August’s 1st Week In Crypto: Galaxy, Mastercard And Nvidia Lead The Pack
In Brief
This week’s partnerships lean toward infrastructure quietly catching up to demand: BNY letting institutions stake without leaving custody, Visa folding stablecoins into a network that already spans 195 countries, SpaceX betting its satellites on Nvidia chips.
This week’s partnerships lean toward infrastructure quietly catching up to demand: BNY letting institutions stake without leaving custody, Visa folding stablecoins into a network that already spans 195 countries, SpaceX betting its satellites on Nvidia chips.
The bigger story isn’t any single deal; it’s how unremarkable these integrations are starting to feel.
Mastercard and Borderless.xyz Team Up on Cross-Border Stablecoin Compliance
Mastercard has partnered with stablecoin infrastructure network Borderless.xyz to tackle a problem that’s less about moving money and more about knowing who you’re moving it to.
The project will explore how Mastercard Crypto Credential’s framework can give stablecoin payment participants a way to verify counterparties and confirm they’ve met required standards, without each new provider having to restart compliance checks from scratch.
Borderless.xyz’s co-founder and CEO, Kevin Lehtiniitty, put the underlying issue plainly: the real friction in stablecoin payments isn’t the payments themselves, it’s that “compliance doesn’t scale the same way the network does.”
He drew a comparison to how correspondent banking solved this decades ago, where trust established upstream doesn’t need to be re-verified at every downstream counterpart, arguing Mastercard is now applying that same model to digital assets, with Borderless.xyz as the network it runs on.
Several of Borderless.xyz’s existing network partners, many graduates of Mastercard’s Start Path startup program, will be among the first to run on this single-audit compliance approach at scale.
It fits a broader shift PYMNTS recently flagged: as stablecoins get easier to move through wallets and cards.
They’re also becoming easier for companies to hold and redeploy, turning idle treasury balances into something closer to programmable working capital, rather than software taking over balance sheet decisions outright.
Visa Adds Stablecoin Settlement to Visa Direct Through Zero Hash Partnership
Visa is bringing stablecoin settlement into Visa Direct, its real-time payments network connecting more than 18 billion accounts across upward of 195 countries.
The mechanism runs through a new partnership with Zero Hash, a Chicago-based digital asset infrastructure firm, letting businesses prefund their Visa Direct balances using stablecoins like USDC or USDT instead of only fiat.
The practical upside here is fairly narrow but genuinely useful: companies that already hold stablecoins as part of treasury operations no longer need to convert them to fiat before making a payout.
That removes a conversion step that used to add cost and delay, particularly for cross-border payroll, supplier payments and disbursements in regions where stablecoin usage is already common.
Zero Hash brings the regulatory groundwork Visa needs for this to work at institutional scale.
The firm holds money transmitter licenses across multiple US states and already supports a range of digital assets, which matters given how much scrutiny stablecoin infrastructure tends to draw.
Visa isn’t alone in this lane; Mastercard has pursued similar stablecoin initiatives, and PayPal has its own stablecoin product.
What sets Visa apart here is scale. Visa Direct’s existing reach gives this integration a distribution advantage competitors would need years to match, even with comparable technology.
SpaceX Expands Its Nvidia Partnership for the Starmind Satellite Network
SpaceX has brought Nvidia on to power computing for Starmind, its proposed orbital AI network, a deal that sent both companies’ stock higher and arrived just hours before SpaceX’s first quarterly earnings report as a public company.
The satellites are set to run on Nvidia’s newest Rubin GPUs alongside its Vera CPUs, hardware Nvidia says offers up to 25 times the AI processing power of an H100.
SpaceX wasn’t part of Nvidia’s original space computing lineup back in March, when the chipmaker named six launch partners including Axiom Space and Planet Labs. Its addition now signals Nvidia widening that roster considerably.
Musk posted on X that SpaceX has committed to using Nvidia GPUs “exclusively because they are the best,” a level of exclusivity that’s notable given how many companies are racing for the same GPU supply.
The scale of what’s being proposed is hard to overstate. SpaceX has separately applied to the FCC for permission to launch up to one million orbital data center satellites, dwarfing the roughly 15,000 satellites currently in orbit today.
Nothing here is approved yet; the FCC granted an earlier application in February, but the final call on this expanded plan is still pending, even as Nvidia shares rose over 3% and SpaceX climbed more than 9% on the news.
Galaxy and BNY Partner to Bring Staking Into Institutional Custody
Galaxy has struck a partnership with BNY that pushes their relationship well past basic custody.
Galaxy will supply the staking infrastructure behind BNY’s Digital Asset Custody platform, letting qualified institutional investors stake supported proof-of-stake tokens and collect rewards without ever moving those tokens out of BNY’s custody in the first place.
That “without moving assets” detail is really the point. Institutions have generally had to choose between the safety of staying in custody and the yield that comes from staking, bouncing tokens between providers to do both.
