Mastercard is expanding its stablecoin settlement capabilities to support intraday, weekend, and holiday settlements using both fiat currencies and on-chain card settlements.

 

 

According to Mastercard, the expansion is aimed at providing users across the company's global payments network with greater flexibility, allowing them to better manage liquidity and gain greater control over how their money moves. The expansion is also expected to facilitate transactions that depend on timing and transparency, including cross-border payments, treasury operations, and payouts.

 

"The next phase of stablecoin adoption is about real-world utility, especially in settlement, where timing and liquidity matter most," said Raj Dhamodharan, executive vice president of Blockchain & Digital Assets at Mastercard.

 

"By introducing intraday and weekend settlement options across our global network, we're expanding how partners manage liquidity and operate in an always-on digital economy while maintaining the trust, resilience, and safeguards they expect from Mastercard."

 

With this expansion, Mastercard will support additional stablecoins, including Paxos's PYUSD, USDG, and USDP; Ripple's RLUSD; and SoFi's SoFiUSD, in addition to Circle's USDC, which it already supports. These stablecoins will be supported across multiple blockchain networks, including Arbitrum, Base, Canton, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Tempo, and XRPL.

 

ARQ (formerly known as DolarApp), CBW Bank, Cross River, Lead Bank, and Nuvei will be among the first companies in the United States and Latin America to support Mastercard's stablecoin settlement options, with further expansion expected throughout the year.

 

Mastercard's addition of more settlement options comes shortly after the payments giant acquired BVNK, a leading stablecoin infrastructure company, in March. The acquisition is part of Mastercard's broader strategy to connect on-chain payment rails with traditional fiat rails.

 

Mastercard is currently one of the world's largest payment processing networks, with more than 150 million merchant locations across 210 countries and territories. The company processed approximately $10.6 trillion in gross dollar volume (GDV) and reported net revenue of about $8.4 billion in the first quarter of this year.

 

 

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.

 

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.

 

 

KBank, South Korea’s first internet-only bank and the exclusive fiat partner of Upbit, South Korea’s largest crypto exchange, has partnered with Ripple to test its on-chain remittance system.

 

The partnership, according to a local news report, is aimed at leveraging Ripple’s global blockchain infrastructure and network to improve KBank’s international remittance systems, including the speed, cost, and transparency of its services through a proof-of-concept system.

 

 

The proof-of-concept system will test the possibility of KBank moving its cross border remittance system from traditional networks to a faster and cheaper blockchain based system. The process, which has already begun, will involve a two stage verification step.

 

In the first verification stage, which has already been completed, KBank and Ripple examined and verified a wallet app based remittance system. The second stage, which is currently ongoing, will test the stability of the on chain remittance system and will involve the virtual linking of customer accounts to KBank’s internal systems. These accounts will then be used to make on chain transfers to countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Thailand.

 

Although KBank developed its own digital wallet, which was used for the first verification stage, it will leverage Palisade, Ripple’s global SaaS based digital wallet, for the second stage of the proof of concept verification.

 

About KBank 

KBank is South Korea’s first internet only, fully digital bank that operates entirely online without physical branches. It gained prominence in the crypto industry when it became Upbit’s exclusive fiat partner. As a result, every trader who buys or sells crypto on Upbit must move their funds through KBank. In this role, KBank serves as an intermediary between traders and Upbit.

 

Because Upbit is South Korea’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, with a user base of over 13 million, its partnership with KBank had a ripple effect on KBank’s own user base, increasing it from 2 million in 2020 to 15 million by the end of 2025.

 

Apart from its partnership with Upbit, KBank has also been involved in several other crypto related partnerships. Earlier this year, it signed an agreement with UAE based digital asset firm Changer.ae and Korean blockchain company BPMG to build won to dirham stablecoin remittance rails. 

 

KBank has also gone public, completing its initial public offering (IPO) last month, and is now listed on the Korea Composite Stock Price Index, also known as KOSPI.

 

 

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA), Hong Kong’s primary banking regulator, has issued its first stablecoin issuer licenses to the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) and Anchorpoint Financial Limited, in line with the city’s new stablecoin framework.

 

The licenses, which were granted on April 10, represent the first batch issued under Hong Kong’s Stablecoins Ordinance framework. The process was competitive, involving 36 applicants, with selections based on several factors, including risk management, credible use cases, and compliance readiness.

 

With these licenses granted, HSBC, one of Hong Kong’s largest and oldest banks, and Anchorpoint Financial Limited, a joint financial venture led by Standard Chartered Bank, Hong Kong Telecommunications (HKT), and Animoca Brands, are now a step closer to achieving their stablecoin plans.

 

HSBC plans to launch a Hong Kong dollar-denominated stablecoin by the second half of 2026. The stablecoin will maintain a one-to-one peg with the Hong Kong dollar and will be backed by high-quality liquid assets held in segregated accounts. It will also be integrated into two of HSBC’s consumer applications, the PayMe app, which already has more than 3.3 million users, and the HSBC HK Mobile Banking app.

 

With this integration, HSBC users will be able to perform peer-to-peer transfers and peer-to-merchant payments using the Hong Kong dollar-backed stablecoin directly within HSBC applications.

 

Anchorpoint Financial Limited also plans to launch a Hong Kong dollar-pegged stablecoin, with its first rollout expected this quarter. While the stablecoin is intended to support the digital economy, including cross-border and local payments, Anchorpoint’s initial focus will be on institutional investors and business partners, with retail users to follow at a later stage.

