payment

According to Bloomberg, payment company Nuvei Corporation announced it will acquire Payoneer Global Inc. for approximately $2.75 billion. After the transaction is completed, the two North American payment companies will be integrated, with a combined annual transaction processing volume exceeding $500 billion.Under the agreement, Payoneer shareholders will receive $7.40 in cash per share, a premium of about 10% over its previous trading day's closing price of $6.75. Both parties stated that this merger will strengthen their layout in cross-border payments, merchant acquiring, and global funds settlement networks, further enhancing their competitiveness in the global digital payment infrastructure sector.Payoneer previously disclosed that it has partnered with Citibank to implement blockchain-based fund transfers through Citi Token Services, and will also connect to Bridge to provide its customers with stablecoin transfer and holding services.

According to The Block, the Latin American cross-border payment app El Dorado has completed a $9 million Series A funding round, led by Paradigm, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and Verda Ventures.El Dorado focuses on addressing the issues of low efficiency and high costs in cross-border payments in Latin America, covering 12 countries including Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia. It currently has over 100,000 active users and has processed more than 5 million transactions.The company stated that its business has expanded to enterprise-level payment services, supporting cross-border trade and corporate cash flow, and has integrated stablecoin and fiat settlement systems into a unified payment architecture.After this funding round, El Dorado further launched an enterprise payment product based on the Tempo Layer 1 blockchain. This network was co-incubated by Paradigm and Stripe, aiming to provide global enterprises with cross-border settlement capabilities without the need for local entities.Analysts believe that as stablecoins and on-chain payment infrastructure accelerate their implementation in emerging markets, Latin American cross-border payments are becoming one of the important testing grounds for the integration of crypto finance and traditional payment systems.

According to PR Newswire, the digital payment platform Interchecks announced the completion of a $50 million Series C financing round, led by Bettor Capital, with participation from Commerce Ventures, Decades Holdings, and Thayer Street Partners.The company primarily serves account transfers, digital banking (neobank), brokerage platforms, and cryptocurrency wallet deposit scenarios, allowing businesses to make real-time deposits to compliant accounts using debit card vouchers, and achieving fast and secure fund flows through an integrated risk control system. It currently maintains partnerships with global payment networks such as Visa and Mastercard.

The Coinbase developer platform has released an update on the progress of the payment ecosystem development. With the official launch of Coinbase for Agents, users can now create independent accounts for AI Agents, executing automated operations such as transactions and asset management under set permissions and risk control rules. The new Coinbase CLI and MCP have simplified the login process and have been demonstrated for identity and operation integration via Claude. The developer wallet is now available through the Swift SDK, supporting the integration of self-hosted wallet functionality in iOS native applications.In the coming weeks, the x402 protocol will support users within Coinbase for Agents to make direct payments using their USDC balance, allowing Agents to not only operate accounts but also complete real payments directly through the stablecoins held by users. Additionally, Coinbase will release a system update on June 16 to further enhance payment and Agent-related capabilities.

According to CoinDesk, Ripple is attempting to introduce XRP along with its stablecoin Ripple USD into the AI agent payment market, aiming to penetrate the on-chain micropayment system currently dominated by the USD stablecoin USD Coin. It has released the "XRPL AI Starter Kit," providing developers with a toolkit to build AI Agent payment capabilities, enabling agents to complete payments, check balances, and perform wallet operations on the XRP Ledger, and supporting automated payment processes based on the x402 protocol.However, Ripple has not yet disclosed any scaled landing customers or real production-level AI Agent payment transaction data; the solution is still in the early exploratory stage of infrastructure and developer ecosystem.

According to Reuters, Anthropic has signed more than 12 preliminary leasing agreements for data centers in the United States, with a total capacity exceeding 1 gigawatt. It is reported that Anthropic executives are discussing with Google about providing financial guarantees for these lease payments, while Apollo Global Management and Blackstone are providing private credit as part of a broader financing structure.Google's Gemini directly competes with Anthropic's Claude, but Google has committed up to $40 billion in investment to Anthropic and is participating in joint server chip design. Last month, Anthropic completed a $65 billion financing round with a valuation of $965 billion, surpassing OpenAI to become the AI company with the highest implied market value, and has secretly submitted a U.S. IPO application.Previously, Anthropic mainly relied on cloud service providers like Google Cloud for computing power, and building its own data centers aims to reduce dependence on competitors. In addition, Anthropic pays SpaceX (also a competitor through xAI) $1.25 billion per month for computing power. Neither Google nor Anthropic has publicly responded to specific details.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong disclosed three platform-level data points on Thursday: the annual stablecoin transaction volume is nearly $1 trillion, the platform holds approximately $20 billion in USDC, and the x402 payment protocol processed over 160 million autonomous transactions in the past year. According to SEC filings, Coinbase's average USDC holdings in the first quarter reached a historic high of $19 billion, with over 25% of the total USDC circulation located within the Coinbase ecosystem.The total circulation of USDC currently stands at $75 billion. The $1 trillion stablecoin transaction volume refers to transfers made through Coinbase's payment infrastructure, in comparison, Visa is expected to process about $14.5 trillion in fiscal year 2025. The x402 protocol is named after the HTTP 402 error code and allows AI agents to make on-chain payments in USDC directly within network requests, with transactions over $1 accounting for 95% of x402 transfer volume.The Base chain has processed $190 trillion in stablecoin transaction volume this year, with over 90% of x402 transaction volume operating on Base. Founding members of the x402 foundation include Google, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, and AWS.