This setup is designed to erase that trade-off, folding staking into the same servicing layer as custody, fund accounting, tax reporting and payments.
Galaxy isn’t just providing plumbing here; it’s also acting as a design partner on BNY’s broader digital asset platform, helping shape what comes next.
Carolyn Weinberg, BNY’s chief product and innovation officer, said institutions are increasingly expecting these platforms to do more than simply “safeguard” assets, and framed the partnership as part of BNY’s push toward more programmable financial infrastructure with institutional-grade controls built in.
Steve Kurz, Galaxy’s global co-head of digital assets, pointed to a broader shift toward open, programmable blockchain infrastructure, arguing that institutions moving early on this will help define what the next phase of digital finance actually looks like.
Staking functionality is still being built out and remains subject to regulatory approval.
REAL Jet Becomes the First Private Aviation Company to Accept Crypto.com Pay
REAL Jet has switched on Crypto.com Pay for its charter booking platform, making it the first private aviation company to let customers pay for chartered flights in crypto.
US residents with a Crypto.com account can now book and settle in dollars directly through the platform, with the payment flow built to meet standard regulatory requirements.
This builds on a partnership between Crypto.com and REAL SLX going back to February 2026, originally framed around reshaping VIP experiences across sports, business and culture.
The payments integration is really the practical extension of that earlier deal rather than something new.
Kenny Dichter, REAL SLX’s founder and chairman, drew a direct line back to the company’s roots, noting that the fractional jet card it pioneered back in 2001 made private aviation accessible to a wider audience for the first time.
He framed Crypto.com Pay as the “next leap forward” for a generation that transacts the way it lives: “instant, digital, and frictionless.” Joe Anzures, Crypto.com’s chief business officer, called landing REAL Jet a milestone for the Pay feature specifically.
The timing lines up with Crypto.com’s broader institutional push. The company closed a $400 million strategic investment from Citadel Securities in July, its first-ever institutional funding round, putting its valuation at $20 billion.
Pi Network Partners With RoboPay to Let PI Pay for Robot Services
Pi Network has partnered with RoboPay to let holders spend PI on robot services running across the Fabric network: a real, if narrow, expansion of what the token can actually be used for beyond trading.
Trading activity picked up alongside the announcement, with volume reportedly jumping 75% to $11.5 million, a sign the market noticed even if the use case itself is still small.
Separately, and unrelated to the RoboPay deal itself, node operators on the network face a mandatory software update deadline of August 11 as part of the broader Protocol 26 rollout; a maintenance requirement meant to keep the mainnet stable and accessible rather than anything tied to this particular partnership.
Anton Kharitonov, an analyst at Traders Union, called the RoboPay tie-up a meaningful step for expanding PI’s real-world utility, while flagging that the underlying fundamentals still carry real risk.
He pointed to strong volume and liquidity as genuinely constructive signs, but said the technical picture remains mixed enough that he’s staying cautious for now, describing the current rally as fragile until price action confirms the move with more conviction.
It’s a partnership that matters more for direction than scale at this point, proof PI can be spent on something concrete, even if the volumes involved are still modest next to the network’s broader ambitions.
Coinfest Asia 2026 Returns to Bali With a New Track-Based Format
Coinfest Asia, billed as the world’s crypto festival, is heading back to Melasti Beach in Bali on August 20–21, organized by Indonesia Crypto Network. This year’s edition ditches the standard conference layout in favor of three intent-based tracks: Institutional, Builders and Traders, each aimed at getting a fairly different type of attendee to the sessions actually relevant to them rather than one generic agenda for everyone.
The Institutional Track leans into stablecoin integration and tokenization, running closed-door roundtables through an Institutional Summit backed by ICEX Group.
The Builders Track is aimed squarely at developers, with a Gemini AI masterclass and a Web3 developer course among the offerings.
The Traders Track brings a global trading competition from MEXC Ventures alongside sessions built for people actively trading rather than building or allocating institutional capital.
A newer piece this year is the “Asia Go-To-Market Sessions,” run jointly with regional partners like WebX 2026 in Japan and India Blockchain Week in India, meant to give attendees a grounded read on regulation and user behavior market by market.
Joditha Winatajaya, Coinfest Asia’s head of event, put the reasoning simply: Asia isn’t “one single market,” and the sessions exist to connect audiences with the right local ecosystems in one place.
Confirmed speakers include Charles Hoskinson, Trust Wallet’s Felix Fan and Nansen’s Alexander Svanevik, with dozens more expected across exchanges, wallets and institutional finance.
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About The Author
Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in crypto, AI, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
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Alisa, a dedicated journalist at the MPost, specializes in crypto, AI, investments, and the expansive realm of Web3. With a keen eye for emerging trends and technologies, she delivers comprehensive coverage to inform and engage readers in the ever-evolving landscape of digital finance.
