Vietnam and India are advancing AI, cybersecurity, and digital payments partnerships, but key projects and cross-border payment services remain in development.
The post Vietnam and India Push AI, Cybersecurity, and Cross-Border Payments at Tech Forum appeared first on TechRepublic.
Vietnam and India are advancing AI, cybersecurity, and digital payments partnerships, but key projects and cross-border payment services remain in development.
The post Vietnam and India Push AI, Cybersecurity, and Cross-Border Payments at Tech Forum appeared first on TechRepublic.
Stablecoins accounted for 60% of crypto purchase value processed through Mercuryo’s on-ramp in H1 2026, up from 43% six months earlier. Meanwhile, accepted stablecoin off-ramp transactions grew 446% year on year, based on the company’s on-ramp report and off-ramp data.
These figures come from one provider, not the entire market. Still, they highlight something worth discussing: how money moves between bank accounts and crypto platforms.
If I were managing those flows for a business, I’d start with two questions. Which currencies are we moving, and where are our bank accounts? The answers help determine which payment routes make sense.
A company with European partners, a Swiss bank account and international USD settlements might use several payment routes, even through the same crypto platform.
SEPA — for EUR transfers across Europe. It connects participating banks across the Single Euro Payments Area and supports euro transfers between eligible accounts.
SWIFT — for international bank transfers. A global financial messaging network used for cross-border payments in USD and other currencies. Costs and timing depend on the banks involved.
SIC — for Swiss franc transfers. Switzerland’s interbank clearing system handles CHF payments between participating financial institutions.
ZEN.COM — for local PLN payments. Unlike SIC, ZEN.COM is a payment provider rather than a clearing system. Its local PLN transfers use ELIXIR, with availability depending on the provider’s integration and customer eligibility.
Other routes, including ACH in the US and PIX in Brazil, become relevant when businesses need to serve customers in different markets.
1. A Polish Fintech Needs Both EUR and PLN
Imagine a fintech in Warsaw receiving euros from European partners while paying local expenses in Polish zloty. It needs both currencies and a way to move funds into and out of crypto.
WhiteBIT On/Off-Ramp could be worth considering. It lists EUR transfers through SEPA and PLN through ZEN.COM within one crypto ecosystem.The fee for EUR deposits and withdrawals is a flat €5, while limits depend on KYB level and agreed conditions.
The service also lists USD via SWIFT and CHF via SIC, alongside TRY, GEL and AUD among its supported currencies. Routes for those additional currencies require separate confirmation.
For this fintech, having several fiat options in one place could simplify treasury operations. I’d first confirm which PLN transactions are available to its legal entity and whether the limits suit its volumes.
2. What If Your Wallet Serves Customers Across Different Markets?
Now imagine a wallet provider that wants customers to buy and sell crypto directly inside its app. Some users pay in EUR, others prefer cards or local payment systems. The company needs an integrated payment experience across its supported markets.
Kraken Ramp, also marketed as Payward Ramp, takes this approach. Its institutional offering lists 24+ payment methods, including SEPA, ACH, PIX, debit cards, Apple Pay and Google Pay. The service offers API and SDK integration, with payment processing, compliance and crypto conversion handled through Kraken’s infrastructure.
The attraction is the combination of local payment methods and embedded crypto access. However, supported methods differ by market, and the company would need to confirm which currencies, countries and transaction directions are available to its customers.
For this type of wallet, the integration experience matters alongside currency coverage. A payment method listed on a product page is useful, but the full customer journey — from funding to completed conversion — needs to work in the intended markets.
3. And What About Thousands of USD Payouts?
Imagine a US fintech where customers convert digital assets into dollars and withdraw funds to their bank accounts. With thousands of payouts, settlement speed and integration become important.
zerohash On & Off Ramp supports fiat-to-crypto and crypto-to-fiat conversions through ACH, RTP, SEPA and payment service providers. It also supports 100+ digital assets, with availability depending on the market and integration.
