Wirex Joins Visa Agentic Push, SpaceX Prices $75B IPO, Perplexity Eyes 2028 Listing

Crypto News

Wirex, a global stablecoin infrastructure provider, has joined Visa's Agentic Ready programme as an issuer, committing to develop secure, scalable agent-initiated payments for the UK market. Through the initiative, the firm will work alongside Visa and ecosystem partners to test how AI-driven software agents can initiate and complete transactions on a user's behalf while preserving consent, control and security. Early focus areas include Software-as-a-Service billing, marketing spend optimisation and corporate procurement automation. The company, which has processed more than $20 billion across 130 countries since 2014, frames the move as a step toward an emerging agentic economy built on blockchain rails and onchain settlement.

Perplexity chief executive Aravind Srinivas confirmed the AI search firm intends to go public in 2028 regardless of how rival listings perform in the interim. Speaking publicly this week, he described the timeline as fixed and decoupled from the fortunes of larger peers preparing their own market debuts. Srinivas argued the wave of imminent AI offerings will serve as a critical barometer for investor appetite, adding that he expects them to succeed because the underlying businesses are growing. His one caveat: any company that goes six months without a meaningful leap in model capability risks seeing its valuation questioned by increasingly disciplined public investors.

Attention this week centres on SpaceX, which is pricing a record $75 billion initial public offering that market participants view as a bellwether for the entire artificial-intelligence and frontier-technology cohort. A strong reception would signal that public markets remain willing to absorb mega-cap technology listings at elevated valuations, smoothing the path for a queue of companies waiting behind it. A weak debut, by contrast, could chill sentiment and force later issuers to revisit pricing. Analysts highlight the offering as the largest such test in recent memory, with direct implications for fundraising conditions across both equities and adjacent DeFi and digital-asset venture markets.

Anthropic has confidentially filed for a public listing at a valuation approaching $1 trillion, a figure that would rank it among the most richly valued debuts in technology history. The move underscores how quickly capital has rotated into frontier model developers, with investors willing to underwrite extraordinary multiples on the expectation of continued breakthroughs. The scale of the prospective valuation also intensifies scrutiny of revenue durability and burn rates, as public-market discipline replaces the looser standards of private rounds. For an industry that has so far raised primarily through venture channels, the filing marks a decisive shift toward mainstream capital markets.

OpenAI is separately drafting its own listing at an $852 billion post-money valuation, adding a third headline offering to an unusually crowded pipeline. Together with SpaceX and Anthropic, the combined deals would test investor tolerance for revenue metrics and growth assumptions at a scale equity markets have rarely confronted simultaneously. The timing concentrates enormous capital-raising activity into a narrow window, and a stumble by any one name could ripple across the others. Observers note the outcomes will shape sentiment well beyond technology stocks, influencing risk appetite that frequently spills into crypto and other speculative altcoin markets.

Beneath the headline valuations, Perplexity's financial trajectory illustrates the speed of the current cycle. The company's annual recurring revenue surpassed $450 million in March 2026, a 50% acceleration within a single month, driven by the launch of Perplexity Computer, an autonomous agent platform that unifies multiple models into a single research infrastructure. Management is now targeting $656 million in recurring revenue by the end of 2026, up from roughly $200 million in late 2025. Unlike rivals pouring capital into training the largest models, the firm has pursued a leaner strategy, a posture executives have framed as a more pragmatic view of AI spending.

The week's events trace a single arc: artificial intelligence is moving decisively from private speculation into public capital markets, and its infrastructure is increasingly entangled with onchain finance. As agents begin initiating payments and mega-listings test investor appetite, the line between AI and digital-asset narratives continues to blur. For crypto, the read-through is twofold — successful AI debuts could reinforce broader risk appetite and a fresh bull market impulse, while agentic payment rails point toward a future where Bitcoin and stablecoins settle machine-to-machine commerce at scale.