Stablecoins — digital tokens pegged to the US dollar, are supposed to be the future of payments. It turns out, for one crypto infrastructure company, that future is already here, and most merchants have no idea it’s happening under their noses.
Rain, a stablecoin payments infrastructure provider, made two announcements within a day of each other this week. On August 18, 2026, the company launched the Agentic Payments Alliance (APA), a coalition of more than 25 organizations, including large industry players like Visa, Mastercard, Fiserv, Circle, Solana, and Remitly. It was formed to help set standards for how AI agents will pay for things on people’s behalf. A day later, at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium, Rain CEO Farooq Malik revealed that stablecoin-based payments the company facilitates already reach more than 100,000 merchants who have no idea they’re involved, since the transactions currently move through Visa’s existing card network rather than a separate crypto rail.
So, in practice, Rain issues payment cards, backed by stablecoins instead of a bank balance, that work anywhere Visa or Mastercard is accepted. Because those cards plug into the standard card networks, a shop ringing up a sale has no way of knowing the money behind it started as a stablecoin. Malik said those transactions currently settle through Visa’s network in roughly three days, and outlined how merchants could instead opt to settle the same day by using stablecoins directly.
The timing lines up with rapid growth in the stablecoin market itself. Total stablecoin supply has climbed past $290 billion, with Tether’s USDT accounting for more than $183 billion of that and Circle’s USDC holding close to $72 billion, according to The Block’s data tracking.
The Agentic Payments Alliance, meanwhile, looks ahead to when stablecoins inevitably become the backbone for commercial settings where AI agents will be making purchases on behalf of people. The alliance’s announcement points to McKinsey projections that global agentic commerce could reach between $3 trillion and $5 trillion by 2030, and says the group intends to develop shared standards for how such agents get authorized to spend, how fraud gets detected, and how loyalty rewards travel with an AI-driven purchase. Rain would use its “Agent Control Layer” and “Scoped Cards” — tools that hand AI agents limited, revocable spending credentials, as groundwork for the alliance’s agenda. Partners believe there shouldn’t be any time wasted in initiating shared standards discussion.
“The risk in a moment like this is not that the industry moves too slowly — it’s that innovation outpaces alignment,” said Sherri Haymond, executive vice president and global head of Digital Commercialization at Mastercard.
“No single company should get to decide how agents transact on someone’s behalf. That has to come from the platforms building the rails, the regulators setting the rules, and the innovators closest to how agents are actually being used today,” commented Farooq Malik, co-founder and CEO of Rain. “We initiated the Agentic Payments Alliance to put all of these parties in the same room, and to do it now, while the category is still taking shape.”