For this business, I’d check which USD payout methods are available, how returned payments are handled and whether prefunding is required. These details can make a big difference when customer withdrawals are part of everyday operations.
I wouldn’t rank these payment routes from best to worst. A longer currency list doesn’t necessarily mean a better setup, especially when availability depends on jurisdiction, account type and banking partners.
I’d start by checking three things: which currencies and payment methods are actually available, whether the money belongs to the business or its customers, and how much each completed transfer costs.
Processing times matter too. Domestic real-time payments may suit frequent customer withdrawals, while international transfers can work well for corporate treasury operations. Fees, conversion spreads and reconciliation requirements should all be part of the calculation.
Finance can map currencies and volumes, operations can verify settlement schedules, and compliance can confirm eligibility. Sometimes one provider will cover most needs, while other businesses may benefit from combining several services.
I’d rather check those details upfront than discover halfway through a transfer that the selected route doesn’t work as expected.
Disclaimer: This is not financial or investment advice. Do your own research before making any decisions. Use at your own risk.
Three Companies, Three Fiat Problems, Three Different Ramps was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
TL;DR: Visa, BILL and Billtrust are piloting trusted AI agents that complete approved invoice payments through supplier portals.
The next stage of automated payments may depend less on how fast a transfer settles and more on proving who authorised it. Visa, BILL and Billtrust announced an October 20 live pilot allowing trusted AI agents to initiate and complete approved buyer-invoice payments through supplier portals.
The project uses Visa’s Intelligent Commerce tools, including Trusted Agent Protocol, to authenticate software agents to portals that historically expected a human user. The companies emphasise preserving supplier oversight and controls. This is a limited business-payments pilot, not an announcement that autonomous systems now have open-ended authority to spend on behalf of anyone.
For cryptocurrency wallets, there is a close parallel. An agent could technically sign and broadcast transfers today, but the difficult questions concern budgets, permissions, revocation, audit trails and responsibility when the agent makes an error. Those are exactly the issues businesses will have to solve before automatic onchain commerce becomes routine.
Visa’s experiment is not itself a public-blockchain settlement launch. Its relevance to crypto is the permission layer: whichever rail eventually carries an automated payment, businesses will want evidence that the software initiating it was known, constrained and acting within instructions. That security problem is becoming a commercial product category of its own.
More from NewsBTC: Cryptocurrency news · Ethereum coverage · Crypto research and categories
Circle’s October 22 update on Match describes a service for connecting institutional USDC flows. A consequential detail sits in its funding documentation: money prepared for a mint-side order remains separate from the ordinary Circle Mint wallet.
TL;DRThe company’s explanation connects the service to institutions with opposing liquidity needs. For a participant, the practical distinction is between making funds available for execution and actually completing the intended transaction.
Circle’s funding documentation explains an important asymmetry. A redeemer reserves USDC already held in a standard Mint wallet. On the minting side, a settled dollar wire becomes restricted Match-only USDC. That balance cannot simply be sent to a blockchain address.
If a mint-side order fills, the institution receives normal USDC in its Mint wallet. If it wants to leave with an unused restricted balance, the documented route is redemption back to dollars by wire. Canceling an order therefore does not necessarily create immediately deployable on-chain money.
For a treasury desk, the implication is an opportunity-cost calculation. Capital committed to an auction cannot simultaneously meet another payment. The relevant comparison includes the expected rebate, the chance of execution and the operational value of retaining unrestricted liquidity.
This is a different problem from the payment-volume growth discussed in NewsBTC’s stablecoin activity coverage. A widely used token can still involve distinct funding constraints at individual service providers.
A successful implementation needs to reconcile what was ordered, what filled, what remained reserved and what eventually settled. An interface balance can be convenient for monitoring without being a substitute for the underlying transaction records.
The order API exposes execution information and links between rolled orders. Those records let a desk distinguish one instruction that waited through several auctions from several independent completed transactions.
