Block's Cash App has officially begun rolling out USDC stablecoin payments to its nearly 60 million monthly users. The feature went live today for roughly 25% of the platform's user base, with full availability expected by the end of the week.

 

The rollout covers four blockchain networks: Solana, Ethereum, Polygon, and Arbitrum. Users can now send USDC from their Cash App wallet to external wallets on any of the supported chains, and incoming USDC is automatically converted into a dollar balance within the app. No separate transfer fee applies, at least for now.

 

A Reluctant Pivot, Years in the Making

The launch carries some ideological weight. Jack Dorsey, Block's CEO and longtime Bitcoin maximalist, spent years positioning Cash App as a Bitcoin-first platform. He built out Bitcoin trading, backed mining hardware development, and integrated Lightning Network support for Square merchants globally. Stablecoins were not part of that vision.

 

That changed, grudgingly. In March, Dorsey publicly acknowledged the shift. "I don't like that we're going to support stablecoins but our customers want to use them," he said. "I don't think it's wise to go from one gatekeeper to another." The comment was candid in a way that's rare for major fintech announcements, and it framed the product addition less as strategic enthusiasm and more as a concession to market demand.

 

Block first hinted at the feature on the Cash App website late last year, describing stablecoins strictly as a payments mechanism rather than an investment tool. But that early hint has carried through to the live product.

 

Why Solana (and Why Not Just Solana)

Solana started as the sole chain involved with Cash App. Back in November 2025, Solana confirmed its involvement after sharing a demo by Circle's Jeremy Allaire showcasing a USDC transfer on the network. The choice made sense: Solana transactions typically cost under a cent and settle in under a second, conditions well-suited for the kind of peer-to-peer and remittance use cases Cash App serves.

 

But Block's Miles Suter framed the company's stance as "chain- and coin-agnostic" from the beginning. Solana was a starting point, not a commitment. The live rollout now includes Ethereum, Polygon, and Arbitrum alongside Solana, giving users flexibility across networks with different cost and speed profiles. Ethereum's gas fees can still spike during congestion, which is precisely why Layer 2 options like Arbitrum and Polygon matter.

 

The multi-chain approach also future-proofs the integration somewhat. If one network faces congestion or reliability issues at scale, users and the platform aren't locked in.

 

The Guardrails Are Real

Cash App is not positioning this as a DeFi on-ramp. The feature comes with meaningful restrictions. Sending is capped at $2,000 per day and $5,000 per week; receiving tops out at $10,000 weekly. The service is currently unavailable in New York and on sponsored accounts. Identity verification is required.

 

Perhaps most importantly, the app warns users that blockchain transactions are irreversible. Funds sent to a wrong address or unsupported network are gone permanently. That's a steep hill to climb for a consumer platform serving tens of millions of people who may be encountering on-chain transfers for the first time.

 

Stablecoins Are Here To Stay...and Thrive

Cash App's move lands against a backdrop of surging stablecoin adoption. As of this week, the total market value of stablecoins has hit a record $322 billion, exceeding the foreign exchange reserves of 95 nations, including the UK and Canada. USDC, issued by Circle, is the second-largest stablecoin and already sees over $14 billion in liquidity on Solana alone.

 

Western Union launched Solana-based remittances in the first half of 2026. Stripe has added USDC support across multiple chains. Visa has integrated Solana for stablecoin settlements. The regulatory picture has also clarified somewhat, with the GENIUS Act signed in July 2025 establishing a clearer federal framework for stablecoin issuance.

 

Taken together, this feels less like a novelty launch and more like a platform making its peace with where consumer payments are heading. Dorsey may not love it, but the product is live, the networks are there, and 60 million people now have a relatively frictionless path to on-chain dollar transfers whether they know what a blockchain is or not.

 

Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, has partnered with the Georgian government to launch GELT, a stablecoin representing the lari, the country’s official currency.

 

 

The partnership, announced on Monday, aims to create a financial ecosystem that supports cross-border commerce, fintech development, and broader access to programmable financial infrastructure across Georgia.

 

GELT will serve as a digital representation of the Georgian lari and will be designed to enable lower transaction costs, near instant settlement, programmable payments, and more efficient movement of value across digital financial systems.

 

“Together with visionary partners like Tether, Georgia is laying the foundations for a more connected, transparent, and digitally empowered financial world,” said Irakli Kobakhidze, Prime Minister of Georgia.

