Crypto World
XDC Says AI Agents Could Upend Invoices and Card Payments
An estimated $390 billion in stablecoin payments took place in 2025, according to McKinsey and Artemis. But inside this market, AI agents are creating an interesting kind of payment activity.
Research shows that agents completed more than 176 million on-chain transactions worth over $73 million between May 2025 and April 2026. But most of them were very small transactions.
The median x402 payment was between $0.01 and $0.10, while 76% of transactions fell below the $0.30 fixed-fee threshold for card payments. USDC accounted for 98.6% of settlements.
Although the transaction amounts are small, the frequency of AI agentic payments is staggering — 173 million.
Software can buy data, compute and other services hundreds or thousands of times without the human behaviors that define conventional commerce. For example, opening an account, entering card details, approving an invoice or waiting until the next banking day.
XDC Network believes this offers an early glimpse of how more payments could work in future.
“Money has always moved as fast as the slowest part of the process, like a bank, a clearinghouse, or normal business hours,” Atul Khekade, Co-Founder of XDC Network, told BeInCrypto. “Agents just show what happens when you get rid of those delays. Payments stop being something you wait around for and turn into a continuous process happening in the background at the speed of the underlying network.”
Machine Payments
Software can transact continuously. An AI service may need a weather feed for one calculation, a market-price API several seconds later, and compute resources immediately afterward.
Each interaction can carry its own price, turning what might once have been a monthly subscription or invoice into thousands of individual transactions.
That helps explain why Keyrock found activity spread across such a large population of AI agents and service directories. The report found more than 104,000 agents registered across at least 15 directories by the end of the first quarter of 2026.
The economics favor systems that can handle payments measured in cents or fractions of a cent. The payments industry is already preparing:
- Stripe launched the Machine Payments Protocol, or MPP, in March. The open standard allows agents and services to coordinate micropayments and recurring payments programmatically, with Stripe supporting stablecoins as well as traditional payment methods;
- Google’s Agent Payments Protocol, or AP2, concentrates on proving user authorization and establishing an auditable record of what an agent was permitted to buy. Google transferred the protocol to the FIDO Alliance in April and added support for autonomous “Human Not Present” transactions;
- Cloudflare entered the market in August with Cloudflare Wallets and cloudflare.pay, giving agents identities and programmable spending controls. Its payment tools support both x402 and MPP;
- Mastercard’s Agent Pay for Machines service, announced in June, is designed for continuous, high-frequency and low-value payments, with settlement across cards, accounts and stablecoins. More than 30 companies, including Stripe, Coinbase, Cloudflare and Tempo, were named among its initial supporters.
Invisible Settlement
XDC’s contribution to this market is XDCAI.tech, which uses the open x402 protocol originally introduced by Coinbase.
x402 turns the HTTP ‘402 Payment Required’ response into a payment mechanism. An agent requests a resource, receives its price, authorizes the payment, and repeats the request with proof of payment. The process allows software to purchase an API call or another digital service within the same interaction.
Coinbase introduced the protocol in May 2025, and its use has since expanded through integrations with companies including AWS.
XDC AI applies x402 to USDC settlement on XDC Network. Users fund a smart wallet with USDC and establish an on-chain spending limit. An agent can then pay an x402-enabled service per request. EIP-3009 allows the payment to be signed off-chain while a relayer covers the network fee, leaving the agent itself to hold and spend USDC.
The system can also connect to AI applications through MCP or a command-line interface, allowing agents running through products including ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and Codex to discover and pay for services.
XDC already had much of the underlying settlement infrastructure in place. Native USDC and Circle’s CCTP went live on XDC in September 2025.
XDC lists two-second block times, six-second finality, and transaction costs around $0.00001, characteristics aimed at high-volume financial applications.
Invoices Could Disappear
Invoices package several functions together. They communicate what is owed, set payment terms, and provide records for reconciliation and accounting. Many businesses then wait days or weeks for the actual transfer to arrive.
Software dealing with software can compress part of that cycle. A service can state its price in a machine-readable format, an authorized agent can evaluate the request, and payment can be settled immediately. Transaction records can then feed directly into treasury and accounting systems.
