After months of gridlock and four hours of pointed debate, the Senate Banking Committee voted 15-9 to advance the Clarity Act, sending one of the most consequential pieces of financial legislation in recent memory toward a full Senate floor vote. Two Democrats joined all Republicans on the panel in support, a small but symbolically meaningful show of bipartisan backing that industry advocates say could prove decisive when the bill eventually needs 60 votes to pass the full chamber.

 

For the digital asset industry, the vote felt like a long time coming. The bill, formally titled the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act of 2025, has been kicking around Capitol Hill for well over a year. The fact that it cleared committee at all, given the partisan atmosphere that dominated much of Thursday's hearing, was seen by many in the space as a genuine win.

 

Rules of the Road, Finally

At its core, the Clarity Act tries to solve a problem that has dogged the crypto industry since its earliest days: nobody could quite agree on who was in charge. The SEC and the CFTC have spent years in an uneasy standoff over which agency has jurisdiction over which digital assets, leaving companies in legal limbo and pushing some development offshore. The bill would draw a cleaner line, classifying digital assets as either securities or commodities and assigning oversight accordingly.

 

The market responded before the committee even finished voting. Coinbase surged more than 8% on the session, as investors bet that regulatory clarity could finally unlock the broader institutional participation that has been sitting on the sidelines. Galaxy Digital climbed over 6%. Strategy, the largest corporate bitcoin holder, was up 7%. Bitcoin itself ground higher, hitting session highs near $81,500.

 

"For too long, regulatory uncertainty has sent talent, investment, and innovation overseas, strengthening foreign competitors while leaving American builders without the certainty they need to compete," said Blockchain Association CEO Summer Mersinger, who called the committee vote a "defining moment." Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse was blunter: "If the largest economy in the world is going to lead on crypto, and it must, this is the moment."

 

Still Some Runway Ahead

Thursday's vote was a milestone, but it is not the finish line. The bill still needs to be reconciled with a separate version approved by the Senate Agriculture Committee, and the full Senate will require 60 votes to pass it, meaning a significant number of Democrats will have to come on board. The House passed its own version of the legislation last year, so the two chambers will also need to hammer out a unified text before anything heads to President Trump's desk.

 

The largest outstanding issue is an ethics provision intended to limit government officials, including the president, from profiting off crypto. Democrats have made clear they will not move forward without some version of it, while White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt has said the administration will not tolerate language targeting a specific officeholder. Both sides appeared at least open to finding common ground, with Cody Carbone of the Digital Chamber telling reporters that a deal on the ethics provision is likely a prerequisite for getting the bill to a floor vote at all. The window, several lawmakers noted, is probably August.

 

A Framework Built to Last

What makes the Clarity Act different from the patchwork of guidance and enforcement actions that have defined crypto policy for the past decade is its ambition. It does not try to pigeonhole digital assets into frameworks designed for equities or futures contracts decades ago. It builds something new, with defined registration pathways for digital commodity exchanges, brokers, and dealers, as well as clear definitions covering blockchain applications, protocols, and smart contracts.

 

Ji Hun Kim, CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, put it plainly after the vote: "Clear durable rules will help drive greater institutional and retail adoption, support innovation, create more high quality jobs in the U.S., protect Americans, and ensure that our country leads when it comes to digital assets policy and innovation."

 

The GENIUS Act, which passed the full Senate 68-30 last year, showed that comprehensive crypto legislation can attract broad support once the details are sorted. The Clarity Act is a harder lift, covering more ground and touching more competing interests. But Thursday's committee vote suggests the political will is there, and the industry is watching closely.

 

"Durable, lasting digital asset policy must be built on a bipartisan foundation," Mersinger added. By that measure, the Clarity Act is not finished yet. But for the first time in a long while, it looks like it might actually get there.

 

Why This Matters for the Future of Digital Assets

Let's be clear about all of this: Thursday was a great day for anyone who believes that digital assets have a meaningful role to play in the future of finance. I am certainly one of those. Not because the Clarity Act is perfect, and not because it's done, but because it signals something important that has been missing for years: the U.S. government is starting to treat this industry like it's here to stay.

 

The case for optimism goes beyond this single vote. The GENIUS Act passing 68-30 last year proved that stablecoin legislation could attract real bipartisan support. Institutional investment in Bitcoin ETFs has steadily matured. Major financial players who once dismissed crypto as a fringe asset are now building infrastructure around it. The underlying technology, particularly in DeFi and tokenization, keeps advancing regardless of what Washington does. What regulation does is create the conditions for all of that to compound. It clears the path for pension funds, endowments, and large asset managers who have been sitting on the sidelines waiting for legal certainty before committing serious capital.

 

That said, the Senate still has to close the deal, and that is not a given. The remaining sticking points on the ethics provision and law enforcement concerns are real, not just noise. Lawmakers like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand have been consistent that they will not deliver Democratic votes without meaningful conflict-of-interest guardrails, and that is a fair position. The 60-vote threshold means the bill needs to be genuinely bipartisan, not just technically so.

