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In a major milestone, the Cardano Foundation has joined Mastercard's Crypto Partner Program.
As part of its Blockchains track, the Cardano Foundation will engage with Mastercard and other participants working across payments and stablecoins on areas including cross-border money movement, B2B transactions, and settlement.
The Cardano Foundation highlighted this significant milestone in an X post, describing it as another step toward connecting public blockchain infrastructure with the way money moves globally.
In a separate milestone, Cardano's agentic economy has seen significant progress: through Masumi, Cardano is now officially integrated into the x402 repository and its official packages, which makes it easier than ever for AI agents to transact on Cardano.
With Cardano now officially part of the x402 codebase as a working implementation, the integration enables x402 payments on Cardano, supported across mainnet, preprod, and preview testnet. This remains in line with Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson's vision on agentic finance.
Hoskinson discussed the confluence of AI agents, blockchain, privacy, and digital finance at the 2026 Wyoming Blockchain Symposium and why he thinks agentic systems can bring the next billion users to crypto.
Hoskinson explained why the next era of finance, commerce, and search might increasingly be agentic and how blockchain could provide the privacy, identity, payments, and control layers that AI agents need.
Cardano scaling upgrade makes remarkable progress
Cardano developers are ready to showcase Leios node peaking at 250 TxkB/s (~1,000 simple 250-byte transactions per second) on a local cluster with emulated round trip times for higher fidelity. For comparison, Cardano mainnet currently tops at 4.5 TxkB/s.
Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson praises the potential of Leios with expectations of it arriving on the Cardano mainnet by the end of 2026.
According to Input Output's Product Manager, Carlos Lopez de Lara, he highlights massive potential, saying, "The throughput is there; the work ahead sits in the network stack, where tuning and optimisation will carry these numbers out of the lab and into real internet conditions. Cardano, beast mode enabled."