This comes as agents are taking on increasing responsibility for procurement, cloud spending, portfolio management, and recurring commercial obligations. A company could eventually give an agent a budget and a set of rules, then allow it to buy compute when demand rises, renew services, pay suppliers or rebalance liquidity within those boundaries.
XDC therefore sees today’s one-cent API payment as the smallest version of something much larger.
The card networks see it too. Visa’s stablecoin settlement program reached a $7 billion annualized run rate in April after growing 50% quarter-over-quarter and expanding to nine blockchains. Mastercard announced stablecoin settlement across networks including Ethereum, Solana, Base, Polygon, Tempo and XRPL in June.
The competition is consequently broader than blockchain networks attempting to replace card companies. Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Google, Coinbase, Cloudflare and blockchain developers are increasingly building interoperable pieces of the same machine-commerce market.
The Other Half of the Problem
Greater autonomy raises questions about permission and accountability.
An agent paying 3 cents per API request incurs limited financial exposure. However, an agent managing a corporate treasury or procurement budget needs controls around authorization, counterparties, limits, and auditability, which is why the major platforms are converging on different pieces of the same problem. This explains why:
- Google has concentrated on cryptographic mandates that record what a user authorized;
- Cloudflare lets owners impose spending caps and approved merchant lists;
- Mastercard’s system combines agent credentials with permissioning rules;
- XDC AI places spending limits at the wallet level
Those controls determine how quickly agentic payments graduate from micropayments into larger financial relationships.
They also temper the idea that cards and invoices disappear on a fixed timetable. Card networks are already adapting their products for autonomous software, while invoices serve legal, tax, credit and accounting functions that extend beyond transferring funds.
XDC believes that payment and service delivery can happen almost simultaneously: APIs, data, compute, digital services and other machine-to-machine transactions. Success there could establish the habits and technical standards that would later be used for larger transactions.
Khekade expects the terminology itself to disappear as the technology becomes commonplace.
“In 5 years nobody will describe this as agentic payments, the same way nobody today calls a wire transfer an internet payment,” he said. “It will just be how value moves. The interesting question is not whether that happens, it is which networks were actually built for it versus which ones bolted it on afterward.”
The post XDC Says AI Agents Could Upend Invoices and Card Payments appeared first on BeInCrypto.
How does the body adapt to seasonal temperature changes?
Spending most of your time indoors in the air conditioning might slow the body’s changes, come summer. “But if we spend time outside exercising, or even just being physically active outdoors, we’ll adapt to those conditions,” Périard says.
When you go for a walk on a hot summer day, before you’ve adapted to the heat, both your skin temperature and your core temperature may go up. That sets off alarms in the body, announcing heat stress. “With that, we trigger lots of sweating, and we increase our skin blood flow,” says Périard. Sweat evaporates from the skin, cooling skin down, and blood sent to the surface of the body helps shed heat.
The volume of blood pumping through the body also goes up. More blood volume allows more heat to be shed and supports greater sweating without dehydration. There are also changes at the level of the cell, with some proteins’ production going up to protect normal functioning in greater heat. The process of reaching a fully adapted state might take a few weeks, although the precise details will depend on the situation.
The nonprofit consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen reported that US President Donald Trump “left investors at least an estimated $4.7 billion underwater” since 2022 through his and his family’s digital asset ventures.
According to Public Citizen, investors lost billions of dollars through the Trump family World Liberty Financial governance token, the president’s nonfungible token (NFT) trading cards launched in 2022, his memecoin Official Trump (TRUMP) and Trump Media’s digital asset treasury.
The bulk of the estimated losses, according to the organization, came from investors in the TRUMP memecoin, with $3.2 billion lost, while buyers of World Liberty Financial‘s USD1 stablecoin “haven’t suffered major losses.” Public Citizen said that in the case of the memecoin, the losses represented “wealth transferred to a small group of early buyers rather than money that simply vanished.”
Estimated losses for investors in Donald Trump’s crypto ventures. Source: Public Citizen
According to Public Citizen, amid the $4.7 billion in investor losses, Trump earned $7.2 million from the NFT licensing fees and royalties, more than $600 million from World Liberty token sales and selling an equity stake, $635 million in licensing fees for his memecoin and $197 million in revenue from capital contributions to World Liberty. This did not reflect the stakes in companies and ventures he continues to hold. Some of the figures were included in the president’s 2025 disclosures, reporting $1.4 billion in earnings tied to crypto.