 

The launch of the GELT stablecoin is built on a regulatory framework created by the Georgian government and the National Bank of Georgia. In March this year, the National Bank of Georgia developed a framework governing the issuance of stablecoins.

 

The framework, officially known as “The Rule for the Initial Coin Offering of a Stable Virtual Asset by a Virtual Asset Service Provider,” sets out standards that must be met by all virtual asset service providers (VASPs) operating in the country, including requirements for 100 percent reserve backing, strong consumer protections, proper risk management, and full compliance with the country’s Anti Money Laundering (AML) standards.

 

“Stablecoins are no longer a niche financial instrument. They are becoming part of the infrastructure layer for global finance,” said Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether. “Georgia has moved early to create serious regulatory architecture for digital assets and stablecoins, and that clarity creates the foundation for real innovation and adoption.”

 

Georgia’s stablecoin framework is also designed to be compatible with other regulatory frameworks, including the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (GENIUS Act) and Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA).

 

By partnering with Tether to launch the GELT stablecoin, Georgia becomes the first country to team up with a major stablecoin issuer to issue a government-supported stablecoin pegged to its national currency. The UAE has also launched a dirham-pegged stablecoin, but unlike Georgia’s GELT, that stablecoin was issued by local consortia rather than a major stablecoin issuer such as Tether.

 

The planned launch of the GELT stablecoin comes shortly after Tether launched its self-custodial wallet. In an effort to increase access to stablecoins, Qivalis recently expanded its consortium to include more banks, which are collectively working to launch a euro-pegged stablecoin.

 

Flipcash, a digital payment app founded by Ted Livingston, the founder of messaging app Kik, has partnered with Coinbase to launch USDF, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar.

 

 

According to Coinbase, the launch aims to make stablecoin issuance more accessible. Through the partnership, Flipcash can leverage Coinbase’s custom stablecoin platform to create its own stablecoin asset without having to handle much of the underlying technical complexity itself. As a result, Flipcash does not need to build an entire stablecoin infrastructure from scratch.

 

The USDF stablecoin will be issued on the Solana blockchain and will be 1:1 backed by USDC. It will also serve as Flipcash’s native currency. Since Flipcash allows users to create their own digital currencies, USDF will be the asset in which those currencies are priced and settled. It will serve as the settlement asset for trading digital currencies within the Flipcash app.

 

Coinbase’s Custom Stablecoin Platform 

Coinbase custom stablecoin, or stablecoin as a service, is a platform launched by Coinbase in 2025 that allows businesses to easily create and issue their own branded stablecoins backed by the United States dollar.

 

As the stablecoin market continues to grow and gain institutional adoption, Coinbase launched its stablecoin platform to make it easier for businesses to enter the stablecoin market, reducing the technical and compliance work associated with issuing stablecoins.

 

Stablecoins launched on Coinbase’s custom stablecoin platform, including USDF, which is the first stablecoin created on the platform, will maintain a 1-to-1 backing with USDC and will be supported across multiple chains, including Base and Solana.

 

About Flipcash 

Flipcash is a Solana-based non-custodial mobile wallet and digital payment app created by Canadian entrepreneur Ted Livingston in 2021.

 

It was created to digitize cash and make peer-to-peer payments as frictionless as possible. Through its “Currency Creator” feature, which officially went live last month, Flipcash allows anyone to create a fixed supply of digital currencies.

 

 

Stablecoin infrastructure startup Checker has just raised over $8 million across pre-seed and seed funding rounds to accelerate development of its stablecoin network.

 

The funding round was led by Galaxy Ventures, Al Mada Ventures, and Framework Ventures, with participation from Onigiri, IGNIA, Cerulean, Aquanow, Commerce Ventures, Pharsalus Capital, SNZ Capital, DFS Lab, Breed, Overlook, Velocity, Bitso Business, and AirTM.

 

Other angel investors involved in the round include Stripe, Tala, Flutterwave, Mesh, ComplyAdvantage, and Superstate, among others.

 

 

With this new funding, the Checker team aims to accelerate its global expansion plans while building a credit infrastructure embedded within its platform that allows users to lend and borrow without always having to pre-fund their accounts. The team also plans to automate its operations by building AI agents to handle treasury management, back office operations, and predictive analytics, all aimed at helping the platform scale efficiently.

