infrastructure

a16z released the latest research indicating that stablecoins are gradually evolving from their initial role as transaction settlement tools and stores of value into global financial infrastructure. Data shows that following the regulatory clarity driven by the U.S. GENIUS Act, the stablecoin market has accelerated its growth, with adjusted trading volumes reaching approximately $4.5 trillion.The report shows that consumer-to-business (C2B) stablecoin transactions grew by 128% year-on-year, reaching 284.6 million transactions. The monthly collateral deposits for stablecoin card projects also increased from nearly zero at the end of 2024 to over $300 million by early 2026, reflecting the rapid expansion of stablecoin payment scenarios. Meanwhile, the velocity of stablecoins has increased from 2.6 times to 6 times since early 2024, indicating a shift from being "held" to being "frequently used." a16z believes that the focus of stablecoin applications is shifting from cross-border payments to local payment infrastructure, particularly evident in markets such as Asia and Brazil.

Web3 AI infrastructure AIW3 announced the completion of a $2 million seed round financing. This round of financing was led by Buffalo Capital, with participation from GalaXin Capital and Three-stones Ventures.It is reported that AIW3 is committed to transforming into an AaaS (Agent-as-a-Service) on-chain execution paradigm, providing callable strategy services, autonomous agent orchestration, and native vault collaborative funding flows, aiming to build a system-level next-generation on-chain execution layer. The official statement indicates that its core protocol infrastructure has officially entered a fully verifiable real-time operational phase, laying the foundation for the long-term development of a scalable decentralized agent network and ecosystem.

The cryptocurrency payment network MoonPay announced that its Iron platform has officially launched virtual account services in New York State, supporting fintech companies, cryptocurrency platforms, neobanks, and financial institutions to integrate compliant fiat-to-stablecoin infrastructure.This launch is based on MoonPay's acquisition of the enterprise-grade stablecoin infrastructure platform Iron in 2025, allowing users to receive payments through channels such as ACH, wire transfer, and SWIFT, and automatically convert them into stablecoins, settling to non-custodial wallets. MoonPay has also obtained a BitLicense, money transmission license, and limited purpose trust license from the New York State Department of Financial Services in the same year.

AI deep technology and Web3 infrastructure company Cluster Protocol announced the completion of a $5 million financing round, led by DAO5, with participation from Paper Ventures, JPEG Trading, Mapleblock Capital, among others, bringing the company's total funding to $7.75 million.The new funds will be used to accelerate the development of its EVM ecosystem-oriented browser-native IDE product CodeXero, expand the product and engineering teams, and enhance AI systems, developer workflows, deployment infrastructure, and ecosystem growth. Cluster Protocol stated that CodeXero has connected over 300,000 wallets, processed more than 3 billion AI tokens, and supported the deployment of over 25,000 dApps.

AI Smart Routing and Infrastructure Network DGrid AI officially announces the launch of its AI inference API integrated with the x402 payment protocol. This API seamlessly merges payment logic with AI model invocation for the first time, allowing developers and AI Agents to complete authorization, inference, and payment within a single API request lifecycle without managing cumbersome API Keys or requiring centralized account pre-funding.It is reported that this API currently supports BNB Chain (BSC) as the underlying settlement network. With the micropayment features of the x402 protocol, the system can achieve extremely low-friction on-chain real-time settlement while ensuring that invocation costs remain absolutely controllable. Additionally, this API supports streaming responses and real-time usage feedback while being compatible with mainstream AI invocation methods, making it suitable for various application scenarios, including model selection for AI Agents, inference billing, intelligent agents, and multi-task execution.DGrid states that this initiative aims to completely break the prepaid barriers of traditional large model invocation and provide a programmable underlying payment infrastructure for building a fully automated AI Agent economy (machine-to-machine transactions).

Axe Compute Inc. (NASDAQ: AGPU), a publicly traded company on NASDAQ, announced that it has signed a 36-month AI infrastructure contract with an enterprise client, with a total contract value of approximately $260 million. The deployment includes a dedicated cluster of 2,304 NVIDIA B300 GPUs and a high-speed AI storage system, expected to officially launch in the third quarter of 2026 at a Tier 3 data center in the United States. This is the largest single enterprise contract since the establishment of Axe Compute.Axe Compute's underlying computing power infrastructure is supported by Aethir's decentralized GPU cloud. The contract includes a dedicated 4.8 megawatt N+1 redundant power supply, with deployment locations and service standards specified by the client, utilizing a structured payment arrangement. Daniel Wang, co-founder and CEO of Aethir, stated that this contract is the result of months of deep collaboration between the two teams: "The enterprise-grade workloads supported by 2,304 NVIDIA B300 GPUs are exactly the scale we aimed for when building Aethir's computing power infrastructure. Today's announcement proves that decentralized GPU infrastructure is capable of handling AI workloads from the world's top enterprises."After the announcement, Axe Compute (NASDAQ: AGPU) experienced significant stock price volatility, with an intraday increase of over 166%, reaching $14.47, and the trading volume exceeding one hundred times the average daily level over the past three months.