 

On timing, the realistic window is narrower than it might appear. Industry insiders, including Cody Carbone of the Digital Chamber, have pointed to August as a likely deadline if the bill is to move this year. Congress typically slows through the fall ahead of elections, and the legislative calendar fills up fast. That gives negotiators roughly ten to twelve weeks to reconcile the two committee versions, finalize the ethics language, and lock down the 60 votes needed for a floor vote. It is achievable, but it requires both parties to decide they want a deal more than they want a talking point.

 

If it does pass, the long-term impact will be substantial. Clear rules attract capital. Capital attracts builders. Builders create products that bring in users. That cycle, running inside a legitimate regulatory framework and anchored in the world's largest economy, is how digital assets stop being a niche and become infrastructure. You know...that "mass adoption" that people have been talking about for years? Well, this could be it. It might not look like how we all imagined, but what ever really does? Thursday was one huge step in that direction. The Senate now needs to finish what it started and we need to come together to make sure they all know that they need to do just that. Let's get it done.

 

Leading startup accelerator Y Combinator will be holding the first-ever interview session in New York City, keenly focused on fintech builders developing projects around tokenization, stablecoins, prediction markets, and trading.

 

 

According to a YC spokesperson, the New York event will be the first of its kind, as it will focus on a specific sector, with accepted startups joining the Y Combinator Summer 2026 batch, which will begin on June 23 in San Francisco. Once a startup is accepted into the accelerator program, Y Coombinator will invest immediately in the company, even before the summer batch begins.

 

With New York becoming a major fintech hub in the U.S. and accounting for around 30% of all U.S. fintech investment in 2025, while also being home to roughly 1,500 crypto and fintech startups, Y Combinator is making this move to tap into this fast-growing sector and back more startups in the space.

 

Y Combinator Investing in Crypto

Through its funding, Y Combinator has helped support some of the most successful companies in the crypto space, with several reaching and surpassing unicorn status.

 

In 2012, Y Combinator invested about $150,000 into the crypto exchange Coinbase, acquiring an approximately 7% stake in the company. With support from Y Combinator and other early investors, Coinbase has grown into one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, with a market cap of around $52 billion.

 

Y Combinator also invested early in the decentralized exchange Uniswap, contributing about $120,000 in 2018. Like Coinbase, Uniswap has grown into one of the largest decentralized exchanges, with a valuation of around $2 billion.

 

The startup accelerator has also invested in the prediction market sector, backing Kalshi at an early stage. With support from early investors, including Y Combinator, Kalshi has grown into one of the leading prediction market companies and recently raised $1 billion in a Series F round, reaching a valuation of $22 billion.

 

Other crypto companies that have benefited from Y Combinator’s support include the NFT marketplace OpenSea, blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs, and the Solana-based trading platform Axiom, with all of these companies surpassing the $1 billion valuation mark.

 

 

Gemini Olympus, LLC, an affiliate of the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange, has recently received a Derivatives Clearing Organization license from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, enabling it to act as the clearinghouse for Gemini’s regulated derivatives trading, including prediction markets.

 

“Today marks a major milestone in Gemini’s marketplace expansion. In addition to our crypto spot marketplace, Gemini now has a full-stack, end-to-end marketplace for predictions as well as futures, options, and more,” said Cameron Winklevoss, Gemini’s president. He added that the DCO license is a major stepping stone toward Gemini achieving its goal of building a super app that allows users to fulfill all their existing and future financial needs in one place.

 

 

With this newly secured DCO license, together with the Designated Contract Market license that Gemini Titan, LLC, another Gemini entity, secured around December of last year, Gemini is now one step closer to obtaining the full suite of CFTC derivatives licenses.

 

Once it secures the Futures Commission Merchant license, the final component of the CFTC derivatives licensing framework, the company would be able to position itself as a fully regulated derivatives platform in the United States, offering U.S. customers a range of products, including crypto futures, options, and perpetual futures.

 

Gemini Joins Exchanges in Crypto Derivatives Push

With the Derivatives Clearing Organization license now secured and the Futures Commission Merchant license in sight, Gemini has joined a host of other crypto exchanges, including Kraken, Crypto.com, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, in the race to position themselves as all-in-one derivatives platforms.

 

To break into the derivatives market, Payward, the parent company of the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, acquired Bitnomial, a U.S.-based derivatives exchange, for $550 million last month. Like Kraken, Coinbase has also taken the acquisition route to enter the crypto derivatives market, acquiring Deribit Exchange for $2.9 billion and The Clearing Company for an undisclosed amount.

 

The race to provide complete crypto derivatives offerings is not unique to cryptocurrency exchanges, as prediction market companies like Kalshi and Polymarket are also making efforts to enter the crypto derivatives market.

 

Through Kinetic Markets LLC, one of its affiliates, Kalshi recently secured the Futures Commission Merchant license, along with the Designated Contract Market license it already holds, with efforts underway to secure the Derivatives Clearing Organization license, which is the final license required.

 

 

Singapore-based fintech company Nium has partnered with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase to integrate the USDC stablecoin into its global payment network.

