Last Week Of August: From Stablecoins To Prediction Markets In Crypto Deals
This week’s list runs from payment giants racing to lock in stablecoin rails (Mastercard, Visa, Ryanair’s own cloud bet) to a scrappy pivot from online casino to trillion-dollar prediction markets. Infrastructure keeps winning the week, whether it’s a blockchain joining a card network or 225 chains landing inside a spreadsheet-friendly analytics tool.
BNB Chain Joins Mastercard’s Crypto Partner Program
BNB Chain, the blockchain network tied to Binance, has joined Mastercard’s Crypto Partner Program, a roster of more than 100 partners working to weave digital assets into global payments infrastructure.
The program leans specifically on high-throughput, low-cost blockchains.
Solana, Polygon and Tron were already in, and BNB Chain now joins them, fitting the same profile with millions of daily transactions and a sizable stablecoin and DeFi ecosystem already running on it.
The focus areas are fairly concrete: cross-border remittances, B2B transfers, payouts and settlement, practical payments infrastructure rather than speculative trading products. It builds on Mastercard’s broader push into on-chain payments, which picked up momentum after the company acquired stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK.
What’s arguably more interesting than the individual chains involved is the structure of the program itself.
Rather than each blockchain building payment standards in isolation, Mastercard is essentially setting up a shared table where partners can coordinate directly with each other on how on-chain payments should work, putting Mastercard in the position of convening the conversation rather than just processing transactions at the end of it.
With Mastercard moving billions of transactions daily across more than 210 countries, joining this network gives BNB Chain a level of payments-industry visibility that a standalone blockchain announcement simply wouldn’t provide on its own.
Shinhan Financial Group Partners With Visa to Pilot Stablecoin Issuance in South Korea
Shinhan Financial Group, one of South Korea’s five largest financial conglomerates, is teaming up with Visa to test a full domestic stablecoin settlement stack (covering issuance, remittance and redemption) using Visa’s enterprise stablecoin platform launched in July.
It’s a notable first: no other top-tier South Korean financial group has adopted Visa’s stablecoin infrastructure at this scale before, and the timing gives Visa a real head start over Mastercard in bank-native stablecoin settlement in the country, since Mastercard’s local crypto partnerships haven’t yet gone that deep.
Jin Ok-dong, Shinhan’s chairman, said the plan is to combine “Shinhan’s financial capabilities with Visa’s global infrastructure” to build new finance models suited specifically to the Korean market, rather than importing a generic template.
Pilot projects will cover stablecoin integration into bank card settlement, alongside expanded B2B and B2C payment flows.
The move fits into a broader pattern for Shinhan, which isn’t treating this as an isolated experiment.
Its asset management arm recently signed a four-party agreement with the Solana Foundation, Etherfuse and Orca to test a won-denominated tokenized fund, and it partnered with Solana back in April on stablecoin payments.
All of this is unfolding against South Korea’s Digital Asset Basic Act taking shape, which will eventually set the regulatory rules stablecoins and VASPs have to operate under.
Miracle Pay Partners With zerohash to Bring Stablecoin Payments to US Merchants
Miracle Pay has partnered with zerohash to give US merchants a way to accept stablecoin payments without having to understand the technical machinery running underneath.
The division of labor is clean: Miracle Pay owns the merchant-facing side (onboarding, payment acceptance, the actual experience a business owner interacts with) while zerohash handles the regulated infrastructure behind it, including conversion, custody, liquidity and settlement, with funds moving in something close to real time.
Hakan Törehan, CEO of Miracle Pay’s parent company Metaterra, made the point that the US market doesn’t need another payment concept so much as infrastructure merchants can actually trust, arguing the partnership creates “an accelerated path from interest to real transaction activity.”
It’s a fair framing. Plenty of merchants are curious about accepting crypto but have stayed away because building or vetting compliant infrastructure alone is a real lift.
Adam Tesan, zerohash’s chief revenue officer, made a similar point from the infrastructure side, noting merchants have spent years working within payment rails that weren’t designed for how fast commerce moves today.
