Circle Internet Group has secured its position as the leading U.S. blockchain patent holder, a status cemented by its acquisition of fundamental assets from IBM’s blockchain portfolio on July 27, 2026. The deal, which includes over 680 patent families and nearly 1,000 issued patents worldwide, represents the largest blockchain intellectual property acquisition in U.S. history.…
The race to define how AI agents pay for goods and services has reached a quiet, structural inflection point. For the past two years, the industry focused on the mechanics of settlement, pitting crypto-native rails against traditional card networks. That competition has effectively ended. Instead of fighting for dominance at the settlement layer, the major…
The agentic commerce conversation has been stuck on the same question for months: will consumers let AI agents shop on their behalf? That question is becoming obsolete. This week’s signals—from payment orchestration platforms, stablecoin networks, merchant infrastructure providers and dispute resolution bodies—point to something more structural happening beneath the adoption headlines. The industry is quietly…
The Senate’s crypto market-structure bill needs seven Democratic votes to clear cloture. It has zero — and the ethics impasse that killed the bipartisan coalition has no obvious resolution before the August recess.
What Agent Identity Means When an AI agent books a flight, signs a contract, or moves money, someone — or something — needs to vouch for it. That vouching system is agent identity: the credential, capability boundary, and action record that tell the rest of the system which agent is acting, what it is allowed…
“Probably 99% of the issuer processing systems out in the world could process an agentic payment,” says Paymentology CTO Tim Joslyn. The issue is not the plumbing; the global infrastructure for moving money is already mature and functional. Instead, the challenge lies in recognizing these transactions and implementing the necessary identity and trust frameworks. The…
## Why agent identity matters Traditional identity systems assume two categories: humans who authenticate with passwords or biometrics, and service accounts that authenticate with static API keys. AI agents break this model in four ways: 1. **Agents are autonomous.** They make decisions and take actions without a human pressing a button for each step. 2.…
What is the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)? The Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) is a payment infrastructure protocol developed by Stripe and Tempo that enables AI agents and automated systems to execute payments programmatically across multiple payment rails. Launched on March 18, 2026, MPP provides a unified interface for agent-driven commerce, allowing AI systems to initiate,…
What Agentic Commerce Actually Means Agentic commerce represents a fundamental shift in how goods and services are bought and sold online. Instead of a human browsing a website, comparing options, and clicking “Buy Now,” an AI agent handles the entire commercial workflow — discovery, evaluation, negotiation, and payment — on behalf of the user, or…
An open, internet-native payment protocol that enables instant, automatic stablecoin payments directly over HTTP, reviving the long-dormant HTTP 402 ‘Payment Required’ status code to facilitate machine-to-machine and AI-agent transactions.