Mastercard Explores Vocalink Sale

The Financial Times reports that Mastercard is exploring a sale of Vocalink, and is also considering a divestiture of the real-time payments unit it built from its 2019 acquisition of the Nets Group’s account-to-account assets. Taken together with April’s $1.8 billion acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK, this is a clean strategic pivot: Mastercard is walking away from a decade-long attempt to build a services layer on top of bank-owned A2A rails, and redirecting that capital toward digital asset infrastructure. It is the right call. It also raises a question Mastercard should be asking itself very carefully before the BVNK integration gets too far along.

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ZelleUSD — A Private Coin

Builds on: Stablecoins: A New Model of Trust | JPMorgan, Citi and TCH: Tokenized Deposits ON Chain | Open Banking, Open Payments and Trust Networks

Early Warning announced this week that Zelle is going international, starting with India — the world’s largest remittance destination. Alongside this, they unveiled ZelleUSD (ZLUSD), which they’re calling a “proprietary U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin.” Cue the analyst notes about banks “finally getting into stablecoin.”

I’m already laughing… this is Banks BEATING Stableocin and Remittance Providers at their own game with a closed network. This Is Not a competitor to USDC, and you can’t buy it on Coinbase, so Don’t Get Confused.

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Proposed Stablecoin KYC Rule

The Fed/FinCEN and OFAC just revealed their proposed Stablecoin KYC rule and consistent with the GENIUS Act it entails bank-level KYC requirements for Stablecoin Issuers (see blog: No more Stablecoin “rewards”). This combined with the 303-page FinCEN/OFAC rule on transaction monitoring and secondary uses places substantial compliance burdens on Stablecoin issuers. So much that it is said the hottest job in Fintech is in Stablecoin compliance.

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Stablecoin Strategy – Visa and Mastercard Are Taking Very Different Roads

The two dominant card networks are both committed to stablecoins. Both see digital assets as a meaningful component of their long-term growth story. Both have articulated clear strategies to their investors. But the roads they are taking could not be more different and the implications for how value-added services grow, who captures the upside, and how fast innovation moves are significant.

Mastercard is buying the infrastructure. Visa is building a network and enabling shared investment.

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JPMorgan, Citi and TCH: Tokenized Deposits ON Chain

Builds on: 101 Update: CBDCs, Stablecoins and Tokenized Deposits | Stablecoins: A New Model of Trust | Stablecoin Scenarios

The WSJ reported yesterday that JPMorgan, Citigroup, and TCH (a consortium of the largest US banks) are planning a shared tokenized deposit system. For anyone who has been following this space, this is not a surprise. It is a confirmation. I’ve been writing about this trajectory for years. The question was never whether banks would adopt blockchain infrastructure. The question was always how and the commercial construct that governs operation. Now we know. 

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FIncen / OFAC 303 Page Rule Squashes Stablecoin eCom Ambitions

Exec Summary

  • New 303 Page FINCEN/OFAC Rule, aligns to the clear language of the Genius act, but IMHO will create major friction for use of USD stablecoins in eCommerce
  • Rules for tracking parties and monitoring secondary activity create a compliance regime that burdens every party with the need to understand the provenance of a coin. Can you imagine accepting $2000 for a new TV, shipping it out, then having your stablecoins burned?
  • So not only do we have KYC but we have SAR reporting requirements as PPSIs must also comply with SAR and the “Travel Rule” (31 CFR 1010.410(f)), which involves collecting and transmitting information about the originators and beneficiaries of funds transmittal.
  • Banks and Stablecoin Issuers that jumpted into Solana’s Token-2022 model saw this coming and are well placed to move forward
  • This creates substantial advantages for banks in sweeping coins into covered accounts and freshly minting new coins when required. 
  • Great news for Big Banks and V/MA. card gain signficant advantage over stablecoins with the proposed rule
  • I see this as tailwind for stablecoins in settlement, but a big headwind for stablecoin in eCommerce (with a few exceptions). 
  • My views on Stablecoin winners and losers remain unchanged except for an update to winners for x402.
  • No wonder Jamie Dimon remains confident that the banks will win, it will take years for stablecoin startups to build the regulatory muscle required to manage 303 pages of FinCEN mandates. By the time they do, the banks will already be running their own stablecoin subsidiaries under the very same rules.

The Rule

The U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and OFAC issued a 303-page proposed rule implementing the GENIUS Act, reclassifying permitted payment stablecoin issuers (PPSIs) as financial institutions under the Bank Secrecy Act. Requirements include bank-grade KYC, suspicious activity reporting, transaction blocking/freezing capabilities, and appointment of a U.S.-based compliance officer. Enforcement begins January 2027. A 60-day comment period opens now.

The NPRM (Notice of Proposed Rulemaking) introduces 31 CFR Part 1033, which specifically outlines the obligations of PPSIs. The density of this document reflects the complexity of applying traditional banking rules to a distributed ledger environment.