Related: Most Americans say the Trump family’s crypto investments are not ‘appropriate’: Poll
Cointelegraph reached out to the White House for comment but did not receive an immediate response. Spokesperson Anna Kelly has repeatedly said in response to questions on Trump’s crypto investments that there were “no conflicts of interest.”
Crypto bill still weeks away from potential vote
Amid the crypto ventures and more “potentially on the way” from Trump, the group renewed calls for ethics provisions in a cryptocurrency market structure bill, the Digital Asset Market Clarity (CLARITY) Act, claiming that “the president’s policy choices and personal portfolio cannot be separated” and any legislation should require a US president and his family to divest from projects in the industry.
Trump met with crypto company executives last week, calling for a “fair version” of the CLARITY Act to pass once the Senate returns to session next month. The bill is scheduled for a cloture vote on Sept. 15, which will require votes from at least 60 senators to advance.
Magazine: SEC’s proposed crypto rules probably won’t spark new ICO boom
Solana’s native token has posted an 8% increase over the past 24 hours, prompting analysts to make highly bullish bets for the near future.
At the same time, some remain cautious, projecting potential double-digit declines, while certain factors reinforce the pessimistic thesis.
SOL’s Bullish Targets
Just a few hours ago, the asset’s price briefly exceeded $105, marking the highest point since early February. Currently, it trades at around $104, which translates into a solid 42% pump on a monthly scale.
SOL’s strong performance appears to stem from a blend of bullish factors working together. The most obvious one is the broader market resurgence driven by monetary policy changes in the US, among other reasons. Another element is the rising institutional interest, with spot SOL ETFs registering seven consecutive green days: something last observed in May this year.
Next on the list is the return of some of the big players. Analytics platform Lookonchain revealed that a smart trader (who has been inactive in the past two years) has purchased almost 96,000 SOL for nearly $10 million. The analytics resource noted that the market participant has previously completed two Solana swing trades, buying low and selling high both times, ultimately making $4.95 million in total profit. Of course, this has led to speculation that the player might know something the rest of us don’t.
For his part, X user Sweep disclosed that a whale opened a $14.8 million long position in Solana, stating that the investor previously made $1.1 million trading the asset with a 100% win rate.
Many analysts applauded SOL’s revival, expecting further short-term gains. X user Daan Crypto Trades argued that everything “looks good” as long as the price remains above $98.
SKYLINE opined that it is only a matter of time before SOL rises beyond $150, whereas Fuel projected an eventual explosion to $1,000. It is important to note that the higher target seems a bit far-fetched, but yet again, nothing is impossible in crypto.
Going South?
Unlike the aforementioned bulls, Sweep outlined a rather cautious forecast. He thinks SOL could nosedive to $70, giving investors a chance to hop on the bandwagon at lower prices. “After that, Solana will go parabolic,” he added.
The asset’s exchange net flow backs the theory of a short-term decline. According to CoinGlass, investors have been moving aggressively from self-custody to centralized exchanges, which in turn boosts immediate selling pressure.
The post Solana (SOL) Reclaims $100: Is It Time for a Parabolic Rally? appeared first on CryptoPotato.
DoorDash has performed 48% better than SpaceX since Elon Musk’s rocketship company launched for public trading at $150 per share on June 12.
While SpaceX, which famously lost $1 trillion of market capitalization for its investors has crashed 6%, DoorDash has increased in value by 42%.
In fact, based on current stock prices, it would have been better to buy any number of restaurant stocks instead of SpaceX on the Nasdaq. Texas Roadhouse has performed 13% better, Flanigan’s has trounced by 35%, and Cracker Barrel has outperformed by 12%.
Measuring the drawdown from SpaceX’s peak is even more embarrassing.
Since June 16, SpaceX has declined 37%. It hit an intraday high of $225.64 that day, and performance has been down-only since.
DoorDash opened for trading at $155.24 per share on June 12, while SpaceX began trading at $150 — $15 higher than its formal IPO price.
Almost everyone has unrealized losses on SpaceX as a reward for patiently holding their IPO investment through today.