Stablecoins settling near-instantly through regulated on-chain infrastructure is the pitch here, and pairing that with Miracle Pay’s existing merchant relationships gives zerohash a distribution channel it wouldn’t have built as quickly alone.
High Roller Technologies Partners With Crypto.com to Enter US Prediction Markets
High Roller Technologies, a company that started life as an online casino operator, is pivoting hard into US prediction markets under its ROLR brand, leaning on a partnership with Crypto.com to get there faster than building the regulatory infrastructure from scratch would allow.
CEO Seth Young said the company shifted strategy in 2025 after its 2024 IPO, shuttering most of its Fruta and High Roller casino markets along the way.
Revenue dropped from roughly $30 million in 2024 to about $20 million in 2025 as a direct result, though Young says the remaining casino operations have improved their unit economics in the meantime.
The Crypto.com deal gives High Roller a shortcut: Crypto.com already holds futures commission merchant, designated contract market and derivatives clearing licenses, so High Roller can focus on the customer-facing side while plugging into Crypto.com’s liquidity pool for event contracts through its CDNA affiliate.
Kris Marszalek, Crypto.com’s co-founder and CEO, said High Roller brings “a premium brand, strong online expertise” and an established platform to the partnership.
Young called the agreement a “significant milestone,” pointing to third-party estimates suggesting a mature US prediction markets opportunity could exceed $1 trillion in annual trading volume, a considerably bigger swing than the casino business it’s replacing.
Hanwha Asset Management Forms a Three-Way Alliance With Ripple and Canary Capital
Hanwha Asset Management has entered a three-way partnership with Ripple and US asset manager Canary Capital, aimed at getting ahead of South Korea’s incoming digital asset regulatory framework rather than reacting to it after the fact.
The structure splits responsibilities fairly cleanly: Hanwha brings financial product design suited to Korean regulations and investor demand, Canary brings US ETF development experience, and Ripple contributes blockchain technology and payments infrastructure.
Steven McClurg, Canary Capital’s CEO, said he believes real-world asset tokenization represents “the future of the financial system,” pointing to the companies’ earlier work launching the first US XRP ETF as the model they want to replicate in South Korea specifically.
This fits into a considerably larger pattern of Korean financial institutions racing into digital assets ahead of regulation catching up.
Hanwha’s own broader group has invested in web3 wallet platform Crysus and data platform Xangle this year, and holds roughly 9.8% of Dunamu, which runs Upbit, Korea’s largest exchange. Elsewhere, Mirae Asset acquired a 92% stake in Korbit and rebranded it Digital X, while Korea Investment & Securities took a 20% stake in Coinone.
The common thread across all of it is the same bet: that stocks, bonds and funds trading in tokenized form is coming, and whoever builds the infrastructure first captures the advantage once South Korea’s Digital Asset Basic Act actually takes effect.
SQD Partners With Google Cloud to Bring 225+ Blockchain Networks Into BigQuery
SQD, the Web3 infrastructure company formerly known as Subsquid, has partnered with Google Cloud to power the data pipelines behind Google’s new Blockchain Analytics product inside BigQuery, effectively becoming the validated backend for enterprise teams who want on-chain data without leaving the analytics tools they already use daily.
The mechanism here is SQD 360, the company’s enterprise arm, which supplies indexing infrastructure designed to keep blockchain data accurate and current rather than just fast to pull.
Every block gets run through six separate cryptographic checks, including multi-source verification and state root confirmations, before it’s served to a user, a level of validation SQD frames as closer to institutional financial-grade standards than typical blockchain indexing.
Scale is the other half of the pitch: SQD streams validated data across more than 225 networks through a single API, sparing enterprise clients from stitching together dozens of separate chain-specific integrations.
Wanja Oberhof, SQD’s CEO, described the partnership as a natural extension of the belief that blockchain data “should be complete, accurate, and provable,” and called landing inside BigQuery a sign that enterprise-grade on-chain data “has arrived” as a category cloud providers are willing to build real products around.
SQD already counts Morpho, GMX, PancakeSwap and Deutsche Telekom among its production clients, which suggests this Google integration extends infrastructure already proven at scale rather than launching something untested.
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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.
