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.
Anthropic launched Claude Platform on AWS this week. The technology has been available for two years through Bedrock. What changed is the contract.
Allbirds sold its footwear assets, signed a $50M funding deal, and rebranded as NewBird AI, an enterprise compute lease business. The stock rose 600 percent on the announcement, giving back 30 percent the next day. The bubble is not in AI. The bubble is in the word.
Anthropic is briefing EU regulators on why it refused to ship Mythos. OpenAI is handing enterprises a cyber-tuned model and $10M in credits. The split just became policy, written by the labs themselves.
Communities across America are blocking, delaying, and voting down the AI infrastructure buildout. Two thirds of protested projects never break ground. The $690 billion capex wave we documented in State of the Stack just hit a wall made of town hall meetings and ballot measures.
Project Glasswing pairs an unreleased frontier model with 50+ organizations to patch the world's most critical software before attackers catch up.
Model Context Protocol started as a developer tool. Now it is inside credit decisioning, payment operations, and fraud detection systems. The compliance and auditability case is driving adoption faster than anyone expected.
85% of banks expect it to get worse. Here is what is missing.
Anthropic acquired Coefficient Bio for $400 million in stock. The startup was eight months old with fewer than 10 employees. The founders came from Genentech's drug discovery unit. Claude is going into science.
OpenAI acquired TBPN and put it under its chief political operative. The advertising business winds down. Editorial independence is promised. The timing, weeks before an IPO, tells the real story.
Anthropic accidentally exposed details of Claude Mythos, a model it warned governments could make large-scale cyberattacks far more likely. Then it leaked its own source code. Now Congress wants answers.
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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.
Revolut's 2025 results are not a fintech success story. They are evidence that a technology company can build a full-stack financial institution from scratch, reach profitability at scale, and outgrow incumbent banks in their own markets.
The US imported $450 billion in chips and computing hardware in 2025, up 60 percent in 12 months. Every chip crossed a border and settled through a payment rail. The AI boom is a payments story.
Coinbase built a payment protocol into HTTP itself. Cloudflare, Google, and Visa joined. The infrastructure for agent-native commerce is being laid in production.
Five weeks ago, we published The $650 Billion Squeeze. The argument was straightforward. Big Tech was writing checks that rivalled national GDPs to build AI infrastructure.
While the world watches chatbots, generative AI is quietly transforming the boring infrastructure that makes commerce work.
Mastercard's Crypto Partner Program is not about crypto adoption. It is about who controls the translation layer between on-chain and fiat.
The card networks are not fighting over who processes the payment. They are fighting over who defines the rules when AI agents spend your money.
The Iran conflict is threatening chip supplies, submarine cables, and energy costs simultaneously. For an industry building agentic commerce on the assumption of abundant AI infrastructure, the timing could not be worse.
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.