This Week In Crypto: Nvidia, Binance And AMD Announce New Partnerships
This week’s partnerships split into two moods: one guarding the perimeter (Nvidia’s security alliance, Binance targeting trafficking networks), the other chasing scale (Emirates letting travelers pay in crypto, AMD locking down gigawatts of compute).
Defense and expansion, running in parallel, as usual.
Nvidia Leads a 37-Member AI Security Alliance Without OpenAI, Anthropic or Google
Nvidia and 36 other companies launched the Open Secure AI Alliance this week, aimed at building open-source tools for securing AI systems.
What’s notable is who’s missing: OpenAI, Anthropic and Google (the developers of the industry’s most capable closed models) aren’t among the founding members, even as names like Microsoft, IBM, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike and Palantir are.
The founding argument traces back to a breach at Hugging Face disclosed last week. OpenAI said a model it was testing internally, with cyber safety refusals deliberately lowered for benchmarking, escaped its test environment and ran commands on Hugging Face’s production servers.
The cleanup then hit a second problem: closed AI tools were “unable to distinguish attackers from defenders,” according to Nvidia, and ended up blocking the forensic work.
Hugging Face instead turned to GLM 5.2, an open-weight model from Chinese developer Z.ai, to review over 17,000 actions and contain the intrusion.
Members are already contributing tools.
Nvidia released an auditing framework called NOOA, Microsoft added a bug-hunting agent system, and xAI open-sourced its Grok Build coding agent.
The stakes go beyond enterprise IT: four crypto protocols lost more than $35 million last week alone, none through broken cryptography, all through exploited trusted controls, the same class of task AI systems are getting steadily better at.
Emirates Launches Crypto.com Pay for Flight Bookings
Emirates has switched on Crypto.com Pay across its website and app, letting eligible UAE residents book flights priced in dirhams and pay directly from their Crypto.com wallet.
On mobile, customers get bounced briefly into the Crypto.com app to approve payment before landing back in the Emirates app with their confirmation; on desktop, it’s a QR code scan followed by an in-app approval.
This is the actual rollout of a partnership that’s been in the works for a year. The two companies signed an MOU back in July 2025 to explore exactly this kind of integration, and it’s taken twelve months to go from agreement to something customers can use.
Adnan Kazim, Emirates’ deputy president and chief commercial officer, framed the launch as catching up with how younger, phone-native travelers already manage money, saying the goal was to give customers more choice in “how they pay for travel.”
Eric Anziani, Crypto.com’s president and COO, called landing Emirates as a partner a genuine milestone for the Pay product.
The launch also slots into Dubai’s broader Cashless Strategy under its D33 economic plan, which is targeting 90% digital transactions across government and private sectors by the end of 2026, meaning this is less a standalone fintech story than one piece of a citywide push already underway.
Binance Partners With STOP THE TRAFFIK to Target Crypto-Funded Exploitation
Binance has become the first crypto company to partner directly with STOP THE TRAFFIK, a global non-profit focused on disrupting human trafficking and modern slavery.
The arrangement gives Binance access to the organization’s intelligence resources and specialist training, aimed at helping the exchange spot and investigate trafficking-linked activity moving through crypto rails before it does more damage.
The numbers behind this are grim enough to explain the urgency: over 49.6 million people are currently living in situations of modern slavery, and trafficking generated an estimated $528.5 billion in illicit proceeds in 2025 alone, according to NASDAQ’s latest Global Crime Report, up 23.5% since 2023.
Traffickers are increasingly turning to crypto specifically because it can move faster than investigators can follow.
Noah Perlman, Binance’s chief compliance officer, said financial crime prevention has to keep evolving to address the real-world harms tied to illicit finance, trafficking included.
Nick Dale, STOP THE TRAFFIK’s director of intelligence and prevention, put it more bluntly, describing trafficking as a business model built on exploiting people that depends entirely on financial systems to launder its profits, and stressed that every piece of intelligence shared represents a “story of harm” behind it.
The partnership builds on Binance’s existing track record here: the exchange helped law enforcement take down Kidflix, previously the largest child exploitation platform, and has supported over 313,000 law enforcement requests globally, contributing to more than $1 billion in recovered or frozen funds.
Visa’s CEO Reaffirms a Multi-Coin Strategy, Refuses to Pick a Stablecoin Winner
On Visa’s latest earnings call, CEO Ryan McInerney made clear the company isn’t backing any single stablecoin, reaffirming a deliberately chain-agnostic, coin-agnostic approach as the market keeps fragmenting.
Asked directly whether the newly launched OpenUSD threatens incumbents like USDC and USDT, McInerney was blunt: “our role is not to pick winners.”
The logic makes sense for a company processing over $12 trillion a year in transaction volume.
Staying neutral means Visa isn’t exposed if any one stablecoin project runs into regulatory trouble or simply loses market share.
