Merchants Are Taking Stablecoins Without Knowing It

Farooq Malik, co-founder and CEO of Rain, discusses how Rain is building agentic payments standards, scope cards to cap AI agent spending, and its acquisition of closed-loop payments firm Onsa. He explains the role of rewards in stablecoin adoption and argues that more than 100,000 merchants already accept stablecoin payments unknowingly through Visa and Mastercard rails. The conversation ends with his view that stablecoins and tokenized money will touch most businesses over the next 5 to 10 years. - Rain launched an agentic payments collective to develop interoperability standards for agent transactions. - Scope cards issue scoped credentials to AI agents with spending limits and delegated approvals. - Rain acquired Onsa, a closed-loop payments firm, to extend Mastercard-based settlement into stablecoin use cases. - Stablecoin rewards are positioned as necessary to drive consumer adoption. - Over 100,000 merchants currently accept stablecoin payments unknowingly via existing Visa and Mastercard settlement rails. - Stablecoin and tokenized money are expected to impact most businesses within 5 to 10 years.