Coinbase launches USDC-secured credit card with Cardless, Gnosis Pay recovers from $265K exploit as cashback programme nears expiry, Mastercard unveils Agent Pay for Machines
Coinbase and Cardless launched a credit card backed by stablecoin collateral on June 9. Applicants pledge a portion of their USDC on Coinbase as security, continue earning yield on the sequestered assets, and receive a credit line without a traditional credit check. The card runs on the American Express network, is issued by First Electronic Bank, and is available to eligible Coinbase One members in the US. Access costs a flat $49.99 fee in lieu of interest charges. The pledged USDC cannot be withdrawn while the account is open. This is a distinct product from the existing Coinbase One Amex card, which offers up to 4% BTC cashback on an unsecured basis. The secured variant solves a specific problem: credit access for users whose wealth is in stablecoins rather than traditional income streams. By letting collateral continue earning yield while simultaneously backing a credit line, Coinbase is borrowing a structure from margin lending and applying it to consumer credit. If the economics work — $49.99 flat fee vs. revolving interest — this model could spread to other crypto platforms holding user stablecoin balances.
Source: CoinDesk Related: Coinbase One (Amex).
Gnosis Pay suffered a security exploit on June 1 that drained approximately $265K from affected Safe accounts via a signature-verification flaw in the Zodiac Delay Module v1.1.0. Co-founder Martin Köppelmann promised full refunds for all affected users. By June 7, card services were restored for 99%+ of users with new Safe accounts linked to their existing cards. The vulnerability had been discovered and silently patched in a newer Zodiac repository months earlier, but the team didn't flag that older deployed contracts remained vulnerable — a disclosure gap more troubling than the exploit itself. Separately, Gnosis Pay's DAO-funded interim cashback programme — offering up to 5% (4% base + 1% OG NFT bonus) — ends June 30. After that date, partner-led incentive programmes take over. Partner cashback is already live through Zeal in Europe and PicnicBR in Brazil, but rates and structures will differ from the current tiers. For Gnosis Pay users, this is a two-part action item: verify your account was migrated to the new Safe contracts, and expect your cashback rates to change after June 30. The card remains one of the few truly self-custodial options — funds stay in your Safe until the moment of purchase — but the exploit is a reminder that smart-contract infrastructure carries risks that custodial cards don't.
Source: The Block Related: Gnosis Pay.
Mastercard unveiled Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M) on June 10, a multi-rail payment service enabling AI agents to make autonomous purchases at machine speed. The protocol handles high-volume, low-value transactions across card rails, bank accounts, and stablecoins, with agent permissions logged on Polygon for multi-party verification. Over 30 fintech and crypto firms joined as early adopters, including Coinbase, OKX, Aave, Tempo, Ripple, and Solana. Mastercard frames this as a 5-year bet on machine-to-machine commerce. AP4M is the third agentic payment product in two months, following MoonPay's MoonAgents Card (developer-focused, launched May 1) and Robinhood's AI agent virtual card for Gold Card holders (consumer-focused, launched May 27). Mastercard's version is infrastructure-level rather than product-level, meaning any issuer on the Mastercard network could integrate agentic payments without building the rails themselves. The stablecoin component matters too: autonomous agents settling in USDC or PYUSD via Mastercard's 24/7 on-chain settlement — launched just a week earlier — could make machine-to-machine transactions faster and cheaper than traditional card authorization cycles. The practical implications for crypto cardholders are still distant, but the direction is clear: the same networks processing your card tap at a coffee shop are building infrastructure for software to pay on its own.
Market Context: The week's three hero stories map to three layers of the crypto card stack. At the product layer, Coinbase's USDC-secured credit card is the first shipping product that turns stablecoin holdings into a credit line — a flat $49.99 fee replacing interest, borrowing from DeFi lending and applying it to consumer credit. If the model works, expect every exchange with stablecoin custody to copy it. At the operations layer, Gnosis Pay's seven-day exploit-to-recovery arc was fast, but the disclosure gap — a known vulnerability silently patched in a new repo while deployed contracts remained exposed — is a warning for every self-custodial card project. Smart-contract risk is the price of 'not your keys, not your coins,' and it's a cost that custodial cards don't pay. At the infrastructure layer, Mastercard launching agentic payment rails a week after going live with 24/7 stablecoin settlement signals that the network sees crypto infrastructure as the foundation for next-generation payment types, not just a way to spend bitcoin at coffee shops. Three agentic card products in two months — MoonAgents, Robinhood Gold, and now Mastercard AP4M — suggest machine-initiated payments are moving from concept to category faster than the market expected. And underneath all of it, the regulatory clock keeps ticking: MiCA and California's DFAL both hit in 15 days.