Impersonation and AI-assisted fraud are becoming one of the most serious security problems in crypto, shifting attention away from code bugs alone and toward identity, access control, and accountability. Chainalysis said at least $14 billion in on-chain funds flowed into crypto scams in 2025, though not all of that activity was tied to AI. Within a subset of cases linked on-chain to AI vendors, the average scam operation was about $3.2 million, compared with roughly $719,000 for scams without those links, a correlation the company did not describe as causal. Executives interviewed across the sector pointed to a broad change in attack methods. Binance Chief Security Officer Jimmy Su said smart-contract security has improved enough that attackers now focus more on people around protocols, credentials, and governance systems, citing Binance security team assistance in stopping a $1.2 million governance attack on BrainTrust. Binance Research also said access control failures accounted for about two-thirds of the $621 million lost to DeFi exploits in April 2026 alone. The report also highlights unresolved attribution issues, mixer-related tracing gaps, and a new frontier in AI agents that can pay, register for services, and potentially transact on users’ behalf. Several executives argued that the missing layer is not transaction verification itself, but trustworthy identity and responsibility behind those actions.

Atul Khekade, co-founder of XDC Network, said AI agent payments are removing delays tied to banks, clearing houses, and business hours, turning payments from a waiting process into a background function that runs at the speed of the underlying network. He said this points to new forms of payment, including possible changes to how invoicing and credit card payments work. Research cited in the report shows that AI agents carried out more than 176 million on-chain transactions between May 2025 and April 2026, with total value above $73 million. Of those transfers, 76% were below the $0.30 fixed fee threshold commonly associated with card payments. USDC accounted for 98.6% of settlement volume. To support high-frequency, low-value payments, several companies have introduced related tools and standards. The report names Stripe’s Machine Payment Protocol, Google’s Agent Payment Protocol, Cloudflare’s wallet and payment tools, and Mastercard’s Agent Pay for Machines. XDC is also entering the segment through XDCAI.tech, using the open x402 protocol originally from Coinbase.

Visa and Mastercard are building out payment rails for AI agents, though the market is still tiny by card-network standards. Visa launched Intelligent Commerce Connect on April 9, a single integration layer that lets merchants accept payments from four agent protocols. Mastercard followed on June 10 with Agent Pay for Machines, aimed at high-frequency, low-value transactions between machines and supporting settlement across cards, bank accounts and stablecoins. On the crypto side, teams are already showing working demos: XDC said it connected Anthropic’s Claude to onchain payments in July and demonstrated an AI ordering and paying for coffee. Even so, a joint study by Visa and Artemis found that x402 and MPP processed more than 110 million transactions over the past 12 months, with total volume of just $136 million, or about $1.24 per transaction. The gap between technical capability and real-world adoption remains large, and questions around identity, authorization, risk controls and accountability are still unresolved.

XDC Network rolled out its XDC AI framework on July 29, introducing a setup designed to let AI agents discover, buy, and pay for digital services on their own. According to CryptoBriefing, the framework includes a smart wallet with built-in compliance features, uses gasless USDC settlement, and is built on Coinbase’s x402 payment standard. The network is also working with Bridge, a Stripe company, on regulated stablecoin and fiat transaction infrastructure. XDC Network said this part of the buildout is intended to support programmable financial identity and seamless conversion between payment rails. The roadmap outlined in the report adds more services before year-end. Those planned integrations include research tools and travel booking, while plugin support for the ElizaOS AI agent framework is also in the pipeline. The update puts payments, compliance, and service access into one package aimed at autonomous AI-driven transactions.

XDC Network is positioning itself as a payments rail for the emerging agentic economy, where AI agents do more than recommend actions and can actually complete transactions. The company’s XDC AI framework combines the x402 open payment standard with gasless USDC settlement, aiming to let autonomous software pay for API calls, book services, and settle trades in real time. XDC Tech, the U.S.-based institutional arm of the network, has also integrated Bridge, a Stripe company, to bring stablecoin settlement into that roadmap. According to comments from co-founders Atul Khekade and Ritesh Kakkad cited by Decrypt, the missing piece for AI agents has been a trust and settlement layer that can handle real-time payments, compliance, KYC, AML, dispute resolution, and spending controls. XDC says it wants to supply that shared infrastructure rather than have each business build its own rails. The company recently demonstrated its XDC AI marketplace at its New York office, where it said more than 100 representatives from banks, tech firms, VC, family offices, AI companies, and ecosystem groups attended. The broader bet is that AI agents, stablecoins, and enterprise blockchain will converge into a new transactional stack for trade finance, RWAs, and machine-driven commerce.

Corporate use of stablecoins and blockchain rails is moving well past small-scale crypto experiments and into payment operations, collateral management and debt issuance. The article contrasts that shift with a much older form of financial engineering: in the 1970s, U.S. companies exploited check-clearing delays to keep cash on their books for a few extra days when interest rates were above 10%. Today, the same underlying corporate goal — freeing trapped liquidity and speeding settlement — is being pursued with tokenized money and digital ledgers instead of distant bank branches and mailed checks. The piece points to several examples. Siemens first issued a €60 million bond on Polygon in February 2023 with a two-day settlement period, then completed a €300 million issuance in September 2024 via SWIAT and settled it in minutes using the Bundesbank’s trigger solution. Deel, which handles payroll for more than 40,000 companies and 1.5 million workers across more than 150 countries and territories, now lets firms use stablecoin treasuries for payroll and has introduced DLUSD. JPMorgan’s Kinexys processes roughly $5 billion a day and has cleared $3 trillion in total, while Tether generated $10.09 billion in profit in 2025 with a team of about 300. The central argument is that automation can remove operational friction in moving cash, collateral and securities, but it does not erase the cost of judging counterparties. Credit assessment, KYC, fraud reviews and margin calls still require people, even as the pipes become faster.

Caleb & Brown, which manages more than $2 billion in client assets, has partnered with Ripple to improve US dollar withdrawals by upgrading the payment infrastructure behind its services.

SUI jumps 19% after a Nasdaq firm stakes 108.7M tokens; XDC gains on Republic as masternode validator; DEXE, SEI, UNI also rise on rotation, ecosystem upgrades and rising protocol revenue. Bitcoin dominance stays at 60%.