Stablecoin-based cards could soon account for double-digit percentages of all cards in some Latin American markets, John Timoney, head of strategic partnerships at Rain, a payments infrastructure platform, said.

Retail stablecoin card spend grew about 105% to 106% over the past year, Timoney said during a panel at Consensus Miami 2026. Cards are physical or virtual, allowing users to spend stablecoins such as tether USDT$0.9997 and USD Coin (USDC) directly from a digital wallet for daily purchases.

Rain provides stablecoin infrastructure for card issuers and recently became a Mastercard Principal Member, allowing it to offer credit and prepaid cards on the Mastercard network. Rain and Mastercard are also exploring on-chain settlement for some card program flows using regulated stablecoins.

The company is not trying to replace card networks, Timoney said. It is trying to make stablecoin balances usable through existing networks that already reach merchants globally.

“The card networks over decades have rolled up hundreds of millions of merchants,” Timoney said. “Rain explicitly did not want to reinvent the wheel.”

Spend patterns are also becoming harder to distinguish from ordinary card activity, he said. Stablecoin card users are spending across typical merchant categories, including large global merchants and everyday purchases.

“There’s nothing too remarkable about that,” Timoney said. “And I think that is what is remarkable.”

Despite their growth, stablecoin cards account for less than 1% of global card spend, senior vice president of business development at Consensys Ray Hernandez said during the same panel.

Crypto card adoption

Latin America has become one of the clearest markets for adoption, Timoney added. Stablecoin cards are being used across custodial and non-custodial wallets, crypto exchanges and products that abstract the stablecoin experience from users.

The merchant still receives fiat in many of those transactions. That separates card-based stablecoin spending from direct crypto push payments, where merchants may have to manage crypto settlement, volatility and transaction risk more directly.

The bigger change may be behind the scenes. Rain says stablecoin settlement lets card programs settle on weekends and holidays, reducing trapped capital by more than 40% in some cases.

Traditional card programs often need to pre-fund network obligations or borrow from networks when banking rails are closed. Stablecoins can move outside bank cut-off times.

That can make rewards and card economics more flexible, Timoney said. Capital that would otherwise sit idle can be used elsewhere in the business.

Mastercard has been moving deeper into stablecoin payments. Earlier this year Binance, PayPal and Ripple joined Mastercard’s broader blockchain payments push. That push saw the payments giant agree to buy stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK for up to $1.8 billion.

Christian Rau, Mastercard’s senior vice president of digital assets and blockchain, said mainstream adoption will depend on making the technology invisible to consumers.

“Other than the people in this room, nobody says ‘oh, I just did an onchain payment’,” Rau said. “The normal benchmark these days is you have a card sitting on your iPhone or on an Android. You tap it, the money is gone.”

The consumer-facing pitch is not an onchain payment, he added. It is the ability to spend any asset in real time, with the network protections users already expect.

Hernandez said the next stage depends on easier on-ramps, abstracted network fees and more local payment infrastructure. Today’s crypto card users are still mostly crypto-native consumers who already hold assets on-chain.

MetaMask is expanding its card strategy around self-custody, Hernandez said. The MetaMask Card, developed with Mastercard and Baanx, lets users spend from a self-custodial wallet while assets are converted into fiat at the time of purchase.

“If all we’re doing is replicating the Apple Pay experience, I think it’s going to be okay, but I don’t think we’re going to overtake,” Hernandez said.

Paying in crypto

That view drew a challenge from GoMining CEO Mark Zalan, who argued that stablecoins and card infrastructure add unnecessary intermediaries to crypto payments.

Zalan said users want to hold bitcoin in self-custody and spend it without converting into stablecoins or relying on off-ramps. He described conversion layers and payment intermediaries as “little helpers” taking small fees from each transaction.

“Protection is another word for rent-seeking,” Zalan said, referring to the consumer protections embedded in card transactions.

Timoney pushed back, saying payments are not only money movement. Card networks also handle chargebacks, merchant risk and other protections consumers and merchants expect.

