Payments

Airbtc’s expansion in El Salvador and rising digital‑wallet uptake among Argentine seniors show Bitcoin shifting from a speculative asset to a payments instrument across Latin America. This regional feature examines merchant adoption, demographic drivers, volatility interaction, and pragmatic recommendations for businesses and policymakers.

A recent 140% surge in XRP on‑ledger payment volume collided with market turbulence around Ripple’s monthly 1B escrow unlock — and a fake memo amplified short‑term noise. This article untangles ledger fundamentals from market reaction and offers a trader’s checklist for payments‑focused investors.

Visa’s expansion of a USDC settlement pilot to U.S. banks signals a potential shift in how card networks and banks think about the settlement layer. This analysis explores merchant flows, operational and regulatory implications for banks and card networks, and the likely liquidity and demand effects for USDC and Circle.

Spot XRP ETFs and the XRPL Lending Protocol together create a new plumbing for institutional liquidity: ETFs can concentrate capital while protocol-level fixed-rate credit turns XRP into a usable, short-term funding asset. This feature explains how ETF flow mechanics differ from BTC/ETH, how XRPL Lending works, recent on‑chain payment spikes, the changed legal backdrop, and realistic 12–36 month scenarios for price, liquidity and adoption.

Visa’s pilot to settle U.S. transactions using USDC on Solana is a watershed for real-world stablecoin rails — it demonstrates issuer-to-acquirer on‑chain settlement and exposes new tradeoffs in speed, cost, and compliance. Payments and product teams must weigh throughput, liquidity, custody and regulatory controls when designing enterprise-grade on‑chain settlement.

YouTube's decision to offer creator payouts in PayPal USD (PYUSD) marks a practical inflection point for stablecoin use in mainstream payments. This article examines how PYUSD payouts work, implications for fiat rails and strategy, tax and merchant issues for creators, RWA/tokenization trends through 2026, and the key risks product and payments teams must manage.

A cluster of XRP events — large on‑chain redistributions during the TOXR ETF window, a rare -20% perpetual funding spike, new Swiss banking adoption, and Ripple's Swell 2026 announcement — forces a reassessment of XRP's trajectory from speculative token to payments rail.

Privacy-first zero-knowledge payments are moving from niche to necessity in emerging markets — driven by lower L2 fees, mobile-first UX, and regulatory-friendly selective disclosure. This piece compares Celo’s payments-first approach to typical Ethereum zk-rollups and gives product recommendations for builders and growth teams.

Regional fiat stablecoins arriving on Polygon could nudge on-chain volume and payments use cases, but meaningful token re-rating hinges on liquidity, fees capture, and developer incentives. This piece assesses KRW1’s launch, Polygon’s architecture, tokenomic pathways for MATIC, and the KPIs investors should watch.

The XRP Ledger saw a blistering 400% spike in payments and on-ledger activity before a sharp cooldown — but does this cycle signal fleeting interest or the start of durable institutional adoption for tokenization?