At this point, insiders who bought at the pre-Nasdaq open of $135 per share are the only shareholders who could possibly have an unrealized gain on a position held since SpaceX’s IPO.
Read more: SpaceX crashed too hard for insiders’ bonus unlock
Better earnings from DoorDash than SpaceX
Both companies reported quarterly results during this comparison period. Management asked investors to process entirely different numbers.
Earlier this month, DoorDash reported 970 million delivery orders for the quarter, $33.1 billion of marketplace gross order value, and a healthy $4.5 billion of revenue.
Orders still grew 17% and revenue grew 24% even after adjusting out a Deliveroo acquisition.
It also generated $944 million of operating cash flow and $742 million of free cash flow.
SpaceX filed its own quarterly results this month, revealing that while revenue reached $7.8 billion, the company lost $541 million. The company also disclosed $18.4 billion worth of capital expenditures.
As of this morning, $10,000 invested in DoorDash as of the June 12 open would be worth about $14,200. The same bet on SpaceX would be worth roughly $9,400.
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Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh speaks during a news conference at Federal Reserve Headquarters on July 29, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Win Mcnamee | Getty Images
The Federal Reserve‘s cryptic chairman is set to deliver his much-awaited keynote address Friday in Jackson Hole, with markets trying to anticipate what, if anything, he will have to say on key matters affecting the economy and monetary policy.
Kevin Warsh will speak during the Fed’s annual symposium in Wyoming, an event this year that is titled “Financial Innovation: Implications for Payments and Policy.”
Prior Fed chairs have used the speech as an opportunity to discuss broad policy frameworks and intentions on where they see policy and interest rates headed, beyond the main focus of the conference.
But given his approach so far since taking the reins in May, a time during which Warsh has placed a far greater emphasis on market direction than cues from the Fed, it’s hard to know what to expect.
“People keep asking me what I’m expecting, and I’m not really expecting much of anything. I think it’s hard to predict what he’s going to say,” said Luke Tilley, chief economist at M&T Bank and Wilmington Trust Investment Advisors. “If I had to guess, I would say that he’s going to give a very high-level, broad look at the work of the task forces and how he thinks the Fed should operate, as opposed to a nuts-and-bolts assessment of the economy and expectations for policy.”
Warsh has set up five task forces aimed at taking what he calls a “first principles” look at Fed functions.
Among their tasks are an assessment of how policymakers view inflation, the balance sheet, the data points that influence decisions, communication strategies and communications.
On the final point, Warsh has taken a unique approach compared to his recent predecessors: Rather than seeking to steer reaction through carefully placed signals, he has preferred a more hands-off approach that lets markets interpret data and send signals to the Fed.
It’s a strategy that has met with mixed reviews so far and could generate adverse reaction.
Looking for more information
“I would appreciate some more detail on how he personally thinks inflation happens, or how he personally thinks monetary policy affects inflation, either in timing or through which channels,” Tilley said. “That doesn’t even have to address the reaction function. It’s just the basic plumbing of financial markets and monetary policy, because there are a lot of channels.”
With rising Treasury yields heavily in focus, that makes the stakes particularly high for Friday’s speech.
“We have the most unusual Jackson Hole monetary symposium in recent memory on deck because of Warsh’s unforced errors early in his tenure,” said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM. “The market has now bid this up to be something that I think the Federal Reserve would rather it not be.”
There’s more at stake, though, than market reaction.
Coinciding with the rise in yields, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced an initiative last week in which the department will double the size of its buybacks on off-the-run, or already issued, debt offerings. Treasury usually buys back $2 billion per weekly operation, but will “at least” double that when the next round begins Sept. 9.
While that’s a relatively small chunk of the massive U.S. debt load, the move still sets up a possibly uncomfortable scenario for Warsh. Market interventions from fiscal and monetary authorities seem to contradict Warsh’s stated intentions so far.
“We’re in a unique set of conditions here, where actions by the Treasury have undermined Warsh’s move. Therefore, the Fed chair is in between a rock and a hard place,” Brusuelas said.
Market impacts
One common complaint about Warsh thus far is his reluctance not only to provide so-called forward guidance on where he thinks the Fed is headed but also neglecting to delineate the “reaction function,” or the conditions that would warrant a move in either direction.
