Ripple, Visa And KuCoin: Crypto’s 2nd Week Of July In Partnerships
In Brief
This week’s list reads like crypto quietly moving into rooms it wasn’t invited to before: a Tour de France peloton, a Big 12 locker room, an intercompany wire between Seoul and Mexico City.
This week’s list reads like crypto quietly moving into rooms it wasn’t invited to before: a Tour de France peloton, a Big 12 locker room, an intercompany wire between Seoul and Mexico City.
Visa, Ripple, KuCoin and others aren’t chasing headlines so much as infrastructure and legitimacy, one unglamorous integration at a time.
Visa Pushes Past Payments With a New Travel Platform
Visa just launched something that looks less like a card perk and more like a full travel product.
Visa Destinations is a mobile-first platform rolling out in ten cities to start: Paris, London, Dubai, Milan, Rome, Mexico City, New York, Miami, San Francisco and Thailand, with more markets promised down the line.
Cardholders get curated perks depending on where they land: Michelin-level tasting menus in Paris, discounted West End tickets in London, shopping deals in Dubai and Thailand, spa access in Mexico City.
It’s a telling move for a company whose core business, moving money, has gotten commoditized. Rather than compete purely on transaction fees, Visa is trying to become part of the trip itself, embedded in the moments people actually remember.
Katya Petelina, who leads global cross-border and commercial sales at Visa, framed it as accompanying travelers “throughout their journey,” while giving issuers and merchants a stake in the money travel generates.
Visa didn’t build this alone. Santander, Global Blue, Star Alliance and Trip.com Group are all backing the offers.
Santander’s Matías Sánchez said the tie-up gives customers in ten markets a shot at “extraordinary experiences” spanning music, sport, fashion and food, access points a standard debit card was never designed to unlock.
UN Blockchain Week Signs crypto.news as Its Media Partner Ahead of UNGA 81
With the UN General Assembly’s 81st session shaping up to be one of the more consequential in years, UN Blockchain Week has brought on crypto.news as its official media partner.
The event, now heading into its fourth year, has carved out a niche as the place where blockchain, AI, energy and policy conversations collide, and this year it’s happening at an especially loaded moment, as world leaders converge on New York to work through serious geopolitical strain.
The dates line up deliberately: September 10–19, 2026, right in the middle of both UNGA and New York Fashion Week, staged in Times Square.
Ten days, a lot of overlapping crowds, and organizers clearly betting that proximity to global decision-makers is the draw.
A spokesperson for the event said they were “thrilled to partner with crypto.news,” pointing to the outlet’s standing in the crypto press as a reason to expect this to be the strongest edition yet.
There’s a practical upside for readers too, a 10% ticket discount through the partner page. Early Bird 2 pricing holds until July 15 at midnight EST, after which prices climb, so anyone weighing a ticket has a real deadline to work against.
KuCoin Joins the Tour de France as UAE Team Emirates’ Exchange Partner
KuCoin has muscled its way into professional cycling, signing on as the exclusive crypto exchange partner for UAE Team Emirates – XRG, home to Tadej Pogačar and a roster that’s dominated recent Grand Tours.
The branding debuts at the 2026 Tour de France, showing up on team buses, support vehicles and fleet cars for the full three-week race, watched by a global television audience in the tens of millions.
The deal gives KuCoin exclusive rights in the blockchain-trading and crypto-wallet categories within the team’s ecosystem, meaning no rival exchange gets anywhere near this particular jersey.
For an exchange trying to reach beyond crypto-native users, attaching itself to a Grand Tour-winning team offers a kind of borrowed legitimacy that ad spend alone can’t buy.
BC Wong, KuCoin’s CEO, said the company was proud to launch the partnership on “cycling’s grandest stage,” adding that the discipline and coordination required to win a Grand Tour mirrors the “team moving in unison” ethos he wants associated with KuCoin’s own growth.
Entering the UCI WorldTour circuit also gives KuCoin a foothold in European and Middle Eastern markets, where cycling carries far more cultural weight than it does in the US, as the exchange leans on SOC 2 and ISO certifications to make its case as a serious, compliant player rather than a speculative one.
Nium Acquires Cypher to Fuse Fiat Rails With Crypto Infrastructure
Nium has bought Cypher, a non-custodial wallet and card-issuing startup, in a deal aimed squarely at the friction points between traditional banking and on-chain finance.
The acquisition brings Cypher’s entire engineering team into the fold, along with founder Kuberan Marimuthu, who’s now set to steer Nium’s digital asset strategy, a team with roots at Coinbase and Amazon and four years spent building at the banking-crypto intersection.
Practically, this means Nium can now offer stablecoin settlement, sophisticated card issuing, and non-custodial wallet integration to Web3 companies and fintechs that previously had to stitch these pieces together themselves. The pitch is that money movement shouldn’t slow down just because a transaction crosses from fiat into stablecoins or back.
Nium’s CEO, Prajit Nanu, didn’t mince words about what’s broken today, saying payouts routinely get “stuck in the correspondent banking flows” while trillions sit idle in nostro accounts for days. He argued that agentic payments need trust and settlement layers that simply don’t exist yet at scale, and that the Cypher deal gives Nium the “muscle” to build them.
It’s a bet that the next wave of growth in cross-border payments won’t come from treating crypto as a side project, but from folding it directly into the core infrastructure.
Prospect Markets Moves Into US Prediction Markets With Crypto.com-Backed Partner
Prospect Markets has signed a letter of intent with Foris DAX FCM LLC, operating as OG Broker and backed by Crypto.com, to bring sports-focused prediction markets to the US.
