Payments giant Stripe has announced a preview version of its new “machine payments” tool, enabling developers to charge AI agents directly using USDC on the Base network and Coinbase’s x402 protocol (with plans to expand supported options).

🧠 What’s changing:

The physical limit of wireless data transfer has just been rewritten. On January 22, 2026, electrical engineers at UC Irvine (UCI) unveiled a revolutionary silicon-based transceiver capable of transmitting data at 120 Gigabits per second (Gbps)—a speed previously reserved exclusively for high-end fiber-optic cables.

Japanese startup Sakana AI announced that its agent ALE-Agent took first place in the AtCoder Heuristic Contest 058, outperforming 804 human participants. This marks the first-ever case of an AI winning a major real-time optimization programming competition, a field traditionally dominated by human intuition and experience.