settlement

The Central Bank of Russia and the Reserve Bank of India are collaborating to establish a mechanism for settling bilateral trade using digital currencies to improve the efficiency of cross-border payments. Russia has launched the digital ruble, and India's digital currency is also used for government projects.Both parties will discuss digital currency trade settlement with BRICS countries at the summit in New Delhi.

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) launched the Demat 2 pilot this week, issuing corporate bonds in the form of digital tokens on a distributed ledger operated by regulated market institutions, and settling through the wholesale digital rupee of the Reserve Bank of India. The size of India's corporate bond market is approximately $620 billion.The state-owned power financing institution REC raised ₹50 billion (approximately $56 million) through this system, engineering and construction giant Larsen & Toubro refinanced ₹50 billion, and non-banking financial institution IIFL Finance raised ₹2.5 billion (approximately $2.8 million), totaling around ₹102.5 billion. The bonds retain fixed interest rates, maturity dates, and investor rights, but the tokenized bonds can be settled simultaneously with the digital rupees used for purchase, thereby reducing transaction risk.Subsequent phases will introduce smart contracts to handle corporate actions such as interest payments and redemptions, and there are plans to open secondary market trading, ultimately allowing retail investors to participate. India maintains a cautious attitude towards private cryptocurrencies, and this pilot is an attempt to introduce tokenization into its controlled financial system.

The Kremlin stated that Russia will discuss trade settlements using digital currencies with BRICS+ partners at the summit in India.

According to Visa, its stablecoin annual settlement volume has exceeded 20 billion USD, a year-on-year increase of more than 15 times. In the second quarter, the Visa network has launched over 160 stablecoin-linked card projects, with related payment amounts increasing nearly 200% year-on-year, indicating that stablecoins are accelerating their entry into card payment and settlement scenarios.Visa is collaborating with Credit Coop to provide revolving credit lines denominated in stablecoins for early stablecoin-linked card programs, used for daily Visa settlement funds. Credit Coop locks accounts receivable through Spigot smart contracts, automates repayments, and combines Visa's daily settlement data for credit and risk control, having executed over 9,000 repayments on-chain, with cumulative financing exceeding 2.5 billion USD and zero defaults. Card projects such as Rain, Karta, Moto, and Xplace have all obtained settlement turnover funds through this model, establishing credit records for subsequent large institutional financing.

The official listing account of Kraken announced that TCS will soon be launched. TCS Blockchain is a blockchain-as-a-service platform aimed at the transportation industry, using ERC-20 tokens on Polygon to settle freight invoices without the need for traditional factoring intermediaries. The token trading will begin on September 9.

According to Onchain Lens monitoring, a trader on Hyperliquid had a total position of 1.15 million dollars in BTC and SOL that was liquidated a few minutes ago, resulting in a loss of approximately 42,000 dollars.This wallet has historically experienced a total of 7 liquidations, but its perpetual contract trading is still profitable by about 632,000 dollars.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) released Working Paper 1374, proposing a technical solution based on the XRP Ledger (XRPL) to verify the source and integrity of official statistical data. This solution generates cryptographic fingerprints for SDMX datasets and records the hash values of batch data on the XRPL, while the original data itself is not stored on the chain.Users can verify the identity of data publishers and whether the data has been tampered with through digital signature credentials combined with a one-time on-chain query. Prototype testing results show that data publication takes about 3 to 5 seconds, while the verification process only takes about 1 to 2 seconds. The paper specifically notes that this system is currently only in the proof-of-concept stage and has not yet been put into a formal production environment.

AI Economic Settlement Agreement AEON announces the launch of Agentic Checkout, supporting AI Agents to complete product search, selection, checkout, and payment through natural language dialogue in the Shopify open merchant ecosystem. The payment process is supported by the AEON AI Card, a virtual card that can set predefined spending limits and authorization scopes, allowing AI agents to complete payments without directly accessing the user's main wallet or main card.AEON Agentic Checkout currently covers over 3 million active stores on Shopify and more than 1 billion products, and will later integrate with the Claude open-source e-commerce agent, expanding to shopping and payment scenarios such as Amazon and Travala.

