Payments Modernization & Rails

Startale Japan, the Japanese arm of the Startale Group, and Hakuhodo Key3 announced on October 5 that they will begin soliciting subscriptions on October 6 for the "Stablecoin Adoption Bond," a digital corporate bond that pays interest and redeems in JPYSC, Japan's first trust-type yen-denominated stablecoin. The issuer is Startale Japan, the offering amount is 99.9 million yen, and the interest rate is 5% per year, with the bonds offered to individual investors. On October 7, the Financial Services Agency updated its caution page on transactions with unregistered operators, adding the operators of IZAKA-YA and Bybit and others to its warning list of crypto-asset exchange operators. On October 6, nine companies including Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation announced that they had completed the first two phases of Project Trinity, a proof-of-concept experiment to settle digital securities with stablecoins, verifying a delivery-versus-payment method that transfers securities and payment simultaneously. On October 8, the Ministry of Finance held the first meeting of its Study Group on On-Chain Government Bonds, which discusses the tokenization of government bonds, as scheduled, and published explanatory materials organizing on-chain government bond initiatives into three categories. In an October 5 speech, Michael S. Selig, chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, explained the joint interpretation of crypto assets compiled by the CFTC and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, expressing the view that Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP and others are "in principle not securities."

Consumer artificial intelligence agents could reshape online shopping, payments and financial services, but their success will depend on how established companies respond, according to Bernstein. The rapid growth of Muse, which can compare products and quotes, call businesses, send emails, fill forms, manage inboxes, cancel subscriptions and negotiate for users, has fuelled speculation about an "iPhone moment" for consumer AI, with OpenAI launching Dots and Google expected to improve Spark. Amazon blocked Muse within two weeks of launch, citing lack of prior notification, failure to identify itself, apparent collection of customer credentials and access to account pages and order histories, while others including Shopify, Walmart, Best Buy, Gap, Sephora, Wayfair, Dick's Sporting Goods, Ulta Beauty, Fanatics, Expedia and Instacart have partnered with Muse for shopping and checkout. Bernstein expects selective access rather than blanket blocking, and Muse is developing API connectors with retailers, although it currently mainly browses websites, fills forms and prepares orders for user confirmation. Cloudflare says AI-agent requests on its network rose over 1,700% in a year, while human traffic in heavily crawled retail and financial-services categories fell as much as 40%, and Bernstein sees payments as a potential winner, with more online transactions potentially benefiting Visa, Mastercard and processors Stripe, Adyen and Checkout.

SoFi Technologies is working with Orbi and Mastercard on new crypto-linked payment cards in Mexico, with the Orbi program using SoFi Tech Solutions infrastructure to support crypto-to-fiat card spending for Mexican consumers. The partnership plugs SoFi Tech Solutions into issuing, authorization, processing and compliance for the cards, with SoFi providing Mastercard BIN sponsorship and connectivity to the Mexico Domestic Switch. Orbi customers can spend from either fiat or crypto balances, with SoFi's stack handling point-of-sale conversion so merchants are always paid in local currency. The launch creates a potential path for stablecoin-powered remittance products built on SoFi's technology in Latin America, and the company said the Orbi and Mastercard program in Mexico only captures part of what SoFi is building out. A key factor to watch will be whether SoFi Tech Solutions secures additional Latin American card programs or remittance products that also adopt SoFiUSD, especially through Mastercard's network, with multiple issuers going live over the next 12 to 24 months indicating that Orbi is a template rather than a one-off experiment.

