This is The Menu: the weekly briefing from the Web3 Dinner Club.

What the market is saying and how the best builders and investors are making sense of it.

In this issue:

Signal, served weekly.

The dinner club is proudly sponsored by Novel Labs.

A multi-award-winning London storytelling studio building the brands of the future in AI, blockchain, and emerging technologies.

Best known for the $100m expansion to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, The Mutant Cartel World.

If you’re a startup or scale-up building a brand and looking for real go-to-market impact from those who have repeatedly built unicorns and category kings as VCs and founders... ask for an intro at the table.

Payment rails are the systems that move money from one person or business to another.

They include the banks, card networks, payment processors, clearing systems and digital platforms that handle a payment behind the scenes.

For example, when you pay for coffee by card, the payment rails check the transaction, move the money between financial institutions and make sure the shop receives payment.

Traditional payment rails can be slow or expensive, especially for international transfers. Blockchain networks and stablecoins are being developed as alternative rails that can operate continuously and settle transactions more quickly.

Simple terms: payment rails are the roads that money travels along.

AI agents are beginning to do more than answer questions. They are searching for data, calling APIs, renting computing power and completing tasks on behalf of users and businesses.

The next challenge is payment.

Traditional financial systems were designed for people: bank accounts, cards, invoices and business hours.

They are poorly suited to software making thousands of tiny transactions across borders and without a human approving each one.

That is the opportunity for the AI payment stack.

At the bottom is a blockchain settlement layer.

On top sits a digital-dollar payment asset such as USDC.

Above that are agent wallets, spending permissions and protocols that allow software to request, pay for and receive online services.

One of the most important pieces is x402, an open protocol built around HTTP’s “402 Payment Required” response.

An agent requests a resource, receives the price and payment instructions, signs a small payment and retries the request with proof of settlement. If the payment is verified, the server releases the resource.

The numbers suggest that this is moving beyond a whiteboard concept.

Coinbase reported around 165 million x402 transactions and approximately $50 million in cumulative volume by late April 2026, while USDC accounted for roughly 98.8% of agent-driven transaction volume, according to Circle.

Circle’s launch of Arc has added another layer to the story.

Arc is designed for stablecoin payments, financial markets and autonomous economic activity, with USDC used for transaction fees rather than a volatile native token. Circle’s Facilitator Service also allows x402 payments in USDC across Arc, Base and Polygon without developers needing to operate their own relayers or gas wallets.

The attraction is clear: a machine can pay a few cents, or less, for precisely what it needs, at any time and without relying on card rails.

But the hype needs to be measured carefully. A recent analysis of x402 activity estimated that only between 0.6% and 7.5% of the $52.7 million examined could be confidently attributed to genuinely autonomous agents. The rest may involve human-controlled wallets, automated software or testing activity.

That distinction matters. Large transaction counts demonstrate that the rails are being used, but they do not yet prove that an autonomous machine economy has arrived.

The harder questions are about control and accountability:

The AI payment stack is therefore an important test for Web3.

Its success will not be measured by how many agents have wallets but by whether machines can transact safely, cheaply and reliably in the real economy.

W3DC:
The future of AI may need a financial system designed for software. The experiment has begun, but the infrastructure is still being tested.

Stephen Witt’s The Thinking Machine is the story of how Jensen Huang turned Nvidia from a maker of gaming chips into the company powering the artificial-intelligence revolution.

The book’s central insight is that Nvidia did not win by chasing the most visible AI application.

It won by building the infrastructure, the chips, software and developer ecosystem, that every major AI company would eventually need.

Witt presents Huang as a visionary but intensely demanding operator whose long-term bet on graphics processors and parallel computing eventually transformed Nvidia into one of the world’s most powerful businesses.

For Web3, the lesson is highly relevant.

It's becoming ever clearer that the next “winners” won't be the projects with the loudest narratives, but the infrastructure underneath the activity: payment rails, tokenisation systems, decentralised compute and markets that businesses and machines genuinely depend on.

