Ledger said is bringing its hardware security model to the fast-growing world of AI agents with the launch of Ledger Agent Stack, an open-source toolkit that allows autonomous software to interact with crypto wallets without ever controlling private keys.

The toolkit lets AI agents read wallet balances, analyze portfolios, prepare transactions and propose payments, but requires every sensitive action to be explicitly approved on a Ledger hardware device before it can be executed.

This is the first product release under Ledger’s 2026 AI roadmap, as the hardware wallet maker bets that human oversight will become a critical security layer as AI agents take on increasingly complex financial tasks.

“Agents propose. Humans approve,” the team wrote in their press release shared with CoinDesk. “Crypto wallets have protected billions on this standard for years,” said Ian Rogers, Ledger’s chief human agency officer, in the press release. “Ledger Agent Stack allows your agent to use these wallets just as easily as humans.”

President Donald Trump said in January he had no plans to pardon Bankman-Fried. He has cleared Binance founder Changpeng Zhao and Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht, along with other white-collar offenders.

Bankman-Fried ran two companies at once. FTX was a crypto exchange, which holds customer money the way a broker does and is not supposed to touch it. Alameda Research was a trading firm he also owned. He moved billions of dollars in FTX customer deposits to Alameda, which spent the money on trades, venture investments, political donations, and Bahamian real estate, while FTX’s software exempted Alameda from the rules that would have forced it to cover its losses like any other trader.

The facade was blown open after CoinDesk obtained Alameda’s balance sheet in November 2022 and found that most of what the firm counted as assets was FTT – a token FTX had created itself and could issue at will.

The collateral propping up Alameda was, in effect, something its sister company had invented. Further cracks emerged after the prominent exchange Binance said, days later, it would sell its FTT holdings, leading to a rapid collapse in FTT prices.

Customers rushed to pull their deposits, and FTX could not return the money because it was no longer there. The exchange filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11, 2022, just over a week after the story ran.

The global market capitalization of tokenized stocks rose to a record $2.3 billion on Wednesday, as more investors sought exposure to blockchain-based equity products.

The Ethereum network boasted the largest market share, at 34%, followed by BNB Chain with 30% and the Solana network with 23%, data aggregator Token Terminal shared in a Wednesday X post.

The largest increase came from Kraken exchange’s xStocks, which accounted for $507 million worth of tokenized stocks and Binance’s bStocks, with $334 million. Ondo Finance remained the largest tokenized stock issuer with $955 million in onchain equities, according to Token Terminal data.

More crypto platforms are bringing traditional investment products onto blockchain rails, in many cases opening up assets to investors outside of the United States. Tokenized stocks can also provide investors with fractional ownership and around-the-clock trading.

The world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, opened zero-commission trading to over 7,000 US tokenized stocks for eligible users on June 1, as part of its strategy to become a multi-asset platform. Coinbase rolled out commission-free US stock and ETF trading with 24/5 availability in December 2025. 

Source: Token Terminal

In April, crypto exchange Bitget launched a proxy offering tied to the pre-initial public offering (IPO) phase of Elon Musk’s aerospace manufacturing and space transportation company, SpaceX.

In January, Vienna-based crypto exchange Bitpanda shared plans to expand its offering to include about 10,000 stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). 

Kraken launched access to 11,000 US-listed stocks and ETFs through xStocks in April 2025 as one of the first major crypto-native platforms. The cumulative trading volume of xStocks exceeded $25 billion within about eight months of launch. 

Related: NYSE parent ICE pushes ‘level playing field’ for 24/7 onchain perps 

Tokenized RWAs surge despite crypto market pullback

The market for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) surged 589% from early 2025 to June 2026, led by government bonds and money market funds, according to a June report from Binance Research.

Tokenized precious metals also attracted about $1.5 billion in value, rising 39% during the period.

The market for tokenized RWAs is becoming more diversified.
Source: Binance Research

However, stocks remain a small fraction of the broader tokenized RWA market, accounting for only about 5.5% of the $34 billion RWA market capitalization. 

