September’s 2nd Week In Crypto: Samsung And OpenAI Deepen Key Partnerships
This week payments infrastructure keeps eating its own tail: Visa and Mastercard building standards for AI agents to transact autonomously, while Robinhood and Coinbase quietly consolidate prediction markets around a handful of regulated venues. Samsung’s chip deal with OpenAI is the odd one out, though even that traces back to the same appetite for infrastructure nobody sees.
Visa and Mastercard Join Ant International to Build AI Payment Standards
Ant International has partnered with Visa and Mastercard to develop shared standards for AI agents handling payments autonomously.
Systems that can analyze a user’s preferences, negotiate terms and complete a transaction without a human clicking “confirm” at any point.
The stated goal is building frameworks secure enough to let this kind of agentic commerce run across global payment rails, rather than each company solving the problem separately.
Each partner brings something distinct to the table. Ant contributes its experience running the Alipay ecosystem at massive scale, while Visa and Mastercard supply the cross-border infrastructure that’s already processing a meaningful share of the world’s card transactions.
The technical case for AI-driven payments rests partly on fraud detection. Machine learning models that can flag suspicious activity and optimize routing across payment rails faster than a rules-based system typically can.
The harder problems are less technical than they sound: getting different AI platforms to actually interoperate, and keeping data private across jurisdictions with wildly different privacy laws. The companies are reportedly working through shared testing environments and encryption protocols built to satisfy multiple regulatory regimes at once.
Industry estimates cited in coverage of the deal suggest merchants could cut processing costs by up to 30% through automated systems like these, assuming adoption follows the timeline analysts are projecting: widespread use by 2030, with early movers among payment networks likely consolidating an advantage well before then.
Bitget Partners With UNICEF on a Blockchain-Focused Financial Literacy Module
Bitget has teamed up with UNICEF to build a new financial literacy module for the Game Changers Coalition curriculum, folding blockchain basics in alongside more traditional topics like budgeting, credit and interest rates.
The course is free, self-paced, and delivered through Agora, UNICEF’s learning platform, aimed primarily at young learners who may be encountering both financial literacy and blockchain concepts for the first time.
The module leans on short video lessons and quizzes, but the more distinctive piece is Neon Paycheck, a short game set in a futuristic city where players make everyday financial decisions (earning, spending, planning, avoiding scams) as a lighter entry point before the more structured lessons. Bitget CEO Gracy Chen appears throughout the material herself, walking learners through blockchain concepts directly rather than leaving that entirely to prerecorded narration.
Chen, who also teaches as an adjunct professor at HKUST, said education has always mattered to her personally, framing the UNICEF partnership as a way of making these concepts accessible early so young people can build “the knowledge and confidence” to navigate the financial system as it keeps evolving.
This builds on a relationship that started in 2025, when Bitget first partnered with UNICEF Luxembourg on the broader Game Changers Coalition, a program that’s since reached more than 642,000 young people, parents and teachers across eight countries, with three more markets, including Indonesia, added for 2026.
Robinhood Routes Football Prediction Contracts to Crypto.com’s Regulated Venues
Robinhood began routing a selection of football event contracts to Crypto.com’s regulated venues on September 8, adding Crypto.com Derivatives North America and OG.com to a router that already includes Kalshi, ForecastEx and Rothera.
The timing lines up neatly with football season and the fall midterms, the two categories Robinhood expects to drive the bulk of new volume this quarter.
The scale involved is genuinely large: Robinhood reported 13.6 billion event contracts traded in the second quarter alone, more than 5 billion of those during the World Cup, and over 45 billion total since the product launched roughly two years ago.
Football contracts will cover game outcomes, player props and custom combinations, spread across OG.com, Kalshi and Rothera depending on availability, alongside a new trading hub with live filtering by week, team and conference.
Kris Marszalek, Crypto.com and OG.com’s CEO, said the ambition is making OG.com “the most liquid venue” for derivatives, starting with prediction markets before expanding into futures and perpetuals. JB Mackenzie, who runs futures and prediction markets at Robinhood, tied the rollout timing directly to the overlapping football and election calendars.