The arrangement runs through the North American Derivatives Exchange (Nadex), which already operates the OG Prediction Markets and Crypto.com Derivatives North America brands, with OG Broker handling clearing.
The plan is for Prospect to offer US participants event contracts regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, giving the company its first real entry point into what’s widely considered the largest prediction markets opportunity in the world. Sports betting culture in the US runs deep, and Prospect is betting that regulatory cover through an established FCM is the fastest way in.
Johnny Chen, Prospect’s founder and CEO, called this the moment his company moves “from vision to reality” in the US, saying the goal has always been to make “every sports moment tradable”, something he now has the infrastructure to actually deliver at American scale.
Steve Humenik, OG’s chief legal officer and a senior legal exec at Crypto.com, framed the deal as part of a broader push toward a compliant digital asset and derivatives ecosystem, one meant to give US users what he described as real “trust and transparency.”
Ripple Puts XRP on Kansas Jayhawks Uniforms in First Crypto College Jersey Deal
Ripple has locked in a five-year sponsorship with the University of Kansas that puts the XRP logo on Jayhawks uniforms, the first time a cryptocurrency brand has appeared on a jersey in major NCAA Division I sports.
Arranged through Learfield’s local unit, Jayhawk Sports Properties, the deal covers more than a patch: it extends to venue branding, digital signage, and financial and technology education programs for KU’s student-athletes.
The personal thread running through this one is hard to miss. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse studied at Kansas as an undergraduate and served as student body president there, and by most accounts that relationship with athletic director Travis Goff is what got this deal moving in the first place.
Goff said the university wanted something that would “transcend just a jersey patch,” arguing there’s a difference between slapping on a logo and actually telling the story of what a company represents in the marketplace.
Learfield’s CEO, Cole Gahagan, credited Goff’s leadership for reshaping what’s possible in college athletics, saying the Ripple tie-up shows what Learfield and Kansas can build together.
Beyond the uniforms, Ripple is also committing to internships and job placement for Kansas graduates across the tech industry, a longer play than most sponsorship deals attempt.
Hyundai Card Tests Cross-Border Payments With USDT on Avalanche
Hyundai Card has run its first real-world stablecoin remittance, moving $20,000 between Hyundai Motor’s US and Mexican units in roughly seven minutes, a trip that would normally take three to four hours through conventional interbank channels.
Hyundai Motor America converted the funds into Tether’s USDT, sent them across the Avalanche network, and Hyundai’s Mexico unit converted them back into dollars on arrival.
What makes this different from a typical pilot is that it wasn’t staged. A Hyundai Card spokesperson noted the test was tied to “actual intercompany settlement needs” between overseas units rather than run as a theoretical exercise, with the company handling its own regulatory review, legal and tax checks, and remittance design; payments firm Axiym also took part.
Hyundai Card isn’t stopping here. A second trial is planned for later this month involving European entities, this time bringing in Visa and USDC issuer Circle, and testing settlement across multiple local currencies rather than dollars alone, partly to see whether stablecoins can meaningfully cut costs, not just settlement time.
The test lands amid a broader pattern: SBI Remit teamed up with Fasset last month on remittance infrastructure, and MassPay folded Coinbase’s USDC rails into a payout network spanning 180 countries, both chasing the same idea of settling globally without prefunding accounts everywhere at once.
Crypto.com and Formula 1 Extend Their Partnership Through 2030
Crypto.com and Formula 1 have stretched their partnership out to 2030, building on a relationship that’s run since 2021 and turned Crypto.com into the sport’s exclusive crypto sponsor.
It’s also kept its title sponsorship of the Miami Grand Prix since that race’s debut in 2022, a foothold that’s given the brand a steady presence in one of the sport’s highest-profile American stops.
The extension isn’t just symbolic. Formula 1 pulls in a global audience north of 1.5 billion and roughly 750 million fans worldwide, plus a 96 million social followers reach that Crypto.com is counting on to push its own user base past 100 million.
Expect more of the fan-facing activations the partnership has leaned on already: digital collectibles, interactive brand displays, and immersive zones at races like Miami where fans can watch live crypto transaction demos or sit through blockchain security sessions.
There’s a compliance angle too. Crypto.com says it’s working directly with F1’s commercial leadership to build a product roadmap that stays ahead of regulatory requirements, framing the whole extension as proof that crypto sponsorships in top-tier sports are shifting from novelty marketing toward something built for the long haul.
Elliptic Partners With CoinGecko to Close Gaps in Crypto Pricing Data
Blockchains are honest about the wrong thing. They’ll show every detail of a transfer (sender, receiver, exact token amount), but say nothing about what any of it was actually worth in dollars.
A move of 40,000 tokens could be pocket change or a small fortune, and the chain itself won’t say which. For anyone doing compliance work, that blank spot is a real problem.
Elliptic has partnered with CoinGecko, one of the two largest pricing providers in crypto, to close it. For years a single pricing source was enough, back when the market consisted of a few hundred meaningful tokens.
That’s no longer true. Coverage now thins out fastest exactly where it’s needed most: newer, fast-growing assets, and especially tokenized real-world assets, as equities and funds increasingly move on-chain.
CoinGecko’s API brings Elliptic real-time pricing across millions of tokens, letting valuations track the market as it moves rather than trail behind it. Once a token has a reliable price attached, every transfer of it becomes something a compliance team can actually screen for financial-crime exposure, not just observe.
Soon Aik Chiew, a product manager at CoinGecko API, said the goal is making on-chain market data accessible to “the teams building, monitoring and securing” the shift toward tokenized real-world markets, calling it critical infrastructure for what comes next.
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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.
