Visa, Mastercard and Ant International are developing shared standards for autonomous AI payments, while Robinhood and Coinbase are expanding their connections to regulated prediction-market venues. Samsung Electronics is also set to produce a custom AI chip for OpenAI as the companies deepen their existing partnership. Taken together, the developments highlight activity across several layers of the digital-finance and AI industries, including payment standards, market infrastructure, education, business treasury tools and specialized computing hardware.

Visa, Mastercard and Ant International Develop AI Payment Standards

Ant International has partnered with Visa and Mastercard to develop common standards for AI agents that can handle payments autonomously. These systems are designed to analyze a user’s preferences, negotiate terms and complete transactions without requiring a person to click “confirm.”

The stated objective is to create secure frameworks that allow agentic commerce to operate across global payment rails, rather than requiring each company to develop separate solutions.

The partners bring different capabilities to the project. Ant International contributes its experience operating the Alipay ecosystem at scale, while Visa and Mastercard provide cross-border payment infrastructure that processes a significant share of global card transactions.

Fraud detection is one potential application for AI-driven payments. Machine-learning models can identify suspicious activity and optimize routing across payment rails more quickly than rules-based systems in some cases.

The companies also face interoperability and privacy challenges. Different AI platforms must be able to work together, while payment data must be protected across jurisdictions with differing privacy regulations. According to coverage of the partnership, the companies are working on shared testing environments and encryption protocols designed to meet multiple regulatory regimes.

Industry estimates cited in that coverage indicate that merchants could reduce processing costs by up to 30% through automated payment systems. Those estimates assume adoption follows the timeline projected by analysts, including widespread use by 2030 and an early advantage for payment networks that adopt the systems sooner.

Bitget and UNICEF Add Blockchain to Financial Literacy Curriculum

Bitget has partnered with UNICEF to create a financial literacy module for the Game Changers Coalition curriculum. The module introduces blockchain fundamentals alongside conventional subjects such as budgeting, credit and interest rates.

The course is free, self-paced and available through Agora, UNICEF’s learning platform. It is primarily aimed at young learners who may be encountering both financial literacy and blockchain concepts for the first time.

The module includes short video lessons and quizzes. It also features Neon Paycheck, a game set in a futuristic city in which players make everyday financial decisions involving earning, spending, planning and scam avoidance. The game is intended to provide a less formal introduction before learners begin the structured lessons.

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen appears throughout the material and explains blockchain concepts directly. Chen is also an adjunct professor at HKUST. She said education has always been personally important to her and described the UNICEF partnership as a way to introduce these concepts early, allowing young people to build “the knowledge and confidence” to navigate an evolving financial system.

The initiative follows a relationship that began in 2025, when Bitget partnered with UNICEF Luxembourg on the broader Game Changers Coalition. The program has since reached more than 642,000 young people, parents and teachers across eight countries. Three additional markets, including Indonesia, were added for 2026.

Robinhood Adds Crypto.com Venues for Football Event Contracts

Robinhood began routing selected football event contracts to Crypto.com’s regulated venues on September 8. The addition of Crypto.com Derivatives North America and OG.com expands a routing system that already includes Kalshi, ForecastEx and Rothera.

The launch coincides with football season and the fall midterm elections, which Robinhood expects to account for most of the new event-contract volume this quarter.

Robinhood reported that 13.6 billion event contracts were traded during the second quarter alone. More than 5 billion of those contracts were tied to the World Cup, and the product has recorded more than 45 billion contracts in total since launching approximately two years ago.

The football contracts will cover game outcomes, player props and custom combinations. Depending on availability, they will be distributed across OG.com, Kalshi and Rothera. Robinhood is also introducing a trading hub with live filters for week, team and conference.

Kris Marszalek, CEO of Crypto.com and OG.com, said the ambition was to make OG.com “the most liquid venue” for derivatives. He said the platform would begin with prediction markets before expanding into futures and perpetuals.

JB Mackenzie, who oversees futures and prediction markets at Robinhood, linked the timing of the rollout to the overlapping football and election calendars.

