A defining week for PayFi. The world’s biggest payment networks are here. Stablecoins are becoming the most essential infrastructure layer in global finance.
Headlines ↓
1️⃣ @Mastercard went live with multi-stablecoin settlement covering Solana, Ethereum and more with always-on intraday, weekend, and holiday settlement.
2️⃣ SWIFT launches a new cross-border payments framework with 50+ banks including @JPMorgan, @HSBC, @Citi and @BNPParibas, promising instant settlement, and end-to-end traceability across major remittance corridors by the end of June.
3️⃣ @MoneyGram launched MGUSD on @StellarOrg, issued by @stripe's bridge with @FireblocksHQ wallet infra embedded in MoneyGram's own payment network.
4️⃣ @RobinhoodApp launched Agentic Trading and an Agentic Credit Card - letting AI agents trade and transact on users' behalf via Robinhood's MCP.
5️⃣ @solana shipped native subscription billing and spending-limit tools to mainnet, giving developers a shared way to build recurring payments, payroll flows and AI-agent budgets directly onchain.
6️⃣ @Morpho open-sourced Midnight, a fixed-term fixed-rate non-custodial RWA lending protocol with offer-based markets, async matching, and cross-chain settlement built for any asset, including permissioned RWAs.
7️⃣ @Paxos Securities Settlement Company received full SEC registration - the first blockchain firm authorized as a central securities depository for U.S. equities, unlocking 24/7 same-day settlement alongside DTCC.
8️⃣ @deel launched stablecoin salary payouts powered by @bvnk_. Employers fund payroll in fiat or stablecoins, employees choose how to receive their net salary.
9️⃣ @coinbase integrated with @Checkout to bring USDC and USDT payments to 1,000+ enterprise merchants.
1️⃣0️⃣ @Citi projected tokenized securities to grow from $17B today to as much as $5.5T, with stablecoins reaching $1.9T by 2030.
Mastercard is rolling out 24/7 stablecoin settlements.
Western Union launched USDPT on Solana.
MoneyGram launched MGUSD on Stellar.
Huma's APAC CEO @jessc2049 breaks down why Huma and PayFi are set to win as stablecoins continue to scale and regulatory clarity locks in.
PST generates yield from real world payments:
• Cross-Border Prefunding
• Trade Finance
• Credit Card Financing
• T+0 settlements
To date, Huma has processed $13B in such transactions with zero defaults.
Read the full PST risk research: https://t.co/W90n7VXeSB
BREAKING:
Someone just put up 10,000,000 $HUMA as collateral on @jup_offerbook.
Looking to borrow 128,157 USDC at 6.4% APY for 30 days.
For Lenders: This is your window. Offer expires in 6d 13h.
@humafinance
Link: https://t.co/vcz8lafSLU
Code: Y42P6ALE
If you use my referral link, complete KYC, and spend over $100 within 30 days, I’ll receive a $25 referral reward.
Will personally share $15 back with you, basically free money if you were already planning to use the card 🤝
Malaysians looking for crypto card/neobanks should just use @JupSpend. Let me explain.
Why?
✅ USDC Cashback 4% (minimum) to 10%
✅ Cashback into spending balance within seconds
✅ Seamless with Apple Pay/Duitnow
Get $15 if you use my referral code/link to register 👇
Wrong anchor.
Manuel is a legend in smart contract security, so when he issues a PSA to exit DeFi because AI agents make it fundamentally unsafe, people listen. But his conclusion anchors on the wrong premise.
Credit card fraud was once considered an existential threat to digital commerce. The industry didn’t solve it by eliminating fraud - that was never possible. They won by engineering the per-incident blast radius down to what the system could absorb: $0 cardholder liability, tokenization, real-time detection, and issuer insurance. Trillions flow through card networks daily on top of a permanent attack surface because they anchored on containment, not elimination.
History repeats this pattern across aviation, the early internet, and traditional banking. Each was once labeled doomed or fundamentally unsafe. Each won, not by becoming error-free, but by iterating until the system could absorb the failures it couldn't prevent.
Yes, AI has lowered the cost of attack. That's real. But as many have noted, AI is just as available to defenders. Auditors, security researchers, whitehats, and protocol teams are using the same tools. And as @StaniKulechov pointed out, DeFi has made generational progress on the defense side: better risk engines and lending market structures, formal verification, oracle improvements, cap management, circuit breakers, automated monitoring, SOC2-grade opsec. None of this existed at scale a few cycles ago. The ecosystem has been building the right infrastructure to guard against attacks, similar to what credit card industry has gone through.
AI is not our enemy; hackers are. The anchor isn't "bug-free". It's "no single bug drains the protocol."
If you design every system with the assumption that a vulnerability will exist, you stop trying to build an unbreachable wall and start engineering the blast radius down to what the network can safely absorb.
The real PSA isn't to exit DeFi. It's to build it right.
DeFi will win.
Another massive week for PayFi and the partners building alongside us.
Headlines ↓
1️⃣ @WhiteHouse issued an executive order directing regulators to evaluate giving non-bank fintechs, including digital asset firms, direct access to Federal Reserve payment rails.
2️⃣ @SoFi, a regulated U.S. bank, launched SoFiUSD, giving its 15M members access to the bank-issued stablecoin on @Solana.
3️⃣ Block’s @cashapp began a phased @USDC payments rollout to nearly 60M users.
4️⃣ @Coinbase and Standard Chartered partnered to unlock multi-currency funding rails for institutional clients, aiming to enhance capital efficiency and reduce FX friction.
5️⃣ @Mastercard granted New York State Department of Financial Services BitLicense.
6️⃣ Bank of International Settlements is collaborating with multiple central banks and over 40 financial institutions to test atomic, multi-currency settlement of wholesale cross-border payments onchain.
7️⃣ @NiumGlobal joined Circle Payments Network (CPN), connecting USDC settlement to Nium’s global payout infrastructure across 190+ countries and 100 currencies.
8️⃣ @Stable partnered with @Morpho, @Theo_Network, and @gauntlet_xyz to launch StableEarn, an institutional-grade Earn experience on Stable.
9️⃣ @jia_DeFi raised $7.3M from @cbventures, @StellarOrg, @A100x_Ventures and more to provide blockchain-based financing to small businesses in emerging markets.
1️⃣0️⃣ @fasset, a fast growing stablecoin-powered banking and payments platform, has raised $51M in Series B from SBI Group, Arz Portfoy, Investcorp, and others.
Whenever I see @humafinance PRIME Open I try to put as much as I can.
Glad to have a really good boss who sent my salary early and I was able to deposit it on time.
20%+ APY in this market is the best. Not sure it's available anywhere else.
Agreed, Stani. Especially for RWA, TVL is often just a Total Vanity Leaderboard.
Over one year ago, DeFiLlama listed Huma with a TVL of a few thousand dollars. Why? Because our capital was ~100% deployed - out of the pools, in active use, and earning yield for LPs. DeFiLlama reported our idle capital as TVL. It’s deeply ironic that traditional metrics penalize maximum capital efficiency. We had them take us down.
For RWA, we need to value protocols based on actual economic activity, not stagnant pools:
- Total Transaction Volume (Real-world impact)
- Total Active Liquidity (Capital actively at work)
- Total Yield Paid (Actual LP returns)
- Total Protocol Income (True revenue basis)