The cryptocurrency trading platform HTX released the "USDD In-Depth Research Report," which points out that the decentralized stablecoin USDD has completed a key transformation into an over-collateralized stablecoin, and its overall maturity has entered the same competitive range as DAI. Relying on the advantages of the TRON ecosystem and multi-chain native deployment, USDD is gradually becoming a new generation of decentralized stablecoin infrastructure that combines stability and yield capability.The report provides a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of USDD from multiple dimensions, including core competitive advantages, yield ecosystem panorama, security system, and competitive landscape, and highly affirms its construction of a sustainable yield ecosystem and differentiated advantages.

Non-custodial staking infrastructure provider Everstake has partnered with Web3 asset data platform RootData to comprehensively empower its business processes using RootData's data. Through the RootData API, Everstake will integrate comprehensive project information into its products, significantly enhancing user experience; leveraging RootData's rich industry data to provide more diverse and in-depth research reports; and obtaining more customer expansion leads based on information such as financing and teams.It is reported that Everstake is an institutional-grade staking infrastructure provider that supports secure and scalable participation in staking across more than 130 proof-of-stake (PoS) networks. Everstake provides support for asset management companies, custodians, non-custodial wallets, protocols, exchanges, and platforms, helping them achieve convenient staking access.

According to official news, B.AI announced a strategic partnership with Biconomy, and both parties will work together to build a financial layer for AI, jointly promoting the development of the digital economy. By integrating Biconomy's high-performance trading infrastructure, validated by millions of users, B.AI will provide a more secure, transparent, and globally accessible financial trading environment for future autonomous agent AI, further solidifying the AI financial value chain in the digital economy era. Committed to providing users with fast and transparent trading infrastructure, both parties aim to create the next-generation financial ecosystem that prioritizes security and global access.

ChainCatcher reported live that Du Yu, head of the Wanxiang Blockchain Lab, and He Yi, co-CEO of Binance, attended the 2026 Hong Kong Web3 Carnival, engaging in a roundtable discussion titled "Reshaping Boundaries: The Next Decade of Web3, AI, and the Intelligent Economy."Regarding the three major areas of personal focus, He Yi stated that she is currently dividing her time among three sectors: first, the world changes brought about by the approaching AI singularity, contemplating the product and service forms of Binance in the next decade; second, organizational and talent development, as companies need self-sustaining growth capabilities to support development once they reach a certain scale; third, the further integration of crypto and traditional finance, which is actively promoted in both the U.S. and Hong Kong, with the possibility that global foreign exchange may occur on blockchain rather than the SWIFT system in the future, and asset trading will achieve 24/7 uninterrupted global operations like in the crypto space.Regarding the impact of AI on Binance, He Yi clearly stated that Binance does not intend to lay off employees on a large scale to cut costs and improve efficiency like most tech companies. She believes AI makes the strong even stronger, as a programmer using AI to write code can enhance efficiency tenfold. She also shared that an employee was discovered and fired for "taking on multiple jobs" after their efficiency improved due to AI. She stated that Binance's overall approach is to further enhance the organization's output and innovation capabilities rather than reduce costs at the current scale.Regarding the goal of reaching three billion users, He Yi revealed that this year they have upgraded their target from pursuing one billion users to pursuing three billion users. She believes that becoming a company with three billion users means Binance is not just an exchange but a global financial infrastructure, with services aimed at everyday payments and wealth management for ordinary people.On the essence of AI, He Yi stated that there should be no "technological arrogance." No matter how advanced AI is, the most important thing for individuals is how technology serves life. She gave an example of when a bean bag can tell a rural elderly woman that a certain health product is fake and not to buy it, or when a lonely elderly person can chat with someone through AI; this is the value and significance that technology brings to humanity.Regarding the integration of crypto and traditional finance, He Yi pointed out that the internet has already gone through this path. Initially, Silicon Valley's internet had a strong hippie culture, which later diverged into two paths: those who went left pursued absolute freedom in the dark web, while those who went right created Google and Amazon, becoming commercial companies serving the public. Binance will steadfastly move towards serving the public. She also revealed that Binance has launched trading in commodities such as crude oil, gold, and silver, with the platform's commodity trading volume already accounting for a very high proportion of traditional scales. She believes that when labeling oneself to distinguish between Crypto and TradFi, that label is "drawing a line," and one should return to first principles: contributing to financial freedom and equality in the world.Regarding industry maturity and original intentions, He Yi stated that when Wall Street and traditional finance make a 180-degree turn to embrace crypto, it precisely indicates that the industry is becoming increasingly mature, with early-stage dividends diminishing. Entering a mature phase means crossing a chasm, and products must truly have value and be grounded. She quoted a phrase she has been saying since 2017: "We are not starting a business; we are creating history." Binance's slogan has also remained unchanged—"Exchange the World." She emphasized that the impact and transformation of Web3 on finance are real, and even if it only improves financial efficiency a little, it is an incredible innovation. There is no need to pursue perfection in one step; "just make a little progress every day."

