The Altitude Card: Visa Spend Straight from Stablecoins in 150 Countries

Privacy for B2B payments

Stepan Simkin says Light Protocol had been building privacy infrastructure on top of Solana before Helius acquired it. He says Altitude has been working with the team for a while on the right design for Altitude, and possibly for Squads Multisig more broadly. "The standard is gonna be on Solana," he says, and he adds that Altitude plans to pioneer it for B2B payments and money management.

A card built on an account

The Altitude Card lets businesses create virtual cards and was launched with Rain. Simkin says Rain powers the majority of crypto cards on the market. According to the source description, the card offers 2% cash back and sits inside a platform that also has stablecoin payments, bill pay and global payouts.

Stepan Simkin says the card is not the product on its own: "The system is and the account is." He says Altitude chose to build the foundation first and is now building up from it.

Agents with limited signing rights

Altitude owns its protocol layer instead of relying on a single key management provider, according to Stepan Simkin. He says this lets it give an agent limited signing rights on a programmable on-chain account, and he describes three agent verticals. He expects agents to be focused on narrow tasks rather than general-purpose AGI. One example he gives is offering an agent to pay an invoice that has come from the same counterparty over the last six months.

He points to Tempo, which launched MPP, and says Anthropic and OpenAI accept stablecoins for AI spend through it on-chain.

Beyond the dollar

Stepan Simkin says the world needs stablecoins for every currency, and he notes that Airwallex and Wise offer multi-currency cards with zero FX when spending in loaded currencies. He says Altitude connects about seven stablecoin orchestrators today. Local currency stablecoins are early and have zero interoperability, he says, though he praises Etherfuse. He expects orchestrators to acquire smaller players. Altitude's SEPA payments already run through on-chain FX via Jupiter on Solana at what he calls "basically Google rate."