 

The integration, announced this week, leverages Coinbase’s custody, liquidity, and wallet infrastructure, allowing Nium’s clients and users to perform cross-border payments in USDC and settle transactions in either stablecoins or local currencies.

 

 

As Coinbase will provide the wallet infrastructure, Nium clients will be able to fund accounts in USDC within a Coinbase wallet embedded in the Nium platform. The USDC can then be converted to fiat currency by Coinbase and paid out through Nium, all within a single workflow on the platform.

 

Through this partnership, Nium will enable end-to-end stablecoin-to-fiat payment flows that allow users to send, receive, and convert stablecoins into fiat across more than 190 countries within a single platform.

 

Speaking about the partnership, Prajit Nanu, CEO of Nium, said it is aimed at providing clients with a more efficient way to move and manage money globally. He added that the collaboration improves capital efficiency while supporting a future in which stablecoins play a central role in Nium’s payment stack.

 

About Nium 

Based in Singapore, Nium is a cross-border payments company that allows users, including retail and institutional clients, to perform cross-border remittances and transactions.

 

Apart from being a core traditional finance company, Nium has in the past made several pro-crypto moves, especially in the stablecoin space.

 

In March of this year, it launched a stablecoin card issuance platform that allows companies holding stablecoins to issue spending cards on both the Visa and Mastercard networks through a single API integration on its platform. To enable USDC settlements on its platform, Nium last year participated in Visa’s stablecoin settlement pilot, which eventually made it possible for the company to settle cross-border transactions using stablecoins across different supported blockchain networks.

 

Like Nium, several other Singapore-based traditional finance companies have taken pro-crypto steps in recent times, integrating blockchain technology and crypto support into their platforms. Notable among them is DBS Bank, Singapore’s largest bank, which launched the DBS Digital Exchange, a platform for asset tokenization, crypto trading, and custody.

 

Cryptocurrency exchanges, including Kraken, OKX, Binance, and Bybit, have also partnered with traditional finance institutions to help bridge the gap between traditional finance and decentralized finance.

 

 

Coinbase dropped a new public discovery tool aimed at making it easier for both people and AI agents to find and use paid online services that settle instantly with crypto micropayments.

 

The platform went live today at agentic.market and works as an open directory for thousands of services built on the x402 protocol. You can jump in and browse immediately without login, API keys, nothing like that required. It pulls fresh data straight from real payments moving through Coinbase’s Developer Platform, so you see live pricing, how much volume each service is actually getting, how many different users are paying, and the latest activity timestamps. This release picks up right where Coinbase left off with its Agentic Wallets back in February, which first let AI agents hold their own funds and spend them independently. 

 

The x402 Bazaar is where paid online services show up once they’re set up with the right discovery info and start receiving payments, so you don’t have to submit a separate listing. It acts as x402’s backend index, tracking what’s available, how it’s priced, and what’s happening on-chain, while Agentic.Market turns that into a public marketplace where people and AI agents can easily search, compare, and plug these services into their workflows. This includes things like AI model runs, data and analytics feeds, media tools for images and video, search and scraping services, social and messaging integrations, core infrastructure like storage and compute, and even trading tools for moving assets around. Coinbase says the protocol is built so both humans and machines can pay programmatically for things like paid APIs, pay‑per‑call tools, and agents buying access at runtime, so the whole setup is really about making it simple.

 

 

Coinbase noted that the x402 protocol already has more than 165 million transactions and moved roughly 50 million dollars in volume, with over 480,000 agents actively taking part across around 100,000 services. The directory puts the busiest and most reliable ones front and center, which helps both humans and machines figure out what is actually getting real traction day to day. 

 

This is about smoothing out the little daily frictions that slow down building, and rolling out useful agents that can move naturally between on-chain steps like shifting assets or chasing better yields and off-chain jobs like running inference or grabbing fresh data, all paid for through in stablecoins. Teams handling internal automation or tools that face customers now have one, clean spot with data to check out providers without digging through random docs or dealing with payment mismatches. Work in DeFi or tokenization gets clearer ways to add agent driven logic that works natively instead of forcing awkward bridges or extra steps.

 

This is still early, so real momentum will come down to more services jumping on the x402 standard and agents getting better at handling payment details and safety checks on their own. Even with that, the way it indexes itself automatically and stays completely open shows Coinbase leaning toward letting the ecosystem expand through actual use rather than any kind of control. Groups that start implementing x402 features into their agents today could end up in a much better spot, as these machine-to-machine payments become normal.

 

 

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has rolled out crypto-backed loans for users in the United Kingdom, allowing users to borrow USDC against Bitcoin (BTC), Ether (ETH), and Coinbase Wrapped Staked Ether (cbETH) holdings.

 

The launch, announced this Monday, is part of Coinbase’s overall efforts to build a leading financial app in the UK that allows users to invest, manage, and grow their money.

 

 

The loans will be issued through Morpho, a decentralized finance lending protocol on Base, and according to Coinbase, users will be able to borrow up to $5 million in USDC, depending on the amount of Bitcoin and other eligible assets they hold as collateral. Coinbase says the interest rates will vary, depending on market conditions on Base, and that these rates will be set by Morpho.