Agentic commerce is fragmenting across infrastructure layers, with control over the checkout gate splitting rather than consolidating even as 89% of merchants prepare for autonomous agents while only 3% of transactions currently involve them, according to the Checkout.com 2026 report. Merchants are reclaiming protocol-level control: Shopify recently implemented robots.txt restrictions to block AI crawlers from checkout and cart paths, the first major eCommerce platform to draw the line at the protocol level, while Amazon has blocked Meta Muse agent checkouts over unauthorized access and credential capture concerns, as GeekWire reported. Only 11% of SMBs are currently agent-ready per PYMNTS/Visa data, and just 28% of merchants are willing to offer agents their full product range. Settlement infrastructure is maturing in parallel, with Moody's issuing its first-ever stablecoin protocol rating, the Citi-Coinbase collaboration wiring its $6 trillion payment network to stablecoins, and SAP Pay stablecoin settlement embedded directly in its ERP software. The liability framework remains unallocated, however: PYMNTS Intelligence data shows 93% of merchants believe AI providers should bear the financial loss for agent errors, yet no clear mechanism exists, and Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller, speaking at Sibos, named authentication, liability, and fraud as the three binding challenges while framing the open-versus-closed choice as the variable that could significantly influence how market structure evolves. Walmart pilot data showed conversion rates roughly three times lower for direct agent checkouts than for click-out flows, according to Walmart executive Daniel Danker, first reported by Wired.

Coinbase Global is expanding its stablecoin distribution through a partnership with Samsung that will bring USD Coin to Samsung Wallet users in the United States, with the service expected to launch in the last week of October 2026 and USDC as the default dollar stablecoin. Coinbase will provide subcustody through Coinbase Prime, alongside licensed infrastructure partner Bastion. The company said average USDC balances held in Coinbase products reached a record $20 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 44% year over year, with more than 30% of circulating USDC held in Coinbase products at quarter-end. Coinbase cautioned that greater adoption will not automatically translate into higher earnings, since the financial impact will depend on customer activity, transaction volumes, operating costs and revenue-sharing arrangements. Among competitors, PayPal Holdings is broadening the reach of its PYUSD stablecoin through its consumer and merchant network, while Circle Internet Group announced a partnership with Tereina on Oct. 7, 2026 to integrate USDC and EURC into enterprise workflows starting with the SAP ecosystem. Shares of Coinbase have lost 55.5% in the past year compared with the industry decline of 27.9%, and the stock trades at a price-to-earnings ratio of 74.44 against an industry average of 15.11.

JPMorgan Chase has launched JLTXX, a tokenized US money market fund on Ethereum aimed at institutional clients, as the bank moves to build reserve infrastructure for future US stablecoin issuers. The bank is working alongside BlackRock to provide tokenized money market products that could support stablecoin reserves, with both groups building fund infrastructure aligned with new GENIUS Act rules that require regulated backing for US stablecoin issuers by 2027. JPMorgan, a US bank and financial holding company with a reported market value of about $876.1b, already runs a global payments, markets, and custody network that gives it a ready-made base to plug tokenized money market funds into real world transaction flows. The push adds to an already heavy technology and AI expense line, while players like Citigroup and Bank of America are also pursuing digital asset infrastructure.

Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach said the clearest use case for stablecoins today is in cross-border payments, telling Bloomberg TV that such transfers take days and carry unclear fees. "If you make a cross-border payment, it takes days; the fees are unclear. From a working capital perspective for a company, if you could move the money instantly, it would be so much better," Miebach reportedly said. Mastercard, alongside Visa, Stripe and other partners, launched the Open USD stablecoin on Solana last month. Miebach said the company was keen to create a stablecoin focused particularly on moving money rather than on investment purposes.

Rezolve Ai has unveiled RezolvePay, a system that lets consumer AI agents interact with merchant-side agents and complete purchases, targeting a global retail industry of approximately $30 trillion in annual sales. The company cited McKinsey estimates that AI agents could mediate $3 trillion to $5 trillion of global consumer commerce by 2030, and said its strategy is to supply the commerce and payment infrastructure through which retailers, brands and enterprise partners participate in that shift. Rezolve Ai published a video showing Meta's Muse interacting with a coffee shop's RezolvePay agent to complete an online order for in-store collection, with a receipt identifying Muse as the agent that placed the order. Naga Samineni, CEO of RezolvePay, said consumers will choose different assistants to shop for them and retailers need the ability to serve those customers whichever agent they use, adding that Rezolve Ai sits on the merchant's side of the interaction and that its proprietary payment rails give it a role in the infrastructure and economics beneath the purchase. RezolvePay combines payment orchestration with Rezolve Ai's proprietary payment infrastructure, including digital-asset and stablecoin rails, and the company said its commercial opportunity includes deploying solutions to merchants and licensing its underlying technology to platforms, financial institutions and payment networks.

