Crypto Morning Brief: Visa Launches Stablecoin Platform; Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 Has Started Rolling Out to Users

By: TechFlow | Yesterday | Market Updates: Visa launches stablecoin platform, plans to open stablecoin services to over 200 million merchants. According to Fortune, Visa announced the launch of the Visa Stablecoin Platform, a stablecoin processing system that can be embedded into existing payment and treasury management workflows for banks and fintech companies, helping institutions manage stablecoin operations within existing Visa infrastructure. Visa said it processes about $15 trillion in payments annually and has already completed billions of dollars in stablecoin settlements. With this more streamlined platform, it aims to bring its roughly 15,000 financial institution clients and over 200 million merchants onto stablecoin services. The platform will initially support OUSD, a stablecoin newly launched by the Open Standards Alliance, complementing stablecoins already supported by Visa such as USDC and Global Dollar. Visa said the platform will integrate its existing stablecoin-related services, with a focus on reducing technical complexity so customers can more easily incorporate stablecoins into payment settlement and funds movement systems. Meanwhile, major payment companies such as Mastercard and American Express are also accelerating their stablecoin infrastructure plans. Injective submits transfer agent registration application to the U.S. SEC, advancing compliant infrastructure for on-chain securities issuance. On July 16, Injective said it had submitted a transfer agent registration application to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Transfer agents maintain the official ownership records of securities and handle transfer changes; in traditional markets, this function is usually maintained off-chain by specialized institutions. The application aims to move this core market function on-chain, making the token itself the ownership record, so that tokenized securities can be registered and transferred within seconds while reducing intermediary reconciliation steps. The filing is part of a series of initiatives by Injective to bring institutions on-chain. Injective has also released a MiCAR white paper to expand its business in a regulated manner across EU member states. Fireworks AI raises $150 million, led by Index Ventures and others. According to CNBC, AI infrastructure startup Fireworks AI announced a $150 million funding round, bringing its latest valuation to $17.5 billion. The round was led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV, with participation from Nvidia, Evantic, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Fireworks AI had previously received support from Nvidia and mainly provides developers with cloud-based runtime services for open-source AI models, helping enterprises deploy AI applications at lower cost. The company disclosed that its platform currently processes about 40 trillion AI tokens per day, with customers including Elastic, GitLab, MongoDB, and others. The report said that more than half of Fireworks AI's early revenue came from the AI coding tool Cursor, though its customer base has since become more diversified. 1inch co-founder Anton Bukov announces departure from the team and launches new project Second Tier. On July 16, 1inch co-founder Anton Bukov announced that he was leaving the company's operations team and launching a new blockchain infrastructure project, Second Tier. According to the disclosure, Bukov had led the design of core architectures such as 1inch Router, Fusion, and cross-chain swaps, and stopped participating in 1inch's day-to-day operations at the end of November 2025 due to strategic direction and management disagreements, while retaining his co-founder status and 50% stake. The new project Second Tier is dedicated to building secure and efficient blockchain infrastructure, aiming to shorten the distance between a user's "economic intent" and "final execution." Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 has already started being made available to users. Moonshot AI's official website has been updated with the new model KIMI K3. After logging in, users can see two versions: K3·Max and K3 Cluster·Max, and the company is expected to make an official announcement soon. Earlier reports from sources said the model has 2 trillion to 3 trillion parameters, making it the largest AI model in China to date and nearing the capabilities of models developed by Anthropic, a leading U.S. AI lab. This development indicates that the gap between China and the U.S. in cutting-edge artificial intelligence is narrowing. As the benchmarked counterpart, Anthropic has not officially disclosed the parameter scale of its models. However, industry insiders generally speculate that its Opus 4.8 model has around 1.5 trillion to 2 trillion parameters. The U.S. Senate unanimously passes a resolution opposing a pardon for FTX founder SBF. According to CoinDesk, the U.S. Senate on July 16 local time unanimously passed a non-binding resolution stating clearly that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) should not receive a presidential pardon or sentence reduction "under any circumstances." The resolution was jointly promoted by Republican Cynthia Lummis and Democrat Ruben Gallego of the Senate Banking Committee's Digital Assets Subcommittee. SBF was convicted by a jury in November 2023 on seven counts related to the FTX collapse, in which more than $8 billion in U.S. customer funds were lost, and is expected to be released no earlier than 2044. Earlier, President Trump pardoned Binance founder CZ and Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, but said he had no intention of pardoning SBF. Base founder Jesse Polla