 

With this first batch of stablecoin issuer licenses and additional approvals underway, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority aims to address financial challenges in Hong Kong and support the development of the city’s digital asset industry.

 

“The granting of stablecoin issuer licenses is an important milestone for the development of digital assets in Hong Kong. We look forward to the issuers launching their businesses according to their plans, exploring growth opportunities while properly managing risks,” said Eddie Yue, Chief Executive of the HKMA. “We hope their promotion of regulated stablecoins will address pain points in financial and economic activities, create value for both individuals and businesses, and support the healthy development of digital assets in Hong Kong.”

 

Hong Kong Stablecoin Ordinance

The Hong Kong Stablecoin Ordinance is a regulatory framework passed into law by Hong Kong's Legislative Council in August 2025. The framework establishes a comprehensive licensing and supervisory regime specifically for fiat-backed stablecoins.

 

Under this framework, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority sets standards for stablecoin issuers seeking licenses in the jurisdiction. These include requirements related to financial resources, reserve assets, risk management, and anti-money laundering and counter-financing of terrorism compliance, among others.

 

Although Hong Kong’s stablecoin regime is considered one of the strictest in the world, it is designed to promote trust and support the long term adoption of stablecoins rather than allow unregulated growth that could ultimately lead to systemic risks.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

Circle is pushing even further into the global payments infrastructure. On April 8, the company officially launched CPN Managed Payments, a fully managed stablecoin settlement product built on top of its Circle Payments Network that lets banks, fintechs, and payment processors tap into USDC rails without ever touching digital assets themselves. Yes, you heard that correctly, they never even have to touch USDC.

 

The solution handles everything on the backend, including USDC minting and burning, payment orchestration, compliance controls, and blockchain infrastructure, so that partner institutions can operate entirely in fiat. In other words, a payment provider signs up, connects once, and Circle does the rest.

 

That is a huge shift in how stablecoin adoption typically works. Until now, most institutions eyeing blockchain-based settlement had to deal with the full stack: custody arrangements, internal compliance buildout, licensing questions, and the operational headaches that come with managing digital assets on a balance sheet. CPN Managed Payments is designed to help institutions overcome those barriers, including digital asset custody, licensing requirements, compliance complexity, and operational risk.

 

"With CPN Managed Payments, we're simplifying how institutions adopt and scale stablecoin payments," said Nikhil Chandhok, Circle's Chief Product and Technology Officer. "By combining issuance, liquidity, compliance, and programmable infrastructure into a unified solution, we are enabling financial institutions to embed stablecoin settlement into their existing payment stacks with enterprise-grade reliability and operational readiness."

 

The launch is an extension of CPN, which Circle first announced in April 2025 and brought live the following month. CPN was designed to connect banks, neo-banks, payment service providers, virtual asset service providers, and digital wallets to enable real-time settlement of cross-border payments using regulated stablecoins. Cross-border payments can still take longer than one business day to settle and cost more than 6%, according to the World Bank, disproportionately impacting emerging markets.

 

The underlying mechanics are worth understanding. On the sending side, an originating financial institution handles customer onboarding, KYC, and fiat-to-USDC conversion. On the receiving side, a beneficiary institution receives USDC and converts it to local currency for payout. Circle sits in the middle as network operator but is not holding or moving the funds itself, acting instead as a coordination layer between member institutions. With the managed payments product, Circle now absorbs even more of that operational complexity on behalf of its partners.

 

USDC's market cap currently sits at around $74.8 billion, and Circle reported Q4 2025 revenue of $770 million, 77% better than the same period the prior year. The company has been aggressively expanding its licensing footprint globally and is now leaning into that compliance infrastructure as a competitive moat rather than just a cost center. Circle said that USDC has supported over $70 trillion in "cumulative onchain settlement," with nearly $12 trillion of that amount coming in Q4 2025 alone.

 

CPN Managed Payments is built on Circle's existing infrastructure, which covers payouts across more than 20 blockchains and domestic payment rails, with connectivity to CPN fiat payout corridors worldwide. The platform is also composable, meaning institutions can start fully managed and gradually take on more of the stack themselves as their internal capabilities develop.

 

Launch partners include Veem, along with other global payment service providers. Earlier CPN adopters included Alfred Pay, which is using the network to enable stablecoin-to-fiat offramps via PIX and SPEI; Tazapay, supporting compliant fiat disbursements into Hong Kong; and RedotPay, initiating USDC-based payments into Brazil.

 

The competitive picture is getting crowded. PayPal has had its own stablecoin product on the market for over a year, and Ripple's RLUSD has been gaining ground in cross-border settlement use cases, particularly in corridors where USDC's footprint has been slower to develop. But Circle's bet with CPN Managed Payments is distinct: rather than compete stablecoin-to-stablecoin, it is trying to become the rails that other institutions use, regardless of which digital dollar eventually wins.

 

Circle is currently focusing on serving organizations transacting in high-value, underserved global trade corridors, with plans to explore expansion into Nigeria, the EU, UK, Colombia, India, the UAE, China, Turkey, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Argentina.

 

For traditional finance players who have wanted stablecoin efficiency without the crypto balance sheet exposure, the product is about as clean an entry point as the market has offered. 

 

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.