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BlockBeats News, February 26, Stripe co-founder and President John Collison recently stated in an interview that as AI Agents gradually become independent economic entities, the global financial infrastructure will need a fundamental overhaul to meet the needs of "machine-to-machine" (M2M) payments. Although everyone is currently discussing this trend, there has not yet been a large-scale outbreak of such transactions, but that day is very near. Stripe expects to see a certain scale of transactions between Agents this year, and a core current task is to build a system specifically adapted for transactions between AI Agents. John Collison further added that the core reason why Stripe is now betting so heavily on USDC is also related to this. Stripe and crypto investment firm Paradigm have jointly incubated a new blockchain, Tempo, because the future world needs a highly scalable blockchain, and existing blockchains are not scalable enough due to technical trade-offs. Tempo has pursued extremely high scalability from its foundational design. Our philosophy is: not only do humans need this capability, but AI agents need it even more, so Tempo is one of our most important initiatives in this field.

According to Odaily, Linea has announced that it will update its terms of service, with the new terms taking effect on March 28, 2026. This adjustment is intended to prepare for the upcoming launch of Linea Yield Boost, marking Linea's transition from a short-term token incentive model to generating yield at the protocol level by utilizing cross-chain funds. In the future, most ETH bridged to Linea will be staked via Lido V3 on the Ethereum mainnet at the bridging layer to achieve underlying automatic yield generation. The user experience for cross-chain operations will remain unchanged, but the bridged ETH will continuously generate staking rewards in the background.

According to data from the official website of the Central Bank of Venezuela, the bank sold nearly 6 tons of gold in the second half of last year. The underlying reason is that the United States imposed restrictions on the country's oil exports, leading Venezuela to face a severe shortage of US dollars. According to estimates by Caracas-based financial consulting firm Sintesis Financiera, these gold sales were mainly concentrated in December. Last year, the Trump administration further tightened restrictions on Venezuela's oil exports and seized the first Venezuelan oil tanker on December 10. This move cut off Venezuela's source of US dollars, causing the gap between the official exchange rate and the parallel exchange rate to reach a historic high, while also increasing the risk of a resurgence of hyperinflation. However, after US special forces arrested Venezuelan President Maduro in January this year, the United States allowed part of Venezuela's oil sales revenue to flow back into the country. This change revitalized the country's official foreign exchange market and narrowed the gap between the official and parallel exchange rates. According to a report released by Sintesis Financiera on Monday, the Central Bank of Venezuela's statements indicate that the country did not appear to conduct any gold sales in January.