 

It is also important to note that while there is no fixed repayment schedule for the borrowed loans, borrowers face liquidation risk if the loan-to-value ratio exceeds specific thresholds that will be set by Coinbase.

 

The crypto-backed loans can be accessed through the Coinbase app, where users can choose the amount of USDC they want to borrow and their preferred collateral asset. Once this is done, the pledged collateral will be transferred on-chain to a Morpho smart contract, and the USDC loans will be automatically disbursed to the user’s Coinbase account, which can then be converted to British pounds (GBP).

 

Coinbase Expands Its Crypto Efforts

Coinbase is one of the cryptocurrency exchanges leading development at the intersection of blockchain technology and artificial intelligence (AI).

 

In an X post last weekend, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced that the exchange was testing and integrating two AI agents into Slack and email. These AI agents will serve as virtual workers, able to perform on-chain actions such as holding funds, spending and sending money, trading, and earning yield.

 

This recent development comes shortly after Coinbase launched the x402 Foundation, designed to enhance the use of its x402 protocol as a standard payment protocol for internet native payments.

 

To achieve its “Everything Exchange” goal, Coinbase made a number of significant acquisitions last year, including the acquisition of the Deribit exchange and Echo. The exchange has also rolled out stock and ETF trading in-app for all eligible users, with its most recent rollout in Canada.

 

 

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has secured the Australian Financial Services License (AFSL) from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), Australia’s main financial regulator, expanding its services beyond cryptocurrencies.

 

With the AFSL license secured, Coinbase Australia Pty Ltd, the exchange’s Australian entity, will be the first cryptocurrency exchange in Australia to offer non-crypto retail derivatives.

 

 

According to John O'Loghlen, the regional managing director for APAC and Australia country director at Coinbase, the expansion will begin with Coinbase offering crypto and equity perpetuals to its Australian users, followed by future expansion into futures, options, and stock trading, all of which will be made available through the Coinbase Wallet app.

 

With this planned expansion, Coinbase will be competing directly with traditional finance companies already offering these non-crypto derivatives, including IG Markets, CMC Markets, and Pepperstone, which serve hundreds of thousands of users. Nevertheless, according to O'Loghlen, Coinbase will be leveraging the speed and execution advantages of crypto.

 

Review of Coinbase Activity in Australia

Since its entry into the Australian crypto market in 2016, Coinbase has performed fairly well, particularly given that Australia is known for high cryptocurrency adoption, with about 33 percent of Australians reportedly having been exposed to cryptocurrencies.

 

In 2022, Coinbase expanded from offering basic crypto services to establishing a local Australian entity, Coinbase Australia Pty Ltd, which was registered with the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Center, AUSTRAC, Australia’s anti-money laundering and counter terrorism financing regulator and financial intelligence agency.

 

Through its Australian entity, headed by John O’Loghlen, Coinbase began offering PayID support for fast Australian dollar transfers, advanced trading features, and round-the-clock local customer support for its Australian users.

 

Coinbase’s journey in the Australian crypto sector has also been relatively smooth from a regulatory perspective, as it has not faced any major legal or regulatory challenges from Australian regulators, despite the country’s strict crypto enforcement actions and penalties imposed on compliance violators.

 

 

Blockchain infrastructure company Alchemy has launched AgentPay, an interoperability tool designed to enable communication between AI payment systems.

 

AgentPay was introduced with the goal of addressing the fragmentation that exists among AI payment agents. By unifying different payment agents regardless of the payment protocols they use, AgentPay enables agents, including those from major payment companies such as Coinbase, Stripe, Visa, and Circle, to work together and communicate with one another.

 

The Fragmentation Problem 

There has been a shift in recent times in the way AI agents are used, with AI agents evolving from being chat assistants like ChatGPT into autonomous economic actors.

 

These AI agents do not only assist or provide feedback. They are able to independently discover services, compare options, negotiate, and execute payments without human intervention. This development has been described by some as the agentic commerce era.

 

With major technology and finance institutions such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Coinbase, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, and Circle actively developing and deploying AI agents capable of conducting real transactions, the adoption of AI in commercial activity has accelerated over the past year. Because these agents often rely on different payment protocols, communication between AI payment agents and systems can be complex. 

 

This fragmentation, if left unresolved, could hinder the growth of businesses integrating AI into their platforms. Analysts project that up to 90 percent of business-to-business purchases could be facilitated by AI agents by 2028, making compatibility with AI agents increasingly important for businesses, regardless of the underlying protocol used by the agent.

 

If an AI agent is not compatible with a business’s application programming interface (API) or service, it may simply move on to another platform that is compatible. In this environment, the most compatible platform may gain a significant advantage. This challenge is what Alchemy’s AgentPay aims to address. 

 

Image credit: Alchemy

 

Instead of requiring businesses to build separate integrations for every protocol used by AI agents, businesses can register their existing application programming interface endpoints with Alchemy. After that, AgentPay generates a proxied endpoint, which is a single, uniform URL that AI agents can use to make payments regardless of the protocol they use, including x402, MPP, A2P, or L402.

