Franklin Templeton is making it increasingly clear that the future of tokenized finance may not belong to a single blockchain. In a recent message from Franklin Templeton Digital Assets, Head of Digital Assets Roger Bayston emphasized that tokenizing across multiple chains allows institutions to tap into the distinct features, utility, and communities of what he…
Stellar has taken another step into the future of internet-native payments by adding support for the Machine Payments Protocol, or MPP, an open standard developed by Stripe and Tempo that allows AI agents and software applications to pay for services directly over HTTP. The update positions Stellar as a more practical settlement layer for machine-to-machine…
The AI agent hype cycle has reached an awkward truth: today’s “autonomous” software is often only autonomous until it needs to pay for something. It can reason, search, plan, call tools, and generate outputs — but the moment it hits a paywall, premium API, dataset, or paid service, the whole illusion tends to collapse into…
Two of the most notable examples are XRP and Stellar (XLM). At first glance, these two projects appear strikingly similar. Both focus on fast cross-border payments, both offer low transaction fees, and both were created by developers with a shared history. In fact, Jed McCaleb, one of the original architects behind XRP, later founded the…