Failing to do so again could have significant market consequences, said Mark Cabana, head of U.S. rates strategy at Bank of America.
“In short, we expect Warsh to signal that he is prepared to raise rates again if inflation does not continue to moderate,” Cabana said in a client note earlier this week. “By contrast, if he uses the speech to focus solely on broader structural themes such as productivity or demographics, we worry markets could interpret the message as dovish.”
In such a case, Cabana said he would expect a sell-off in long-dated Treasurys that could send the 30-year yield to 5.5% or higher, which would be more than 0.3 percentage point from the current level to highs not seen since at least the early part of the 21st century.
Specificity, then, could be Warsh’s friend as he prepares to deliver the most important remarks of his tenure so far.
“Warsh is not going to be able to engage in cryptic discourse,” Brusuelas said. “He’s going to need to be a little bit more forthright and clear on what he means.”
Mastercard deepens its ties to the Ripple ecosystem right as XRP ETF flows show signs of life again. The token is still nowhere near its old highs, but the combination of institutional plumbing and fresh capital rotation is enough to put XRP back on trading desks’ watchlists this week.
The XRP Ledger Foundation confirmed Mastercard as a sponsor of the XRP Ledger Hackathon, a 36-hour event running October 24-25 ahead of Ripple Swell 2026 (October 27-29). The Foundation called the payments giant’s involvement “thrilled,” worthy news, framing the decade-old XRP network as “ideally suited for payment use cases.”
This announcement also follows Mastercard’s March move to enlist Ripple alongside Binance, PayPal, Circle, and others in a broader blockchain-payments partnership program.
Meanwhile, 21Shares has adjusted how its XRP ETF prices the underlying asset, a technical but telling shift arriving just as ETF inflows show renewed momentum after a rough patch.
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Can XRP Price Hit $1.50 This Week?
XRP’s intraday range has spanned $1.38 to $1.46, with the current print at the $1.45 area sitting closer to the top of that band. Trading volume has picked up alongside the move, consistent with its August 2026 ETF activity, which saw $56.86 million in net inflows.
Not just ETFs, its trading volume sees the strongest showing since January. The $1.40 handle is now acting as immediate support, with resistance clustering in the mid-$1.40s near the recent high.
For XRP, a clean break above $1.46 opens room toward $1.60-plus, especially if the CLARITY Act clears its September 15 cloture vote and formalizes XRP’s status as a CFTC-regulated commodity. Consolidation between $1.30 and $1.46 could happen too while the market digests whale activity and ETF flow data.
The bear case sees XRP slip below $1.34 and risks a retest of the $1.00 psychological zone that held support in mid-August. Roughly 60% of supply reportedly sits underwater relative to the $1.48 realized price, an overhang worth watching before chasing strength here.
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Bitcoin Hyper Targets Early Mover Upside as Ripple Token Tests Key Levels
XRP holders riding this bounce have earned it; a move off $1.00 back toward $1.45 isn’t nothing. But at a roughly $90 billion market cap, doubling from here means finding another $90 billion in fresh capital, a heavier lift than most presale-stage assets face.
Standard Chartered’s cut of its 2026 target from $8 to $2.80 underscores how institutional expectations have already been recalibrated downward. That gap between JPMorgan’s original $8 billion inflow call and the roughly $1.5 billion actually delivered is exactly the kind of asymmetry that pushes capital toward earlier-stage bets.
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The post Ripple Gets Mastercard Boost as XRP ETF Makes Major Changes appeared first on Cryptonews.
South Korean financial group Mirae Asset plans to build a 150 trillion won ($109 billion) digital asset business around Digital X, the crypto exchange formerly known as Korbit, according to The Korea Times.
The report said Digital X will focus on crypto, stablecoins, real-world assets and security token offerings, with plans to tokenize physical assets including gold, silver and electricity.
The expansion plans follow Mirae Asset Consulting’s acquisition of a 97.15% stake in Korbit in July for a cumulative 141.4 billion won. The exchange was subsequently rebranded as Digital X, marking the first time an affiliate of a South Korean financial group acquired control of a domestic crypto exchange.