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MPP Phase 2 Live – Ask Tom Goes Agentic

Long blog – First 2 Pages are economic implications, last 6 pages are tech deep dive

MPP is a big deal because value exchange enables specialization and market forces to operate (as discussed in last week’s MPP – Addressing the Internet’s “Original Sin”.MPP and X402 are BIG.. really big. A whole new market. This isn’t about cash replacement or taking share from xx this is about enabling a new Economy. Today’s blog is 4 paragraphs of the economic implications (for investors and CEOs), followed by 4 pages on tech detail covering what I built. Please note “Ask-Tom” is just a model of an x402 service…. of course it won’t generate much demand (service ID is at bottom).

First, let me try to explain why this is such a big deal from an economic perspective. The foundational driver for MPP’s success is the radical reduction of transaction costs through standardized commercial terms. As outlined in my 2016 blog Small Wins, the forces that once drove asset-heavy, integrated organizations are atrophying in favor of “refragmentation” and specialized networks. Historically, the economic cost of inking a bilateral contract for every micro-interaction was prohibitive (ex “Account Creation” bottleneck that stifled agentic autonomy). Following the principles of Ronald Coase’s Transaction Cost Economics, MPP and x402 provide the multilateral governance and common commercial rules necessary to bypass these friction points. By establishing trust and speed through a common interface, these protocols allow for the “Small Win” of a single transaction to scale into a global network effect, where the cost of connection approaches zero.

This standardization enables the “Value Assembly” of “super-specialists” who can target previously unreachable “shale deposits” of niche market demand (see Network Effects and Value Assembly). A successful network enables specialists like “Ask-Tom” to provide high-value, grounded intelligence without the overhead of building independent settlement or reconciliation infrastructure. This is far beyond mere “agentic commerce”; it is an evolution in how software and hardware interact with EVERYTHING ECONOMICALLY. For example, MPP’s session-based economics provides a virtual “bar tab” for agents to execute tasks within human-granted budgets, paying only for precise resource consumption. This creates a sustainable commercial model where the incentives for specialization and market forces to operate on software service at a hyper granular level. Market forces in turn encourage specialists to solve increasingly granular problems across diverse domains, and unlocks the “shale deposits” of data that doesn’t play. I’ll discuss what this could look like next week as a follow up to Value Assembly.

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MPP (and X402) – Solving the Internet’s “Original Sin”

Yes another agentic payment acronym. This one is important enough to remember. Where AP2 and ACP address agents acting on behalf of humans, X402 and MPP are about agents paying agents. My friend Simon Taylor just put together one of his all-time best posts on MPP and The Intention Layer. Today’s blog is a follow-up with a bit more of a comparison, and why this is a big deal from a payment and economic perspective. My key takeaways from Simon’s post

  • The “Skinny Master Account”: Taylor suggests that humans will grant “intent” (a budget and a goal) to an agent. MPP’s Session model perfectly mirrors this: a human “locks” $50 into a session (the intention), and the agent autonomously spends it in sub-cent increments (the execution).
  • The Substrate of AI: Taylor points out that AI thrives on Structured Text (Markdown). Ironically, legacy finance (ISO 8583, NACHA files) is essentially structured text. MPP acts as the “translator” between the agent’s markdown-based intentions and the rigid requirements of the global banking system.
  • The Outcome: The winner won’t be the protocol that is “most decentralized,” but the one that most effectively manages Trust and Permissioning. Stripe and Visa, as the incumbent trust-layers of the internet, are better positioned to solve the “Agentic Spend” problem than a pure-crypto protocol.

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Stablecoins Are Not Free — Why They Are A RAIL in Consumer Payments


There’s a narrative running through payments circles right now that goes something like this: stablecoins will replace card rails because they’re cheaper, faster, and programmable. Stripe makes acceptance easy. Card networks are too slow to innovate. Machine-Machine payments need programmability. GENIUS Act passed. The future is obvious.

I’ve been writing about stablecoins for over two years, from the case for stablecoin as a trust platform to the ECB’s monetary sovereignty alarm. And I keep coming back to the same conclusion: stablecoins are not a replacement for cards, but rather another rail with cards retaining their role as the layer of abstraction for multiple networks (as they do today). They will do well where cards don’t play (micropayments, B2B and uncarded markets).

Here’s why (and why that matters more than you might think).

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Stablecoins and Monetary Policy: The ECB Confirms What Italy Said Last Year

The ECB published a study today warning that stablecoins could erode retail deposits across the eurozone and undermine the effectiveness of monetary policy. The finding is notable — not because it’s new, but because it’s taken this long for the institution to officially say it.

As I related last May, Italy’s Finance Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti made exactly this argument, warning that the displacement of traditional bank deposits by dollar-denominated stablecoins represented a direct threat to European monetary sovereignty. His remarks were largely dismissed at the time as political protectionism. The ECB’s study vindicates the concern. The mechanism is straightforward: if depositors move funds from bank accounts into stablecoins, banks lose the deposit base that anchors their lending capacity — and the ECB loses its primary transmission channel for monetary policy. Rate changes simply don’t land the same way when the money isn’t sitting in a regulated deposit account.

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