That distinction matters when calculating results. Counting submitted volume would exaggerate activity if the same amount repeatedly rolls forward. Comparing the quoted fee with the realized fee alone would also ignore time spent waiting and any required fallback.
Other institutional designs, including USDC-based derivatives clearing, likewise depend on how balances become available at the moment an obligation falls due.
Payment screening remains a separate control. The checks described in Mastercard’s stablecoin-security initiative concern the transfer’s legitimacy, whereas matching concerns liquidity and execution.
Match can make opposing institutional flows economically useful to one another. The operational test is whether that benefit survives the full journey from prefunding through matching to usable money at the destination.
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
A payment can move across a blockchain in seconds while the company delivering it remains short of cash for days. Ripple’s new arrangement with Arf targets that funding mismatch, using RLUSD to supply working capital to licensed payment businesses.
TL;DRIn its announcement, Arf describes short-duration liquidity typically repaid within one to five days. Its reported $10 billion in annual settlement activity refers to the wider existing business; it is not the amount of a new RLUSD loan pool or a disclosed commitment to buy XRP.
A simple example explains the need. A remittance company may owe a recipient money today but receive the corresponding settlement tomorrow. Faster transmission of the payment instruction does not supply the missing funds. Temporary financing can bridge that gap, provided the lender understands who will repay and when.
That is why loan underwriting remains important even when the asset moves on a public ledger. A blockchain can provide a record of a transfer. It cannot, by itself, establish the quality of a borrower’s business, whether its receivables will arrive on time or whether a disputed payment will be reversed elsewhere.
The initiative develops the payment infrastructure theme in NewsBTC’s coverage of Ripple’s institutional financing business. Different products address different bottlenecks, so their volumes should not be combined into a single measure of network adoption.
Arf’s plan distinguishes direct financing from a later phase using native vault and lending capabilities. The underlying XRPL amendment process requires changes to gain validator support before activation. An integration built against a proposal is not proof that the proposed feature is operating on mainnet.
For readers following XRP, the distinction between the loan asset and network asset matters. Dollar-denominated principal measures credit extended. Transaction fees and account reserves measure different uses of the ledger. A large loan can move in a small number of transactions, so its face value should not be treated as equivalent demand for the native token.
NewsBTC’s reporting on SoFi’s separate deposit and stablecoin products and stablecoin payment activity points to a similar measurement problem. The instrument, outstanding balance and value transferred each describe a different part of the business.
The strongest evidence of success would be disclosed financing outstanding, repayment performance and actual payment corridors served. Reusing the same capital across successive short loans could support substantial volume without requiring an equally large permanent pool.
For now, the announcement establishes a commercial direction and a staged implementation plan. The useful question is how much dependable working capital reaches payment firms, and whether it arrives before the payout needs to happen.
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
Bitcoin Magazine
Parker Lewis: Bitcoin Will Settle 100% of Global Payments
Parker Lewis says Bitcoin will settle 100% of global payments, and that the credit system pushing people toward it is straining under a $107 trillion debt stack. The Gradually, Then Suddenly author joins Grace Remington and Sean Hagan to explain why the 2023 bank failures convinced him payments are the most necessary piece of Bitcoin, how merchants drive adoption by skipping 3% card fees and chargebacks, and why the dollar price eventually becomes irrelevant. On the macro side, he argues the Fed and Treasury have “lost control” of the long end of the curve, with 7%+ mortgages and corporate refinancing at 9–10% showing the strain first and money printing as the only way out. He also breaks down why Bitcoin treasury companies and perpetual preferreds are misaligned with their investors.