Curve Finance announced on platform X that due to the LayerZero infrastructure being attacked in the rsETH hacking incident, it has decided to suspend Curve's LayerZero infrastructure as a precautionary measure until further understanding of the root cause of the incident. This action will affect:CRV bridging from the following chains: BNB, Sonic, Avalanche, Fantom, Etherlink, Kava (other chains will still use native bridging);The fast bridging of crvUSD (slow bridging on L2 will still be available for normal use).

Alcoa, the American aluminum company, is about to reach a deal with the Bitcoin mining company NYDIG to sell its idle Massena East aluminum smelter located in New York State, expected to be completed by mid-year.The plant has been idle since 2014 and is equipped with a substation, transmission lines, and high-capacity grid access, making it attractive to Bitcoin mining and data center operators due to the hydroelectric resources provided by the New York Power Authority. Reports indicate that some retired industrial sites in the U.S. are being transformed into Bitcoin mining, artificial intelligence, and high-performance computing facilities.

At the "Crypto 2026: From Cryptocurrency to Smart Economy" themed forum held in Hong Kong, Tencent Cloud's industry architect Alan Nie delivered a keynote speech titled "Cloud + AI Dual Engine: Tencent Cloud Empowers New Growth in Web3."Alan Nie pointed out that Web3 enterprises face three major bottlenecks in global infrastructure, R&D efficiency, and business intelligence. Tencent Cloud deeply integrates the "Cloud + AI" dual engine to provide low-latency infrastructure covering the globe. Among them, the Singapore data center is the only cloud provider in the world that offers four availability zones, and the self-developed TDSQL-C database can achieve elastic scaling in seconds, with Redis single-node performance reaching over 300,000.In terms of AI empowerment, Tencent Cloud launched CodeBuddy (AI Pair Programmer) and WorkBuddy (Personal AI Assistant), which can automatically generate code, batch process office documents, organize meeting minutes, and support multi-agent parallel execution of complex tasks. In financial scenarios, the automation research report reproduction cycle has been shortened from three days to half a day; in on-chain data analysis scenarios, storage costs have been reduced to one-tenth of the original, with query responses reaching millisecond levels.Alan Nie stated that Tencent Cloud is committed to using the "Cloud + AI" dual engine to help Web3 enterprises build the next generation of smart economic infrastructure.

At the "Crypto 2026: From Cryptocurrency to Smart Economy" themed forum held in Hong Kong, Max Zhou, the business leader of RootData, delivered a keynote speech titled "Trust as Infrastructure: How Data Transparency Reshapes the New Cycle of Web3."Max Zhou pointed out that transparency is no longer an "added bonus," but rather a threshold for institutions, regulators, and users. RootData positions itself as a leading Web3 enterprise data platform, quantifying project information completeness and credibility through financing data, relationship graphs, and the industry's unique "transparency scoring" system.He introduced that RootData has recorded over 9,600 financing events, more than 18,000 key industry figures, and has rated over 19,000 projects on a scale from A to F, becoming an important reference for institutional due diligence and exchange listing assessments. The platform has established ecological cooperation with over 220 institutions, including Binance Wallet, OKX, and ByBit.In addition, RootData has launched a three-dimensional exchange assessment model (liquidity + asset value + transparency), abandoning the "volume-only theory." Max Zhou emphasized that transparency is becoming a new axis for Web3, just as essential as security audits.

Bank of AI and the Peking University Blockchain Association PKUBlockchain have officially released their first research report titled "Web4.0: When AI Agents Become Economic Entities------Infrastructure, Track Patterns, and Investment Outlook." The report systematically outlines the three-layer infrastructure gaps of the x402 payment protocol, ERC-8004 identity standard, and MCP tool invocation protocol, and focuses on how Bank of AI can package five core components into a one-stop Agent financial operating system, becoming a typical case of a closed-loop from protocol to product. The research report points out that the daily average transaction volume on the TRON chain exceeds $22 billion, with a circulation of $86 billion USDT, providing a scalable foundation for high-frequency micro-settlement for Agents. Both parties will continue to promote the coordinated development of Web4.0 infrastructure and the agent economy.