Ant Digital Technologies and HSBC have successfully completed a technical verification test showing how AI agents could act on behalf of a user to manage service interactions and the associated payment as one connected, automated process. The test combined HSBC's Tokenised Deposit Service, Ant Digital Technologies' Anvita Flow network and its Jovay Testnet blockchain environment, with HSBC providing TDS and related settlement capabilities including real-time risk checks through its MCP interface. In the demonstration, an AI agent discovered and used a digital service, made a micropayment, often defined as less than $2.00, and completed the transaction with real-time settlement, with Jovay Testnet serving as the underlying Layer 2 test environment for the blockchain transactions. The companies said the test was carried out solely as an exploration of the technology and does not represent a commercial launch or live customer proposition. Zhuoqun Bian, President of Blockchain Business at Ant Digital Technologies, said the verification demonstrates the potential use of on-chain AI agents, while Lewis Sun, Global Head of Digital Currencies at HSBC, said the bank is exploring how continued innovation, new use cases and collaboration could enhance the customer experience and reduce friction for clients.

SBI Holdings, Money Forward and US-based Mesh Connect announced on October 7 that they have reached a basic agreement to establish a joint venture in Japan. The new company aims to develop services that simplify the purchase, transfer and settlement of crypto assets, as well as a payment infrastructure utilizing blockchain. Subject to the conclusion of a final contract and dealings with relevant authorities, the company aims to be established during 2026, with Japan as its main business target and capital of 100 million yen. The ownership ratio is planned to be 60 percent for Mesh, 26 percent for the SBI Group and 14 percent for Money Forward. Mesh provides a payment infrastructure that connects more than 300 crypto asset exchanges and wallets through APIs, and the joint venture will combine Mesh's connectivity technology with the SBI Group's financial services infrastructure and regulatory expertise.

JPYC, the company that issues the Japanese yen stablecoin JPYC, announced on October 9 that it had submitted information to the Japan Fair Trade Commission regarding the competitive environment in the cashless payment market. The submission was made on September 14, explaining how JPYC works and the changes taking place in the payments market. The company pointed out that card merchant agreements could hinder discounts offered to customers who use JPYC for payments, arguing that passing on payment cost savings to customers should be left to each store's own free business judgment. JPYC is an electronic payment instrument issued and redeemed at 1 JPYC to 1 yen, and since issuance began on October 27, 2025, it has become usable at more than 150 stores and businesses, including restaurants, retailers, and e-commerce sites. Payments in JPYC work by having the user send funds to the store on a blockchain, and JPYC does not collect merchant fees from stores, which the company says keeps store cost burdens lower than existing cashless payment methods. What the company takes issue with are three prohibited clauses said to be widely present in credit card and other merchant agreements, which ban charging card users extra, offering discounts to cash users, and encouraging the use of other payment methods. In its April 2022 fact-finding survey report, the Japan Fair Trade Commission stated that uniformly prohibiting different pricing for card users and cash users may risk being problematic under the Antimonopoly Act when it could weaken competition among stores to attract customers. JPYC believes the view set out by the commission also applies to discounts for customers using new payment methods such as stablecoins, and it has set up a consultation desk for stores that are uneasy about offering discounts or that have been asked by payment providers to stop doing so.

