Every other major federal banking regulator got there first. The OCC proposed in February, the FDIC in April, NCUA in May, Treasury in August. On September 24, 2026, the Federal Reserve released two Notices of Proposed Rulemaking for Board-supervised payment stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act, and the federal supervisory picture was finally complete. That…
I spent most of last week trying to get my smart home to do something genuinely useful, and I ended up mostly just fighting with my own thermostat. You see the marketing, you hear the promises of a seamless, agent-driven future, and then you try to actually use it, and you hit a wall. September…
There is a strangely elegant contradiction at the center of the stablecoin industry: the companies that issue digital dollars are among the largest holders of US government debt in the world, yet the law now explicitly forbids them from sharing any of the interest that debt generates with the people actually holding the tokens. Section…
Meta built a functional commerce surface in exactly 15 days. Between September 8 and September 23, the company integrated Stripe Link, Shopify, PayPal, and major retail, travel, and grocery partners into the Muse agent. This engineering velocity marks a significant inflection for agentic commerce. Yet as the surface area for these agents expands, the underlying…
We used to think of the internet as a place where humans clicked buttons to buy things. Now, it is becoming a place where software agents do the clicking for us, and the plumbing underneath is finally starting to look like it was built for the job. For the past few years, the financial industry…
Agentic commerce is currently a study in mismatched expectations. The Agentic Commerce 2026 report notes that 42% of merchants are testing agentic workflows, yet a mere 3% of transactions actually involve agents. While 70% of industry leaders call this the most disruptive force in commerce, the reality is a fragmented mess of competing protocols. This…
Roughly 61 million American consumers now begin their retail shopping research using AI. They have swapped the search box. What they have not swapped is where the money goes. Six in ten AI-assisted purchases still close on Amazon, according to new PYMNTS data. The search routine changed. The reward did not. This is the central…
Baselayer has raised $35 million in a Series A led by M13, with participation from Torch Capital, Picus Ventures, Afore Capital, and Matt Thompson of Socure. The round, announced September 22, marks the first dedicated capital injection into Know Your Agent identity infrastructure — the layer that lets banks, merchants, and platforms verify which AI…
The digital asset market is currently bifurcated by the regulatory architecture of the GENIUS Act, which has effectively forced a choice between bank-native tokenized deposits and yield-optimized stablecoin wrappers. At the center of this divide is Section 4(a)(11), which explicitly prohibits stablecoin issuers from paying interest or yield to holders. Tokenized deposits function as bank…
The 288-Launch Play At Stripe Sessions on April 29, 2026, the company unveiled 288 new products and features. The number itself is not the story. The story is what they cover: discovery, checkout, settlement, fraud prevention, and financial infrastructure — every layer an agent needs to move money from intent to settlement. “AI is the…