Payments

Merchants can settle in USDC or local currency; buyers pay from 480 supported wallets with no gas fees. The chain roster is still EVM-only, with Base at the centre.

Western Union went live with USDPT, a dollar-backed stablecoin, on Solana on May 4. Anchorage Digital Bank is the issuer, and the company plans to use it for agent settlement, institutional listings, and a consumer payments product launching in more than forty countries this year.

MoonPay went live Friday with the MoonAgents Card, a virtual Mastercard debit product that lets autonomous AI agents transact using stablecoin balances on Solana. Funds stay self-custodial; a smart contract authorises each purchase one transaction at a time.

South Korea's largest card issuer signed a memorandum of understanding with the Solana Foundation on Thursday to develop stablecoin payment infrastructure on Solana, with eight other Korean financial institutions reportedly building parallel integrations.

Visa added Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon, and Tempo to its stablecoin settlement pilot on Wednesday. The network now spans nine chains and is processing $7 billion in annualised live volume, up 50 per cent in a single quarter.

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.

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.

MoonPay has signed on to the stablecoin payment rail that WalletConnect and French terminal maker Ingenico began building earlier this year, giving the in-store crypto checkout experiment a branded fiat settlement layer for the first time.

Polygon Labs is seeking between $50 million and $100 million in equity to fund its Open Money Stack stablecoin payments business, built on the Coinme and Sequence acquisitions it completed in January. The raise positions Marc Boiron's company as a settlement layer underneath Stripe, Mastercard, and the banks, rather than a consumer-facing payments brand.

Visa processed 97% of crypto-linked card transactions in March as monthly volume hit $600 million, driven by stablecoin adoption in Southeast Asia and a structural shift away from speculative spending.

The Bitcoin Lightning Network's total capacity surpassed 5,000 BTC in early 2024, representing approximately $225 million in locked liquidity across over 15,000 active nodes.