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Western Union partners with Rain to launch the Stablecard in 37 markets, allowing users to spend USDPT stablecoins through the global Visa network.
Western Union has just announced a partnership with stablecoin infrastructure provider Rain to launch Stablecard, a product combining an e-wallet and a Visa-branded card that allows users to hold and spend stablecoins backed by USD. This is considered one of the biggest moves by this international money transfer group to deepen its involvement in blockchain-based payments.

The EU supervisory authority warns of a rise in impersonation scams as more than 1,700 companies dealing in unlicensed crypto assets must leave the market under MiCA.
European Union (EU) financial regulators have issued a warning about a surge in impersonation scams as the bloc tightens licensing for crypto-asset service providers.
According to officials cited by the Financial Times, scam artists are impersonating financial regulators and crypto-asset firms to target customers of service providers that are not licensed to operate in the EU, taking advantage of the timing when many users are forced to look for alternative providers.

Mastercard partners with Borderless.xyz to pilot a Crypto Credential framework, boosting trust for cross-border stablecoin payment flows.
Mastercard continues expanding its stablecoin payment infrastructure through a new pilot program with Borderless.xyz, a global liquidity network specializing in stablecoins. As announced by the two companies on Wednesday, the program will test how the Mastercard Crypto Credential framework can support trustworthy interactions in cross-border stablecoin payment flows.

Vietnam officially establishes a legal framework for crypto assets, limiting individual investors to trading a maximum of 300,000 rubles per year.
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed and issued a landmark law establishing a regulatory framework for the crypto-asset market, according to the state news agency TASS reported on Tuesday.
A law sets out the principles applicable to crypto-asset exchanges, custodial organizations, brokerage firms, clearing and settlement organizations, investors, and other market participants, while continuing to maintain a ban on using crypto assets as a means of payment or as legal tender within the territory of Russia.

Circle will launch the Arc mainnet on September 16 with Visa, Mastercard, and BlackRock as validator entities, with USDC in circulation reaching $73.3 billion.
Circle has just announced a plan to publicly open the mainnet of the Arc blockchain on September 16, while also revealing that the list of founding validator units is almost entirely made up of traditional financial institutions, alongside the release of its Q2 business results on Wednesday.
The set of validator entities ensuring network safety includes BlackRock, The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), Galaxy, Global Payments, the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) trading platform, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, and Visa. Among them, BlackRock is expected to deploy BUIDL, the company’s tokenized money market fund, on Arc, while DTCC will support the tokenization of assets held in custody by this organization, even though this activity will only begin in the second half of 2027.

The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals vacates a ban on Perplexity’s Comet, saying Amazon will struggle to prove a CFAA violation in a lawsuit involving an AI agent.
The U.S. Federal Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has just lifted an injunction blocking Perplexity’s AI shopping tools from operating on Amazon, giving the startup an initial victory in a case being closely watched by the tech industry. This is considered the first appellate ruling to directly address whether AI agents can legally carry out online activities on behalf of users—an unresolved legal question as agentic AI browsers and assistants become increasingly popular.

Few and Far NFT founder Taj Tarsha was charged with securities fraud, accused of using $10 million in investor capital for gambling, speculation, and his personal DJ hobby.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York charged Taj Tarsha, 34, the founder of the NFT trading platform Few and Far, with allegations of securities fraud and wire fraud.
According to the indictment, Tarsha raised more than $10 million from investors with the commitment to use the funds to build a decentralized trading platform for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). However, in reality, most of the money was transferred to support online gambling activities, speculative cryptocurrency trading, and personal expenses, including funding a personal DJ hobby.

Visa’s handshake with Zerohash enables Visa Direct customers to pre-fund and make payments using stablecoins, expanding its global blockchain strategy.
Visa continues to expand its footprint in the stablecoin space through a new cooperation agreement with Zerohash, a crypto infrastructure provider for financial institutions. According to information Zerohash disclosed on Wednesday, new features will be rolled out via Visa Direct, Visa’s payments network, allowing eligible customers to pre-fund into an account and make payments with stablecoins.

Meta introduces Muse Code running on Muse Spark 1.2, notable for its ability to recover from failures, though it still lags behind Claude Code on many evaluation benchmarks.
Meta has officially joined the race for agentic programming tools, a field currently led by Anthropic and OpenAI, with the launch of the Muse Code experimental version.
This tool operates on a terminal device, run by Muse Spark 1.2 — the company’s latest model—designed to handle complex software engineering tasks on large-scale code repositories, from change planning, to writing code, to verifying results, while also being able to orchestrate multiple subsidiary agents working in parallel.