Tokenized RWA market overview, all-time chart. Source: RWA.xyz 

About $15 billion in tokenized US Treasury debt represents the largest segment, or 44%, of the RWA market, followed by $4.5 billion in tokenized commodities, accounting for 13%, according to data provider RWA.xyz. 

Magazine: The 5 types of real world assets being tokenized fastest onchain

AI agents are starting to change how payments need to work, and Visa is warning that the world’s card rails were never built for the transaction volume, speed, and cost sensitivity required by machine-to-machine commerce. In a joint report released this week with investment thesis platform Artemis, Visa argues that AI-driven micropayments demand near-zero fees and faster settlement to become commercially viable.

The report links the timing to a capability shift: it says AI agents crossed a key threshold in mid-2025, enabling them to discover unfamiliar APIs, assess pricing, and make autonomous payment decisions. That capability, Visa and Artemis say, is pushing commerce toward an agentic model—while existing infrastructure gaps continue to limit mainstream adoption.

Key takeaways

• Visa and Artemis say traditional cards are optimized for low-frequency, human-paced payments, making them poorly matched to high-frequency AI micropayments.
• The report frames 2025 as a turning point for “agentic” payment automation, driven by AI agents’ ability to autonomously evaluate and execute transactions.
• Visa and Artemis propose convergence: cards remain useful for proxy purchases inside merchant networks, while stablecoins fit machine-native micropayments.
• Some machine-payment standards are already gaining momentum, including Coinbase’s x402 protocol, which the report cites as reaching sharply higher monthly transaction counts in late 2025.

Why AI agents stress existing payment rails

Visa and Artemis describe the underlying mismatch as structural. Cards were designed for human commerce—where transactions tend to be less frequent and costs can be amortized across larger purchase sizes. AI agents, by contrast, are expected to generate many more micro-transactions, often on short time horizons and with different cost constraints.

For agentic micropayments to scale, the infrastructure must support payments with extremely low per-transaction overhead and settlement that enables rapid decision-making loops. The report suggests that without these properties, the economics of autonomous “machine-to-machine” payments remain unfavorable—even if the AI itself can now carry out the payment decision.

The report also warns that infrastructure gaps aren’t just theoretical. It frames current limitations as a direct brake on adoption, arguing that the shift from experimenting with agent capabilities to using them in everyday transactions depends on payment networks that can keep up.

x402 shows demand for machine-native transaction patterns

While Visa and Artemis emphasize the broader need for new infrastructure, they also point to early signs that some agentic payment designs are gaining usage. The report cites the x402 payment protocol developed by Coinbase as an example of standards beginning to attract real transactional volume.

According to the report, x402 processed $15 million in adjusted volume across more than 109 million adjusted transactions since its May 2025 launch. It also highlights a significant acceleration in October 2025: the monthly transaction count reportedly increased from 40,000 to 3.8 million, resulting in 38 million transactions processed in October alone. The report attributes this momentum to the growing practicality of the protocol for machine-style payments.

Stablecoins as an on-ramp to agentic micropayments

A central claim in the Visa-Artemis report is that stablecoins could play a key role in enabling machine-native micropayments without forcing all commerce to migrate away from cards. Rather than positioning stablecoins and card networks as direct competitors, the report argues for a convergence model.

“The trajectory points toward convergence rather than competition: cards for proxy purchases inside existing merchant networks, stablecoins for machine-native micropayments, and hybrid flows where both are used within the same workflow.”

This framing matters for investors and builders because it implies that payment interoperability—not replacement—will likely define near-term strategy. In practice, an AI agent workflow may still need cards for certain merchant-bound transactions, but stablecoins (or other crypto rails) could be better suited for the agent’s “background” actions that require very low fees and fast settlement.