Spreading volume across multiple CFTC-regulated venues does tend to tighten pricing and reduce the risk of any single venue getting overwhelmed, though liquidity across the space remains genuinely fragmented, and binary contracts still settle strictly on the official result, meaning thin order books or a contested outcome can leave prices noisy right up until settlement.
Flex Partners With Mesh to Let Business Owners Deposit Crypto and Stablecoins Directly
Flex, a finance platform aimed at consolidating a business owner’s accounts in one place, has partnered with Mesh to let customers fund their Flex account directly with crypto or stablecoins.
No separate crypto account, no new infrastructure to learn, just connecting an existing exchange or wallet and letting Mesh verify ownership at the point of deposit.
The practical effect is turning digital assets sitting idle in a wallet or corporate treasury into actual working capital: money that can pay suppliers or cover expenses inside the same platform a business owner already uses for everything else financial.
Bam Azizi, Mesh’s CEO and co-founder, said this kind of infrastructure “shouldn’t be reserved for large enterprises,” arguing the point of the partnership is making digital assets usable for business owners who aren’t already crypto-native.
Zaid Rahman, Flex’s founder and CEO, put it more bluntly, saying most fintechs build crypto products for people already comfortable with the technology.
Flex, he said, was built “for everyone else,” on the idea that a dollar should just be a dollar regardless of what form it arrived in.
The deal lands amid a genuinely busy stretch for Mesh, which recently launched a wallet built for AI-agent stablecoin transactions, joined Paxos’ Global Dollar Network, and struck separate partnerships with Deel, AMINA Bank and Rain.
Samsung Will Build a Custom AI Chip for OpenAI, Deepening an Existing Partnership
Samsung Electronics has agreed to produce a custom AI chip for OpenAI, according to OpenAI Korea, pulling the South Korean manufacturer deeper into a chip race that’s so far been dominated by Nvidia and TSMC.
Harrison Kim, general manager of OpenAI Korea, told reporters that chips represent the area where the two companies have made the most progress together, calling their joint research “one of the areas where we have made the most progress.”
Neither company has disclosed the new chip’s name, though it’s widely believed to be an inference processor and successor to Jalapeno, OpenAI’s first custom chip, which was built with Broadcom and manufactured by TSMC.
Bringing Samsung in as a second chip partner gives OpenAI some real insurance against relying too heavily on a single manufacturer, a concern that’s become more urgent as AI compute demand keeps outpacing supply.
Memory appears to be the other major thread here, with both companies planning joint work on advanced memory chips, possibly tied to OpenAI’s Stargate data center project, which already counts Samsung’s domestic rival SK Hynix as a supplier.
Samsung has also started shipping samples of its next-generation HBM4E memory, becoming the first supplier to do so, with customers including AMD, Nvidia and Google.
Kim separately noted that ChatGPT Enterprise usage among South Korean businesses jumped 28-fold by late August compared with the same month last year, underscoring how deep OpenAI’s presence in the Korean market has already become.
ION Partners With Coinbase to Support Kalshi’s Event Contract Clearing
Coinbase has selected ION‘s XTP for Event Contracts platform to support clearing for Kalshi, the largest prediction market by volume.
It’s a partnership that’s actually been running quietly since December 2025, when the three companies first teamed up ahead of Kalshi’s event contract listing. XTP handles the full lifecycle of an event contract: creation, resolution and settlement, all in real time, with the ability to onboard tens of thousands of accounts a day.
The system has already been stress-tested at real scale. During its initial rollout, XTP processed Kalshi’s first one million trades over a single Super Bowl weekend, which is about as demanding a load test as this kind of infrastructure is likely to face early on.
Toni Gemayel, Coinbase’s head of prediction markets, said the partnership gives the exchange the “operational infrastructure needed” to support its growing event contracts business without sacrificing back-office stability as volumes climb.
Max Crowley of Kalshi echoed the compliance angle, noting that safe, regulated markets need more than good exchange rules. They need “sound operational risk management” running underneath.
Samuel Shorthouse of ION framed the whole arrangement as part of a broader push to support the prediction market sector’s rapid growth on infrastructure that’s actually built to handle it at scale, rather than bolted on after the fact.
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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.