Founded in 2013, Korbit was South Korea’s first cryptocurrency exchange. Despite its long history, the exchange accounted for just 0.5% of South Korea’s cryptocurrency trading market in 2025, according to the country’s Fair Trade Commission.
Mirae Asset founder and chairman Park Hyeon-joo outlined the plans at a Digital X employee event in Seoul on Wednesday. “Our initial goal is to make Digital X a core pillar of ‘Mirae Asset 3.0,’” he said, according to The Korea Times.
On Monday, Digital X began waiving trading fees across all won-denominated assets, with the zero-fee policy set to run through Aug. 24, 2027.
Magazine: Bitget CEO isn’t buying the Bitcoin rally — She’s waiting for $50K
Bitcoin price prediction has the leading digital asset trading at $79,400, down -0.4% on the day, as the market digests a violent breakout that briefly punched the price above $81,000 before sellers stepped in.
The pullback looks orderly rather than panicked, more consolidation than capitulation. There’s a bigger question sitting underneath this chart, and it involves a number most retail traders haven’t heard yet.
The move followed a decisive break above the long-standing descending trendline and the $66K-$67K resistance band that had capped BTC for months. Price then cleared the $72K-$74K supply zone in a single expansion leg, tagging roughly $79K-$81K before easing back.
Stronger-than-expected US PCE inflation data triggered some of the profit-taking, hitting gold and equities alongside crypto. That macro sensitivity is worth flagging: rate-path repricing still moves BTC more than most technical levels do, and the next several CPI/PCE prints will matter more than any chart pattern.
Bitcoin Price Prediction: Can BTC Hit $83K This Week?
BTC is consolidating in the high-$78K to $79K range after tapping a three-month high near $81,235.Recent price-prediction coverage flags $80K-$83K as the critical resistance shelf, a former swing-high zone likely to attract sellers on approach. Volume has stayed elevated through the pullback rather than collapsing, which typically favors trend continuation over reversal.
Bull case: daily acceptance above $83,000 would satisfy the threshold CryptoQuant analysts cite for confirming a fresh bull-cycle leg, opening a path toward the $94K-$98K supply zone. Bernstein’s standing $150,000 target sits well beyond that.
Base case: continued chopping between $77K and $81K while the market absorbs the recent gain.
Bear case: a break below the $72K-$74K zone, which would undercut the structural-reversal thesis and point back toward deeper trend support near $65K-$66K. Options positioning into upcoming expiries could accelerate whichever direction wins.
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Bitcoin Hyper Targets Early Mover Upside as Bitcoin Tests Key Levels
A position taken near $66K looks smart right now. Bitcoin price prediction says that buying BTC at $79,500 and chasing a move toward $83K is a different trade; the easy asymmetry has already happened.
For traders who missed the trendline break, chasing spot exposure at these levels means capped upside for outsized risk. That’s pushed capital toward earlier-stage plays with more room to run.
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The post Bitcoin Price Prediction: Can BTC Reclaim $80K This Week? appeared first on Cryptonews.
The UK government is proposing to give the Bank of England a secondary mandate focused on innovation in digital payments, explicitly covering payment systems that rely on “digital settlement assets” such as stablecoins. The move, announced by HM Treasury on Thursday, keeps financial stability as the Bank of England’s primary responsibility while carving out room for experimentation and development of emerging forms of digital money.
According to HM Treasury, the change would apply to the central bank’s oversight of payment infrastructure, with the expectation that the Bank of England will report progress to Parliament each year on how it is advancing the new payments innovation objective. The government plans to embed the mandate through amendments to the Financial Services and Markets Bill, which is set for further debate in the House of Lords on Sept. 7 and 9.
Key takeaways
- The Bank of England would gain a secondary objective to support innovation in payment systems and digital money, while financial stability remains the top priority.
- The mandate is intended to cover systems that use digital settlement assets, including stablecoins, linking UK stablecoin policy more directly to payments development.
- The Bank of England would provide annual updates to Parliament on its innovation work, potentially increasing public accountability for how stablecoin-related rules are implemented.
- The proposal is set to be incorporated through amendments to the Financial Services and Markets Bill, with House of Lords debates scheduled for Sept. 7 and 9.
- Industry reaction may hinge on the practical details of how the Bank of England’s annual reporting is used alongside existing stablecoin requirements.