Coinbase has launched "Coinbase for Agents," creating dedicated accounts and sub-accounts for AI Agents, enabling them to trade, manage funds, and make payments on behalf of users. Users can control the AI Agent through natural language commands, such as regularly adjusting their portfolio, executing trading strategies, researching market information, or automatically purchasing assets within a set budget, without the need to manually transfer funds between different wallets.Coinbase stated that this product is built on its AI-related developments over the past year, including the previously launched x402 AI payment open standard and AgentKit. Currently, platforms like Gemini, OKX, and MetaMask are also exploring financial accounts and wallet infrastructure for AI Agents, indicating that the cryptocurrency industry is accelerating its layout for "non-human user" scenarios.

According to official news, Binance announced that the Full Payment Securities Lending (FPSL) service is officially launched, allowing users to earn passive income by lending out stocks. It is reported that FPSL is a common securities lending mechanism in traditional financial markets, usually facilitated by brokers or custodians, which lends out securities held and unused by investors to institutions that need to short sell, arbitrage, or provide market making.

The global stablecoin payment infrastructure platform WasabiCard has been featured in a special report by Forbes, which discusses the challenges faced by stablecoin payments in becoming mainstream applications and includes an interview with WasabiCard co-founder and CEO Ray Yang. The report points out that as stablecoin applications gradually extend from crypto trading to real business scenarios such as corporate payments and cross-border settlements, the underlying payment infrastructure is becoming a key driver of industry development.In the interview, Ray Yang stated: "At this stage, the development of stablecoin payments still faces dual challenges in technology and regulation. From a technical perspective, the core issue is no longer the transfer of funds itself; rather, the key lies in licensing qualifications, compliance systems, risk management capabilities, and banking network capabilities."Ray Yang further pointed out that the key to achieving large-scale commercialization of stablecoin payments does not lie in the payment capability itself, but in whether a global infrastructure can be built to connect digital assets with the traditional financial system. As a global stablecoin payment infrastructure platform, WasabiCard continues to focus on the global payment network, compliance systems, and enterprise-level payment capabilities, committed to promoting the widespread application of stablecoins in real business scenarios.This special report by Forbes reflects the ongoing attention of international mainstream financial media to the development trends of stablecoin payment infrastructure and indirectly highlights the growing importance of compliance and the value of building scalable global payment networks in the market.

According to Bitcoin Magazine, Coinbase's Vice President of Tax, Lawrence Zlatkin, has proposed to U.S. lawmakers to establish a de minimis capital gains tax exemption threshold for everyday small Bitcoin transactions, arguing that "Americans shouldn't have to hire an accountant just to buy a pair of jeans with BTC."

According to The Block, Ripple announced a toolkit for developers to build "proxy payment" applications on the XRP Ledger (XRPL), supporting AI agents to execute automated financial transactions.Ripple stated that AI agents are no longer a concept of the future but are actively participating in paying computational costs, settling invoices, and completing transactions without human intervention. As the application of AI agents expands, the market is accelerating the construction of payment infrastructure for machines, including wallets and stablecoin payment channels, enabling AI to autonomously complete service payments and asset transactions.This week, Robinhood also launched related plans, allowing users to try stock trading executed by AI agents, with plans to expand into the cryptocurrency space in the future; MetaMask also released a non-custodial wallet solution for AI agents.Ripple pointed out that traditional payment systems mainly serve human-initiated and approval processes, while AI agents require infrastructure that enables fast settlement, predictable outcomes, and no human approval. It emphasized that its new toolkit also supports payment capabilities based on the x402 protocol, allowing settlements using XRP and Ripple USD (RLUSD).Meanwhile, the IC3 team, composed of researchers from several universities, stated that although AI combined with blockchain can achieve automated trading, AI agents still heavily rely on humans and underlying infrastructure, lacking complete independence.

According to Fortune, Mastercard has announced a new protocol called Agent Pay for AI, allowing AI agents to make payments and conduct small transfers among themselves— for example, automatically paying when an AI agent retrieves data from a website in segments. The protocol stores the permissions granted to AI agents by humans on the blockchain, initially using the Polygon network to ensure transparency and verifiability, allowing multiple parties to verify whether the agents are acting as instructed.Companies like Adyen, Coinbase, and Cloudflare are collaborating with Mastercard to develop this protocol. Mastercard's Chief Product Officer Jorn Lambert stated that this protocol will not become a major source of revenue in the short term, but it is expected to develop into a significant new market over the next five years.Giants like Visa, Stripe, Coinbase, and Google are actively laying out AI payment protocols, jointly promoting the future of "machine-to-machine payments" and AI chatbots dominating e-commerce transactions; however, the current volume of agent-based payments remains relatively small.