Moomoo, the trading platform owned by Nasdaq-listed Futu Holdings, is rolling out real-time account deposits through Apple Pay and Google Pay in partnership with Visa and Checkout.com. The service lets users deposit money 24 hours a day, seven days a week using an eligible debit card linked to their digital wallet, rather than relying on bank transfers limited to business hours. Funds can be used to invest in stocks, cryptocurrencies, ETFs, options and event contracts, though access is subject to funding availability and depends on region and compliance processes. The service runs on Visa's payments network and Checkout.com's payment infrastructure. Neil McDonald, chief executive of Moomoo U.S., said expanding funding capabilities through Visa and Checkout.com makes it easier for users to quickly move money into their Moomoo accounts when they are ready to invest. The move comes as retail brokers compete to keep customers active beyond regular market hours, and follows Moomoo's addition of Web3 wallet integration, agentic investing tools through its Moomoo API Skills and prediction markets through a partnership with Kalshi; the company says it serves more than 30 million investors worldwide.

Samsung Wallet is adding support for transfers using USDC, the stablecoin issued by Circle that is designed to maintain a 1-to-1 value with the US dollar. The feature will reach 82 million Samsung devices and will run largely on Solana, according to commentary from Scott Melker on "The Daily Wolf." The capability is aimed primarily at remittances and cross-border payments, and users will not need a separate crypto app or to manage private keys themselves, since the functionality sits inside the Samsung Wallet already installed on their phones. Melker framed the move as a major step toward mainstream adoption, arguing blockchain wins when it is completely abstracted away and users never know they are using crypto, and compared it to SoFi's plan to settle its Mastercard entirely on blockchain rails while merchants still get paid in dollars. He added that the development implies significant traffic for Solana.

Mesh, a crypto payments infrastructure company, announced on October 7 a partnership with World Liberty Financial, which is backed by the Trump family. The partnership will allow World Liberty Financial's US dollar-pegged stablecoin, USD1, to be used for payments at millions of merchants worldwide. The announcement was made at the crypto event TOKEN2049 in Singapore. Users who hold USD1 in supported wallets and exchanges will be able to pay through services that have integrated Mesh's payment infrastructure, with any necessary currency conversion handled automatically by Mesh. Services already using the company's infrastructure can support USD1 without additional systems integration work, and Mesh's payment services connect to more than 300 wallets and exchanges. Meanwhile, USD1 has drawn criticism over potential conflicts of interest between President Trump's official duties and his family's business interests, with Democratic senators raising concerns that a president with influence over crypto policy could also be involved in regulating businesses tied to his family's interests.

Circle Internet Group announced on October 7 that it has partnered with Tereina, a financial services company backed by SAP. The two will integrate the US dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC and the euro-pegged EURC into the business systems companies use every day. The initial focus is SAP's cloud-based ERP, where the stablecoins will be usable through the payment service SAP Pay. For eligible US dollar-denominated payments, USDC will be the preferred option, while EURC will be offered for euro-denominated transactions. Circle cited payments to overseas suppliers, fund transfers between group companies, and settlement of accounts receivable and payable as use cases, saying blockchain-based payments that run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year can be used alongside existing bank payments. The announcement said commercial transactions involving SAP's customer companies account for 84% of the global total. However, unless otherwise specified, SAP Pay covers transactions by customer companies and affiliates located in the United States or the EU, and using USDC also requires an eligible account with Circle Mint, Circle's corporate service. Over the coming months, the two companies plan to work with customers to verify the benefits of adoption and to hold training sessions for finance and payment staff.

