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IBM Joins Swift's Blockchain: 17 Banks Already Piloting It

Visa Is Shutting Down the Meme Coin Credit Card Loophole

Crypto Funds Just Posted Their Best Week of 2026 — $3.5B in a Single Week

Upcoming IPOs Are Back. Here’s What Investors Should Beware Of

Vitalik Says AI Will Make Crypto More Secure

Visa Is Shutting Down the Meme Coin Credit Card Loophole

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  Buying meme coins with a credit card came with an unexpected perk: some users could earn ordinary credit card points and cash back on their crypto purchases. Visa is now moving to close that loophole. The issue centered on how meme coin purchases were classified by payment processors . Some Crossmint-powered checkouts used merchant category code (MCC) 5815 , a category intended for digital media such as movies, music and audiobooks, rather than a crypto-specific category. That meant a meme coin purchase could look to the card network like a normal digital-media purchase. How the loophole worked Users of Robinhood Wallet and Fomo could purchase certain meme coins using credit cards through Apple Pay or Google Pay. According to The Block's testing, transactions made with Visa and Mastercard cards were classified as digital-media purchases and could earn normal card rewards, including points and cash back. The classification mattered because crypto purchases are generally t...

21 Banks Just Joined Forces to Build Their Own Stablecoin

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  The stablecoin race is no longer just a crypto-company story. On September 1, 21 major financial institutions announced plans to create a joint company that will issue stablecoins for payments and settlement. The group includes names such as Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank , alongside other major institutions. But the story actually started much smaller. From 10 banks to 21 The consortium began taking shape in October 2025 , when 10 financial institutions were reportedly exploring the creation of a jointly owned stablecoin company. Over the following year, the group expanded as banks became increasingly interested in using blockchain infrastructure for payments and settlement. By September 2026, the project had grown to 21 institutions . What began as an experiment among a smaller group of banks has now become a coordinated attempt by traditional finance to build its own stablecoin infrastructure. The first product is coming in 2027 The consorti...

Japan Wants Stablecoins to Work More Like Money

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Japan is making an interesting distinction between crypto you invest in and digital money you actually spend . The Financial Services Agency has asked for trust-type stablecoins to be exempt from certain mandatory tax-reporting requirements starting in fiscal 2027. Its reasoning is straightforward: these tokens can circulate between large numbers of users, are used frequently for transactions, and simply holding them does not generate income. That distinction matters. Stablecoins are being treated differently Japan's FSA increasingly sees stablecoins as payment instruments rather than investment products. If you're using a yen or dollar-backed stablecoin to pay someone, move money or settle a transaction, taxing every transfer like an investment event creates unnecessary friction. The FSA's proposed exemption is aimed precisely at that problem. But crypto assets are moving in the opposite direction. Japan's 2026 regulatory overhaul reclassified 105 specified ...

Europe Is Building Two Very Different Digital Euros

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Europe could soon have two competing visions for what digital money should look like. On one side is the European Central Bank's digital euro  central-bank money designed to work across the euro area, including offline. On the other is EURR , Revolut's euro-denominated stablecoin, issued by Bridge, a Stripe company, and being rolled out initially to eligible users in Denmark, Poland and Portugal. They're built differently, but they'll ultimately compete for the same thing: How people move euros digitally. The ECB is putting privacy at the centre The digital euro is being designed with a separation between identity and payment data . Users would access it through their bank or another authorised payment provider rather than holding an account directly with the ECB. For offline payments, the privacy goes even further. A user's phone or payment device can transfer digital euros directly to another device without the transaction details being sent to the ECB o...

Let's Discuss Crypto

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  Ripple Is Winning Payments. So Why Is XRP Struggling? Ripple is expanding its footprint in global payments. XRP is struggling to stay above $1. That contradiction is becoming harder to ignore. On Tuesday, August 18, South Korea's Jeonbuk Bank announced a strategic partnership with Ripple to use Ripple Payments for business cross-border transactions. The bank becomes the first regional South Korean bank to adopt the payment service. The announcement sounds like exactly the kind of institutional adoption XRP investors have been waiting for. But there is a problem. The growth of Ripple's payments business does not automatically mean growing demand for XRP. And that distinction may be one of the most important things for XRP investors to understand. Ripple and XRP Are Not the Same Thing The market often talks about Ripple and XRP as if they are interchangeable. They aren't. Ripple is a financial technology company building infrastructure for banks, financial insti...

AI Agents Are Getting Wallets. What Happens When They Start Spending Money?

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  For most of human history, money has required a human. You earn it. You hold it. You decide where it goes. You approve the payment. But artificial intelligence is beginning to challenge that assumption. AI agents are being connected to wallets, stablecoins and payment infrastructure that can allow software to make transactions on behalf of people and businesses. And that raises a much bigger question than whether AI can buy something online: What happens when software becomes an economic participant? AI Doesn't Need a Wallet to Be Smart. It Needs One to Act. An AI agent can already write code, analyze markets, search for information and interact with software. But intelligence alone doesn't give an agent much economic independence. Money changes that. Give an agent access to a wallet with defined permissions and suddenly it can potentially pay for the resources it needs to complete a task. It could pay for an API call. Buy additional computing power. Purchase...

XRP Is Starting to Look Like a Stablecoin That Keeps Depegging

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XRP isn't a stablecoin. It doesn't promise to stay at $1. It isn't backed one-for-one by dollars. And nobody should treat it like one. But look at the way investors sometimes talk about XRP's price, and an unusual comparison starts to emerge. It can feel like watching a stablecoin repeatedly lose its peg. Not because XRP has a peg. But because the market keeps establishing a price level that investors begin treating as an anchor—only for that anchor to disappear when the market moves sharply. Imagine XRP Had a Peg Imagine XRP were supposed to remain at $2. It falls to $1.90. People ask: "Why did it depeg?" It falls to $1.50. Now the question becomes: "Is something fundamentally wrong?" It recovers to $1.80. Optimism returns. Then it falls to $1.20. Suddenly, $1.50 no longer feels like the anchor. That's essentially the psychological game investors can experience with a volatile asset like XRP. The difference is that there wa...

PayPal Was Once Worth $280 Billion. Now Stripe Wants to Buy It.

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  PayPal once looked almost untouchable. In 2021, the payments giant was worth more than $280 billion . Now, one of the world's biggest private fintech companies is discussing buying it. Stripe and private-equity firm Advent International are in talks to acquire PayPal , according to people familiar with the situation. But there is a catch. The first offer wasn't good enough for PayPal. The $53 Billion Offer In July, Stripe and Advent reportedly offered $60.50 per PayPal share . That valued PayPal at roughly $53 billion . PayPal considered the offer too low. The two sides have continued negotiating over a potentially higher price, but there is no deal yet and no guarantee one will happen . PayPal shares closed at about $61.66 on Friday, giving the company a market value of roughly $54 billion . Think about that difference. A company that was once worth more than $280 billion is now being discussed in a deal worth around $53 billion. That's an enormous fall. ...

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