 

 

Charles Schwab, the Texas-based brokerage giant with more than $12.2 trillion in assets under management, confirmed Friday it is on track to roll out spot Bitcoin and Ethereum trading for U.S. clients before the end of Q2. It is, by any measure, a significant moment for the digital asset industry, though the market's reaction has been muted so far.

 

"We remain on track to launch our spot crypto offer in the first half of 2026, starting with Bitcoin and Ethereum," a company spokesperson told reporters Friday. Clients looking for early access can now join a waitlist through the newly launched Schwab Crypto page, which has quietly appeared under the firm's Investment Products section online.

 

A Phased Rollout

CEO Rick Wurster, confirmed the launch will start in Q2 with a limited client pilot before widening to the broader investor base. Before that even happens, the firm plans to test the product internally with its own employees, a cautious approach that is very much in line with how Schwab tends to operate.

 

The service will be operated through Charles Schwab Premier Bank, SSB, a regulated banking subsidiary. Although, not everyone in the U.S. will have access at launch. Residents of New York and Louisiana are excluded from the signup form, due to tight state-level regulatory considerations that have long complicated crypto product rollouts in those markets.

 

What This Actually Means for Crypto Exchanges

The competitive implications here are real. Schwab is not some fintech startup trying to chip away at Coinbase's market share from the margins. This is a firm with tens of millions of existing retail and institutional clients who already trust it with their stocks, bonds, and retirement accounts. Bringing Bitcoin and Ethereum into that same account view, without needing a separate wallet or a new platform login, removes one of the biggest friction points keeping traditional investors on the sidelines.

 

Bloomberg ETF analyst Eric Balchunas has flagged pricing as the key variable to watch. Schwab already offers zero-commission stock and ETF trading. If the firm prices spot crypto below 50 basis points, the pressure on crypto-native exchanges could be significant, particularly for casual retail traders who are cost-sensitive and already comfortable inside the Schwab ecosystem.

 

Are Stablecoins Next?

Spot trading is likely just the opening move. Wurster signaled during an earnings call late last year that the firm wants exposure to stablecoins as well, describing them as something that will likely play a role in transacting on blockchains. A stablecoin offering, if it materializes, would put Schwab in even more direct competition with crypto-native platforms and potentially with payment networks.

 

The firm has also been expanding through acquisitions. Earlier this year, Schwab announced a $660 million deal to buy private shares platform Forge Global, aimed at giving clients access to pre-IPO investments. Wurster has said Schwab remains open to further deals in the crypto space if the right opportunity and valuation align.

 

Where Bitcoin and Ethereum Stand Right Now

At the time of writing, Bitcoin was trading near $67,000, down roughly 47% from its all-time high of $126,080. Ethereum sat around $2,050, off nearly 59% from its own peak set last August. Both assets have had a difficult few months, which makes the timing of Schwab's entry intriguing. The firm is coming in during a period of weakness, not euphoria, which could prove to be well-timed when the market recovers.

 

Schwab shares closed Thursday up about 1.5%, trading near $93.77, representing roughly a 19% gain over the past year. That compares favorably with Bitcoin's 18.5% decline over the same stretch. The brokerage's stock has, for now, outperformed the very asset class it is preparing to offer its clients.

 

Whether Schwab's entry into spot crypto ultimately proves to be a turning point for mainstream adoption, or just another incremental step in a long institutional migration into digital assets, remains to be seen.

 

The internet has always had a payments problem. HTTP moved data. SMTP moved email. But money? Money got stuck behind proprietary rails, bank integrations, and checkout forms that were never really built for a digital-first world. That gap, which the industry has spent decades papering over with varying degrees of success, is now the target of something bigger than any one company: the x402 Foundation, launched today under the Linux Foundation, with Coinbase, Cloudflare, and Stripe among its founding backers.

 

The announcement, timed to April 2 (a nod to HTTP status code 402, "Payment Required"), marks a formal step toward turning x402 into a neutral, community-governed standard. And the list of companies signing on makes it hard to dismiss as just another crypto lab experiment. Adyen, Amazon Web Services, American Express, Ant International, Google, Mastercard, Microsoft, Shopify, the Solana Foundation, Visa, and more than a dozen other names from across fintech, big tech, and crypto all attached their names to the effort.

 

What x402 Actually Does

The protocol is simple. When a client tries to access a resource gated behind x402, the server responds with the 402 Payment Required status code along with machine-readable payment instructions: amount, asset, network, recipient. The client then attaches a payment authorization header and resends the request. A facilitator verifies the payment and settles the transaction. That is the whole flow. No accounts, no subscriptions, no API keys, no manual billing cycles.

 

Coinbase launched the first version in May 2025, quietly, with the 402 HTTP status code having sat largely dormant since it was first defined in the early 1990s. Within months the protocol had processed over 100 million payments across APIs, apps, and AI agents. By December, the team shipped x402 V2, which added multi-chain support by default, cleaner separation between clients, servers, and facilitators, and the architectural foundations for session management and identity. The reference SDKs are available across TypeScript, Go, and Python.