Rau made a similar point. Most consumers were “socialized with deposit insurance” and chargeback protection, he said.

“Payment is more than moving money from A to B,” Rau said. “From a consumer perspective, the experience of payment is interoperability, safety and security.”

MIAMI – Coinbax won the $20,000 grand prize at Consensus Miami’s PitchFest after pitching a system designed to help banks and financial firms manage compliance for stablecoin payments.

The company, founded by former Jack Henry executive Peter Glyman, builds programmable escrow infrastructure that adds controls to wallet-to-wallet crypto transactions. The software is meant to reduce the risks financial institutions face when moving funds onchain.

“Banks want to use stablecoins for payments, but they need to get their compliance people comfortable with the idea of moving money onchain,” Glyman said during his presentation.

He described a future where “wallet addresses [are] associated with every bank account,” with transactions moving between banks, fintech firms and self-custody wallets. In that environment, he argued, compliance checks need to happen directly onchain rather than only through traditional banking intermediaries.

Coinbax uses smart contracts to hold funds in escrow while third-party services verify identity, sanctions screening and transaction risk. Funds settle only after conditions are met.

“We provide a trust layer,” Glyman said. “We provide programmable escrow that adds the control layer to these payments.”

The startup launched in October, closed a seed round in December and is already live on Base mainnet, according to Glyman. He said the company is working with banks, custody firms and wallet providers on pilot programs.

Second place went to Tashi, a decentralized infrastructure project focused on coordinating and managing AI systems across distributed networks.

Miami — Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao said a revived Binance.US is one possible path for giving American crypto traders access to better prices.

Binance wants to help restore U.S. users’ access to global crypto liquidity, CZ said, naming a possible Binance.US revival as one route after years of limited engagement in the American market.

“The best liquidity in crypto is outside of the U.S.,” CZ said during Consensus Miami 2026. “Crypto is one of the very few markets that U.S. don’t have access to the best prices.”

“I think in our ecosystem, Binance has the best liquidity in this market,” he continued. “We would love to be able to provide that in some way, either revitalize Binance.US or somehow provide U.S. the best liquidity in the world and the best prices for the consumers.”

The comments come two years after CZ resigned as Binance CEO and pleaded guilty to numerous U.S. charges. Zhao was later sentenced to four months in prison, released in 2024, and pardoned by President Donald Trump last year.

Binance.US has been plotting a comeback under CEO Stephen Gregory, with plans to expand beyond spot crypto trading into derivatives and prediction markets.

CZ said U.S. policy toward crypto had “changed in the last year and a half or so,” pushing him to spend more time with U.S. builders, regulators and policymakers. He said the U.S. is now “leading in the world in terms of crypto policies,” citing market structure legislation, including the CLARITY Act.

The U.S. still lacks access to the deepest liquidity, he said, even as developers and crypto firms return after years of regulatory pressure.

“Many of the U.S. people left,” Zhao said. “They went to Abu Dhabi, they went to Hong Kong, Singapore. Many of the developers left, and then they’re now coming back.”

Zhao also framed BNB Chain as underexposed in the U.S. after years of limited domestic activity. He said the network now has a builder house in New York, a small San Francisco presence and more U.S. investment activity through YZi Labs.

YZi Labs, formerly Binance Labs, rebranded last year with Zhao taking a more active investment role. The firm later introduced a $1 billion fund for BNB Chain projects.

“BNB in particular has not had a lot of exposure in the U.S., … Other layer 1 blockchains have done much more marketing, community building, builder houses, etc., in the U.S.”

Zhao said U.S. institutions had limited access to BNB until recently, leaving the token behind other major cryptocurrencies in exchange-traded products and institutional distribution.

“The lack of access for institutions to BNB is actually an opportunity for BNB investors,” Zhao said. “When the institutions come in, that’s generally better for the token.”

Zhao also said AI agents will need crypto rails to transact with each other, arguing that blockchains are better suited than credit cards or bank rails for automated cross-border payments.

