Western Union is launching a stablecoin on Solana, Meta is paying creators in USDC, Visa has passed seven billion dollars in annualized stablecoin settlement, and Stripe is opening for autonomous AI agents. The payments stack moved this week.
In this week's 10-minute episode of Kaupr Weekly, Morten Myrstad reflects on the thread running through the past couple of weeks: Western Union, Meta, Visa, Stripe and Lightspark have each, separately, confirmed that stablecoins are the settlement layer they are building on. None of them are crypto companies. That is precisely what makes the shift interesting — the infrastructure for how money moves globally is being rebuilt, without looking like crypto in the interface customers see.
Kaupr Weekly is a short podcast anchored in the news flow. One main takeaway from the week — a trend, a story or an event — analyzed and prepared by Morten Myrstad.
Listen to the full episode on Kaupr Today, or read the key points below.
Western Union has been moving money across borders for 170 years, ever since the telegraph era. This week the company confirmed it will launch its own stablecoin on Solana in May, connected directly to its 360,000-agent cash pickup network through a single API.
This is not a pilot. A company with deep exposure to existing international payment networks is replacing its settlement layer with a blockchain.
Four years after the Libra project was shut down by regulators across multiple continents, Meta is back in digital money — but in an entirely different form. This week the company began paying creators in USDC in Colombia and the Philippines, through Stripe.
It was not announced as a crypto product. It was simply rolled out. The difference from Libra is not the ambition but the method: Meta is not building a new currency, but using existing stablecoin infrastructure as a payout layer to billions of users.
Visa reported this week that its stablecoin settlement network has reached an annualized run rate of seven billion dollars — up 50 percent in a single quarter. The network spans nine blockchains.
For the world's largest card network, this is not a side bet. The volume growth shows that stablecoins are functioning as a settlement layer between financial counterparties, not just as a speculative asset.
At its annual conference toward the end of the week, Stripe launched a range of products for what it calls the agentic economy — tools that let AI agents initiate, manage and settle transactions autonomously.
What is striking about Stripe is the same thing that is striking about Western Union, Meta and Visa: this is not a crypto company. The entire strategy is built around abstracting away anything that looks like crypto in the user interface — the complexity, the wallet addresses, the volatility — while stablecoins and blockchains run underneath.
David Marcus built PayPal into what it became, later led Messenger at Meta, and then attempted to launch Libra as a global digital currency. Central banks and regulators shut it down in concert.
This week he was on stage at Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas, launching Grid Global Account, Lightspark's new platform for global payments. Grid is a single API connecting to local payment networks in 65 countries, supporting stablecoins, Visa cards, bank transfers and Bitcoin — with a settlement layer that is invisible to the end user. The platform also gives AI agents their own ring-fenced accounts with spending limits and audit trails.
"The agent plans, the policy decides, and the account enforces," Marcus said of the model.
The shift is not only American. At the Norway Fintech Festival in Bergen a week ago, crypto, stablecoins and agentic AI took up more space on the program than ever before. Norges Bank and DNB sat on panels alongside Firi, K33, Revolut and Klarna. The question was no longer whether digital money has a future, but what that future looks like in practice.
At Treasury 360 Nordic in Gothenburg, around 1,000 Nordic treasurers gathered, and eight sessions on the program dealt directly with digital assets, stablecoins and tokenized deposits. Danske Bank, Nordea, SEB, BNP Paribas and ING were all on stage — not to talk about crypto, but about products they are building or, in the French case, already running in production.
Banking Circle started as an idea inside Saxo Bank in Copenhagen in 2013. Today the company processes more than one trillion euros in payment volume annually and serves over 700 financial institutions, including Stripe, Alibaba and Paysafe.
Banking Circle recently received its MiCA license for crypto assets. The company now holds a banking license, an EMT license and a CASP license under one roof in Luxembourg — the only operator in Europe with this combination — and has launched regulated stablecoin settlements. That makes Banking Circle Europe's most fully licensed payment infrastructure provider, with Nordic roots.
Two years ago, this was future-scenario talk. Now it is operational workshops at conferences with custody people in the room. The infrastructure is ready.
The question is whether Nordic and Baltic companies are moving fast enough to use it.
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