 

Another goal for the Checker team is to solve the fragmentation problem currently facing stablecoin infrastructure. Despite the growing adoption of stablecoins and tokenized assets, liquidity fragmentation, operational complexity, and compliance hurdles continue to hamper large-scale adoption, particularly among institutions.

 

While institutions have adopted several makeshift solutions to work around these hurdles, such solutions are often difficult to maintain and scale. This is the problem Checker aims to solve.

 

Through its single API, institutions can launch and scale products across trading, payments, treasury, and credit markets. Institutions do not need to worry about integrating multiple providers into their platforms, as Checker abstracts these complex integration processes into a single API connection.

 

About Checker 

Checker is a stablecoin infrastructure startup that allows financial institutions access to stablecoin and fiat liquidity through its single API platform. Its platform currently supports over 75 currencies, supporting over 50 liquidity providers, including exchanges, OTC desks, and banks. 

 

Since its launch, Checker has processed several billion dollars, processing over 43 billion within its first 12 months of operation. It also serves several financial institutions across the US, Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia, notable among them are Rail, which was acquired by Ripple, and Brasa Bank in Brazil.

 

 

Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market company, has partnered with Nasdaq, the global financial technology company, to launch the first prediction markets that track the performance and milestones of private companies. 

 

 

Prior to the launch of this new offering, only institutions and high-net-worth investors had exclusive access to invest in private, high-growth companies before they went public. However, with the launch of this new offering, individuals, including retail traders, can now access some of the most sought-after private companies before they go public. 

 

The new offering also provides real-time signals to institutional investors on how private markets are unfolding, helping them make informed investment decisions and better manage their risks. Users can now access and monitor events in the high-growth company market, which currently comprises over 1,700 unicorns globally. 

 

"Prediction markets are one of the most powerful tools we have for democratizing access to financial information and opportunity," said Shayne Coplan, Founder and CEO of Polymarket. "Today’s launch brings that power to one of the last frontiers of financial markets that retail participants have never been able to access. For the first time, anyone can engage with the outcomes driving value at the world's most consequential private companies."

 

And with the Nasdaq Private Market serving as the resolution data provider for private company markets, users can access private companies through the Polymarket platform. The “privates” section on Polymarket currently has about 20 active private markets, including SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Anduril, and Canva. 

 

Hence, users can now transparently engage with verifiable private company events, including taking positions in a company’s valuation milestones, Initial Public Offering (IPO), and other secondary market activity. 

 

“Nasdaq Private Market has established itself as a trusted source of liquidity and investment infrastructure across the private market ecosystem,” said Tom Callahan, CEO of Nasdaq Private Market. “Polymarket has built a platform that can open access to a broader audience. We are proud to provide the data that ensures every market resolves accurately. When retail participants enter any market, high-integrity data matters.”

 

 

Zerohash, a leading crypto infrastructure provider, has received an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license from De Nederlandsche Bank, the Dutch central bank.

 

The EMI license comes shortly after it secured a Markets in Crypto Assets Regulation (MiCAR) license in October 2025 from the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM).

 

With the EMI license secured, Zerohash is now the first MiCAR-licensed firm to obtain an Electronic Money Institution license in accordance with the European Banking Authority’s June 2025 No Action Letter and February 2026 clarifications, which gave crypto firms and stablecoin issuers a temporary breathing space to get their payment licenses in order by March 2nd of this year.

 

 

By securing the EMI license, Zerohash positions itself to issue, manage, and support stablecoin-powered payments using e-money tokens across the European Economic Area. Zerohash now has the regulatory basis to integrate crypto and traditional electronic money flows for its institutional clients.

 

"Europe has a massive market for stablecoin applications," said Roeland Goldberg, Managing Director, Europe at Zerohash. "The announcement comes on the heels of accelerating momentum for Zerohash across Europe. In recent months, the company has expanded its European Union presence in Amsterdam and is now powering partners, including Interactive Brokers Europe, in the region."

 

Alongside the previously secured MiCAR license, Zerohash can now serve its institutional clients, including banks, fintechs, brokerages, payment providers, and large enterprises, providing compliant stablecoin settlement, remittances, and digital asset services across Europe.

 

About Zerohash 

Zerohash is a leading infrastructure provider for crypto, stablecoins, and tokenized assets. Through its application programming interface (API) and embeddable developer kit, it enables large institutions, including banks, brokerages, and fintech companies, to integrate crypto trading, stablecoin payments, custody, tokenization, and fiat to crypto and crypto to fiat conversion services into their own platforms, without having to build complex backend infrastructure or navigate regulatory frameworks themselves.

