Day one in Las Vegas on the stablecoin and agent stages. Every panel I sat in kept circling one question: when money moves itself, who carries the risk?
I spent Monday, the first full day of Money20/20 USA at The Venetian, moving between the Meridian and Intersection stages with a recorder running. By the afternoon I could have written the same sentence under every session. Nobody I heard was still arguing about whether stablecoins or AI agents work. The argument was about who carries the risk when they do something nobody intended.
Trust before scale
It started with Mastercard. Just before its late-morning stablecoin panel, Ann Johnson, who runs security solutions at Mastercard, launched Stablecoin Security, a risk score for stablecoin payments that combines 16 years of the network’s fraud, identity and cyber intelligence with blockchain analytics and is built to work at machine speed. Her framing was simple: “the thing that allows innovation to scale is trust.” Mastercard says it will launch in North America first, with worldwide availability expected in 2027.
The panel that followed made the case for why it is needed. Rajpal Khangura, co-founder and chief compliance officer of Keyrails, settles trade payments for merchants in markets such as Nigeria paying suppliers in China, with an average ticket of $250,000 to $350,000. His customers used to ask only how cheap and how fast; now they ask how safe the wallet is, and how safe the fiat is when it lands. His hardest problem is the wallet that is not sanctioned itself but has transacted a few hops away from one that is, and keeping his own risk appetite in step with every bank and liquidity partner downstream. He also told the room it can still be quicker to put cash in the back of a van and drive it across a border than to send the payment.
Keith Vander Leest, who runs BVNK in the US and is now part of Mastercard, said too much stablecoin activity is still trading and he wants real-world payments to become the majority. That, in his view, depends on building quickly the protections the fiat world took decades to build, and on carrying far more data with each payment on chain, from ISO 20022 messages to travel rule information. Alex Garn of Borderless said the US can learn from instant payments in the UK, where extra checks happen at the moment a new payee is added, and from Pix in Brazil, where fraud is fought by sharing signals across the whole network rather than bank by bank. His one-word answer to what the industry must get right was invisible.
The enterprise view
Earlier that morning, on the Intersection Stage, Nik Milanović of This Week in Fintech chaired From Pilot to Payout, a panel with Payoneer, eBay and Citi. He opened with Payoneer’s new survey of 265 payments, treasury and finance leaders, in which 69 per cent are already using stablecoins and 41 per cent at meaningful scale, then asked the room who had actually paid with one. I counted six or seven hands, in a room full of payments professionals.
The panel explained the gap. Renata Camera Santos, head of wallet at eBay, said a marketplace has to give buyers and sellers the same experience whatever the rail, and that solving for the happy path is not enough when card payments have had decades to work through every edge case. Every vendor pitches stablecoins as if the world is your oyster, Santos said, when what a marketplace needs is to be told where the oyster is. Pix in Brazil, where Santos grew up, already delivers much of what stablecoins promise, so a stablecoin has to fix a margin or speed problem better than that.
Will Artingstall, Citi’s head of banking as a service, said that for the first time a new-product conversation with clients was about risk rather than features, with a new vocabulary of know-your-transaction checks and hosted and unhosted wallets, and that the dispute rights a card holder takes for granted have no stablecoin equivalent yet. Where Citi has seen strong take-up is tokenised deposits, because clients fund from an ordinary account and never hold a wallet while the token is minted and burned behind the scenes. Rowland Berry of Payoneer added that however much of the stack you outsource, the accountability stays with whoever holds the licence.
Agents need papers
The afternoon session on the trust layer for agentic commerce, with Mastercard, Skyfire and Forter, was the most useful half hour of my day. Ranjita Iyer, executive vice president of services for North America at Mastercard, chaired it and said the network expects one transaction in ten could be made by an agent by 2030, possibly sooner. Adam Davies, director of AI strategy at Forter, set out what a merchant now has to establish for every agent at the door: which person it represents, whether it is acting within the authority it was given, and what credential it is paying with. Each already has rival standards, from Visa‘s Trusted Agent Protocol and Google’s AP2 to Mastercard’s Verifiable Intent and Stripe‘s shared payment tokens, and no merchant can realistically support them all alone.
Amir Sarhangi of Skyfire said we built the internet for humans and today’s fraud tools are probabilistic, while merchants now want to know with certainty which agents are good and who is behind them. Skyfire’s Know Your Agent token binds a verified business behind an agent to verified details of its user, and Forter reads it at checkout. Merchants, he said, do not want a separate registration for agents; they want the agent recognised as the customer it acts for, loyalty account and all.
Then Iyer raised the question that has followed this whole autumn of conferences. When an agent buys something its owner did not authorise, or simply gets it wrong, the issuer needs that identity and intent data to deal with the liability and, in Iyer’s words, “to figure out who’s holding the bag on those types of transactions.”
Rules after innovation
I finished on the Intersection Stage with former CFTC Chairman J. Christopher Giancarlo, a month after the CLARITY Act failed a Senate procedural vote. He was relaxed about it. “As someone who wrote rules at the CFTC, I’m not that disappointed that clarity didn’t get done,” he said, arguing that the US should let innovation solve commercial problems first and legislate once the public policy issues are clear, as his old agency is now doing with prediction markets. He predicted that by 2040 anything of value that can be tokenised will be.
Karin Kusano, the crypto strategist known as Cryptomommi, gave the session its human side, describing how ordinary banking shut her out when she had no fixed address. She then turned on her own industry: crypto has behaved like a teenager, she said, and needs to grow up, starting with pump-and-dump schemes and meme coins.
Around the floor
Elsewhere on Monday, Huntington launched The 1866 Studio, an agentic small business platform built with Google Cloud, Proof and Circle demonstrated an agent proving who it acts for and then paying in USDC, and Skyfire and Forter formalised the partnership discussed on stage. Day two brings FDIC Chairman Travis Hill in conversation with the Financial Technology Association at 10:00 Pacific time.
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