Chapters:
0:00 Why Silicon Valley Bank’s Collapse Pushed Parker Lewis From Custody to Payments
1:36 Bitcoin Is Too Centralized Without Payments: Closing the Value Transfer Loop
2:22 Bitcoin Is Already Money: The Problem With the “Digital Capital” Framing
3:49 Why Buying Bitcoin Doesn’t Create Value: The Treasury Company Misalignment
6:08 Perpetual Preferreds as a Currency Swap and the $1.5 Trillion Reality
9:15 How Merchants Drive Bitcoin Payments: Fewer Fees, No Chargebacks
12:56 100% of Global Payments on Bitcoin and Why the Dollar Price Becomes Irrelevant
14:45 Lightning vs. On-Chain Capacity and Building for the Next 10x
16:59 Credit System Strain: $107 Trillion of Debt vs. $52 Trillion in 2007
19:26 Paulson’s Break-the-Glass Plan, No Risk-Free Rate, and 7% Mortgages
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this show are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of BTC Inc., Bitcoin Magazine, or any affiliated entities. This content is provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or accounting advice. Nothing contained in this show constitutes a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer to buy or sell any securities or financial instruments. Viewers should consult their own advisors before making financial or business decisions.
This post Parker Lewis: Bitcoin Will Settle 100% of Global Payments first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Patrick Green.
TL;DR: PHP released fixes for two critical flaws on October 21 and urged immediate updates. Crypto businesses using PHP-based web infrastructure should check that layer of their systems; the advisory does not announce a breach of Bitcoin or BTCPay Server itself.
Security work for a crypto business does not end at its wallet. A critical PHP update has put ordinary web-server software back on the operational agenda.
The PHP project’s October 21 advisory identifies two vulnerabilities that can allow unauthenticated remote code execution. Fixed upstream releases are PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35. The project strongly encourages affected users to update immediately.
It says installations serving web requests are at risk and highlights the Apache mod_php configuration as particularly exposed. Distribution vendors may provide patched packages, so the applicable fix depends on how the software is supplied and maintained.
The connection to crypto commerce is practical. BTCPay Server’s official documentation explains how merchants can connect its payment system to WooCommerce, including arrangements involving an existing store or a deployed store environment.
A merchant using that combination has several components to maintain. The checkout website, its plugins, the hosting environment and the payment service have distinct responsibilities. Updating one component does not establish that every other part of the stack has been patched.
The PHP advisory is about the runtime handling web requests. It is not evidence that Bitcoin’s protocol has been compromised, and it does not by itself identify a flaw in BTCPay Server’s core software.
It does provide a reason for administrators and hosting providers to check whether any connected storefront or service uses an affected PHP installation. The relevant confirmation is that the running environment contains the fix, rather than simply that an application plugin was updated.
The PHP team’s guidance is the authoritative starting point for remediation and version-specific details. Unsupported installations need particular attention to vendor support or migration to a maintained release.
No claim about stolen customer funds or a specific crypto company’s compromise is established by the advisory. The immediate news is the release of critical fixes for infrastructure that can sit underneath a crypto payment experience.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
TL;DR: MoonPay and Dunamu are exploring stablecoin payments, corporate treasury services and broader access to GIWA. Their announcement describes work to assess opportunities, with no commercial launch date disclosed.
MoonPay and South Korean exchange operator Dunamu are examining how their infrastructure could support cross-border payments and corporate finance using digital assets.
The companies outlined the collaboration in a MoonPay-issued announcement distributed late Tuesday in New York, at midnight entering October 21 in London.
Three areas are on the agenda: stablecoin-based payments and fund transfers, corporate finance and treasury operations, and international expansion of Dunamu’s GIWA blockchain ecosystem.
The proposed work combines MoonPay’s financial-service network with Dunamu’s technology and business capabilities. It includes assessing commercial opportunities and ways to broaden access to GIWA-based services and assets.
The wording is deliberately preliminary. The release does not announce a jointly launched payment product, a settlement-volume commitment or a date when corporate customers can begin using a new service.
That matters because the business problem spans more than transferring a token. A company making an international payment needs to know who receives it, which currency the recipient gets, what records its finance team can reconcile and what happens if a payment fails.
Treasury management adds another layer. Businesses must decide when balances are available, which counterparties hold them and how transactions fit into their existing controls. A working blockchain connection answers only some of those questions.