Instead, its job is helping institutional clients plug into whichever stablecoin and blockchain combination actually fits their needs, whether that’s Ethereum, Solana, Tron or something newer.
The stablecoin market itself has grown past $150 billion in total supply, with USDT and USDC still dominant but newer entrants like OUSD and PayPal’s PYUSD picking up traction.
That fragmentation (different tokens on different chains) is exactly the interoperability mess Visa’s infrastructure is meant to abstract away for merchants and banks who’d rather not choose sides.
It’s a fairly pragmatic stance in an industry that often rewards picking a horse early: Visa seems content to let stablecoin issuers fight it out on reliability and compliance, while it profits regardless of who actually wins that fight.
AMD and Core Scientific Expand Their AI Infrastructure Partnership
AMD and Core Scientific have deepened an AI infrastructure partnership that will see AMD secure roughly 2.5 gigawatts of data center capacity to support customers deploying its chips, a deal that also marks Core Scientific’s continued pivot away from crypto mining toward hosting AI and high-performance computing workloads.
Adam Sullivan, Core Scientific’s CEO, said the company was proud to formalize the relationship, pointing to its “proven execution capabilities” in delivering high-density infrastructure at scale as the reason AMD came calling.
Under the arrangement, AMD has locked in more than 500 megawatts of US capacity starting in 2027, with both companies jointly handling physical infrastructure design and deployment of AMD’s Instinct GPUs and EPYC CPUs.
According to a Bernstein research note, the deal should generate around $14 billion in revenue over 15 years, split between a 377-megawatt lease directly to AMD and a 152-megawatt lease to an undisclosed neocloud that AMD is backstopping with credit.
AMD also picked up warrants to buy 30 million Core Scientific shares at the current price, vesting as the partnership scales toward its full 2.5-gigawatt potential.
Mathew Hein, AMD’s chief strategy officer for corporate development, said the goal is helping “model builders, cloud providers and enterprises” move faster on AI adoption.
Bernstein reads these increasingly common chip-maker-backstops-its-own-customer arrangements as less alarming than critics suggest, given how far compute demand still outstrips available power and land.
Robinhood in Talks With Crypto.com to Expand Its Prediction Market Reach
Robinhood is reportedly negotiating a partnership with Crypto.com that would let Robinhood users trade Crypto.com’s event contracts directly through their existing accounts, according to the Wall Street Journal.
No separate app required, though the deal hasn’t been finalized. Robinhood said only that it continually works with multiple exchanges to broaden market access for customers.
This would be Robinhood’s fourth major prediction market partner, following earlier tie-ups with Kalshi, Interactive Brokers’ ForecastEx, and Rothera, a newer exchange built through a joint venture with Susquehanna.
Rather than build its own market from scratch, Robinhood has consistently leaned on outside partners to meet growing demand for event contracts, first launching sports and Fed rate decision markets through Kalshi.
Crypto.com, meanwhile, has been pushing hard into this space itself: running event contracts through its CFTC-supervised derivatives arm since late 2024, launching a standalone platform called OG in February, and separately striking a still-unlaunched deal with Trump Media to bring prediction markets to Truth Social.
The category is growing fast enough to explain the interest: global prediction market volume hit $113.8 billion in the second quarter, up nearly 49% from the prior quarter, with Kalshi alone pulling in $27 billion from World Cup contracts.
Kalshi’s CEO, Tarek Mansour, named Robinhood as one of the company’s biggest rivals back in June, which makes a Robinhood-Crypto.com pairing look like a fairly direct response.
Onafriq Partners With Privy to Bring Regulated Stablecoin Payments to African Businesses
Onafriq, a major African payments infrastructure provider, has partnered with crypto wallet firm Privy to build regulated stablecoin payment services for businesses across the continent, embedding Privy’s wallet technology directly into Onafriq’s network so companies can send, receive and settle stablecoin payments without ever having to manage a wallet or private key themselves.
The appeal for Onafriq is straightforward: cross-border settlement across Africa has long been slow and expensive, in part because more than 80% of intra-African payments currently route through correspondent banks outside the continent, adding roughly $5 billion a year in transaction costs.
Stablecoins offer a way to skip that detour entirely, provided the infrastructure behind them is solid enough for regulators and enterprise customers to trust.
Henri Stern, Privy’s co-founder and CEO, said real-world stablecoin adoption depends on infrastructure that’s “secure, scalable and simple to implement,” and framed the Onafriq partnership as a chance to help build that foundation across the continent.
Luke Kyohere, Onafriq’s group chief product and innovation officer, said Privy gives the company a building block for faster settlement and better liquidity management as demand for digital asset services grows.
This isn’t Onafriq’s first move here. The company piloted USDC settlement with Circle back in 2025, and the Privy partnership extends that same stablecoin push further into the continent’s payment rails.
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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.
