Squads has closed an $18 million strategic round led by Solana Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, L1D, Collab+Currency, Electric Capital, Placeholder, Jump Crypto, and Robot Ventures. Total funding now stands at $42.9 million. The capital is directed at Altitude, a financial operating system built on stablecoin infrastructure.

The underlying thesis is structural, not speculative. For most of the last decade, building financial products for businesses meant building on top of banks — partnerships required to hold customer funds, access payment rails, and clear compliance in every new market. Blockchains changed the underlying layer. Stablecoins turned money into software, separating treasury and payments from the fractional reserve system for the first time. That separation created a new category of licensed Payment Service Providers capable of moving funds across both stablecoin and traditional banking rails simultaneously.

Visa has officially launched a validator node on the Tempo network, marking a significant step in the payments giant’s push into blockchain infrastructure. Tempo, a purpose-built Layer-1 blockchain designed for agentic commerce and real-time payments, now counts Visa, Stripe, and Zodia Custody by Standard Chartered among its first external validators.

The validator node was configured and managed entirely in-house by Visa following six months of joint engineering work with Tempo’s team. Rather than relying on third-party operators, Visa integrated its secure infrastructure directly into the Tempo network — positioning itself as an anchor validator during this initial phase of network growth.

The convergence of AI agents and blockchain infrastructure was not planned. It emerged from a practical problem: AI agents that operate autonomously — browsing the web, executing tasks, purchasing services on behalf of users — need a way to transact without human approval at every step. Credit cards require a human name, a billing address, and terms of service that presuppose a human accountholder. Bank accounts require identity verification that legal entities find cumbersome and software agents cannot satisfy. Crypto wallets require none of this.

The framing that pits stablecoins against central bank digital currencies as competing visions for the future of money is analytically convenient and mostly wrong. The two instruments are pursuing different use cases, attracting different users, and solving different problems. The competition, where it exists, is narrower than the rhetoric suggests.

Stablecoins — primarily USDT and USDC, which together account for the vast majority of the market — are settlement instruments for crypto-native activity. They allow traders to move between positions without exiting to fiat. They allow DeFi protocols to denominate loans and yields in dollar terms. They allow cross-border transactions to settle without the correspondent banking rails that add cost and latency to international payments. These are real functions. They are also functions that a retail CBDC, constrained by privacy concerns, programmability limits, and central bank conservatism, is not well positioned to perform.