According to the latest weekly report from Gate Ventures, the market has shown a significant cooling of risk appetite under the influence of strong economic data and ongoing inflationary pressures, with global growth assets generally under pressure.The cryptocurrency market has also pulled back, with BTC down 14.4% for the week and ETH down 15.7%. The total market capitalization of cryptocurrencies has decreased by 12.5%, and market sentiment has dropped to the "extreme fear" range. In terms of capital flow, the spot BTC ETF saw a net outflow of $1.72 billion in a single week, setting a record for the largest weekly outflow in history; the spot ETH ETF experienced a net outflow of $168.2 million during the same period, indicating that institutional funds are becoming more cautious in the short term.In terms of industry development, Mastercard announced the expansion of stablecoin settlement applications in its global payment network, supporting various compliant stablecoins for round-the-clock settlements in payment scenarios, further promoting the integration of stablecoins into mainstream financial infrastructure.In terms of investment and financing, three financing transactions were disclosed last week, with the infrastructure sector continuing to dominate. Among them, the digital asset derivatives infrastructure project SignalPlus completed a $50 million financing, demonstrating that market funds are still focused on underlying infrastructure and long-term application scenario development.Overall, the market is temporarily disturbed by macro factors, but stablecoin payments and infrastructure development remain important directions for industry growth.

The institutional-level digital asset custody platform Zodia Custody announced that it has obtained a payment institution license issued by the Luxembourg financial regulator CSSF (Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier), allowing it to compliantly provide electronic money token (EMT, i.e., stablecoin) custody and transfer services across the EU.Zodia Custody stated that this approval is a further expansion based on its already obtained MiCA license, which will enhance its digital asset service capabilities for institutional clients. The company believes that as the application of stablecoins in payment settlement, liquidity management, and corporate fund operations continues to grow, the ability to custody and transfer stablecoins will become a core configuration for digital asset infrastructure providers.Founded in 2020, Zodia Custody focuses on the institutional client market, with shareholders including Standard Chartered Bank, Northern Trust, SBI Holdings, Emirates NBD, and National Australia Bank. Following the approval of the Luxembourg license, Zodia Custody has obtained relevant regulatory licenses in multiple jurisdictions, including the UK, UAE, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and the EU.

According to The Block, a research paper released by IC3, composed of researchers from top universities such as Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Princeton, Yale, and ETH Zurich, points out that the role of cryptocurrency in addressing the main challenges in the AI field is severely overestimated.The paper clarifies three major misconceptions: providing AI agents with wallets does not make them truly "autonomous," but only enables automated trading; blockchain is suitable for timestamping records but cannot effectively distinguish between AI-generated content and human content; decentralization cannot fundamentally solve the problem of bias in AI algorithms.IC3 believes that while cryptocurrency can provide some infrastructure support for AI, its practicality in areas such as trust, payment, and content verification is limited.

Michael Saylor, the founder and executive chairman of Bitcoin Treasury Company Strategy, posted that STRC and MSTR shareholders have approved changing the dividend payment frequency of STRC from monthly to semi-monthly. According to the new arrangement, the first record date is June 30, and the first payment date is July 15.

According to the "Procuratorial Daily," Lin, Zeng, and Dai conspired to use virtual currency trading as a pretext. During the trading process, they secretly filmed the victim's digital wallet private key and, after the virtual currency was credited, secretly logged into the victim's wallet to reverse the transaction, transferring the related virtual currency back to their controlled accounts. The three committed the crime three times, causing the victim a total economic loss of 660,000 yuan.The first-instance court held that in the absence of a clear judicial interpretation regarding the valuation method of virtual currency and sentencing standards, it was inappropriate to directly determine the amount involved as particularly huge based on the victim's purchase amount of 660,000 yuan. Therefore, they sentenced the three based on "other serious circumstances," imposing prison terms ranging from eight years to five years and six months, along with fines. The Hanyang District Procuratorate of Wuhan City in Hubei Province subsequently filed an appeal, which was supported by the Wuhan City Procuratorate.The prosecution argued that the first-instance court applied the law incorrectly and imposed an excessively light sentence. Prosecutor Dai Wentao of the Wuhan City Procuratorate stated that in the case where the victim had a clear loss amount to refer to, it was contradictory and legally erroneous to claim that the value of virtual currency could not be determined. In judicial practice, using the resale price and transaction price as the basis for determining the amount of theft has become mainstream, and determining the value of virtual currency based on the actual cost paid by the victim has factual, legal, and practical basis.The Intermediate Court of Wuhan accepted the prosecution's opinion in the second instance, revoked the corresponding content of the original judgment, and changed the determination of the theft amount to particularly huge. It sentenced the principal offender Lin to ten years and six months in prison for theft, and sentenced the accomplices Zeng and Dai to eight years in prison each, along with fines.