“Credit cards don’t have an API,” Zhao said. “The most native thing for the agent to use is obviously a blockchain.”

He added that BNB Chain should position itself as payments infrastructure for AI agents, though he said the market is still in its earliest stage. “BNB Chain should just be the money for agents,” he said.

AI agents will become more relevant than humans on the internet within the next decade, a shift already already forcing Google, Facebook and Amazon to react, said Charles Hoskinson.

In his keynote at Consensus Miami 2026 on Wednesday, Hoskinson also said that “by 2035, the majority of searches, commerce and activity on the internet will be AI agents instead of people.”

He said the change threatens existing business models. “Amazon, Google, Facebook, they’re terrified of the agentic revolution,” Hoskinson said, adding that companies are investing heavily because “all of their business models are going to be disrupted.”

AI Agents do not click ads or have brand preferences, Hoskinson explained, saying this “threatens the advertising-driven models of platforms like Google, Amazon and Facebook.”

“Why do you think Google is interested in x402?” he asked his audience of the Coinbase-backed protocol that enables AI agents and applications to make direct, programmatic payments over the internet using stablecoins and crypto rails.

Hoskinson noted this shift will change how crypto is used, adding that artificial intelligence (AI) will increasingly handle tasks such as due diligence, transaction execution and interaction with decentralized finance.

Hoskinson AI agent forecast echoes that of Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, who said “very soon there are going to be more AI agents than humans making transactions” and Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao, who predicted they “will make one million times more payments than humans.”

On the flipside, Hoskinson said AI agents are the “single best thing to ever happen to cryptocurrencies” because it simplifies user experience.

The Cardano founder warned crypto users against relying on intermediaries rather than maintaining direct control of their assets, which is the principle, he said, crypto was built on.

“You have to own your data. You have to own your identity. You have to own your money,” he said, adding that users are “outsourcing that to custodial wallets,” “permissioned networks,” and “third parties that they come to regret trusting when they get their account shut down.”

He also pointed to fragmentation across blockchain ecosystems as a barrier to progress, saying it has slowed down development. “There’s been 11 million tokens issued over the years. We have enough of them,” Hoskinson said. “What I want is cooperation. What I want is the mission to be achieved.”

User experience remains a key issue limiting user adoption, said Hoskinson, who described the current crypto onboarding processes as complex and prone to error. “That is the user experience in 2026,” he said. “Is this like a product you want to use?”

He said technologies such as account abstraction and chain abstraction could simplify how users interact with crypto systems, while maintaining control over assets and identity.

Hoskinson highlighted changing attitudes among financial institutions, noting that JPMorgan has moved from restricting crypto-related activity to developing blockchain-based products. “Back when we started JPMorgan was turning people’s bank accounts off and now they have a blockchain product,” he said.

Disclosure: The author of this story owns shares in Strategy (MSTR).

Strategy (MSTR), the world’s largest publicly traded corporate holder of bitcoin, floated the idea of selling bitcoin in order to cover its dividend obligations.
Executive Chairman Michael Saylor suggested, during its Q1 2026 earnings call, the company may sell a portion of its bitcoin holdings to fund dividend payments, stating: “We will probably sell some bitcoin to pay a dividend just to inoculate the market and send the message that we did it.”

The company disclosed a $12.54 billion net loss for Q4, while maintaining a total bitcoin position of 818,334 BTC at an average acquisition cost of $75,537 per coin.

Strategy has an outstanding dividend obligation of approximately $1.5 billion, including annualized preferred stock dividends and interest on outstanding debt. The firm has roughly 18 months of dividend coverage, based on its USD reserves relative to these obligations.

Saylor described the model as leveraging credit to acquire Bitcoin, allowing it to appreciate, and then selectively selling portions of the asset to meet dividend commitments.

“You buy bitcoin with credit, you let it appreciate, and then you sell bitcoin to pay the dividend.

Following the announcement, Strategy’s stock fell more than 4% in after-hours trading, while bitcoin declined below $81,000.

