A consortium supported by a who’s who of the payments, banking, and crypto industries has launched a new stablecoin, Open USD. The reserve-backed stablecoin is the brainchild of Zach Abrams, founding CEO of Open Standard and co-founder of stablecoin infrastructure firm Bridge, which was bought by payment processing firm Stripe in 2024. “Existing stablecoins have great strengths, but to use them at scale, businesses need something that’s open, low-cost, high-throughput, broadly accessible, and aligned to their interests,” Abrams said in a statement. Open Standard’s founding users include Visa, Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, Western Union, Blackrock, Standard Chartered, Google, IBM, Coinbase, OKX, Solana, Ripple, and Aave among more than 140 companies.…
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Alchemy Launches AgentCard, a Visa Payment Card for AI
AgentCard will support crypto payments
Blockchain infrastructure provider Alchemy is partnering with Visa to launch AgentCard, a new payment method for AI agents designed to let them operate in the real world. Using agents from any provider, the virtual Visa card will let users’ AI agents ”book a vacation, order groceries, or renew a subscription on a consumer’s behalf, without the consumer ever touching a checkout screen,” Alchemy said in a statement. The AgentCard features built-in spending controls, including merchant category restrictions, per-transaction limits, and customizable budgets, all configurable at startup or in real time. “The hardest part of deploying an agent today has nothing to do with intelligence, it is getting the agent set…
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Oobit Issues Debit Card Built for AI Agents
A corporate card designed for non-human spenders
Digital wallet and payment app startup Oobit has created a new stablecoin-backed corporate Visa debit card designed from the ground up for AI agents. Backed by Tether, Oobit’s new virtual Agent Card will give agentic bots the ability to make purchases autonomously, but with built-in spending limits and oversight. “The corporate card was designed seventy years ago for a human in a suit signing a paper receipt,” Oobit said in a release. “It is now being handed to autonomous software that makes hundreds of decisions a minute, and the results are exactly what you’d expect: no clear audit trail, no per-agent controls, no visibility into what was bought or why.”…
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Visa Adds Five Blockchains to Stablecoin Settlement Network
Settlement run rate hits $7B, up 50%
Visa is adding five blockchains to its stablecoin settlement network as it expands its multichain vision of global payments. The news comes as the payments giant announced that its settlement run rate hit $7 billion in Q1 2026, up 50% over the previous quarter. The network allows issuers and acquirers to settle transactions with stablecoins instead of the slow and costly traditional banking rails. Visa’s stablecoin settlement pilot now has nine blockchains, with Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon, and Tempo joining Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana, and Stellar. “Our partners are building in a multi-chain world, and they expect their options to reflect that reality,” said Rubail Birwadker, global head of growth products…