 

Zerohash is currently a licensed money transmitter in 51 United States jurisdictions and serves more than 5 million users across over 190 countries. Its crypto and stablecoin infrastructure has also been used by several institutional firms, including Interactive Brokers, Stripe, Franklin Templeton, and MoneyLion, with its infrastructure also supporting BlackRock’s BUIDL fund.

 

 

Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic recently secured $120 million in a Series D funding round led by One Peak, with participation from Nasdaq Ventures, Deutsche Bank, and the British Business Bank. The company is now valued at $670 million.

 

 

According to Elliptic, the funding will be used to accelerate its mission to deliver enterprise-grade on-chain analytics to some of the world’s largest financial institutions, including banks, fintech companies, crypto companies, and government agencies.

 

“As digital assets become more embedded in the global financial system, institutions need trusted infrastructure to manage compliance and risk at scale. Elliptic’s platform plays an important role in providing that infrastructure, helping firms navigate digital asset adoption with confidence and integrity,” said Gary Offner, Senior Vice President and Head of Nasdaq Ventures.

 

Among Elliptic’s expansion plans is scaling its native artificial intelligence compliance system for enterprises. Leveraging its years of experience building one of the most comprehensive and diverse datasets and its ability to process more contextual information per second than competitors, Elliptic plans to build an enterprise-grade compliance system that allows compliance teams to do more with less: alerts resolved in minutes rather than hours, human judgment reserved for where it genuinely matters, and compliance costs falling as volume grows.

 

“As institutional adoption of digital assets accelerates, the demand for scalable compliance solutions has never been higher. Elliptic pioneered the use of blockchain analytics to meet this challenge and has cemented its status as a global leader, screening over 1 billion transactions a week for more than 700 customers in 30 countries,” said Charlotte Lawrence, Managing Director of Direct Equity at the British Business Bank.

 

This capability will also benefit stablecoin and tokenized asset companies that process billions of dollars in transactions. In 2025, about $33 trillion in transactions were processed by stablecoin companies. By leveraging its data intelligence infrastructure, Elliptic enables these companies to meet enterprise-grade compliance requirements in real time, an operational necessity for crypto exchanges that handle and move billions of dollars in crypto daily.

 

About Elliptic 

Elliptic is a London-based blockchain analytics firm that specializes in tools for financial crime risk management, anti-money laundering (AML), transaction monitoring, wallet screening, investigations, and threat intelligence across the global crypto ecosystem.

 

Elliptic currently serves over 700 clients across 30 countries, supports more than 65 blockchain networks, and screens about 1 billion blockchain transactions each week. It has partnered with leading industry players, most recently the layer 1 Solana and the Tempo blockchain networks.

 

 

Corpay, the leading corporate payments company, has partnered with stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK to provide stablecoin wallets and settlement capabilities to its global customer base.

 

The partnership, announced on Monday, will see the integration of stablecoin wallet capabilities into Corpay’s financial platform, enabling its customers to view stablecoin balances alongside their fiat balances, while also providing embedded stablecoin wallets for sending, receiving, storing, and converting stablecoins, all within the platform.

 

 

Corpay will also integrate stablecoin rails into its treasury operations, reducing reliance on pre-funded accounts when sending and receiving funds. This is expected to improve capital efficiency and enhance the way funds are moved globally. As a result, customers will no longer be limited to traditional banking hours, as the embedded stablecoin rails will allow them to process transactions even outside these hours.

 

“At our scale, the ability to move liquidity quickly and reliably is critical,” said Mark Frey, Group President, Corpay Cross Border Solutions. “Stablecoins introduce a 24/7 settlement capability that strengthens our existing infrastructure. BVNK provides the technology and compliance framework we need to deliver this securely and at scale.”

 

Jesse Hemson Struthers, CEO of BVNK, said in a statement that he believes stablecoins are reshaping the foundation of global payments, and that Corpay’s scale and reach make the two companies ideal partners in bringing these stablecoin capabilities into the mainstream.

 

What to Know About Corpay and BVNK

Corpay is a global S&P 500 corporate payments company that enables businesses and users to manage and pay expenses in a simple and controlled manner. In 2025, it recorded revenue of about $4.5 billion, a 14% year over year increase, and reported $1.26 billion in revenue last quarter. Corpay currently serves over 800,000 business clients globally.