GameStop (GME) is aiming for a major expansion with a proposed $55.5 billion acquisition of online marketplace eBay (EBAY), raising fresh questions about whether its bitcoin BTC$79,943.49 holdings could help fund the deal.

The video game retailer, which holds about $368 million worth of BTC, submitted a non-binding offer Sunday to buy eBay for $125 per share in cash and stock. The bid represents a 46% premium to eBay’s share price in early February, when GameStop began building a position. The company said it now holds a 5% economic stake through shares and derivatives.

A deal of this size would likely require significant cash. GameStop said it expects to fund the offer using its $9.4 billion of “cash and liquid investments” on its balance sheet and up to $20 billion in financing, backed by a letter from TD Securities.

Will GameStop sell BTC?

That raises fresh questions about whether GameStop will sell its BTC to help pay for the deal.

The acquisition plan follows earlier remarks from CEO Ryan Cohen, who said in February he was pursuing a “very, very, very big” acquisition of a public consumer firm. He described the plan as “way more compelling than bitcoin” and left open the option of selling the company’s crypto holdings to fund a deal.

GameStop disclosed last month that it shifted about 4,709 BTC to Coinbase Prime, crypto exchange Coinbase’s prime brokerage platform for institutions, as part of a covered-call options strategy, keeping exposure to bitcoin while generating income.

The company held little over $9 billion in cash and accounted for its $368 million bitcoin stash as “receivables” after the Coinbase Prime maneuver. Those items add up to the $9.4 billion balance sheet power that could be used to fund the acquisition.

In an interview with CNBC, Cohen also said the firm has the “ability to issue stock in order to get the deal done.”

GameStop did not respond to a request for comment on its plans for its bitcoin holdings by press time.

The proposed eBay deal would turn GameStop into a broader e-commerce player. It will also determine whether the firm’s bitcoin remains a long-term holding or becomes a funding source for the expansion.

Tether, issuer of the largest stablecoin by market capitalization, said first-quarter net profit was $1.04 billion and excess reserves increased to a record $8.23 billion.

The company did not provide year-earlier or fourth-quarter figures. It reported a net profit of more than $10 billion for all of 2025.

The amount of the dollar-pegged USDT in circulation remained stable, with total token-related liabilities of about $183 billion as of March 31, the firm said in its quarterly report. The company’s total assets are just under $192 billion, it said.

The report was released at a time of increasing global demand for stablecoins as they find uses outside crypto trading as a mechanism for international payments. Just this week, Visa announced expansion of its stablecoin settlement pilot to nine blockchains, adding Base, Polygon, Canton Network, Arc and Tempo to existing support for Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche and Stellar.

Excess reserves, up from $6.3 billion at end-2025, were supported by “continued profitability and a reserve base concentrated in short-duration, high-quality liquid instruments,” the company said.

USDT is the third-largest cryptocurrency, behind bitcoin BTC$78,228.80 and ether (ETH), with a market capitalization of just under $190 billion.

The majority of Tether’s reserves are held in U.S. government-backed instruments and short-term liquidity facilities, the firm said, adding that it is the 17th-largest holder of U.S. Treasuries globally. Tether has become a top 10 buyer of U.S. Treasuries over the past two years, surpassing Taiwan, Israel and the UAE.

Its physical gold holdings are roughly $20 billion and its bitcoin reserve is approximately $7 billion, it said.

Coinbase’s (COIN) asset management arm said Thursday it’s rolling out a credit fund tied to stablecoin markets, with plans to offer investors onchain access through a tokenized share class.

The fund, called the Coinbase Stablecoin Credit Strategy (CUSHY), targets institutional investors seeking yield from lending activity tied to digital assets.

Investors will have the option to hold shares onchain through tokenization specialist Superstate’s platform. The fund will be available on Ethereum, Solana, and Base, Coinbase’s blockchain built on Ethereum.

The fund reflects a growing overlap between traditional credit markets and crypto infrastructure. Transactions in stablecoins — cryptocurrencies with prices pegged to fiat money — have surged in recent years as more financial activities migrate onto blockchains. The supply of stablecoins doubled to $300 billion in the past two years, while monthly transaction volume tripled to $1.2 trillion.

