Circle and Crossmint Partner to Power Agentic Commerce With USDC Stablecoin 

Stablecoin issuer Circle’s venture capital arm, Circle Ventures, has invested in crypto infrastructure and self-custody platform Crossmint to expand global accessibility for its flagship product, USD Coin (USDC), across more blockchain rails. The move comes as part of the crypto giant’s plan to reach billions of new users, including AI agents.

The partnership comes as global demand for stablecoins in cross-border finance is surging. These fiat currency-pegged digital assets are increasingly powering global remittance and payment networks, driving nearly half of all crypto-related activity in regions like Africa and South America, which are struggling economically.

Circle and Crossmint Partner to Develop Stablecoin-Powered Financial System for Agentic Commerce

In an announcement made on Wednesday, Crossmint said that the partnership with Circle Ventures enables the company to prepare its wallets and APIs for stablecoin onramps, orchestration, and agentic payments using USDC. The firm also noted that this is “laying the foundation for a new era of finance”, where money can be moved near-instantly, globally, and across systems built for both humans and machines.

Crossmint’s support for AI agents comes as researchers at Coinbase predict that these autonomous programs, which can think and transact without human input, could soon become Ethereum’s biggest power user by unlocking a new economic frontier, called agentic commerce. The Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 3009, published in August 2025, proposes connecting the blockchain with the HTTP ‘402 Payment Required’ web standard, which would allow AI agents to make stablecoin transfers without human intervention.

Meanwhile, the crypto infrastructure firm is working with Google to support agentic finance, positioning itself as a backend platform for AI-driven commerce.

Coinbase has already implemented the HTTP 402 via the ‘x402 payments protocol’ on its crypto trading platform, suggesting that the company is prepared to onboard agentic commerce. Kevin Leffew and Lincoln Murr, two members of the Coinbase development team, highlighted that AI agents could revolutionize e-commerce with stablecoins, providing examples of some use cases, such as large language models (LLMs) paying for model inference, AI agents paying for context for task optimization, apps using stablecoins for permanent data storage, browsers paying to read gated content, and self-driving taxis owning themselves and paying for its own maintenance. The new internet becomes naively monetizable by machines.

Crossmint’s Strategic Partnerships Aimed at Expanding Global USDC Adoption

Last week, remittance firm MoneyGram announced that it will be leveraging Crossmint’s crypto infrastructure and self-custody solution to enable USDC services. The initiative is set to make its debut in Colombia, where it will offer residents a new way to receive and store stablecoins as an alternative to the hyperinflationary and weakening Colombian peso, which has a convertibility rate of 3,891 pesos for 1 USD. MoneyGram serves over 50 million customers across more than 190 countries, thus expanding the number of customers who can utilize Crossmint’s technology and use USDC for payments.

Crossmint has also partnered with the team behind the Layer-1 payments-focused blockchain Tempo, as part of its efforts to grow stablecoin adoption. Tempo was recently incubated by payments infrastructure firm Stripe and crypto venture capital firm Paradigm.

Despite the hoard of strategic partnerships leveraging Circle’s USDC, the stablecoin continues to lag behind Tether’s USDT, which has seen nearly $100 billion in trading volume over the last 24 hours, nearly 10x that of USDC’s $10.3 billion. USDT is also the most traded cryptocurrency in the market, as it serves as a trading pair for the majority of assets, and has a market capitalization of $173 billion. USDC is the second-largest stablecoin by volume, boasting a market cap of $74.1 billion.