Hey, it’s Marc

We’ve read every “AI agents will pay for things” press release for two years. They all promise. None ship.

Then June 10 happened. In one day, Mastercard, Visa, and Tether all shipped real infrastructure for machines to move money.

The interesting part: Mastercard put its agent credentials on Polygon, Solana, and Base. Public chains. Not a Mastercard database.

For 60 years, the card networks owned two things: the trust layer and the rails underneath it. Every credential, every authorization, every settlement ran through infrastructure they controlled.

A card network just admitted it can’t be the trust layer on its own. Let’s unpack.