 

Transaction costs sit near zero, with Coinbase's facilitator offering the first 1,000 transactions per month free and charging $0.001 per transaction beyond that. For micropayments, the kind worth a fraction of a cent that credit card networks have never handled well, that matters enormously. The protocol currently runs on Base, Polygon, and Solana, with stablecoins like USDC as the primary settlement layer. Future versions are designed to accommodate traditional rails as well, including ACH, SEPA, and card networks, using the same payment model.

 

Why This Moment, Why This Structure

The timing is not accidental. The push into autonomous AI agents across the industry has exposed a glaring problem: agents need to pay for things. When an AI assistant browses the web to buy something, or a trading bot needs a real-time data feed, or a robot needs to procure compute on the fly, making a human stop and authorize each payment defeats the entire point. What the industry needs is a payment primitive that works the way HTTP works: in the background, at machine speed, without friction.

 

"The internet was built on open protocols," said Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation, in comments tied to the launch. The Foundation's involvement is a deliberate move to ensure no single company ends up owning the payment layer of the agentic web. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince echoed that logic in September when the two companies announced their intent to launch the Foundation together: the internet's core protocols have always been governed independently, and x402 should be no different.

 

That governance structure is a meaningful part of the pitch. The x402 Foundation is framed explicitly as stewardship, not ownership. No single company controls the standard. The membership body is open to developers, startups, and enterprises. Cloudflare's alignment with the effort also signals that x402 is being treated as infrastructure at the edge level, not just a crypto developer toy. Integrating x402 into Cloudflare's edge compute and CDN stack means payment requests can slot into everyday web workflows the same way SSL became table stakes for basic security.

 

The Bigger Picture

Early use cases already live in production. Hyperbolic, an AI compute marketplace, uses x402 for AI agents paying per GPU inference session rather than committing to a monthly subscription. OpenMind has robots autonomously procuring compute and data. Cal.com embeds x402 for paid human interactions directly inside scheduling workflows. The scope of what a frictionless pay-per-use primitive unlocks is genuinely wide, and that is before the protocol adds broader identity support and more payment backends.

 

There are real risks worth naming. The protocol currently leans heavily on Coinbase's own facilitator infrastructure, which handles verification and settlement and is, today, the most mature option in the ecosystem. Cloudflare and others reduce protocol-level concentration, but early traffic still routes largely through Coinbase's stack. The facilitator is free now. That may not last indefinitely once network effects solidify. And unlike credit card networks, x402 has no network-level payment reversal. Refunds require a compensating transfer from the merchant, making the protocol closer to cash than to a reversible card transaction. For high-frequency API calls that is a feature. For consumer flows that expect buyer protections, it is a liability worth monitoring.

 

What x402 has going for it, beyond the technical architecture, is the coalition. Visa and Mastercard alongside the Solana Foundation and Polygon Labs in the same founding member list is unusual. Google Cloud's managing director for Web3 and Digital Assets called the shift toward agentic commerce a fundamental reason Google is joining, describing the need for cloud infrastructure that is as open as the protocols it supports. Whether that breadth translates into real interoperability or remains aspirational will be one of the defining stories to watch as the Foundation gets off the ground. If x402 does become foundational plumbing, the question will be who benefits most from having been at the table when the standard was written.

 

Coinbase and mortgage lender Better Home & Finance have announced a new product that lets prospective buyers use Bitcoin or USDC as collateral on a Fannie Mae-backed mortgage, without ever having to liquidate their holdings. It is, by most measures, the clearest sign yet that digital assets are finding their way into the mainstream and will be used as the machinery of American homeownership.

 

How It Will Work

Borrowers transfer their digital assets from Coinbase into a custody wallet held by Better, retaining legal ownership of the crypto throughout the life of the loan. The collateral sits there as a pledge, not a payment. For holders of USDC, Circle's dollar-pegged stablecoin, the arrangement even lets them keep earning yield on their holdings while those same assets secure the mortgage.

 

The rate premium is real, though. Borrowers should expect to pay 0.5 to 1.5 percentage points above a standard 30-year fixed loan, depending on their overall profile. Whether that spread feels worth it depends largely on how much a borrower values not triggering a taxable event by selling appreciated crypto positions. For long-term Bitcoin holders sitting on significant gains, the math can work out in their favor.

 

One of the more notable design choices here is the absence of margin calls. In most crypto lending products, a sharp price drop can trigger forced liquidation of collateral. This product is built differently. If Bitcoin falls 40% in a month, the terms of the mortgage do not change and no additional collateral is required. Liquidation risk only enters the picture after a 60-day payment delinquency, putting the structure firmly in line with how conventional mortgages work rather than how crypto lending typically operates. This matters a great deal for borrowers who have been burned by or are skeptical of DeFi-style collateral arrangements.

 

How Did We Get Here?