W3DC:
A sharp, timely account of Nvidia’s rise and a useful reminder that technological revolutions are usually won beneath the surface.

A curated, seated dinner for a small group of builders working in crypto, AI, and frontier tech.

One table. No pitches. No panels. No ego contests.

Just the kind of conversation that doesn't show up in your LinkedIn feed. The relationships that move capital, talent, and ideas in Web3 don't start at conferences.

They start at a handful of dinners with the same people, repeated over time.
Seats are limited by design.

Proudly sponsored by Novel Labs.

Web3’s first phase was driven by possibility: everything would be tokenised, decentralised and rebuilt on blockchain rails.

The next phase is more practical.

The question is no longer what blockchain can do in theory, but whether it can become infrastructure that people, businesses and machines genuinely rely on.

Stablecoins are being developed as payment rails. Tokenised assets are entering financial markets. AI agents are being given wallets and spending rules. DePIN projects are using incentives to coordinate computing power, storage and connectivity.

But creating a token is not the same as creating useful infrastructure.

A tokenised asset still needs clear ownership, custody, liquidity, pricing and redemption. Recent estimates put on-chain real-world assets at $34.18 billion, up 85.2% this year, but only around 12% is actively being used in DeFi. The assets are arriving on-chain; the harder question is whether they are doing anything useful once they get there.

Circle’s Arc mainnet is a good example of Web3 moving into this more practical phase. Arc is designed for stablecoin payments, tokenised assets, financial markets and AI-agent transactions. It uses USDC for fees and launched with more than 100 applications and institutional participants.

Its importance lies in the combination: digital dollars, programmable settlement, tokenised markets and machine payments brought together in one financial network.

But adoption also raises questions about control. If large issuers, banks and financial institutions operate the key rails, is this decentralised finance, or traditional finance adopting selected blockchain features?

There is no simple answer. The infrastructure may not need to be fully decentralised to be useful, but users should know who controls it, who can change the rules and what happens when something fails.

Web3’s next success will be judged by five simple questions:

The most successful projects may eventually stop looking like crypto companies. They may look like payment providers, exchanges, custodians or infrastructure firms that use blockchain only where it improves the underlying system.

That may be the real sign of success: users benefit from the technology without needing to think about it.

W3DC:
The hype promised a new internet. The infrastructure test asks whether Web3 can build something the world actually needs.

Dr Samer Soliman’s short new report asks whether CBDCs will defeat stablecoins or whether stablecoins will make CBDCs irrelevant.

His answer is that they are not competing for exactly the same role.

Stablecoins already have the adoption lead, with approximately $308 billion in circulation. CBDCs, meanwhile, are being explored by 146 jurisdictions, but retail use remains limited.

Soliman’s proposed digital-money stack is divided into three parts:

The United States has reinforced this divide by regulating stablecoins while blocking a Federal Reserve retail CBDC.

The dollar may therefore go digital through private, regulated issuers rather than through a public digital dollar.

The report’s conclusion is provocative: there may be two winners, but only one loser, the status quo of correspondent banking and slow settlement.

Will the future of money be built by central banks, private companies, or by a partnership in which each controls a different part of the system?

Binance is investing $100 million in Circle and signing a new five-year commercial agreement to expand USDC access, particularly in emerging markets.

The partnership gives Binance a larger role in promoting and integrating USDC across its platform, while Circle will provide the infrastructure for holding and using the stablecoin.

This is more than a financial investment. It is a bet that USDC can become a global digital-dollar payment rail for trading, remittances, savings and cross-border commerce.

The deal also highlights the growing importance of distribution. Circle provides the stablecoin and infrastructure; Binance provides access to hundreds of millions of users across more than 100 countries.

But adoption will depend on what happens beyond the exchange. Users need reliable ways to convert USDC into local currencies, spend it, withdraw it and understand the risks.

The partnership fits neatly with this issue’s infrastructure test. Stablecoins are moving from being crypto trading tools to becoming part of the financial plumbing.

W3DC:
The real question is no longer whether stablecoins can move dollars. It is whether they can become trusted, everyday money.

Until next time