MoonPay and Dunamu’s announcement identifies these corporate uses as areas to investigate. It does not show that the practical, commercial and regulatory arrangements have all been resolved.
GIWA’s overseas reach is a separate part of the proposed collaboration. Access to a distribution network can make services easier to reach, but it should not be confused with evidence that those services have already attracted customers in new markets.
For now, the announcement establishes the scope of the relationship. The next substantive step would be a named product or deployment with defined users, availability and operating terms.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
TL;DR: BitGo has launched a research and product unit focused initially on AI and crypto. Its first projects include Gokubu, a consumer financial app that BitGo says is already live.
BitGo is moving further into the application business with a new unit intended to build products on top of its digital-asset infrastructure.
The company announced BitGo Labs on October 21, describing an initial focus on the intersection of artificial intelligence and crypto. The unit will develop applications and publish research, prototypes and reference implementations.
Its launch includes Gokubu, which BitGo describes as a consumer app combining an AI-assisted card, a personalized financial assistant and automated rewards features. BitGo says the product is live and accepts registrations.
The move puts a different kind of execution challenge alongside custody and other infrastructure services. An application must persuade users that its convenience is worth adopting, then deliver that convenience consistently.
For an AI-assisted financial product, usefulness also depends on the boundary between suggestions and actions. Showing someone a possible saving is different from making a transaction on their behalf. Permissions, clear account information and understandable costs are part of the product experience, not details that can be left to the technology underneath.
BitGo’s announcement makes ambitious claims about the role crypto infrastructure could play in an economy of autonomous software agents. Those claims describe its strategy. They do not establish that the emerging applications have already generated material revenue or reached a particular scale.
Similarly, the release’s description of Gokubu does not provide a complete account of fees, jurisdictional eligibility or the terms governing every advertised benefit. Readers should treat it as a launch announcement rather than a review of the service.
The meaningful development is that BitGo has assigned a dedicated team to turn its infrastructure into applications and named an initial consumer product. Whether that approach creates a lasting business will depend on the behavior of those products in use, including how clearly they handle the financial decisions customers entrust to them.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
TL;DR: Tether says it led Peso’s pre-seed round to expand USDT payment infrastructure in Latin America. The announcement emphasizes local bank connections and merchant payments, without disclosing the investment amount.
Tether’s latest investment is aimed at the point where a dollar token becomes useful for buying lunch, paying a merchant or moving money into a local bank account.
The USDT issuer announced on October 21 that it led a pre-seed funding round in Peso, a Bolivian financial-technology company. Financial terms were not disclosed in the announcement.
Peso’s products include USDT accounts, point-of-sale acceptance and virtual accounts connecting to Bolivia’s banking system through QR and ACH payment arrangements, according to Tether. The company also describes an integration enabling food orders paid in USDT through Yango in Bolivia.
Funding is intended to expand local on- and off-ramps in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Argentina, as well as merchant and account infrastructure.
Moving a stablecoin between blockchain addresses is only one part of a usable payment service. A customer may earn local currency, hold a dollar balance and pay a business that wants its proceeds in a bank account.
Connecting those steps determines whether the token works as spending money or remains an asset the customer must repeatedly convert and transfer. It also determines where costs appear: a cheap blockchain transaction does not guarantee an inexpensive conversion or withdrawal.
The announcement puts Peso’s local connections at the center of the investment case. That is a more specific proposition than simply adding another wallet capable of holding USDT.
However, product availability and commercial adoption are different measures. The funding release does not establish how frequently customers use the described services, how much merchants process through them or the all-in cost of a typical payment.
Those operating figures would show whether the investment is translating into routine spending. For now, Tether has disclosed a commitment to a payments provider and identified the infrastructure it wants that provider to expand.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
GCash parent Mynt's record ₱60.9B Philippine IPO puts digital lending in focus. Here's what PH users, merchants, and IT teams should watch next.
The post GCash Parent Raises ₱60.9B in Record PH IPO: What’s Next for Digital Lending? appeared first on TechRepublic.
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