 

BVNK, on the other hand, is an enterprise-grade stablecoin payment infrastructure company that enables businesses and corporates to send, receive, store, convert, and settle transactions using stablecoins. 

 

As one of the most notable stablecoin infrastructure companies, BVNK processed about $30 billion in annualized stablecoin payment volume last year and has been integrated into several major traditional finance platforms, including Visa, Mastercard, Worldpay, and Deel.

 

 

MoonPay is not slowing down. The crypto payments giant announced Monday the acquisition of Dawn Labs, an applied AI research startup focused on autonomous trading tools for digital asset markets. Alongside the deal, the company launched Dawn CLI, a product that lets users build and execute trading strategies using plain-English prompts. No coding background required.

 

The move pushes MoonPay deeper into what it calls the "agentic" layer of crypto, where AI systems can reason, plan, and now, apparently, trade on your behalf. It also adds another chapter to the company's broader infrastructure buildout, which has been accelerating through 2025 and into this year.

 

Plain English, Real Trades

Dawn Labs founder Neeraj Prasad, who now serves as Chief Engineer of MoonPay Labs, put it bluntly: until now, building a systematic trading strategy meant being a developer, a quantitative analyst, and a portfolio manager all at once. Dawn CLI collapses all of that into a single interface. You describe what you want, the system writes the code, and then it runs.

 

The platform is launching first on Polymarket, the decentralized prediction market that has seen explosive growth over the past two years, attracting traders betting on elections, sports results, economic data, and geopolitical events. Prediction markets have gone from a niche crypto experiment to a mainstream information layer, and tools to actually trade them systematically have lagged badly behind the demand. That's the gap MoonPay is targeting.

 

"We're starting with prediction markets because they are one of the fastest-growing sectors, and many traders in the space are underserved by existing tooling," Prasad said. Additional trading venues and asset types are on the roadmap for the coming months.

 

Infrastructure First Model

The Dawn Labs deal sits within a larger strategic context. Earlier this year, in February, MoonPay launched MoonPay Agents, a non-custodial software layer built on its developer-focused command-line interface that lets AI agents access crypto wallets, execute trades, perform cross-chain swaps, and off-ramp back to fiat, all autonomously. CEO and founder Ivan Soto-Wright described the thinking in stark terms: "AI agents can reason, but they cannot act economically without capital infrastructure. MoonPay is the bridge between AI and money."

 

The service works through a one-time KYC process, after which an agent can transact on behalf of the verified user within preset permissions. Wallets are non-custodial and stored on the user's device, not held by MoonPay. It also supports the x402 standard, a machine-to-machine payments protocol that has been gaining traction across the industry, with Stripe and Cloudflare both adding support in recent months.

 

A Broader Industry Shift

MoonPay is not alone in this push. Gemini launched its own agentic trading feature for AI agents back in April, and Coinbase, Stripe, and Amazon have each rolled out AI-compatible stablecoin payment rails in recent months. Solana and Google have made similar moves. The pattern is clear enough: major players across crypto and fintech are racing to build the financial plumbing that AI agents will need to operate as independent economic actors.

 

For MoonPay specifically, it sees this as a natural extension of what it already does. The company, founded in 2019, serves more than 500 enterprise clients and 30 million users globally. Its core business has always been connecting fiat payment systems to blockchains. Extending that to AI systems is, in some ways, the logical next step.

 

Prasad said the company does not view AI agents and human traders as separate customer bases. "We've been building MoonPay around four pillars: fund, tokenize, trade, and spend," he explained. "Our agentic products put that same stack in the hands of both humans and machines."

 

What Comes Next

Following the Agents launch in February, MoonPay unveiled a Ledger integration in March, allowing AI-initiated transactions to be signed on a hardware device, a notable security step for users wary of handing autonomous control to software alone. The Dawn CLI launch now adds an execution layer on top of that infrastructure, specifically aimed at traders who want strategy-building capabilities without the technical overhead.

 

Whether retail traders will warm to the idea of an AI agent placing bets on Polymarket on their behalf remains to be seen. But MoonPay is clearly positioning itself well ahead of that question. If the agentic economy arrives on the timeline its backers expect, the company wants to be the rails it runs on.

 

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.

 

 

OpenTrade, an institutional-grade stablecoin yield platform used by fintechs and exchanges, has raised $17 million to scale its stablecoin yield infrastructure.

