TradFi & Fintech

Ripple released the XRPL AI Starter Kit on Wednesday, giving developers tools to build AI-agent payment applications on the XRP Ledger using XRP and RLUSD. The launch lands alongside Mastercard naming Ripple as a partner in Agent Pay for Machines, its agentic-commerce network.

Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M) Wednesday, extending its payments network to autonomous AI agents with 30-plus crypto and fintech launch partners including Coinbase, Ripple, Solana Foundation, Polygon, Aave Labs and Stellar.

Japan’s three largest banks have formalized their stablecoin ambitions, forming a joint council to govern infrastructure and governance for a yen-denominated stablecoin targeting live transactions by the end of Japan’s fiscal year.

Janus Henderson Investors, the $480 billion asset manager, has announced a four-part partnership with Ethena covering CLO fund distribution, a strategic ENA token investment, USDe treasury deployment, and exploration of exchange-traded instruments for USDe distribution.

JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and more than a dozen peers have announced a joint initiative to put commercial bank deposits onchain, operated by The Clearing House and targeting a first-half 2027 launch.

BitMine Immersion Technologies filed a 424B5 prospectus supplement to raise up to $300 million through Series A Perpetual Preferred Stock at a 9.5% cumulative dividend — applying Strategy's STRC capital-markets playbook to a corporate Ethereum treasury sitting on $9.2 billion in unrealized losses.

Western Union has made its USDPT stablecoin available on Bybit's fiat channels in Latin America, making Bybit the first major crypto exchange to integrate USDPT — arriving two days after MoneyGram launched its own rival dollar token on Stellar.

Visa and stablecoin issuer Brale are piloting settlement using SBC, a U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, on Canton Network, the privacy-preserving institutional DLT, testing whether blockchain settlement can meet bank-grade compliance requirements.

Deel is the first enterprise to combine Bridge, Privy, and Tempo in a single product, issuing a custom USD-denominated stablecoin for 1.5 million contractors across 150 countries, starting in Argentina.

The British neobank, with 70 million customers and a $75 billion valuation, will pair FDIC-insured accounts with stablecoin access on a single platform — a tier-one fintech entering US banking with stablecoins designed in, not bolted on.