The Cardano Foundation has joined Mastercard's Crypto Partner Program through its Blockchains track, where it will work with Mastercard and participating companies on global money movement, business-to-business transactions, payments and stablecoins. Mastercard launched the program on March 11, 2026, with more than 85 partners, including Binance, Circle, Ripple, PayPal and Paxos. The development coincides with Cardano's official integration into the x402 repository and packages through Masumi, supporting HTTP-based payments on mainnet, preprod and preview testnet for applications and autonomous AI agents. Separately, a Leios node reached 250 TxkB/s on a local cluster, while Charles Hoskinson expects the upgrade to reach mainnet by the end of 2026; Input Output Product Manager Carlos Lopez de Lara said further tuning is needed to reproduce the result under real internet conditions.