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One shared conclusion: issuing stablecoins creates less strategic value than building the infrastructure that makes any stablecoin useful.

From: Stablecoins’ Infrastructure Moment.

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This procedure also helps address lengthy remittance times and reduces exchange rate risks in China-Africa trade. Remitting funds from China to some African countries can take three to four days, while certain jurisdictions on the continent maintain requirements on foreign exchange settlement. Using US dollar-backed stablecoins can speed up transactions and help prevent losses.

From: Explainer | How some Chinese exporters benefit from US dollar-backed stablecoins | South China Morning Post.

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Together, these forces generate an impossibility result: transparent and decentralized trading cannot coexist in equilibrium. All robust equilibria are centralized, while decentralized allocations require knife-edge conditions or fail to exist. Transparency—intended to eliminate intermediaries—systematically recreates and entrenches them.

From: On the Impossibility of Transparent and Decentralized DeFi Trading  by Hanna Halaburda :: SSRN.

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When users are on public blockchains, it’s easy for them to transact with users on other chains — it doesn’t matter which chain they join. When users are on private blockchains, on the other hand, the chain they choose matters much more because, once they join one, they’re less likely to move and risk being exposed. This creates a winner-take-most dynamic. And because privacy is essential for most real-world use cases, a handful of privacy chains could own most of crypto.

~Ali Yahya, a16z crypto general partner

From: 17 things we’re excited about for crypto in 2026 – a16z crypto.

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The web needs a new techno-economic model where value flows automatically. The key transition for the coming year will be moving from static licensing to real-time, usage-based compensation. This means testing and scaling systems — potentially leveraging blockchain enabled nanopayments and sophisticated attribution standards — to automatically reward every entity that contributes information to an agent’s successful task.

~Liz Harkavy, a16z crypto investment team

From: 17 things we’re excited about for crypto in 2026 – a16z crypto.

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The internet becomes the bank
As agents arrive en masse, and more commerce happens automatically in the background rather than through user clicks, then the way money — value! — moves needs to change.

In a world where systems act on intent instead of on step-by-step instructions — moving money because an AI agent recognized a need, fulfilled an obligation, or triggered an outcome — value has to travel as fast and freely as information does today. This is where blockchains, smart contracts, and new protocols come in.

A smart contract can already settle a dollar payment globally in seconds. But, in 2026, emerging primitives like x402 make that settlement programmable and reactive: Agents paying each other for data, GPU time, or API calls instantly and permissionlessly — without invoicing, reconciling, or batching. Developers shipping software updates that come bundled with built-in payment rules, limits, and audit trails — without fiat integrations, merchant onboarding, banks. Prediction markets that self-settle in real time as events unfold — where odds update, agents trade, and payouts clear globally in seconds… without a custodian or exchange.

Once value can move this way, the “payment flow” stops being a separate operational layer and becomes a network behavior: Banks become part of the internet’s basic plumbing, assets become infrastructure. If money becomes a packet the internet can route, then the internet doesn’t just support the financial system… it becomes the financial system.

~Christian Crowley and Pyrs Carvolth, a16z crypto go-to-market team

From: 17 things we’re excited about for crypto in 2026 – a16z crypto.

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“Fiserv sold and operated systems that were so insecure that no regulated financial institution should have been asked to run its confidential data through them,”

From: NC credit union sues Fiserv over ‘insecure’ systems | American Banker.

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To help protect businesses, the Agentic Commerce Suite handles and processes Shared Payment Tokens (SPTs), a new payment primitive for agentic commerce. AI agents use SPTs to initiate payments using a buyer’s saved payment method without exposing payment credentials. Every token can be scoped to a specific seller, bounded by time and amount, and observable throughout its lifecycle to prevent unauthorized agent actions and reduce the likelihood of disputes.

From: Introducing the Agentic Commerce Suite: A complete solution for selling on AI agents.

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Today, we’re introducing the Agentic Commerce Suite: a new solution that gets your business agent-ready. It enables you to sell on AI agents more easily by making your products discoverable, simplifying your checkout, and allowing you to accept agentic payments via a single integration.
To get started, you simply connect your product catalog to Stripe and then, in the Stripe Dashboard, select which AI agents you’d like to sell through. From there, Stripe helps with discovery, checkout, payments, and fraud detection, and will send you order events so you can continue using your existing commerce stack. All components of the Agentic Commerce Suite are modular by default, so you can pick and choose what best meets the needs of your business.

From: Introducing the Agentic Commerce Suite: A complete solution for selling on AI agents.

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At the heart of this transformation lies the European Digital Identity Wallet (EUDI Wallet), which will serve as a trusted and interoperable tool for securely sharing verified identity credentials across borders and sectors. The challenge for financial institutions is twofold: determining when and how these wallets will impact their customer and operational workflows and defining their role within this ecosystem. Traditionally, banks have operated purely as relying parties, consuming verified identities issued by others. Under the new framework, however, they may also act as issuers or verifiers of credentials. This expansion of roles opens opportunities to build deeper trust relationships with customers and to streamline compliance processes through verified digital attestations

From: Europe’s new digital identity framework: urgency and opportunity for financial institutions.

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