Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach said crypto integration and agentic commerce will be central to the global payments network's growth strategy, describing them as two forces likely to shape the industry going forward.
Mastercard Makes Stablecoin Choice, AI Agents H2 Priorities
30 July 2026 - 20:41 UTC
By Isabelle Castro
"These are two areas that will shape the future of payments," Miebach said during the company's second-quarter earnings call on 30 Jul.
The comment follows Mastercard's June launch of Agent Pay for Machines and its announcements later that month that it would join both Paxos' Open Dollar Network and the Open Standard stablecoin consortium.
Not featured in financials
Mastercard reported second-quarter net income of $4.4bn, or $4.97 per diluted share, compared with $3.7bn, or $4.07 per share, a year earlier. Adjusted earnings rose 21% to $5.04 per share, beating analysts' average estimate of $4.77.
Net revenue increased 14% year over year to $9.3bn, also exceeding the $9.1bn expected by analysts. Gross dollar volume rose 8% on a local-currency basis to $2.9tn, while cross-border volume, an important revenue driver, grew 12%. Adjusted operating expenses increased 11% to $3.6bn.
Mastercard (MA) shares closed 2.5% higher at $577.37 on 30 Jul following the results.
The company did not disclose separate financial results for its stablecoin or agentic-payments activities and declined to provide further details when contacted by Sandmark.
Though stablecoins weren't broken out separately, Miebach emphasized stablecoin integration, including its role in agentic commerce, as a key area of focus for the company going forward. Agentic commerce, he said, could give rise to "an entirely new range of transactions and that is machine to machine payments, low ticket, micro ticket transaction that happened at very high velocity." For this, he explained, a "different kind of underlying infrastructure is required," referring to its recently launched agent pay for machines product.
The launch of agent pay for machines attracted the interest of 30 companies at the time of the initial announcement including payments firm Checkout.com as well as crypto exchanges OKX and Coinbase, the CEO said.
The stablecoin unique selling point
Stablecoins – blockchain-based tokens generally designed to maintain a fixed value against currencies such as the US dollar – could be used by AI agents to complete payments, but Miebach said their utility extended beyond agentic commerce. "Stablecoins will play a role in the financial ecosystem of the future, which is why we have been investing," he said.
He pointed to the company's acquisition of stablecoin payments company BVNK - announced in March and expected to close this quarter - to provide interoperability for users, allowing usage of different chains and coins by Mastercard's clients. "There's clear utility for stablecoins, for example in some B2B and P2P flows [...] Stablecoins are additive to our network. It's another opportunity for us to enable choice in how our customers and cardholders engage in commerce."
Miebach commented on the company's most recent inclusion in the Open Standard consortium, explaining that while still in early days, the initiative would be focused on establishing payment use cases and the distribution of its economics going forward, making the most of its "neutral market utility." "This is one coin that will be enabled in our network and we will enable other coins [...] choice has always been a key criteria."