Why the Bank of England’s “innovation” role matters for stablecoins
The announcement effectively broadens the Bank of England’s remit beyond purely stability-focused oversight. Under the proposal, the Bank of England would extend an existing regulatory approach applied to core market infrastructure—specifically central counterparties (CCPs) and central securities depositories (CSDs)—to also incorporate a payments innovation goal.
The significance for stablecoins is that the mandate is not limited to abstract research or central bank digital money alone. HM Treasury states that the mandate would cover payment systems using digital settlement assets, a phrasing that includes stablecoins and helps clarify that they are part of the UK’s wider payments technology agenda.
For market participants, this matters because regulatory emphasis can shape how quickly new payment rails move from pilot to deployment. A formal “innovation objective,” paired with parliamentary reporting, may also influence how the Bank of England balances caution with experimentation as stablecoin rules and related infrastructure testing develop.
Parliamentary reporting could intensify scrutiny
While the innovation mandate is described as secondary to financial stability, the details of implementation may determine how much room it creates for the stablecoin market to grow under the UK’s framework.
According to Maksym Sakharov, co-founder and CEO of WeFi, the annual reporting requirement could shift the balance toward greater public scrutiny. Sakharov told Cointelegraph that because the innovation objective is “secondary to financial stability,” it “overrides nothing,” but the Bank of England would still have to publish annual accounts of its work on payments innovation and digital money.
He suggested that this publication requirement could matter particularly because it would place additional attention on the stablecoin rules the central bank finalized in June. In other words, even if the innovation mandate cannot dilute stability obligations, the reporting component could increase the visibility of how those obligations are applied in practice.
Existing stablecoin requirements and a key reserve debate
Sakharov focused on specific requirements for “systemic stablecoin issuers,” including a reserve structure that—per his comments—requires issuers to keep at least 30% of their backing assets in non-interest-bearing deposits at the central bank.
He argued that the “reserve split is the first thing to fix,” adding that the requirement could influence whether a stablecoin business is commercially viable. This is a notable point for investors and operators because reserve rules directly affect cost structure, risk management, and the economics of issuance—factors that can shape which issuers can scale while still meeting compliance expectations.
Importantly, the Bank of England’s innovation mandate does not automatically change those reserve mechanics. However, by tying central bank reporting to digital payments innovation, the proposal could create additional pressure—politically and publicly—for regulators to explain how stablecoin market design aligns with broader payments modernization goals.
UK stablecoin momentum: from interoperability tests to cross-border alignment
The new mandate arrives as the UK increases its operational and policy work around stablecoins. In August, a group participating in the Bank of England’s Digital Pound Lab began testing whether a stablecoin could interoperate with a simulated digital British pound for a cross-border trade payment. HM Treasury and project reporting described the experimental platform as not using real customers or money.
Earlier, in mid-July, the UK and US published a joint statement on stablecoins that signaled intent to enable their use in cross-border finance and called for closer alignment between regulatory frameworks. The statement indicates the UK is seeking interoperability not just at the technical level, but also in how rules may converge across jurisdictions.
The UK’s approach also shows a pattern of adjusting earlier constraints. Cointelegraph previously reported that the Bank of England dropped plans to cap individual holdings at 20,000 British pounds and business holdings at 10 million British pounds, replacing those limits with a temporary cap of 40 billion pounds (about $52.9 billion) on issuance for each “systemic stablecoin.” That shift, paired with the July and August policy and testing activity, suggests UK regulators are working toward a structure that emphasizes systemic risk while allowing broader participation than earlier retail- and business-specific limits.
Additionally, the UK government’s direction to expand the Bank of England’s mandate fits within a broader effort to support innovation in tokenized and distributed ledger-based approaches—an idea echoed by City Minister Lucy Rigby, who said tokenisation and DLT could transform financial markets globally.
As lawmakers prepare for House of Lords debates on Sept. 7 and 9, market participants should watch not only whether the mandate is adopted, but also how the Bank of England translates “innovation” into measurable actions—especially in areas like systemic issuer requirements and reserve design that currently influence stablecoin business economics.
The courtroom combat across state and federal courts is so far producing roughly split outcomes, suggesting a big job may be coming for the Supreme Court.
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