JCB said that George Bamford will become joint chairman of the company alongside his father, marking the first change at the top of one of the UK’s biggest private companies in more than 50 years

JCB signs an MOU with Circle to test USDC for cross-border treasury settlement and in-store stablecoin payments for merchants and tourists in Japan. Read more at

Another massive week for PayFi and for the partners building alongside us. Headlines ↓ 1️⃣ @SolanaFndn, @Ripple, Visa, and Mastercard join x402 Foundation, pushing open payment standards and agentic platforms. 2️⃣ SBI Group and @DigiFTTech launched JX, bringing Japanese capital markets to Solana, enabled by ecosystem participants including Huma. 3️⃣ @galaxyhq launched GOFR (Galaxy Onchain Financing Rate), enabling borrowing at an optimized blended rate across top DeFi venues. 4️⃣ @HSBC and Marketnode completed Hong Kong’s first tokenized structured product issuance, testing tokenization across issuance, PayFi, and servicing. 5️⃣ The House Financial Services Committee holds a CLARITY Act field hearing tomorrow, pushing the market structure bill toward a Senate vote. 6️⃣ JCB and @Circle are exploring USDC for cross-border payments and merchant transactions. 7️⃣ @Tether led a $7M round in Pact Labs to grow adoption of USAT. 8️⃣ @dragonfly_xyz and @firstmarkcap co-led @velocityxyz_ $38M round, backing a platform that lets companies hold and settle funds in stablecoins across existing banking rails.

NEW STARTUP: Europe also has its own automous construction tech! Gravis Robotics @GravisRobotics is a 2022 ETH Zurich spinout (Zurich, about 75 people) that makes existing construction machines autonomous instead of building new robots. Similar to @BedrockRobotics I talked about recently. Its Gravis Rack is a hardware-agnostic retrofit kit (sensors, onboard compute and a touchscreen) that clamps onto excavators and other heavy equipment across a dozen-plus brands, from a compact machine to one five times its size, building a 3D map of the terrain and driving the machine's own hydraulics to dig, trench, grade, load trucks and manage stockpiles. Two lighter products flank it: Gravis Copilot keeps a human operator in the cab with real-time 3D guidance and hazard detection, and Gravis Slate is the worksite interface. It is deployed on real fleets across four continents (clients include Holcim, Boskalis, Morgan Sindall and ArmaSuisse; an active UK job with Flannery Plant Hire). On 17 August 2026, it announced a $200M Series A led by SoftBank. Gravis makes no excavators; the Rack bolts sensors and compute onto machines that already exist and drives their hydraulics, and it is deliberately cross-vendor (a compact excavator or one five times its size, across Caterpillar, JCB, Volvo, John Deere and a dozen more). The vision is that the world already has millions of capable machines on site, so the missing piece is a vendor-agnostic autonomy kit, not a new body. The IP is the software stack; the hardware is a commodity you clamp onto, the same retrofit-someone-else's-hardware logic as Asylon on Boston Dynamics Spot, but aimed at the trillion-dollar installed base of heavy equipment. Caterpillar and the other makers can build autonomy into new machines, but heavy equipment lasts 15 to 20 years, so a build-it-into-new-Cats strategy leaves the entire existing fleet untouched for a decade. Gravis reaches that fleet today, on any brand, which is exactly the market a single-OEM autonomy play cannot serve, and it is why SoftBank's money is a bet on the cross-vendor aftermarket rather than on one manufacturer's roadmap. The $200M SoftBank Series A is a European frontier-robotics event in a file otherwise all US and China. Gravis is Swiss (ETH Zurich), and SoftBank's round, which the company calls the largest Series A in construction-robotics history, is a bet that Europe's robotics edge is field and industrial autonomy, not humanoids or foundation models. It is the commercialization of Marco Hutter's ETH Robotic Systems Lab (co-founder and board member; the lab behind the ANYmal quadruped and the HEAP autonomous walking excavator), Europe turning a decade of legged and heavy-machine research into a category leader.