“Stablecoins are the bedrock of the next financial era,” said Anthony Bassili, president of Coinbase Asset Management. “With CUSHY, we are fusing the efficiency of digital rails with the rigor of traditional credit.”

Fund tokenization trend

The move also highlights a broader trend: Asset managers are starting to treat tokenization as an extension of existing products for broader distribution, a shift that could bring more traditional finance activity to the blockchain environment.

CUSHY’s tokenized share class is powered by FundOS, Superstate’s platform for bringing investment funds onchain. Rather than building custom token structures, asset managers can use FundOS to issue and manage blockchain-based shares alongside traditional ones.

That approach is gaining traction. Invesco, an asset manager with more than $2 trillion in assets under management, recently became the first large asset manager to adopt the platform, underscoring a move toward shared infrastructure rather than one-off tokenization efforts.

“We are the connective tissue between onchain demand and managers who have highly sophisticated institutional experience,” said Jim Hiltner, co-founder of Superstate.

Superstate said it expects several more asset managers to adopt the platform in the coming months, suggesting early momentum beyond initial partners.

Superstate CEO Robert Leshner said the partnership will allow the fund to expand across multiple blockchain networks and into decentralized finance (DeFi) use cases.

*** NOT FOR PUBLICATION – EMBARGOED TILL 5AM ET APRIL 30 ****

XO Market is betting that the future of prediction markets won’t be dictated by centralized teams deciding what people can trade on, but by users themselves.

The startup, which just closed a $6 million seed round led by 20VC, Picus Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Venture Together and a group of angels including Australian cricket captain Pat Cummins, is positioning itself as the “YouTube of prediction markets,” according to co-founder Ali Habbabeh.

“Today’s major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket act more like Netflix,” Habbabeh told CoinDesk in an interview. “They decide what markets exist. We’ve flipped that model entirely. On XO, users create the markets themselves.”

The distinction is critical. While incumbents rely on internal teams to curate and list prediction markets, XO allows individuals or companies to spin up their own markets, set parameters and fees, and let others trade on them. The result, Habbabeh said, is a broader, and often more creative, set of opportunities.

“We believe the future of prediction markets is user-generated. The best markets aren’t decided by a platform, they emerge from the community.”

Mainnet beta launch

The model appears to be gaining traction. Since starting its mainnet beta in mid-November, XO has generated more than $150 million in trading volume, attracted over 30,000 users and seen more than 600 user-created markets. An earlier pilot began in April 2025 with a testnet rollout.

“The metrics look strong because the incentives are aligned,” Habbabeh said. “If you create a compelling market, people trade on it. If you don’t, it dies naturally.”

That “natural selection” dynamic may be a double-edged sword. Even Habbabeh points out that competing user-generated platforms like Nine Lives and Warm Protocol struggled to convert the concept into meaningful liquidity, resulting in inactive markets or minimal trading activity.

It is unlikely that Polymarket or Kalshi will offer user-generated markets, according to Habbabeh, because they would need to find market makers willing to provide liquidity for thousands of different events and would have to alter their infrastructure. Their current models are also extremely profitable, he added.

Prediction markets are gaining traction beyond their niche origins, drawing increased interest from retail traders and institutional participants alike as a new venue for pricing uncertainty. Advances in digital-asset infrastructure have lowered barriers to entry, while a series of high-profile political and economic events has underscored the limitations of traditional forecasting tools.

The result is a growing number of platforms where contracts tied to real-world outcomes are traded with increasing liquidity, positioning prediction markets as an emerging, and lightly regulated, complement to conventional financial markets.

Total industry volume jumped roughly fourfold to more than $60 billion in 2025, up from about $15 billion–$16 billion the year before, with platforms like Polymarket driving much of that growth.

On Polymarket specifically, monthly trading exploded from just $54 million at the start of 2024 to over $2.6 billion the following November, helping push cumulative volume past $9 billion in a single year.