SWIFT service provider Bottomline announced a collaboration with the blockchain infrastructure project Chainlink to enable over 600 bank clients in its network to access blockchain-based cross-border settlements. Bottomline processes over $16 trillion in payments annually and serves 1,200 financial institutions and 10,000 enterprises.Through this integration, banks can continue to use the ISO 20022 standard to send payment instructions, with Chainlink's infrastructure connecting the instructions to blockchain settlements. Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) supports the transfer of tokenized value across different blockchain networks, while Chainlink's Runtime Environment (CRE) is responsible for payment processes, transaction routing, and operational change coordination.CCIP has been recording mainnet activity since July 2023 and is currently connected to over 60 blockchain networks. Chainlink's Project Pangea has covered more than 50 banking institutions in Europe and South Korea, with participants managing assets totaling over $10 trillion, and the project's goals include achieving T+0 settlement for foreign exchange transactions.

According to CoinDesk, digital bank SoFi has partnered with cryptocurrency exchange Kraken to interconnect their respective financial infrastructures. Kraken's parent company Payward will join SoFi's settlement network SEN, allowing its institutional clients to transfer dollars and manage liquidity around the clock without waiting for traditional bank operating hours.Meanwhile, Kraken will launch the bank-issued stablecoin SoFiUSD from SoFi, while SoFi will use Kraken Prime as an additional source of liquidity for its clients' cryptocurrency trading. SoFi CEO Anthony Noto stated that the financial system should not close when financial markets remain open; Payward co-CEO David Ripley noted that millions of users will purchase cryptocurrency assets for the first time through the applications they use daily, and the underlying infrastructure should connect deep, liquid markets.This collaboration is part of SoFi's return to the digital asset space. SoFi has already provided cryptocurrency trading in its app and launched the dollar-backed stablecoin SoFiUSD, and in April of this year, it introduced Big Business Banking, integrating corporate banking with digital asset services. Both parties indicated that future collaborations may also expand to payments, fund management, lending, and other digital asset services.

According to Cointelegraph, Russia's legal framework for cryptocurrency trading, custody, and cross-border settlements officially came into effect today.

According to informed sources, Meta Platforms has discussed the possibility of reaching a settlement during court proceedings with the attorneys general of multiple states in the U.S. The case accuses Meta of designing Facebook and Instagram to be addictive for teenagers, facing a maximum fine of $1.4 trillion.

According to the Nikkei, Japan's Financial Services Agency, Ministry of Finance, Bank of Japan, and financial institutions plan to establish a research group in the summer of 2026 to promote the construction of next-generation payment and settlement infrastructure based on blockchain (distributed ledger), with a specific preparation plan expected to be formed in early 2027.The plan initially focuses on government bonds and stock trading, aiming to achieve 24-hour instant settlement of funds and securities. The report notes that although there have been several blockchain financial application trials in the past, this is the first time the Japanese government and central bank have set a clear timeline for the actual implementation of related infrastructure.

Visa announced its participation in the BLOOM (Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency) initiative led by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), aimed at expanding the settlement capabilities of financial institutions and promoting interoperability between traditional payment systems and stablecoin payment rails, allowing institutions to enjoy faster, programmable payments while retaining security and compliance assurances.As the first partner under the BLOOM framework, Nium will pilot the use of stablecoin settlements with Visa, exploring more efficient cross-border fund flows based on Visa's payment network, security, and compliance capabilities. The two parties will study the implementation of settlements seven days a week (including weekends and public holidays) using stablecoins to reduce delays and enhance efficiency. The pilot supports regulated stablecoins backed by major currencies, including US dollar and euro-denominated stablecoins.

The Arbitrum development team stated that they are introducing zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs into the Arbitrum platform to achieve a multi-proof settlement model. Through ZK proofs, the settlement time of Arbitrum blocks to Ethereum L1 is expected to be reduced from several days to several hours, while enhancing user, cross-chain bridge, and protocol capital efficiency, and maintaining security through the multi-proof mechanism. Related capabilities are aimed at Arbitrum One and dedicated chains based on the Arbitrum platform. Offchain will subsequently submit upgrade proposals to the DAO.Current progress includes: the ability to run the same state transition functions in SP1 zkVM as in optimistic execution, generating ZK proofs for real mainnet block production; Stylus's WASM contracts can be proven alongside Solidity contracts; the team has launched an independent Rust verifier, making ZK proofs a first-class mode alongside standard verification; the BoLD settlement protocol has supported the acceptance of ZK proofs and is endorsed by a fast confirmation committee, while the original dispute games still serve as a fallback path, forming a multi-proof architecture that coordinates ZK proofs, proof committees, and fraud proofs.The team claims to be continuously reducing proof costs and will gradually merge related code into the Nitro main production path. The next steps include further optimizing proofs and shifting to Reth-based execution, completing L1 message inbox proofs, and integrating ZK settlement capabilities into node configurations for on-demand activation across chains.