In June 2025, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte issued a directive ordering Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prepare proposals for counting cryptocurrency as an asset in mortgage risk assessments, without requiring borrowers to first convert those holdings into dollars. The directive was framed explicitly around President Trump's stated goal of making the U.S. the crypto capital of the world. Pulte's letter specified that only crypto held on U.S.-regulated centralized exchanges would qualify, and he called for risk mitigants including valuation adjustments to account for volatility.

 

Until now, Fannie and Freddie's guidelines required that any cryptocurrency a borrower wanted to use for a down payment, closing costs, or reserves had to be liquidated into U.S. dollars first. The Coinbase-Better announcement marks the first time that framework has been operationalized into an actual product backed by Fannie Mae. Whether lenders across the broader market follow suit remains to be seen, as industry experts have cautioned that adoption will be gradual. Individual lenders may impose their own overlays, and aggregators who purchase loans will need to get comfortable with the structure before it becomes truly mainstream.

 

Coinbase and Better are not alone in seeing opportunity here. Newrez, one of the largest mortgage servicers in the country with roughly $778 billion in assets under management, announced late last year that it was assessing Bitcoin and Ethereum for mortgage qualification purposes. Bob Johnson, head of originations at Newrez, described the FHFA directive as a meaningful signal from Washington that the capital markets infrastructure underpinning a significant share of U.S. mortgage origination is open for change.

 

Bitcoin ETFs have surpassed $100 billion in assets under management since receiving SEC approval in early 2024, and a growing cohort of American households hold meaningful digital asset positions. For those buyers, particularly younger, crypto-native professionals who have built wealth in digital rather than traditional asset classes, the old requirement to sell before buying a home was a genuine friction point. This product is a direct answer to that segment.

 

Questions Sill Remain

Not everyone is convinced the move is without risk to the broader housing system. A group of Democratic senators wrote to Director Pulte last July raising concerns about attaching a notoriously volatile asset class to one of the most systemically important markets in the U.S. economy. The letter questioned the transparency of the decision-making process and asked for details on how downside risks would be managed. Those concerns have not disappeared just because a product has launched.

 

Experts in the mortgage industry have echoed a degree of caution. Some analysts expect lenders to apply heavy discounts to crypto valuations for qualifying purposes, potentially treating holdings at 10% or less of market value, and to require that assets be seasoned on regulated exchanges for a defined period. The operational side of verifying, valuing, and monitoring digital assets in a mortgage context is still being developed, and few lenders have the infrastructure in place today to do it at scale.

 

Whatever the short-term practical limitations, the symbolic weight of Fannie Mae's involvement should not be understated. The government-sponsored enterprise, which has been under federal conservatorship since 2008 and underpins a substantial portion of American mortgage finance, is now part of a product that treats Bitcoin and USDC as legitimate collateral.

 

The irony here is hard to ignore. The 2008 financial collapse, driven largely by reckless mortgage-backed securities dealings, was the very event that inspired Satoshi Nakamoto to write the Bitcoin whitepaper. That invention, born as a rejection of and answer to the broken banking system, will now be used to back the same financial instrument that helped trigger the crisis. Life, as they say, comes full circle.

 

 

Something shifted in Washington on Friday, and the people who have been watching the CLARITY Act back and forth for months could feel it. Two key lawmakers, Republican Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Democrat Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, reached an agreement in principle on one of the most stubbornly contested provisions in the bill: stablecoin yield. It is the kind of deal that, when the details finally shake out, may well be remembered as the moment the United States stopped kicking the crypto regulatory can down the road.

 

The news broke late Friday and was first reported by Politico. Senator Alsobrooks confirmed it plainly. "Sen. Tillis and I do have an agreement in principle," she said. "We've come a long way. And I think what it will do is to allow us to protect innovation, but also gives us the opportunity to prevent widespread deposit flight." The White House's crypto executive director, Patrick Witt, called it a "major milestone" and added that more work remains, but that progress toward passing the CLARITY Act was now real and tangible.

 

Senator Cynthia Lummis, the Wyoming Republican who chairs the Senate Banking Committee's crypto subcommittee and has been one of the most tireless advocates for this legislation, marked the occasion in her own way. She posted a photo on X of a "yield" sign. No caption needed.

 

 

The Stablecoin Yield Standoff, Explained

For months, the stablecoin yield question was the immovable object blocking the CLARITY Act from getting its Senate Banking Committee hearing. 

 

The GENIUS Act, signed into law by President Trump in July 2025, prohibits stablecoin issuers from paying interest directly to holders. The intent was to prevent stablecoins from functioning as de facto bank deposit accounts, which would put them in direct competition with traditional savings products and, as the American Bankers Association argued loudly, threaten deposit flows into community banks. The concern: if Coinbase or another platform could offer users 4% on their dollar-pegged tokens simply for holding them, why would anyone keep money in a checking account?

 

The problem is that the GENIUS Act only covered issuers. It left a gap for third-party platforms that might offer rewards to customers who hold stablecoins on their systems. The ABA saw this as a loophole and spent months in Washington lobbying to close it. Crypto companies, for their part, said those rewards programs were fundamentally different from deposit interest and should be allowed.

