Payments. AI. Commerce. Decoded. 255 articles and counting.
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Mastercard's acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure platform BVNK is not about embracing crypto. It is about adding a settlement layer the card network does not have.
Frank Bisignano built the infrastructure that processes 44 percent of America's card payments. Now he is restructuring the agency that collects $5.1 trillion in taxes. The playbook is familiar. The stakes are not.
In a single week, Convera, Nium, OpenFX, and Mastercard all made the same bet: that stablecoins are the next generation of cross-border payments infrastructure.
The Solana Foundation launched a developer platform with 20+ infrastructure partners and a single API. Its first three users are a card network, a money transfer giant, and a global acquirer.
Coinbase built a payment protocol into HTTP itself. Cloudflare, Google, and Visa joined. The infrastructure for agent-native commerce is being laid in production.
Mastercard's Crypto Partner Program is not about crypto adoption. It is about who controls the translation layer between on-chain and fiat.
Mastercard is retiring the card number. Visa is betting on biometrics. The EU is mandating digital wallets. For the first time, identity and payment credentials are merging into a single layer, and the fight over who controls it will reshape the industry.