Mastercard is sponsoring the 36-hour XRP Ledger Hackathon on October 24–25 as a pre-event to Ripple Swell 2026 on October 27–29, after the XRP Ledger Foundation said it was thrilled to welcome the payments firm, which has a long-running relationship with Ripple. The sponsorship follows Mastercard’s broader crypto partnerships, including a March program with Binance, Gemini, PayPal, Paxos, Circle and Ripple, and a June expansion of blockchain settlement support for assets such as Ripple’s RLUSD and Circle’s USDC. Developers are set to compete in New York across protocol, agentic finance, lending and open tracks, with a Core Dev Bootcamp planned beforehand; the move confirms sponsorship rather than a new Mastercard XRPL product. Separately, an SEC filing showed 21Shares switched pricing for its XRP ETF (TOXR) from the CME Group to the FTSE XRP Index effective August 27, and will pay the sponsor in XRP once every three months instead of weekly. Spot XRP ETFs extended net inflows with $13.82 million, $24 million and just over $28 million over three recent sessions, while TOXR remained the only fund in the red at about -$20.06 million cumulative and Bitwise’s XRP ETF led with about $575 million in cumulative net inflows.