This year was one to remember for $XLM They bagged two legacy payments giants in Mastercard & Stripe. As Stellar's a payment focused DLT, this is HUGE But just how big are Stripe & Mastercard? In 2023 Mastercard processed over $9 Tril in transactions while Stripe did $1 Tril in total payments volume for the year. Some pretty impressive numbers, but lets look a little further at how essential these 2 are in payments. In the US 68% of E-Comm stores use Stripe for payments & ~20% of global payments go thru Mastercard. So as we can see... These two are pretty critical players within our global digital payments economy. Funny enough, Stripe & Mastercard are also my 2 primary uses of payments in my day to day. I use a Mastercard crypto cashback card for purchases while I receive payments for my business from clients via Stripe. And I know I'm far from the only one who regularly uses these services. Stripe & Stellar have some interesting history with their connections as Stripe was a seed investor of Stellar. Earlier this year we saw executives of Stripe invited to discuss at Stellar's Meridian event. On top of this we'd seen Stripe's Head of Crypto discussing plans for integration of Stellar into Stripe. While we've yet to see an official partner announcement, it's closer than ever. Integrations are already discussed, the connections are already established & potential utility is clear as day. On the other hand things with Mastercard seem to progressing quite smoothly. We'd seen Mastercard integrate their Crypto Credential Services into Stellar for verified interactions across public DLTs. More specifically this helps verify interactions among consumers and businesses on-chain. This also plays perfectly into all the regulations around crypto payments KYC/AML we've been seeing. But this is just Step 1 of the partnership. Mastercard aims to integrate far more services beyond just their crypto credentials in the years to come. And in return... We could soon see Mastercard's world class payment services live on Stellar too! –––––––––––––––––––– These two have been absolute payment giants in the legacy space. Mastercard has been dominating for decades, while Stripe has become the new hottest payments method with the boom in E-Commerce. I'd imagine that things with these two really begin kicking off in the Stellar ecosystem starting next year. Payments innovation on DLT is happening in front of our very eyes, you just gotta look in the right places. And as we've seen Stellar's the home for all that.💸