This was a hectic week.
Senior figures from PayPal and Google Cloud said open payment protocols, machine-readable merchant catalogs and multi-party crypto custody are needed to scale agentic commerce.
Novig CEO Jacob Fortinsky said his company will transition to a federal Designated Contract Market framework this summer to launch in all 50 states, while 57 Maiden's Adam Mastrelli said he was banned from two major sportsbooks within two months for being “sharp."
Trust Wallet CEO Felix Fan and Mesh CTO Arjun Mukherjee said AI agents are creating a new role for crypto wallets.
Nearly 1,000 developers competed at the venue, from ecosystems like Base, Solana, and others arriving from companies like Microsoft and Google, most racing to build products around the theme of AI agents.
Executives from MoonPay, Ripple and Paxos said at Consensus Miami 2026 that regulation has accelerated stablecoin adoption, but infrastructure, privacy and distribution remain major hurdles.
Stablecoin settlement enables weekend/holiday settlement, reducing trapped capital by over 40%. This improves card economics and financial flexibility for issuers.
Panelists at Consensus Miami said institutional investors are still largely absent from perp DEXs, citing security risks and KYC friction as key barriers.
Chappy Asel says autonomous software may be more natural users of wallets and stablecoins than humans, though agentic payments remain mostly theoretical.
Coinbax took the top spot at Consensus Miami with software built to add compliance controls to onchain payments.
Public blockchains make transactions traceable, but that transparency can come at the expense of user privacy. Speakers from Moody’s Ratings and ChangeNOW said that hybrid blockchain architecture and address-level monitoring can help solve both problems simultaneously.
The Binance founder said BNB Chain is the optimal payments rail for automated transactions between AI agents, noting that U.S. crypto policies are improving.
Jesse Spiro, Head of Government Affairs at Tether, said at Consensus Miami 2026 that the midterms will be a key test for whether crypto’s recent policy gains in Washington can survive politically.
DeFi and its underlying technology have already proved themselves at scale, said eToro CEO Yoni Assia.
World Liberty Financial co-founder Donald Trump Jr. and co-founder and CEO Zach Witkoff pushed back on recent online rumors as the crypto firm battles Justin Sun in court.
Since the Genius Act passed, Anchorage has won every single large stablecoin issuance mandate across the landscape, according to the firm’s CEO Nathan McCauley.
Panelists are split on the four-year cycle's relevance, with year-end price targets varying widely from potentially not reaching a new high to possible targets of $150k or $250k.
It's day three of Consensus Miami 2026 on Thursday. Stay tuned for updates throughout the day.
Kraken owner Payward will acquire Hong Kong-based Reap Technologies as the crypto exchange expands its stablecoin and payments infrastructure business in Asia.
Bitcoin-backed “digital credit” is scaling fast, with executives pointing to a $3 trillion long-term opportunity.
The Blockstream CEO told Consensus Miami 2026 that sovereigns, pension funds and treasury companies will join the next wave of bitcoin adoption.
Yat Siu said the metaverse is evolving beyond immersive digital worlds, with AI agents increasingly handling commerce, payments and coordination through blockchain infrastructure in the background.
At Consensus 2026 in Miami, executives from Two Prime, Ledn and Lygos Finance said institutional borrowers increasingly prioritize custody, transparency and standardized lending structures over complex DeFi products after the crypto credit collapses of 2022.
The founder and CEO of Cardano’s Input Output said Google, Amazon and Facebook are terrified because AI agents will not behave like humans when confronted with ads.
The real-estate mogul said the hybrid model brings new users into crypto and challenges traditional real estate structures.
Nasdaq’s Tal Cohen said a friendlier SEC is giving crypto firms and exchanges room to experiment with tokenization and digital market infrastructure.
DTCC CEO Frank La Salla said the clearing giant is working with layer-1 blockchains to bring millions in corporate actions like dividend payments onchain, but challenges remain.
Executives from Binance, Revolut and Circle say crypto is evolving beyond speculation into the financial infrastructure powering payments, remittances and broader global access.
Alex Pruden said the asymmetry between acting on a post-quantum signature scheme today and waiting for certainty about quantum-computing hardware timelines means Bitcoin developers should move from research into production.
The Greylock partner and LinkedIn co-founder said autonomous agents will need crypto-based trust systems to transact across the open internet.