 

Section 404 of the Senate Banking Committee's draft tried to thread this needle. It prohibits digital asset service providers from paying interest or yield "solely in connection with the holding of a payment stablecoin," while explicitly allowing "activity-based" rewards tied to transactions, payments, platform use, loyalty programs, liquidity provision, and other behaviors. The distinction is real: a reward for moving money through a system is not the same thing as interest paid for parking money in one.

 

Senator Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican on the Banking Committee, captured the nuance at an ABA summit earlier this month: rewards cannot be simply about how much money sits in an account, but they might reasonably be tied to how active that account is. "We're trying to reflect that in the discussions," he said.

 

Lummis had suggested the final compromise would disallow anything that "sounds like banking product terminology" and bar rewards tied to the size of a user's balance. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, whose withdrawal of support in January helped torpedo a scheduled markup hearing, has been described by Lummis as "really pretty good about being willing to give on this issue."

 

 

From 99% to Done

The past week has been a rapid acceleration. As recently as Thursday, sources familiar with the situation described the stablecoin yield issue as being on the verge of resolution. A closed Senate Republican meeting on Wednesday, attended by White House crypto council director Patrick Witt, produced what Lummis told reporters afterward were significant breakthroughs, with "major light bulbs" switched on among the participants.

 

FinTech Weekly, which has closely tracked the legislative calendar, reported that stablecoin yield negotiations were "99% of the way to resolution" coming out of that meeting. The digital asset provisions of the bill more broadly were described as being in a "good place." The remaining friction, sources said, was not technical but political, specifically around whether community bank deregulation provisions might be attached to the CLARITY Act as part of a broader legislative trade.

 

Then came Friday's agreement. "We've come a long way," Alsobrooks told Politico, with a formality that understated just how much ground has been covered since January, when the scheduled markup hearing collapsed under the weight of over 100 proposed amendments and an industry revolt over the yield language.

 

 

What Comes Next and Why the Timeline Matters

An agreement on yield does not mean the CLARITY Act is done. Several other issues need resolution, decentralized finance remains a live debate, and the bill still needs to clear the Senate Banking Committee before it can go to a full Senate vote. After that, it must be reconciled with the version that passed the Senate Agriculture Committee in January. And before the President can sign it, that combined Senate text has to be reconciled with the House-passed version from July 2025. 

 

But the clock is ticking here. Senate Majority Leader John Thune controls the floor calendar, and it is crowded. Unrelated fights, including the Republican voter-ID bill and ongoing debate over the situation in Iran, are competing for limited floor time. Haun Ventures CEO Katie Haun, in a CNBC interview Friday, put it directly: "The big question on the Clarity Act is, is Congress going to get a bill to the floor on time to vote?"

 

Lummis has said she expects a Banking Committee hearing in the latter half of April, after the Easter recess. Advocates have been hoping for a May resolution. Prediction markets are currently pricing the odds of the CLARITY Act being signed in 2026 at around 72%, according to FinTech Weekly. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has described passage as a spring 2026 target. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has put the odds at 80 to 90%.

 

JPMorgan analysts have described CLARITY Act passage by midyear as a positive catalyst for digital assets, pointing to regulatory clarity, institutional scaling, and tokenization growth as the key drivers. The crypto industry committed nearly $150 million to the Fairshake political action committee in the current cycle and announced a $193 million war chest around the Agriculture Committee markup in January. The companies behind that spending are waiting.

 

 

What This All Means

The stakes of the CLARITY Act extend well beyond Senate procedure. Markets are waiting. Institutions that have been slowly building out crypto infrastructure, custody solutions, tokenized asset offerings, trading desks, need to know what the rules are before they can fully commit capital and resources. The SEC's interpretation helps, but as Atkins himself acknowledged, it is not a substitute for law.

 

The CLARITY Act, if signed, would give the CFTC clear jurisdiction over most digital asset spot markets, create a path to register exchanges and brokers, establish consumer protections with real enforcement teeth, and provide the kind of statutory framework that companies can build businesses around. It would, in the language of its Senate Banking Committee sponsors, establish the United States as the crypto capital of the world, not just by rhetoric but by law.

 

If the bill fails this year, the status quo continues. Crypto companies operate under regulatory uncertainty. The SEC retains broad discretion to treat digital assets as securities. Institutional adoption continues but without a clear statutory framework. And the crypto lobby, which has made clear it will treat failure as a political liability, turns its $193 million war chest into something that looks a lot more like electoral pressure.

 

Friday's agreement does not guarantee passage. It does something important though. It removes the single biggest substantive obstacle to moving forward. The stablecoin yield question, which derailed a January markup hearing and has consumed months of negotiations, now has a resolution in principle. The path ahead still has obstacles, but for the first time in a while, it looks like an actual path.

 

Senators Tillis and Alsobrooks just handed the crypto industry something it has been asking for since the last bull market: a credible signal that Washington is finally going to do its job. The deal is in principle, the details are not yet public, and there is still legislative work ahead. But after years of false starts, shelved bills, collapsed markup hearings, and agency standoffs, this is the moment the trajectory changed.