Articles

What is a stablecoin?

A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency designed to hold a steady value — almost always one US dollar — by being backed by reserves or managed by code. They are how dollars move on a blockchain.

How to accept stablecoin payments as a business

Accepting stablecoins as a business means choosing a gateway or wallet, connecting an off-ramp, handling accounting, and building a settlement workflow — all of which are solvable problems with established tooling in 2026.

Stablecoins in Africa: cross-border payments and dollarization

Sub-Saharan Africa pays the world's highest remittance fees — averaging 7.9% — and has the fewest banking options. Stablecoins are filling both gaps, with USDT adoption accelerating across Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Egypt.

Agentic commerce: what it means for businesses that sell services

Agentic commerce is the pattern where AI agents — acting on behalf of a human buyer — research, select, and complete purchases without step-by-step human approval. For businesses that sell services or data, this creates a new class of buyer: software that pays programmatically, expects machine-readable pricing and catalogs, and has no patience for checkout flows designed for humans. Businesses that expose agent-accessible APIs and accept stablecoin payments via protocols like x402 or MPP can capture this buyer class; those that don't will be bypassed.

The infrastructure behind agentic payments: wallets, keys, and settlement

Agentic payments require three infrastructure layers working together: a wallet the agent can sign transactions from, a key custody model that protects that wallet without requiring human interaction, and a settlement chain that confirms payments in under a second for fractions of a cent. Without all three, autonomous machine-to-machine payments at scale are not viable. This article explains each layer and the design choices operators face when deploying AI agents that spend money.

How AI agents use stablecoins to pay for APIs and services

AI agents pay for APIs and services by holding funded stablecoin wallets and executing payments inline with HTTP requests — no human approval at each step, no merchant account required. Two open protocols, Coinbase's x402 and Tempo's Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), define the handshake. The agent sends a request, receives a price challenge, signs a stablecoin payment, and retries — the whole exchange fits inside a single HTTP cycle.

Argentina's stablecoin economy: how USDT became a shadow dollar

Argentina has the world's most intense stablecoin economy relative to its size. With inflation that exceeded 200% in 2023, capital controls on physical dollars, and a parallel FX market built into daily life, USDT and USDC filled the gap that the peso could not.

B2B stablecoin payments: the complete business guide

Stablecoin rails let businesses settle supplier invoices, fund marketplace payouts, and automate AR/AP in seconds at a fraction of wire costs — with the compliance and accounting framework now mature enough for enterprise adoption.

Why banks are building on stablecoin rails (not fighting them)

The largest US banks announced a joint tokenized deposit network in 2026. Visa and Standard Chartered are now blockchain validators. Coastal Bank settles cross-border payments on-chain. Banks are not fighting stablecoin infrastructure — they are building on it, because the economics of 24/7 instant settlement are too good to leave to fintech alone.

The best corridors for stablecoin payments in 2026

Stablecoin infrastructure is unevenly distributed. The US–Mexico corridor is the most mature, with Bitso handling over 10% of total corridor volume. US–Philippines, US–Nigeria, and US–India have strong on-ramp coverage but varying off-ramp depth. European cross-border flows benefit from MiCA-compliant issuers. Emerging corridors in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa are developing fast.

Best stablecoin wallets in 2026

A stablecoin wallet is software that holds your private keys and signs transactions — or, in the custodial case, a service that does both on your behalf. The right wallet depends on how much control you want, which chains you use, and whether you need institutional-grade custody or just a quick way to send USDC.

The biggest stablecoin failures, and what they taught the market

Three stablecoin designs have failed publicly and at scale: algorithmic coins with no reserve (TerraUSD, ~$40B lost), partially-collateralised hybrids (Iron Finance, ~$2B), and fiat-backed coins whose reserves were temporarily inaccessible (USDC/SVB, recovered). The lessons shaped both regulation and the architecture of the coins that followed.