Visa and Stripe back OpenUSD to cut Tether dominance
- Payment giants committed $1 billion to OpenUSD to challenge Tether's reserve interest monopoly.
- Spiral merged Lightning support into Coinbase's X402 standard to give autonomous AI agents native Bitcoin rails.
- Corporate yield sharing now determines whether open stablecoins or proprietary rails win machine payment traffic.
Traditional payment rails are failing machine actors. Autonomous software agents operating around the clock demand immediate settlement without human friction.
On September 24, 2026, macro investor Jordi Visser explained on TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast that agent-to-agent token traffic now outpaces human interactions with artificial intelligence. Visser detailed how autonomous software like consumer assistants coordinate schedules and execute purchases, clashing directly with legacy credit card clearing delays. As central banks devalue fiat money, programmable digital settlement layers are becoming the default infrastructure for software workers.
The next day on Presidio Bitcoin Jam, former Stripe executive Zach Abrams launched OpenUSD, a rival stablecoin protocol backed by $1 billion in liquidity commitments from Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, and Shopify. Unlike Tether, which retains all reserve interest, OpenUSD distributes yield and equity to partners based on the transaction volume they process.
This revenue-sharing mechanism creates compelling incentives for payment heavyweights. While Coinbase holds an existing revenue agreement with Circle for USDC through 2029, host Steve Lee noted on Presidio Bitcoin Jam that OpenUSD captures enterprise volume USDC cannot touch. For Visa and Mastercard, joining the alliance functions as a strategic defense against card network disintermediation.
Simultaneously, open-source developers are building competing rails for machine payments. Spiral developer Ben Carmen merged a pull request adding native Bitcoin and Lightning support to the X402 payment protocol specification, an HTTP standard originally created by Coinbase. Block subsequently joined the initiative alongside Steve Lee to give autonomous agents direct access to permissionless settlement.
Protocol integration does not guarantee real-world usage. Lee pointed out that merchants must still run Bitcoin wallets and generate Bolt 11 invoices, keeping merchant adoption an uphill battle against enterprise-backed stablecoins. Machines do not care about private key management, but merchants still care about administrative overhead.
A central battleground is emerging between open protocols and closed ecosystems. On Presidio Bitcoin Jam, co-host DK warned that walled-garden platforms like Muse could steer automated agent traffic toward proprietary settlement rails. Unless open-source agent frameworks take hold, corporate platforms will dictate which currencies machines are allowed to spend.
The settlement rails for the agentic economy are being laid now. Traditional card networks intend to control them.
Source Intelligence
- Deep dive into what was said in the episodes
Block Brings Bitcoin to x402, Open USD Enters the Race, Trump Renames AI • Sep 25
- The X402 payment protocol specification officially merged support for Bitcoin and Lightning, driven by a pull request from Spiral developer Ben Carmen. Block subsequently announced it was joining the standard alongside Coinbase.
Also discussed on this episode: (10)
Media (2)
- Presidio Bitcoin Jam saw its baseline traffic increase to 600 views per episode, up from 100 to 200 views during its first year. A past episode covering a Coldcard incident reached 3,400 views.
- Presidio Bitcoin Jam changed its tagline to "open money, open intelligence" to reflect its coverage of AI and Bitcoin. This aligns with Spiral's tagline and a broader industry trend of merging open source AI with cryptocurrency.
Stablecoins (2)
- Zach Abrams is leaving Stripe to lead a new independent stablecoin issuer for OpenUSD. Backed by Coinbase, Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and Shopify, the consortium is deploying one billion dollars for liquidity.
- Coinbase renewed its USDC revenue-sharing agreement with Circle in August, securing its economic terms through 2029. This agreement creates a financial headwind for Coinbase when capital migrates to competitive stablecoins like OpenUSD.
Lightning (1)
- Spiral developers are integrating Bitcoin Lightning payments into Mesh LLM, an open source peer-to-peer AI inference project. This enables node hosts to monetize their spare compute on a decentralized network.
Privacy (1)
- Steve Lee plans to pitch Signal's Meredith Whitaker on integrating Mesh LLM to provide private, decentralized AI capabilities. This setup would leverage Signal's existing enclaves and allow developers to monetize secure Nvidia hardware.
Models (1)
- Max notes that futurist Ray Kurzweil remains remarkably accurate with his prediction that AI will achieve human-level intelligence by 2029. Kurzweil models the technological singularity to occur in 2045.
Payments (1)
- Steve Lee argues that proving humanness is a red herring for bot prevention, citing Nikita Beer's insights on bot issues at X. Instead, metered cryptocurrency payments like X402 provide the optimal economic rate-limiting solution.
Nostr (1)
- Max successfully deployed a backup of meme-pay.dev to decentralized Blossom servers using the Insight.lol gateway and Nostr keys. This allows the web application to run permissionlessly outside traditional DNS architecture.
Startups (1)
- AI search startup Particle integrated the X402 standard into its Radar podcast indexing database. The service charges users per database query but lacks native Bitcoin and Lightning support.