The report adds that a single machine-payments framework could support both stablecoin-based flows and traditional card transactions. Visa says this creates a path for card networks to plug into agentic payments over time, rather than treating agent commerce as a separate universe.

Protocols and tooling: connecting onchain and fiat through tokens

Visa and Artemis point to a broader effort to unify payment approaches using shared payment tokens and machine-payment protocols. The report says Tempo’s Machine Payment Protocol (MPP) now spans both onchain crypto payments and fiat payments through shared payment tokens.

Visa also states that its Card Specification SDK was built to extend the protocol into card-based agent commerce. It further notes that Tempo and Visa’s crypto division launched AI-related tools in March, with different focal points: Visa’s tooling is described as enabling same-day payments for AI agents, while Tempo’s Machine Payments Protocol is designed to make it easier for AI actors to send and receive money.

While the report doesn’t spell out new performance benchmarks for every component, it does make one clear point: adoption depends on interoperability across rails and token frameworks. If AI agents can consistently route payments through a machine-friendly layer, then the difference between stablecoin settlement and card settlement becomes a routing and workflow decision—not a structural barrier.

For readers watching the space, this suggests a practical trend: payment infrastructure will likely evolve through standards, SDKs, and shared protocol logic that allow agentic workflows to move between fiat and crypto settlement depending on cost, speed, and merchant coverage.

Going forward, the key question is whether agentic micropayment demand keeps accelerating fast enough to force mainstream payment networks to meet machine-level cost and settlement requirements. Buyers of payments infrastructure, developers integrating agent payments, and traders tracking adjacent stablecoin usage should watch how quickly token-based frameworks and machine payment standards—like x402 and MPP—translate early transaction growth into consistent, scaled deployments.

The implication does not stop there. According to Imran Lakha, founder of Options Insights, dealers hold a “net long gamma exposure” above $70,000. It means the dealers, who strive to maintain market-neutral exposure while making money from the bid-ask spread, would short or sell into strength above 70,000 to stay neutral or hedged.

“That hedging acts like a brake, capping how fast BTC can run once it gets up there,” Lakha said, adding that ether (ETH) isn’t as exposed to dealer gamma dynamics and can rip much faster.

Bitcoin was recently changung hands near $64,100, down nearly 1% since midnight UTC. Other major cryptocurrencies, including ether, XRP (XRP) and solana (SOL) nursed similar losses, while Nasdaq 100 index futures fell 0.5%.

“As always, there is a risk of a sudden sell-off amid financial market shocks, which could send BTC or global stock indices into a tailspin, but waiting for such moments is a thankless task,” said Alex Kuptsikevich, the chief market analyst at FxPro. “In such conditions, buying in a quiet market at less than half of peak levels looks like a perfectly reasonable tactic for the coming days or weeks.”

Stay alert!

Read more: For analysis of today’s activity in altcoins and derivatives, see Crypto Markets Today . For a comprehensive list of events this week, see CoinDesk’s “Crypto Week Ahead.”

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Galaxy Digital (GLXY) has launched an institutional vault curation business on decentralized lending protocol Morpho, expanding its push into onchain finance with a product designed to help clients earn yield on idle stablecoin balances without managing decentralized finance (DeFi) infrastructure themselves.

The offering, called Galaxy Curator, is available through Fireblocks Earn, giving the custody platform’s more than 2,400 institutional clients access to curated onchain lending strategies from within their existing treasury and custody workflows, the company said in a press release Thursday.

The launch targets a longstanding challenge for institutional crypto holders. Large stablecoin balances often remain uninvested between settlements, deployments and operational holds due to the complexity and risk associated with directly interacting with decentralized finance protocols.

The rollout comes as professional vault curation has emerged as one of the fastest-growing segments of DeFi, with asset managers, trading firms and fintechs racing to package institutional-grade onchain yield products. Over the past year, firms including Bitwise, Gauntlet, Steakhouse Financial, Wintermute, Dialectic and RockawayX have launched or expanded curated vault offerings on Morpho.