Connected Society
Two decades after being ousted from PayPal, Elon Musk is launching X Money, a payments service inside X that analysts say could disrupt his old company and reshape US payments.
Elon Musk has called Bitcoin an ‘energy currency’ whose value is rooted in physics and electricity rather than government policy, and mused that AI and robots could one day make money itself obsolete.
China has made ‘ciyuan’ the official translation for AI ‘token’, a move widely read as the seed of a token-based currency for the AI age, and a long-term challenge to the US dollar.
America’s biggest banks, led by JPMorgan and Bank of America, are building a tokenised deposit network to settle payments on a blockchain around the clock, their answer to the rise of stablecoins.
Worldline, ING and Mastercard have run Europe’s first live agentic payment, with an AI agent assembling a purchase the shopper still has to approve — showing agent-led buying can clear existing bank security and authorisation.
A Walmart-backed startup, Eko, is hand-building an “AI-ready” product catalogue — photographing millions of items from every angle — so AI shopping agents like ChatGPT and Gemini can describe and sell them accurately.
A non-developer built a production-grade autonomous trading system in a day using Claude Code — exposing how thousands of identical AI models could converge and destabilise global markets faster than regulators can react.
World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture tied to Donald Trump, is expanding into debit cards, tokenised commodities and its USD1 stablecoin as it pushes to extend dollar influence on-chain.
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