More than 140 companies, including Visa, Mastercard, Coinbase and BlackRock, backed a new stablecoin in June that took direct aim at Circle's USDC. Weeks later, Mastercard opened a payment network built for AI agents rather than people, and Ant International closed a $1.2 billion funding round to build similar infrastructure for cross-border commerce. Three separate moves, one direction: the plumbing of digital payments is being rebuilt around stablecoins and autonomous agents at the same time.
A 140-company consortium takes on Circle
Open Standard, an independent entity governed by its member companies rather than a single issuer, unveiled Open USD on June 30. The launch list runs to more than 140 firms: Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, Adyen, BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, Coinbase, Ripple, Google, Shopify, DoorDash and Samsung among them (Open Standard, 2026).
The design breaks from how Circle's USDC works. Open USD lets partner businesses mint and redeem the token without fees or volume caps, and it passes most of the interest earned on the reserve assets back to those partners instead of keeping it at the issuer (Open Standard, 2026). Roughly 96% of Circle's revenue comes from interest on the Treasuries backing USDC, so a model that redistributes that yield to the businesses using it strikes directly at Circle's income (Motley Fool, 2026). Circle's stock fell 17.6% the day of the announcement and lost 44.6% of its value across June (Motley Fool, 2026; CoinCentral, 2026). Open USD is expected to launch fully by the end of 2026, debuting on Solana before expanding to other chains (Open Standard, 2026).
This is not a niche crypto story. It is a coalition of the payment networks, banks and platforms that route most consumer and merchant transactions today deciding that stablecoin infrastructure is worth owning collectively rather than renting from a single issuer.
Mastercard builds a payment rail for machines, not people
On June 10, Mastercard launched Agent Pay for Machines, a network built for AI agents to transact directly with each other at high frequency, without a person approving each purchase (Mastercard, 2026). The service supports settlement across cards, bank accounts and stablecoins, including USDC, PayPal USD, Ripple USD and Paxos-issued tokens, across Ethereum, Solana, Base, Polygon and the XRP Ledger (Mastercard, 2026).
More than 30 partners signed on at launch, including Stripe, Adyen, Coinbase, Cloudflare, OKX, Ripple, Polygon and Solana (Mastercard, 2026). Mastercard has said it plans to widen access to the network later in 2026 (Mastercard, 2026).
The premise is that machine-to-machine payments, an AI agent buying compute, data or a service on behalf of a business, need settlement guarantees and fraud controls that were never built for that use case. Mastercard is positioning itself as the credentialing and settlement layer underneath that activity before a competitor does.
Ant International raises $1.2 billion for the same bet, in cross-border commerce
On July 21, Ant International closed a Series A equity round of approximately $1.2 billion, led by existing investors Ant Group and Alibaba Group along with other international investors (Ant International, 2026). The company said the capital will fund expansion of its cross-border payments and "agentic commerce" capabilities across its four business lines: Alipay+, Antom, WorldFirst and Bettr (Ant International, 2026).
Ant International frames the round around the same problem Mastercard is solving on the machine-payment side: merchant payment, treasury and credit infrastructure built to work with AI agents acting on a business's behalf, not just with a person checking out (Ant International, 2026).
What to watch next
Open USD's full launch, expected by the end of 2026 starting on Solana, will be the first real test of whether businesses redirect volume away from USDC once a fee-free, yield-sharing alternative exists at scale. Circle's next earnings report will show whether June's stock drop reflected a durable shift in expectations or a one-day overreaction.
Sources
- Open Standard, "Introducing Open USD" - https://joinopenstandard.com/blog/introducing-open-usd
- Motley Fool, "How Circle Internet Group Stock Lost 45% Last Month" - https://www.fool.com/investing/2026/07/07/how-circle-internet-group-stock-lost-45-last-month/
- CoinCentral, "Circle Stock Falls 16% After Open USD Stablecoin Consortium Launches" - https://coincentral.com/circle-stock-falls-16-after-open-usd-stablecoin-consortium-launches-analysts-arent-worried/
- Mastercard, "Mastercard Launches Agent Pay for Machines to Unlock Super-Fast, Always-On Payments" - https://www.mastercard.com/global/en/news-and-trends/press/2026/june/mastercard-launches-agent-pay-for-machines.html
- Ant International (via Business Wire), "Ant International Raises approx. US$1.2 billion in Series A Equity Financing to Boost Cross-border Payments, Agentic Commerce Solutions for Global Businesses" - https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260720424592/en/