UK–US financial management working group discusses the implementation of the GENIUS Act, asset encryption, and cross-border cooperation in London.
The United States and the United Kingdom reaffirm their commitment to strengthening cooperation on financial asset management at a recent meeting of the bilateral working group, indicating that both countries continue to maintain policy alignment on encrypted assets as US authorities roll out key legislation on stablecoins.

Cloudflare has begun rolling out programmable wallets that allow AI agents to pay API, data, and online content using stablecoin via the x402 protocol.
Cloudflare is in the early stages of rolling out programmable wallets designed to let AI agents pay through an application programming interface (API) for data and online content using stablecoins, thereby adding an important infrastructure component to the company's agent-commerce ecosystem.

BlackRock merged Ethereum Trust ETF shares at a 1-for-3 ratio in October, helping reduce trading costs from 7 to about 2 basis points.
BlackRock is expected to carry out a reverse stock split at a ratio of 1-for-3 for the Ethereum Trust ETF (ETHA) on October 6, according to a filing submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The split will combine every three shares of ETHA into one share, thereby increasing the fund’s net asset value per share without changing the value of an investor’s holdings or the fund’s total assets, as stated in the filing.

The Central Board of Direct Taxes of India has amended guidance on FATCA and CRS, bringing crypto assets and CBDC under international tax reporting, and tightening account due diligence for amounts over 1 million USD.
India has expanded its framework for international tax reporting to include crypto assets that fall under regulated scope, central bank digital money, and digital money products within the scope of updated regulations under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) and the Common Reporting Standard (CRS).

Wells Fargo is expected to launch a crypto deposit service this fall, supporting 24/7 settlement between USD and the British pound for business customers.
Wells Fargo is expected to roll out a crypto deposit service this fall, allowing business and commercial customers to transfer and settle capital outside the bank’s traditional operating hours.
In a report dated August 4 by The Wall Street Journal, Wells Fargo said the service will allow customers to continuously transfer, program, and settle capital within a regulated banking framework, with the initial rollout phase applying to transactions between the US dollar and the British pound.

Five defendants were convicted of imprisoning and extorting two French crypto millionaires for 52 hours, even though neither victim gave evidence.
Five men have been convicted for offences related to extortion and unlawful imprisonment of a pair of French crypto millionaires, keeping them captive for 52 hours in an apartment in East London last July, according to the Daily Mail. The two victims, both in their twenties, were ambushed in Shadwell and taken to an apartment in Canning Town. Prosecutor Heidi Stonecliffe KC told the Inner London Crown Court that their lifestyle had been widely publicised on social media and may have attracted unwanted attention.

Ledger warns that the exploitation of Coldcard, causing $130 million in damage, shows that AI is reshaping both attacks and defense for hardware wallets.
Ledger hardware wallet manufacturer says the recent exploitation of a Coldcard vulnerability should be seen as a warning to the entire crypto asset industry. According to Ledger CTO Charles Guillemet, the incident exposed weaknesses in how some devices for storing crypto assets generate cryptographic randomness, while also showing that artificial intelligence is reshaping both cyberattacks and digital defense activities.

OpenAI publicly released emails and messages rebutting Apple’s lawsuit, saying the complaint contains many errors and serious personnel mix-ups.
OpenAI has just publicly rebutted the trade-secret lawsuit that Apple initiated behind closed doors, by releasing a batch of emails, messages, and a detailed response covering each argument.
In a post on the official information page on Monday, the company accused the iPhone manufacturer of providing multiple pieces of inaccurate information before filing the lawsuit, including confusing two employees with similar names, incorrectly claiming that OpenAI ignored efforts to contact them, as well as falsely asserting that Apple’s outside counsel had exchanged messages with OpenAI’s general counsel, Che Chang, before the lawsuit was filed.

Boltz suspends Bitcoin swap service indefinitely after a surge of attacks once the TVL of $262,000 was hit with help from AI, leaving the team unable to patch the vulnerabilities in time.
Boltz, a non-custodial Bitcoin swap service provider, has announced it is suspending all swap functionality indefinitely, citing the rapid increase in AI-assisted cyberattacks as the cause. In a series of posts on the social network X on Monday, the company said the swap feature would be disabled “until further notice” and that it has not yet been able to provide a specific timeline for restoring service.