AnotherBall $16M Debt Financing Round⚡️ 📑 About: @anotherball_jp is a virtual entertainment platform for VTubers, avatars, and digital creator ecosystems. 🤝 Investors: Mizuho Financial Group, MUFG, @smbc_midosuke, and Shoko Chukin Bank

A traveler taps her card at a market thousands of miles from home. The payment feels instant, simple, straightforward. It’s not. Behind that tap, money may need to move across currencies, banks, payment providers, and borders. Traditional systems often require companies to park funds in local accounts before they are needed, leaving capital stagnant for long periods of time where it’s not able to earn a return or be put to work. Members of the Avalanche Payments Collective are building a more efficient global payments model, one that keeps capital productive up until the moment it needs to move. Here are five members working across different parts of cross-border payments and treasury infrastructure: @AxiymFinance provides payment and treasury infrastructure that helps institutions route liquidity and settle transactions without pre-funding every market. Its technology supported Hyundai Motor America’s stablecoin payment to its Mexico affiliate, completed on Avalanche in minutes instead of days. @nonco_otc helps institutions exchange currencies and stablecoins by requesting prices directly from a network of professional liquidity providers. That gives them access to more competitive rates while allowing both sides of the transaction to settle together onchain. SMBC, Japan’s second-largest bank, is exploring stablecoin infrastructure for wholesale institutional payments. It is also working alongside MUFG and Mizuho on a potential yen-pegged stablecoin initiative built on Avalanche. @StraitsX is working with KBank through Project BLOOM to develop payment infrastructure that can improve settlement across Southeast Asian corridors where moving money remains particularly slow and expensive. AeraTech helps multinational companies manage cash across subsidiaries, offset internal obligations, and settle inter-company payments without unnecessarily routing every transaction through external banks. These different companies all represent or engage with different parts of the payment and treasury stack. But they all have a shared goal: keep capital working longer, move it when it is needed, and make cross-border payments faster and more efficient. That is what the Avalanche Payments Collective is bringing together. Frictionless, borderless payments that really are instant, simple, and straightforward.

Kite is embedding verifiable identity and programmable spend controls into global payment rails, physical AI, and developer workflows. Here's what we delivered last week: 1️⃣ We joined the Avalanche Payments Collective as a Contributing Partner alongside @FTDA_US, @vaneck_us, and @krakenfx, bringing the Kite Agent Passport to a global payments network covering 150+ countries and 96 currencies. 2️⃣ We shipped cross-chain x402 payments, allowing agents to settle transactions across Base, Tempo, and Solana regardless of where funds are held, with full route timelines now visible in the Kite Passport dashboard. 3️⃣ Settlement is now live on Base, enabling direct-pay and cross-chain routing to handle 1:1 USDC bridging and replacing the treasury relay path for agent wallets. 4️⃣ At Agent Experience Demo Night in SF, our Co-Founder & CTO @scottshics previewed a new developer product coming this month that provides per-user spend visibility and automated cost controls to prevent runaway agent bills. 5️⃣ Kite joined @AethirCloud as an ecosystem partner for Aethir Claw, providing agents with the verifiable identity and stablecoin settlement layer needed to move from ready-to-work to ready-to-transact. 6️⃣ We partnered with @ChainPatrol to protect the Kite community, successfully identifying and taking down 381 malicious links and impersonation attempts to date. 7️⃣ We supported @RiverdotInc Sessions x AI in Tokyo on July 13, joining @axisrobotics and @0G_labs to explore the onchain infrastructure required for physical AI and robotics to sense, settle, and act. 8️⃣ We announced the winners of the Kite Global Hackathon, hosted with @encodeclub alongside @googlecloud, @avax, @cbventures, @smbcnikko_jp, @StanfordSBA with @theBBFund, and @BerkeleyHaas. Over two months, builders competed across Agentic Commerce, Agentic Trading and Portfolio Management, and a Novel track, judged by leaders from Microsoft, Uber, Nvidia, Meta, and Google DeepMind. Eight teams shared a $12,400 prize pool, led by Flattora × ZUKKU (1st), Quittance and WasiAI A2A Gateway (2nd), and ORCA and Kutip (3rd), with standouts like a physical robot concierge that books trips inside budget caps and proof-of-delivery escrow already live on Kite Mainnet. 9️⃣ We launched the Kite Mainnet Use Case campaign in our Discord, recognizing the creative contributions and organic support driving the growth of the Kite ecosystem. The infrastructure for the agentic internet requires both identity and control. 🪁