Visa has moved the first of its Visa Direct stablecoin pilots into commercial use. The October 15 announcement lets eligible businesses prefund their cross-border payouts with USDC in near real time, instead of waiting on bank funding windows. Inyo Global, a Visa Direct processor, is the first company running it live.

The headline says pilots, plural. The detail is narrower.

What actually went live

Visa ran two stablecoin pilots on Visa Direct in 2025. The first, unveiled at Sibos in September, let businesses fund Visa Direct with stablecoins; Visa treated those balances as cash on account and paid out in local currency. The second came two months later at Web Summit in Lisbon and sent payouts straight into recipients’ stablecoin wallets, pitched at creators, freelancers and gig workers.

The GENIUS Act goes live on January 18, 2027, at the latest. The law sets its own effective date as the earlier of that day or 120 days after regulators finish the implementing rules. With three months to go, not one of those rules is final. Issuers, banks and exchanges are getting a hard start date and a rulebook that is still in draft.

The statute gave regulators a year from its July 2025 signing to write the regulations. That deadline lapsed in July. What exists now is a stack of proposals from five agencies, with comment periods that close weeks before the law starts to bite.

Spiko has raised $90 million in a Series B led by NEA (New Enterprise Associates). The Paris company runs regulated money market funds whose shareholder register lives on public blockchains, and it now manages $2.7 billion in them, more than five times what it had a year ago. Most of that money arrived in the last twelve months.

Index Ventures, which led the Series A, came back for more. Bpifrance, Speedinvest, White Star Capital, Flourish Ventures and Wintermute Ventures are in the round as well, along with an angel whose name carries weight in Frankfurt and Zurich: Axel Weber, the former Bundesbank president who went on to chair UBS for ten years. Spiko has raised about $120 million since it was founded in 2023.

Circle Foundation announced two grants on September 25. One goes to the UN Development Programme, the other to the World Food Programme, and both aim to move stablecoin payments out of pilot projects and into the regular business of delivering aid. The foundation is funded by Circle Internet Group’s 1% equity pledge and is run as a donor-advised fund at Fidelity Charitable. Neither grant comes with a published dollar figure.

The most useful detail in the Bitget breach is what the attacker did in the first six minutes. Unauthorized transfers began at 18:31 UTC on September 24 with a 0.84 ETH test from a wallet labelled Bitget 6. Within minutes, the USDT, USDC and Tether Gold in the haul were being swapped into ether on Uniswap at prices up to 5% above spot. A thief holding roughly $67M of dollar tokens and $12.8M of tokenized gold accepted up to about $4M of slippage to avoid holding any of it for an hour. Those assets can be frozen by their issuers. Ether can’t. By the time the last transfer landed at 21:23 UTC, about 24,590 ETH sat in three previously unused wallets, and the total loss was confirmed at $351.6M.

Binance has bought $100 million of Circle stock. The two companies also signed a new five-year commercial agreement to push USDC, Circle’s dollar stablecoin, across the exchange and into emerging markets.

The equity part is simple. Binance took 1,237,011 Class A shares of Circle Internet Group (NYSE: CRCL) in a private placement at $80.84 each, about 5% under the September 17 close of $85.09. The deal closed that day and was announced on September 22. Binance can’t sell, transfer or hedge the shares for up to two years, or until it exits the commercial agreement, but it keeps its voting rights. CRCL rose close to 2% premarket on the news.

SoFi Bank has switched its whole card program to stablecoin settlement on Mastercard’s network. That’s roughly $25 billion a year in debit and credit card volume, now settling in SoFiUSD, the dollar token SoFi issues itself. It went live on September 22.

SoFi says it’s the first national bank to do this. Who’s doing it is what makes it news. SoFi Bank, N.A. holds a national charter and is supervised by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. So a regulated bank is moving its own payments business onto a blockchain, using a token it issues itself.

At 14:28 UTC on Sunday, the Liquid Federation paid out 3,996 bitcoin to a customer’s address on the main chain. Nothing about the payment looked wrong. A peg-out request had come in through SideSwap, an approved trading venue on the network, the matching L-BTC had been burned on the sidechain the way the protocol requires, and the signers signed. A small 2.5 BTC transfer had gone out just before it. The two amounts ended up consolidated in a single address holding about 3,998.5 BTC.

Fasset closed a $68 million round led by Japan’s SBI Group at a $1 billion valuation, announced Monday. The gap between this round and the last one is the detail worth pausing on: the company raised $51 million in May, which puts total funding for the year at $119 million and compresses the whole journey to unicorn status into roughly three months of calendar time.

Valuations that move that fast usually signal one of two things. Either the market is repricing a category wholesale, or the company put numbers on the table that changed the conversation. In this case it looks like both.

Cloudflare spent July building the side of the machine payments market where money gets collected. This week it shipped the side where money gets spent.

Cloudflare Wallets launched Tuesday as part of the company’s Agents Week, giving AI agents running on its network a stablecoin balance and a readable name to present when they buy something. The name lives at cloudflare.pay, where account owners can reserve a handle now. Everything else, funding the wallet, fiat onramps, letting agents actually spend, arrives “in the coming months.”