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Our newsletter covers news, industry perspectives, and updates from the USBC ecosystem. Check out our last report here.

This week:

The painful challenges behind USBC’s latest launch
The importance of the Phase 1 milestone
The principles behind an ideal digital dollar system
What happens when AI agents can actually make payments on your behalf?
The difference between a crew and a team
Stuff happens

Some of the most important decisions when building a complex system are also the toughest to make. It often means accepting short term disruptions or compromises to ensure longer term goals such as accountability and scalability.

Greg Kidd dives into some of those tough decisions in our latest batch of Q&A questions with USBC’s co-founder and CEO.

Given the latest internal launch, Greg also maps out what the next set of major milestones of USBC’s development will look like.

Phase 1: Internal testing with core functionality
Phase 2: Redesign and rebrand
Phase 3: Triparty partnership testing
Phase 4: General launch

Here’s Greg:

What’s so exciting for USBC is that those tough decisions are now bearing fruit. Over the past three months, USBC has:

• Moved from Ethereum to Solana

• Shifted identity from phone numbers to real personhood

• Introduced identity switching and vouching

• Enabled send, spend, convert, and load

• Added PushPay and PullPay using QR flows

This means USBC is no longer just an idea or a roadmap. The core functionality is now in place. As Greg notes, this is a major milestone not just for the team, but for the future of the product and the company.

What makes a great digital dollar platform? Some of the key ideas we’re exploring at USBC, according to Greg:

Why “open banking” and “fair access” need to be implemented, not just stated
How excluding countries can lead to competing financial systems
The importance of adoption over control in maintaining global standards
Why asymmetric competition (low-cost alternatives vs high-cost systems) matters
How financial systems mirror broader technological ecosystems

One of the biggest drivers for payments volume will be agentic AI.

And AI agents only become truly useful when they can act—not just chat or “think.”

That means:

Making purchases
Managing subscriptions
Handling transactions
Operating on behalf of a user or entity

This only works with safety and accountability if each action is tied back to a real identity. These considerations have been baked into USBC’s identity stack with the latest launch introducing key features that will enable more robust functionality for AI agents:

Identity switching (multiple identities per user)
Delegated authority (to people, entities, or AI agents)
A system where all actions tie back to a single underlying personhood
A framework for compliant, consumer-protected agent-driven transactions

Here’s Greg on the future of payments, identity, and AI agents:

Learnings from Artemis II, featuring NASA astronaut Christina Koch (via Alexandra Lutyens):

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The painful challenges behind USBC’s latest launch | #347

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