Distributing volume across multiple CFTC-regulated venues can help tighten pricing and reduce the risk of a single venue becoming overwhelmed. However, liquidity remains fragmented across the sector. Binary contracts also settle strictly according to the official result, meaning thin order books or contested outcomes can produce volatile prices until settlement.

Flex and Mesh Enable Direct Crypto and Stablecoin Deposits

Flex, a financial platform designed to consolidate a business owner’s accounts in one place, has partnered with Mesh to allow customers to fund Flex accounts directly with cryptocurrency or stablecoins.

Customers can connect an existing exchange account or wallet and have Mesh verify ownership when they make a deposit. The arrangement removes the need for a separate crypto account or additional infrastructure.

The service is intended to turn digital assets held in a wallet or corporate treasury into working capital. Those funds can then be used to pay suppliers or cover expenses through the same platform that business owners use for other financial activities.

Bam Azizi, Mesh’s CEO and co-founder, said this type of infrastructure “shouldn’t be reserved for large enterprises.” He said the partnership is intended to make digital assets accessible to business owners who are not already familiar with cryptocurrency.

Zaid Rahman, Flex’s founder and CEO, said most fintech companies develop crypto products for users who are already comfortable with the technology. Flex, he said, was built “for everyone else,” based on the idea that a dollar should remain a dollar regardless of the form in which it arrives.

The partnership follows several recent developments for Mesh. The company launched a wallet designed for AI-agent stablecoin transactions, joined Paxos’ Global Dollar Network and announced separate partnerships with Deel, AMINA Bank and Rain.

Samsung to Produce Custom AI Chip for OpenAI

Samsung Electronics has agreed to produce a custom AI chip for OpenAI, according to OpenAI Korea. The arrangement brings the South Korean manufacturer further into an AI-chip market dominated so far by Nvidia and TSMC.

Harrison Kim, general manager of OpenAI Korea, told reporters that chips were the area in which the two companies had made the most progress together. He described their joint research as “one of the areas where we have made the most progress.”

The companies have not disclosed the new chip’s name. It is widely believed to be an inference processor and a successor to Jalapeno, OpenAI’s first custom chip. Jalapeno was developed with Broadcom and manufactured by TSMC.

Adding Samsung as a second chip partner would reduce OpenAI’s reliance on a single manufacturer. That issue has become more significant as demand for AI computing capacity continues to exceed supply.

Advanced memory is another focus of the relationship. Samsung and OpenAI plan to work together on advanced memory chips, potentially in connection with OpenAI’s Stargate data-center project. The project already lists Samsung’s South Korean rival SK Hynix as a supplier.

Samsung has also begun shipping samples of its next-generation HBM4E memory, becoming the first supplier to do so. Customers include AMD, Nvidia and Google.

Kim separately said that ChatGPT Enterprise usage among South Korean businesses had increased 28-fold by late August compared with the same month a year earlier. The figure indicates the extent of OpenAI’s existing presence in the South Korean market.

ION Supports Coinbase Clearing for Kalshi Event Contracts

Coinbase has selected ION’s XTP for Event Contracts platform to support clearing for Kalshi, the prediction market with the largest trading volume.

The partnership has been operating since December 2025, when Coinbase, ION and Kalshi first worked together ahead of Kalshi’s event-contract listing. XTP manages the complete event-contract lifecycle, including creation, resolution and settlement, in real time. The platform can onboard tens of thousands of accounts per day.

XTP was tested during its initial rollout by processing Kalshi’s first one million trades over a single Super Bowl weekend.

Toni Gemayel, Coinbase’s head of prediction markets, said the partnership provides the exchange with the “operational infrastructure needed” to support its expanding event-contract business while maintaining back-office stability as volumes increase.

Max Crowley of Kalshi emphasized the compliance requirements for regulated markets. He said safe markets require more than effective exchange rules and also depend on “sound operational risk management.”

Samuel Shorthouse of ION described the arrangement as part of a broader effort to support the prediction-market sector’s growth with infrastructure designed to operate at scale rather than being added after the fact.

Source: Metaverse Post