Ep. 16 | Bitcoin and Black America. Is Coinbase watching you? Bitmain’s Game of Thrones.
Other top blockchain news: China sounds new warning against crypto. Brave browser brouhaha. Startups in Japan and Malaysia.
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Ep. 5 | U.S. weighs digital dollar, Coinbase top lawyer joins Treasury, and more
In this newsletter and podcast, we bring you top headlines around the world, including: A new proposal to create a digital dollar. Coinbase’s legal chief heading U.S. Treasury. A Bitcoin-Red Cross coronavirus fundraiser in Italy. Universal basic income’s revival. Steem’s hard fork into Hive, and more.
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Euronet and Fireblocks Expand Stablecoin-Funded Card Programs to Every Bank’s Existing Portfolio
Banks seeking to offer stablecoin-backed spending have long faced a significant technical hurdle: the friction of building a bridge between legacy infrastructure and digital assets. Euronet and Fireblocks announced a partnership extension that removes this barrier. Any bank using Euronet’s Ren or CoreCard issuing platforms can now integrate stablecoin-funded card programs directly into their existing…
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Visa and Mesh Partner to Make Crypto and Stablecoin Balances Spendable at 175M+ Visa Merchant Locations
The stablecoin payments buildout has spent the year assembling rails: Visa Direct moving USDC prefunding into commercial production, Mastercard wiring BVNK stablecoin settlement into 130 countries, and Marqeta and Coinbase building processor-layer settlement on Base. Each solved a different leg: cross-border prefunding, card issuing, and processor integration. What none of them solved was the simplest…
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JPMorgan Deploys JPM Coin on Ethereum Mainnet — Institutional Stablecoin Payments Go Multi-Chain
JPMorgan has expanded the reach of its JPM Coin, making the token available to institutional clients on the Ethereum mainnet as of October 19, 2026. The move, reported by CoinDesk, follows the initial launch of the token on the Coinbase-linked layer-2 network Base in November 2025 and marks a shift in how the bank approaches…
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Seven Months After Europe’s First Agent Payment, the Trust Layer Is Still Under Construction
Seven months after Europe’s first live end-to-end AI agent payment, the trust infrastructure is still under construction.
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Treasury NPRM Comment Period Closes TODAY: What the Industry Filed Before the GENIUS Act Deadline
The October 19, 2026, closure of the comment period for the GENIUS Act NPRM (TREAS-DO-2026-0496) signals the end of the primary public feedback phase for the administration’s stablecoin framework. Published as 91 FR 53368, the proposal drew significant industry engagement, reflecting the urgency noted by Treasury Secretary Bessent in the August 17 press release. The…
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Know Your Agent: How the Payments Industry Is Building the Trust Layer OAuth and SAML Couldn’t
Money20/20 USA 2026 opens today at The Venetian in Las Vegas. Its Monday panel, “Know Your Agent: Here’s How Banks Are Updating Identity Verification,” brings Skyfire CEO Amir Sarhangi, Firmly CEO Kumar Senthil, PayOS co-founder Johnathan McGowan, VGS CEO Chuck Yu, and J.P. Morgan’s Frank Medrano to the ArrA.I.val Stage for thirty minutes on agent…
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B.AI Wrote TRON’s Agent Identity Standard. Now It Sells the Stack That Runs On It.
TRON’s agent identity standard is Final and Ethereum’s is still Draft. The team that finished it sells the stack that runs on it, and the spec’s own schema carries the payments its text disclaims.
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Card Checkout Is Dead for Agents. The Replacement Rails Have Settled 191 Million Transactions.
Card-based checkout for AI agents ended in March 2026. That was when ACP retired its in-chat flow. The industry finally admitted that forcing legacy payment rails into agentic workflows was unsustainable. Now, the market is splitting into two distinct, stablecoin-native replacement rails: the x402 protocol and the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP). They are not converging.…