Payzum Blog

Crypto Payments Blog

Non-custodial, crypto-only payments — explained for the operators and developers who actually run the money. Pain, mechanics, and how Payzum solves it.

Agentic payments

The Stripe OpenRouter acquisition: the AI money layer just got bought — and what it means if you sell an API

On August 16, 2026, Bloomberg reported that Stripe had finalised an agreement to buy OpenRouter — the gateway that routes developers and agents across 400-plus AI models — for more than US$7 billion, roughly 5.4× the valuation it raised at three months earlier. Seven months after Stripe bought the usage-based billing company Metronome, the shape of the bet is legible: whoever meters AI consumption gets to bill for it. This is what that means for the people on the other side of the meter — the API, data and tool providers whose calls are being counted.

19 min read
Construction & remodeling

Accept crypto payments as a construction company

A draw that lands three days late doesn't cost you three days — it costs you the crew. Deposits, progress draws and change orders collected in stablecoins, settled non-custodially to your own wallet, plus one CSV to pay every sub on Friday.

22 min read
Stablecoins

Stablecoin payments counterparty risk: Visa is hunting for a new settlement partner because Mastercard bought the last one

On August 18, 2026, CoinDesk reported that Visa has put out a request for proposals for a stablecoin settlement and OTC partner licensed in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Singapore. The vacancy exists because Mastercard closed its acquisition of BVNK on August 3, and BVNK was the firm doing that job for Visa. Nothing broke. No one was hacked. A vendor was simply bought by a competitor — and the largest payment network on earth discovered that its stablecoin leg was a supplier relationship. Here is what that should tell a merchant about the parties standing between 'the customer paid' and 'the money is mine'.

18 min read
Freight & logistics

Accept crypto payments as a freight forwarder

Demurrage runs per container per day while a wire sits in a correspondent chain. Payment links, invoices with expiry and CSV agent payouts — settled non-custodially to your own wallet in seconds.

20 min read
Stablecoins & policy

Which stablecoins can US merchants accept? Treasury just proposed the rule

On August 18, 2026 Treasury proposed the regulations that decide which payment stablecoins may be offered or sold to people in the United States — and asked, in writing, whether enabling US merchant acceptance counts as a foreign issuer selling into the country. Here is what it changes, what it does not, and why the answer depends on who holds your money.

20 min read
Language schools

Accept crypto payments as a language school

Enrolment money crosses the border months before the student does — and wires arrive late, arrive short or arrive never. How a language school collects deposits, tuition and on-site extras in stablecoins, non-custodial and final.

20 min read
Stablecoins

Mastercard Crypto Credential and stablecoin payments: the card networks are rebuilding the permission layer

In three days in early August 2026, Mastercard closed a $1.8 billion acquisition of stablecoin payments infrastructure and started piloting Crypto Credential — its verification framework — on cross-border stablecoin flows. The problem it solves is real and precisely described by the partner running the pilot: compliance doesn't scale the way the network does. But look at why that problem exists. It exists because the money moves hop by hop through licensed intermediaries, the same architecture correspondent banking had. A merchant getting paid directly into their own wallet has zero hops — and nothing to vet.

17 min read
Car dealerships

How to accept crypto payments as a car dealership

A dealership is the rare retailer whose average ticket is too large for the card rail it already has. Cards get capped at two or three thousand dollars because interchange on a $45,000 vehicle would erase the gross profit on the unit, so the balance arrives by wire or cashier's check — and both of those bring their own problems: transfers that land days after the customer wants the keys, floorplan interest ticking on a sold unit, forged payment instructions, and counterfeit cashier's checks that clear before they bounce. This guide covers what a dealer can actually charge in stablecoins today — reservation deposits that hold a unit, purchase balances, export-buyer payments, accessories and the service lane — and how to pay transporters, reconditioning vendors and referral partners in a single batch. It is also explicit about what does not change: your title and registration process, your customer identification checks, your Form 8300-type reporting duties and your sales tax, which stay yours whichever rail the money arrives on.

21 min read
Agentic payments

OpenAI Agents SDK payments: the buyer side of agentic commerce just became default

On August 13, 2026, OpenAI published a cookbook with AWS — "Controlled Agentic Commerce with AgentCore Payments" — showing an OpenAI Agents SDK agent paying for a paid API over x402, settling 0.25 USDC on Base in about two seconds, inside a budget the application set in advance. The hard part of agentic commerce was never whether agents would want to buy. It was giving an autonomous process a wallet nobody could run away with. That's now a managed service. Which moves the bottleneck to the other side of the transaction: the supply of endpoints that answer with a price.

17 min read