Citi and Coinbase announced an expanded collaboration on September 28, 2026 to bridge traditional fiat and digital asset rails for corporate and consumer clients, a partnership first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Under the arrangement, Coinbase Virtual Accounts powered by Citi's Virtual Account Wallet convert incoming fiat into stablecoins automatically, with Coinbase offering a 3.75% annual yield on those balances that is a platform incentive, not a product of the stablecoin issuer, and explicitly not FDIC-insured. Separately, Spring by Citi, the bank's integrated payment acceptance platform, will let institutional clients accept stablecoin payments at checkout, with Coinbase Payments handling the blockchain transaction and Citi converting the digital currency to fiat as bank of record. Citi processes approximately $6 trillion in daily payment volume, banks 90 percent of the top eCommerce companies, and counts 15 of the world's 20 largest FinTechs as clients, and the partnership allows merchants to serve over 150 million stablecoin holders globally without holding, custodying, or managing digital assets directly. The GENIUS Act, enacted July 18, 2025, requires every permitted payment stablecoin issuer to maintain one-to-one reserves using eligible assets by January 18, 2027, and Citi said it is also developing its own stablecoin and plans to launch a tokenized deposit system next year alongside crypto custody services.

Zacks Investment Research featured Chime Financial, Marqeta and Kronos Worldwide in its Analyst Blog as three stocks with projected third-quarter earnings growth of 100% or more. Chime Financial raised its third-quarter 2026 revenue guidance to $705 million, implying roughly 30% year-over-year growth, and adjusted EBITDA guidance to $117-$120 million, while announcing a $590 million agreement to acquire Stride Bank that it expects to create more than $100 million in net synergies over time. The consensus estimate for Chime's third-quarter earnings is 8 cents per share, up 153.3% year over year, with the estimate up 60% over the past 60 days. Marqeta's third-quarter consensus estimate is 7 cents per share, up 275% year over year, after second-quarter total processing volume rose 32% and adjusted EBITDA jumped 31%. Kronos Worldwide's third-quarter consensus estimate is 16 cents per share, an upside of 188.9% year over year, following a 15.9% rise in second-quarter sales volumes. Zacks said S&P 500 earnings are expected to increase 24.6% year over year on 11.6% higher revenues, the eighth consecutive quarter of double-digit earnings growth.

Tether, a leading stablecoin issuer, announced on October 7 that it has signed a memorandum of understanding with Kazakhstan's National Bank and the Alatau city authorities. The three parties will jointly study the concept and a pilot rollout for a stablecoin pegged to the national currency, the tenge. The cooperation covers not only stablecoins but also tokenization, the issuance and management of local assets on a blockchain, with the three parties examining overseas issuance models to pin down concrete use cases. For asset tokenization, they will select the assets to be covered and run a pilot project in Alatau, a city aiming to become a digital finance hub under a special legal regime, with the use of Tether's Hadron by Tether platform under consideration. Beyond its US dollar-pegged token, Tether has been expanding its involvement in the digitalization of national currencies, including announcing plans on May 25 to issue GEL₮, a stablecoin pegged to Georgia's lari, with backing from the Georgian government.

Anyflo, a stablecoin payments orchestration service incubated within Mysten Labs, emerged from stealth at Sui Basecamp during TOKEN2049 Singapore, led by founder and CEO Lola Oyelayo-Pearson, formerly of Shopify Money, Capital One and Mysten Labs. The company enters the market bolstered by the acqui-hire of Native, which had raised just under USD 2 million, built a market-ready Bitcoin lending platform on Sui and ranked among the top five out of 630 projects at Sui Overflow 2025; Native co-founder Robert Zaremba and team bring engineering expertise, cross-chain IP and readiness for scale. In addition to incubating Anyflo, Mysten Labs has invested USD 1 million in the company, giving it early backing from the team behind Sui. Anyflo enters private alpha in October with a production preview and liquidity onboarding, followed by beta in Q1 2027. The company positions itself as an orchestration layer offering access to stables across multiple chains while handling blockchain networks, liquidity and routing so enterprises can focus on business outcomes.

