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David Marcus put a Bitcoin-settled dollar account onto the Visa network on Tuesday and gave AI agents permission to spend from it. The principal-member status is the rare part — most fintechs rent access to Visa through Marqeta or Stripe Issuing.

Western Union confirmed its Solana-based dollar stablecoin USDPT will launch next month, connecting crypto wallets to the company's network of 360,000 retail payout locations across 200 countries.

Tempo's new Zones feature lets enterprises run permissioned parallel chains for confidential transactions like payroll and treasury management, but critics say the operator-controlled model amounts to a glorified database with a blockchain receipt.

The largest IPO in history is targeting a 30 per cent retail allocation — roughly $22 billion — and analysts warn that the capital earmarked for SpaceX shares is the same risk-on money that has been propping up bitcoin's April rally.

The $12 trillion brokerage has begun a phased rollout of Schwab Crypto, offering direct bitcoin and ether trading through the same interfaces its clients already use for equities, with Paxos handling execution and custody sitting at its Premier Bank subsidiary.

The Stablecoin Reserves Portfolio invests exclusively in cash, short-dated US Treasuries and overnight repos, targeting the 100 per cent reserve requirement that the GENIUS Act imposes on payment stablecoin issuers.

The Besqala Mining Valley in Karakalpakstan will exempt operators from corporate and property tax until 2035, but requires all sale proceeds to be repatriated through Uzbekistan's domestic banking system.

Bitmine moved roughly $320 million worth of ether into staking over 48 hours, putting more than 70 per cent of its nearly five million ETH hoard to work generating yield — and positioning itself to earn $330 million a year from validator rewards alone.

The crypto trading firm's new Crypto Core3 ETF — ticker BESO — charges a 1 per cent fee, rebalances weekly, and earns staking rewards on Ethereum and Solana holdings.

Two AI agents based on co-founder Fred Ehrsam and former CTO Balaji Srinivasan are already fielding questions on Slack and email, as CEO Brian Armstrong signals a future where automated colleagues outnumber flesh-and-blood staff.

Bitmine Immersion Technologies bought 101,627 ether last week — its largest weekly purchase of 2026 — bringing its total holdings to 4.97 million ETH and within striking distance of its stated goal of controlling 5 per cent of Ethereum's circulating supply.

Payward's acquisition of Chicago-based Bitnomial gives it a designated contract market, a derivatives clearing organisation and a futures commission merchant under one roof — shortcuts that would have taken years to build from scratch.

SWIFT has completed the design phase of its blockchain-based shared ledger and is building an MVP for live tokenised deposit payments across more than 200 countries. The system, built on Hyperledger Besu, aims to make cross-border settlement a 24/7 operation.

The USDC issuer's chief executive told Reuters that China could launch a yuan-backed stablecoin within three to five years, framing the dollar-yuan contest as a technological race that Circle intends to win regardless of which currency prevails.

The social trading platform's acquisition of the keyless MPC wallet — which has never been hacked in seven years — is its clearest signal yet that it sees crypto's future in user-held assets rather than centralised order books.

The stablecoin issuer's new tether.wallet app supports USDT, bitcoin, and tokenised gold with human-readable addresses and no gas tokens — a consumer play aimed squarely at emerging markets.

Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi confirmed the exchange's confidential SEC filing at the Semafor World Economy summit, while a concurrent Deutsche Börse investment valued the company at $13.3 billion — a $6.7 billion markdown from its November 2025 fundraise.

OKX has launched X-Perps, a MiFID-regulated perpetual-style derivatives product offering up to 10x leverage across ten trading pairs, available to retail and institutional traders across the European Economic Area.

Visa will operate critical blockchain infrastructure on Tempo, the Stripe-backed layer-1 network built for AI-driven payments, alongside Stripe itself and Standard Chartered's Zodia Custody.

The payments giant launched a platform on 9 April that lets artificial intelligence agents initiate purchases, handle tokenisation and enforce spend controls across its network of 150 million merchants.