Welcome to another edition of the Money Code newsletter (fka The Weekly Stable), the essential source of stablecoin news coverage for global fintech professionals, brought to you by This Week in Fintech and Stablecon.
This week we cover:
Mastercard to acquire BVNK for up to $1.8 billion
Stripe-backed Tempo releases AI payments protocol and launches blockchain
Money Code Ep 24: 70 Countries Without a Single Download w/ May Zabaneh (PayPal)
Product launches, partnerships and funding news from Exodus, MetaComp, Moody's, Privy, Thunes, TransFi, World and more.
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🏆 Top Stories
Mastercard to Acquire BVNK for Up to $1.8 Billion
Mastercard agreed to acquire BVNK, the London-based stablecoin infrastructure firm, for up to $1.8 billion ($300M contingent on milestones). The deal eclipses Stripe's $1.1B Bridge acquisition from February 2025: largest stablecoin acquisition to date. Coinbase tried to buy BVNK four months ago for roughly $2B. Those talks fell apart. Mastercard stepped in.
Why it matters:
Mastercard bought BVNK to make sure stablecoins never route around Mastercard. The play: extend the layer where enterprises already make routing, compliance, and settlement decisions to cover onchain rails. Stablecoins, tokenized deposits, fiat. One platform.
Regulated distribution is the scarce asset. Stablecoin tech is reproducible. Global licenses, enterprise trust, merchant relationships, compliance credibility: those take decades to build. BVNK already processes $30B annually for companies like Worldpay and Deel across 130+ countries. Mastercard gives it distribution gravity no standalone infra company can match.
Owning the control surface. Mastercard expects most financial institutions and fintechs will offer digital currency services. By absorbing BVNK, every bank, fintech, and enterprise CFO can access stablecoin rails through a partner they already trust. No reason to build around it.
Stripe set the template. Mastercard raised it. Stripe paid $1.1B for Bridge. Mastercard paid 60% more. Each successive deal reprices stablecoin infra upward.
Vertical integration across the stack. Fireblocks expanded from custody into wallets and accounting (Dynamic, TRES). MoonPay assembled a full payments stack through five acquisitions. Chains like Monad are buying wallet infrastructure (Portal). Every layer is consolidating. The logic is the same everywhere: take existing tech and apply it toward your distribution to capture more value per user.
Stripe-Backed Tempo Releases AI Payments Protocol and Launches Blockchain
Tempo, the blockchain startup incubated by Stripe and Paradigm, launched its mainnet and an open-source "Machine Payments Protocol" (MPP). The protocol lets AI agents send and receive money without human intervention. The core mechanism: "sessions," where an agent authorizes a spending cap once, then streams micropayments as it consumes data, compute, or API calls. Visa contributed to the protocol specifications.
I wrote about Tempo at length when it was first announced (see Tempo Aims to Speed-Run Neutrality). The mainnet launch and MPP spec move the conversation from theory to production.
Why it matters:
Stripe and Paradigm are building payment infrastructure for machines. MPP runs on Tempo today but the protocol is rail-agnostic, designed to work across blockchains and traditional payment methods.
Sessions are the new primitive. An agent authorizes a spending limit once, like depositing to escrow. It then streams thousands of micropayments as it consumes services (an API call, a model inference, a data query), all aggregated into a single settlement. Card authorization and ACH batch cycles were built for human purchase patterns. Sessions were built for machine patterns.
100+ services in the payments directory at launch. Alchemy, Dune Analytics, Parallel Web Systems and many more. For Stripe businesses, MPP payments appear in the Dashboard like any other transaction: same payout schedule, same fraud protection, same reporting. A few lines of code via API.
Two competing agentic payment standards are now live. Coinbase's x402 launched first. MPP launched with deeper Stripe and fiat connectivity. MPP is more vertically integrated with Stripe as a trust layer. Stripe supports both. The race to define how machines pay each other is on.
Multi-rail from day one. Visa extended MPP for card-based agent payments. Stripe extended it for wallets and other payment methods. Lightspark extended it for Bitcoin Lightning. An agent can pay via stablecoins, cards, or Lightning through one protocol. The standard also works on other blockchains beyond Tempo.
📺 Money Code Podcast
Ep 24: 70 Countries Without a Single Download w/ May Zabaneh
PYUSD went live in 70 countries overnight. Nobody had to download a new app, create a new wallet, or learn about "crypto."
May Zabaneh runs crypto at PayPal, where she's scaling a stablecoin inside an existing payment network serving hundreds of millions of users. That meant compliance, disputes, and customer care across 70 regulatory regimes, all before a single user touched a dollar. A much more complex undertaking than the non-custodial approach.
We decode
May insists on nailing hold, earn, send, spend before touching programmability. Where did PayPal lose focus trying to do too much?
PayPal's cross-border business profits from fiat friction. PYUSD removes that friction. How May navigated the cannibalization conversation inside a public company.
If success in 3-5 years means merchants never touch crypto and consumers never think about it, what does that mean for how you build today?
Give it a listen and share your feedback by sending me a DM or replying to this email.
Money Code is presented by Stablecon and Powered by BVNK
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Read on for a round up of this week's news:
📊 Market Trends
Billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller says the global payment system will run on crypto stablecoins within 10-15 years (read more)
Stablecoin market cap map (read more)
USDC supply reaches all-time high of 81.1B (read more)
💸 Fundraises and M&A
Alibaba-backed MetaComp closes $35M in three months as stablecoin infrastructure race heats up (read more)
Mastercard to buy stablecoin startup BVNK for up to $1.8 billion (read more)
Stablecoin payments firm TransFi raises $19 million for global expansion (read more)
🚀 Product Announcements & Partnerships
Exodus launches XO Cash, a USD-backed stablecoin built on M0's platform and issued by MoonPay (read more)
Moody's launches Token Integration Engine to bring credit analysis onchain, starting with Canton (read more)
PayPal expands PYUSD stablecoin availability to nearly 70 countries (read more)
Privy introduces Privy Earn with vault infrastructure from Morpho, Steakhouse, Gauntlet, Aave, and Kamino (read more)
Stripe-backed Tempo releases AI payments protocol and launches blockchain (read more)
Thunes launches stablecoin payouts to 11,500 banks via SWIFT connectivity (read more)
World adds identity toolkit for AI bots on Coinbase's x402 protocol (read more)
⚖️ Regulatory Developments
CFTC grants no-action relief to Phantom Technologies for self-custodial crypto wallet (read more)
SEC advisory group backs tokenized securities push, outlines how to keep it safe (read more)
SEC issues first-ever definitions for what crypto assets are securities (read more)
Senate leader says Clarity Act unlikely to advance before April (read more)
U.S. Senate votes to ban CBDCs in housing bill that may face trouble in the House (read more)
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