Mastercard Goes Live With SoFiUSD Settlement for $25 Billion Card Program

Meta assembled the first integrated agent-commerce stack, letting its Muse agent move from product discovery to completed payment without a human touching checkout. On September 8, 2026, Meta launched Muse with Stripe's Link wallet for agents built in, enabling checkout at more than a million businesses that accept Link, with Link generating a single-use virtual card for other merchants; Muse is the first AI agent covered by Link's purchase protections. Shop Pay arrived on September 21, when Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke and Meta's Alexandr Wang announced a deep partnership enabling Shop Pay checkout across all Shopify stores and adding Meta as an AI channel inside Shopify's Agentic Storefronts. A day later, PayPal confirmed global payments across its worldwide merchant network, with Mastercard's Agent Pay platform providing the secure payment rails, and PayPal's stock rose nearly 5 percent on the news. By Mark Zuckerberg's September 23 Meta Connect keynote, the pipeline was live with Stripe, Shop Pay, PayPal, Expedia for travel and Instacart for groceries; Keybanc analysts raised Meta's price target to $900, calling it Muse's moment, and Muse hit number one in Apple's US App Store. Each Muse user gets a dedicated Muse Secure VM, an isolated Linux virtual machine with its own browser, where a separate Sentinel agent approves internet access and sensitive actions, credentials stay in vaults the agent cannot read, and every action generates an audit trail, with a Muse Confidential VM planned later in 2026. Amazon has blocked Muse from shopping on its site, while Muse remains US-only at launch with no global expansion timeline specified and full Shop Pay rollout details undisclosed.

Visa announced on September 23 that, in a survey of U.S. consumers on international money transfers, intent to use stablecoins would rise from 36% to 56% if fraud protections and deposit insurance equivalent to those of banks were provided. The survey, part of Visa's "Money Travels 2026," was conducted by Morning Consult from February 24 to March 2 among 2,192 U.S. adults, with respondents given definitions of key terms such as stablecoins before being questioned. Sixty-four percent said that when it comes to trusting new payment methods, they place more importance on who provides the service than on the technology itself, and intent to use stablecoins rose from 36% to 45% when they were offered through existing financial services providers. Among providers of digital currency services, trust was high in traditional commercial banks and global payment networks, at 61% and 60% respectively. Awareness, meanwhile, remains a challenge: 56% of respondents said they had never heard of stablecoins, and even among those aware of them, some mistakenly believed they were subject to price fluctuations like Bitcoin. Regarding fraud in international money transfers, 36% said they had encountered it, 24% had received AI-generated messages that looked genuine, and 44% were concerned about AI deepfakes impersonating family members. The question assuming bank-level protections was hypothetical, and stablecoins themselves are not covered by deposit insurance from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.