Polygon Labs announced on October 7 US time that its enterprise payments platform, Polygon Open Money Stack, now supports the TRON network. Money transfer operators and payment service companies will be able to connect funds in bank accounts to the stablecoin USDT on TRON through a single system integration. With this support, three capabilities become available on TRON: fiat currency deposits and withdrawals under money transmitter licenses in 48 US states, creation and management of TRON wallets, and the ability to move USDT between TRON and Ethereum-compatible networks in a single transaction. USDT in circulation on TRON exceeds 94 billion dollars, and cumulative transfer volume exceeds 30 trillion dollars. Polygon Labs is pursuing the acquisition of two companies that form the foundation of Open Money Stack: it acquired Sequence in a deal announced in January worth more than 250 million dollars, and its acquisition of Coinme, which holds money transmitter licenses in 48 US states and handles cash at more than 50,000 retail locations, is still in process. Polygon's cumulative payment processing volume surpassed 3 trillion dollars as of September 21, and the company said TRON support is the first phase, with supported assets, markets, and payment functions to be expanded progressively.

Metallicus has deployed an alpha version of the DogecoinVM payment layer on mainnet, which the fintech company says makes Dogecoin transactions 300 times faster. "We made it 300x faster," said Metallicus CEO and Dogecoin Foundation board member Marshall Hayner. Hayner positioned the development as a direct technological solution to a major challenge Elon Musk identified in 2021.

The protocol stack for autonomous agent-to-merchant commerce is now effectively complete, but merchant adoption remains fractured and consumer trust lags far behind the infrastructure. Four layers now underpin machine-led spending: the Stripe Machine Payments Protocol, launched in March 2026, provides a programmable policy layer for stablecoin, fiat, and BNPL transactions; the Google Universal Commerce Protocol set an open standard for agentic commerce in January 2026; and by June 2026 Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines with more than 30 launch partners including Adyen, Coinbase, and Stripe. Capital flows have surged alongside these rails, with Visa stablecoin settlement reaching an annualized $20 billion by September 2026, a 15x increase year-over-year, while Stripe stablecoin card volume hit $1.2 billion in the same month. Merchants, however, have split into three incompatible postures: QVC has integrated agents into its supply chain and catalog distribution, sending catalogs to OpenAI and Google; Kate Spade lets agents browse inventory but blocks them at the point of purchase, citing fraud and inventory management risks; and Amazon and eBay have moved to block AI agents entirely, even as Shopify makes Muse the default agent interface for consumers. The core barrier is trust rather than technology, with an NMI survey finding that only 3% of US adults trust AI agents to complete purchases on their behalf, and the VML Tomorrow's Commerce 2026 report showing one-third of active AI users refuse to authorize agents to spend their money. The bottleneck has thus shifted from the protocol layer to the trust layer, leaving a high-capacity system operating at a fraction of its potential throughput.

The Ripple stablecoin treasury has minted 30 million Ripple USD, or RLUSD, adding to a recent series of larger issuance transactions for the USD-pegged token. The 30 million RLUSD mint is the latest in that run of bigger issuances. No further details on the transaction were disclosed.

Institutional stablecoin settlement moved onto four live production rails within a single month, with stablecoin-linked card spending reaching $1.2 billion in September 2026, roughly triple the year-earlier figure, according to PaymentScan data cited by CoinDesk. SoFi and Mastercard went live on September 22 with SoFiUSD, the first stablecoin issued by a U.S. nationally chartered bank deployed for live card-settlement production, with $25 billion in annualized card volume migrating to blockchain-based settlement on Mastercard's global payments network. Visa is already operating at a $20 billion annualized run rate for stablecoin settlement as of September 8, a 15x increase from $1.3 billion a year earlier and up from $7 billion in April, while Stripe announced October 1 that it is expanding its stablecoin card programs to more than 100 countries by year-end, up from 18. The Solana DvP standard, launched October 5-6 with JPMorgan advisory input, cuts settlement finality from T+2 days to roughly 400 milliseconds and cost from $50-500 to less than one cent, though it launched with no production settlement volumes yet. Separately, the DTCC's tokenization service, supported by a working group of over 50 firms including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and State Street, is planned for October launch, and OKX closed a funding extension at a $25 billion pre-money valuation with backing from Circle, Ripple, Standard Chartered's SC Ventures, and Qube Research.