XO Vaults

Alongside its core platform, XO is preparing a new product aimed at “democratizing” another key part of the ecosystem: market making.

The forthcoming “XO Vaults” will allow users to pool capital into strategies that provide liquidity across prediction markets, something traditionally dominated by professional firms.

“On platforms like Kalshi or Polymarket, liquidity is controlled by a handful of large market makers,” Habbabeh said. “With XO Vaults, anyone can become a market maker.”

Users will be able to create vaults tied to specific strategies or categories, such as sports or politics, and earn fees by supplying liquidity. Others can invest in those vaults, effectively gaining exposure to market-making returns without actively trading.

“It’s similar to copy trading, but for liquidity provision,” Habbabeh said. “We’re targeting yields of around 8% to 10% annually based on what market makers typically earn.”

The product, expected to debut within weeks, could introduce a new yield primitive in decentralized finance, blending prediction markets with passive income strategies.

“Not everyone wants to bet on outcomes,” Habbabeh said. “Some people just want to earn from the activity around those markets.”

Parlays

The XO team is also developing a feature it says could reshape how parlays work in prediction markets.

“It’s not your typical copy-paste of sportsbook parlays into prediction markets,” said Habbabeh.

The feature, tentatively named “XO Stories,” aims to give users more creative control by linking multiple outcomes beyond traditional parlays. Though details remain limited, the team says pricing will be dynamic, offering a new take on prediction markets.

Built on XO Vaults, the system is meant to support complex, multi-outcome structures without simply aggregating existing trades. Habbabeh shared few details, but suggested it could reshape how users think about and use parlays.

The best content comes from users

Despite increased regulatory scrutiny around prediction markets, particularly in the U.S., Habbabeh said he believes XO’s onchain, permissionless design could offer advantages.

“Everything on XO is transparent and onchain,” he said. “That puts us in a different category compared to more centralized platforms.”

For now, the focus remains on growth and product expansion.

As XO builds out its ecosystem, Habbabeh is confident the user-generated model will continue to differentiate it.

“The internet showed us that the best content doesn’t come from centralized studios, it comes from users,” he said. “We think prediction markets will follow the same path.”

Read more: AI agents are quietly rewriting prediction market trading

Artificial intelligence is pushing financial systems toward a model where machines execute transactions at scale, raising new challenges around control, oversight and infrastructure, said Microsoft and Chainalysis executives.

Bill Borden, corporate vice president of worldwide financial services at Microsoft, said Tuesday that legacy systems will face increasing pressure as transaction demands grow more complex. The tipping point comes when “latency, scale, complexity are starting to impact your ability to compete,” forcing firms to rethink how their systems are built, he said at an event hosted by Alchemy in New York City.

While automation has long been part of finance, Borden said the focus is now shifting from capability to trust. “It’s not about, can technology automate … executing a hedging strategy — that can be done. The question is: can you trust it? Can you audit and control?” he said.

Microsoft, which offers its own AI assistant in many of its products, is developing tools to manage that transition, including systems that assign identities and permissions to AI agents and track their actions. In regulated environments, Borden said firms must be able to show “what controlled it” and whether a system “followed the policy” when decisions are made without direct human input.

Jonathan Levin, co-founder and CEO of Chainalysis, said the crypto sector already offers a working model of automated finance. Blockchain networks process large volumes of transactions through smart contracts and software-driven wallets, creating what he described as an environment similar to agent-based systems. “We’ve been preparing for these moments way before other parts of the financial services industry,” Levin said.

That experience extends to risk management. Levin pointed to efforts to track illicit funds across “thousands of different wallets” as an example of the kind of monitoring needed in a system where transactions happen at scale without direct human input.

Looking ahead, both executives expect a mix of systems to coexist. Levin said “the majority of commerce in 10 years time will be settled on public infrastructure,” while Borden pointed to a more integrated approach linking public blockchains, private networks and existing rails.

“I do think traditional rails will continue to exist,” Borden said, with software acting as the layer that connects them.