JPYC price briefly diverges to 2.2 yen on Upbit listing, circulating supply up 2.2x day-on-day to over 4.2 billion yen

Regarding the issue of the Japanese yen stablecoin JPYC's price diverging from its roughly 1 yen peg, JPYC President Noritaka Okabe responded to an interview with NADA NEWS on September 18. JPYC was listed on the South Korean crypto exchange Upbit on September 17, and immediately afterward 1 JPYC rose to a level exceeding 2 yen. Arbitrage trades, in which coins issued at 1 yen were sold in the higher-priced market, occurred one after another, and the circulating supply swelled to approximately 4.26 billion JPYC as of 9 a.m. on the 18th, about 2.2 times the previous day's level. Okabe revealed that issuance surged and inventory ran short in the middle of the night, and that employees took on overnight work due to a sharp increase in account applications, and he expressed his gratitude to the employees. He also said he had no knowledge at all of the Upbit listing and had not thought the first day's trading volume would exceed 30 billion yen. Noting that although it is a stablecoin compliant with Japanese regulations, not a single domestic electronic payment method operator has yet begun trading it, he expressed hope for trading to start at an early date. He explained that because JPYC Inc. always receives 1 yen at the time of issuance, it can be redeemed regardless of the secondary market price, and he called on users to use it with peace of mind.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said AI agents will need their own financial infrastructure, telling Scott Melker that the company has built a set of tools for the agentic economy. Armstrong said the existing payment rails are sometimes not sufficient for AI because agents want to move very fast, make payments globally, and in some cases transact in very small amounts. The stack includes the Base blockchain, the USDC stablecoin that Coinbase co-created with Circle, and the X402 protocol, which Coinbase created and which is now under the Linux Foundation in collaboration with Google, AWS, CloudFlare and others. He said X402 allows agents to pay each other in real time instantly all over the world, even in very small transaction amounts like a couple of cents at a time, which traditional payment rails do not really support. Armstrong also said Coinbase has been able to bring perpetual futures products to the US under this administration, calling them a pretty killer app in the trading world, and that he expects a future not too far off in which more agents transact in the economy than humans.