 

The capital was raised in a strategic funding round led by Mercury Fund and Notion Capital, with other investors including a16z Crypto, AlbionVC, and CMCC Global also participating in the round, bringing the total funds raised to more than $30 million.

 

 

As part of its expansion efforts, the new funding will be used to scale OpenTrade’s permissioned and permissionless blockchain infrastructure, as well as support the growth of its Curation+ investment services. The funding will also be used to expand OpenTrade’s engineering, asset management, and trading teams, while building a dedicated customer support team to serve its growing client base.

 

OpenTrade was initially designed to provide plug-and-play infrastructure that enables financial institutions, including fintechs, exchanges, and neobanks, to offer multicurrency dollar and euro-denominated stablecoin yield products without having to build their own investment, custody, or infrastructure systems.

 

However, as the stablecoin yield market expanded, companies began seeking additional capabilities. Asset issuers started looking for distribution channels through decentralized markets. Non-custodial wallets and platforms also began seeking ways to enable users to earn yield without directly handling funds, all without having to build stablecoin yield infrastructure or internal investment teams from scratch.

 

To meet this demand, OpenTrade expanded its infrastructure to include its permission protocol layer and Curation+ services. Curation+ is a suite of sophisticated vault curation services designed to create and manage complex investment strategies, removing the operational burden associated with yield generation.

 

This infrastructure, together with OpenTrade’s broader platform, is currently used by companies including Littio, Midas Kripto, and Glim to deliver stablecoin yield products without having to build infrastructure or investment teams from the ground up.

 

“As we grew, it became clear that our infrastructure could also serve non-custodial platforms, treasuries, and asset issuers that all need the same thing: a safe, scalable way to connect stablecoins to diversified yield strategies,” said David Sutter, OpenTrade’s CEO.

 

“This raise allows us to scale that infrastructure and support a much broader range of use cases without compromising on risk management or quality of execution.”

 

OpenTrade recently surpassed $200 million in total value locked, or TVL, after processing more than $250 million in transaction volume last year. The team expects this volume to reach $1 billion by the end of the year and has already processed more than $300 million in transaction volume this year.

 

 

Cryptocurrency exchange OKX has launched Agent Payments Protocol (APP), a new payment protocol that allows AI agents to perform commercial activities.

 

The new payment protocol, according to OKX, is an open standard that defines how AI agents communicate and negotiate, pay for services, and pay each other. It also, for the first time, allows AI agents to move beyond simple payments and into full-scale commerce.

 

 

“In the past few months, AI agents moved from answering questions to running workflows, managing business processes, and acting autonomously on behalf of users,” OKX wrote in a blog post. “The bottleneck shifted from intelligence to commerce - not just paying, but the full cycle of doing business: quoting, negotiating, escrowing funds, metering usage, settling, and resolving disputes.”

 

This existing problem among AI agents is what OKX aims to solve with its new Agent Payments Protocol (APP), allowing agents not only to manage single payment requests but also to manage payment requests across multiple levels.

 

Inside the Agent Payment Protocol

The agent payment protocol (APP) from OKX is an open standard designed to work across all chains, especially the Solana and Ethereum blockchains.

 

APP unlocks new capabilities for AI agents, making it possible for these agents to operate and communicate autonomously across the full commerce lifecycle, pay each other through agent-to-agent payments, and also allowing AI agents to perform upfront and top-up payments, including deductions.

 

At its implementation layer is the payment software development kit (SDK) that makes it possible for developers to accept and make agent payments with just a few lines of code. According to the blog announcement, the agent payment protocol supports a wide variety of payments, including one-time payments, batch payments, pay-as-you-go, and escrow payments, which OKX says is coming soon.

 

Embedded within the payment protocol is the OKX self-custodial agentic wallet, which supports over 20 blockchains. Since the wallet is secured by means of a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), a hardware-based security environment, the wallet’s private keys and sensitive operations are kept highly secure.

 

Despite its early launch, the OKX agent payment protocol is currently supported by major cloud infrastructure firms, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Alibaba Cloud, as well as blockchain companies such as Uniswap, Paxos, MoonPay, Zerion, and Nansen.

 

With the launch of its payment protocol, OKX joins companies such as Coinbase, Stripe, and OpenAI, which have already launched their payment protocols, namely x402, Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP), and Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), respectively.