlement rather than traditional card-network processing. It lands in a week where US regulators have signaled growing openness to the shift: separately on September 22, Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Michael Selig said US markets and regulators should prepare for wider stablecoin use and 24/7 trading, though the CFTC has not proposed a rule specifically tied to the SoFi-Mastercard deployment.
SoFi and Mastercard did not disclose which blockchain network underlies the SoFiUSD settlement rail in their announcement.