Mastercard Acquires BVNK, Circle Launches Arc L1 — Institutional Stablecoin Infrastructure Push

Mastercard completed $1.8B acquisition of BVNK for bank-grade stablecoin rails. Circle announced Arc L1 mainnet on Sept 16 with founding validators including BlackRock, Visa, DTCC, Mastercard, ICE. BlackRock deploying BUIDL, DTCC tokenization integration in 2027. Day-one DeFi includes Aave, Uniswap, Morpho. Cloudflare also launched stablecoin wallets for AI agents. MetaMask launched a dedicated wallet for AI agents. This cements stablecoins as core institutional infrastructure.