AI Infrastructure, Stablecoin Payments and Tokenized Finance Are Pulling in Billions

This week overview (May 18 - May 22, 2026)

• Tether and Gnosis co-led a $4.4 million seed round into Sorted Wallet, a lightweight stablecoin and crypto wallet built for mobile users across emerging markets, as adoption accelerates in regions like Africa, South Asia, and Central America.
  

• MoonPay acquired cross-chain infrastructure platform Decent.xyz in an eight-figure deal and launched MoonPay Trade, expanding its institutional tokenized asset and onchain settlement infrastructure across more than 200 blockchains.
  

• Blackstone and Google announced a new AI infrastructure joint venture backed by a $5 billion commitment to build a large-scale TPU cloud platform for AI training and inference workloads.
  

• Hyperliquid’s HYPE token surged above $60 after spot HYPE ETFs from Bitwise and 21Shares attracted $54 million in inflows within their first seven trading sessions, highlighting growing institutional demand for crypto ETF exposure.

Tether and Gnosis Back Mobile Stablecoin Infrastructure Through Sorted Wallet

Tether and Gnosis co-led a $4.4 million seed round into Sorted Wallet, a lightweight non-custodial crypto wallet built for mobile-first users across emerging markets. The raise included $3.4 million in equity financing alongside participation from Movement, Angel Invest Group, and several crypto angel investors. Built as a 10MB wallet optimized for low-cost devices and limited connectivity, Sorted has already surpassed 500,000 downloads, with strongest adoption across Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Madagascar and parts of Central America.

“Over the years, digital asset use cases have evolved from trading tools to real-life applications, promoting financial freedom and inclusion. However, to achieve true inclusion, we must reach hundreds of millions of people who cannot afford smartphones or data plans," Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino said.

The investment reflects a broader push to expand stablecoin infrastructure and crypto payments beyond traditional users and into regions where mobile infrastructure is growing faster than banking access. Tether’s USDT is increasingly functioning as a transactional layer across emerging markets, while Gnosis views wallets like Sorted as a key distribution layer for real-world stablecoin payments and financial access.

With the new capital, Sorted plans to expand deeper into Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia while increasing integrations with mobile operators and launching new payment infrastructure aimed at low-bandwidth environments.

MoonPay Expands Tokenized Finance Infrastructure With Decent.xyz Acquisition

MoonPay is deepening its push into tokenized finance infrastructure with the acquisition of Decent.xyz in an eight-figure deal, marking at least its fourth acquisition of 2026.

The move coincides with the launch of MoonPay Trade, a unified execution and settlement API designed to connect crypto payments, liquidity, cross-chain routing and token conversion across more than 200 blockchain networks and protocols

"Every major financial institution is building a tokenized asset strategy. MoonPay Trade is the execution layer that MoonPay Institutional is built on, giving firms one technology platform to access onchain markets with full compliance," MoonPay CLO and CEO of MoonPay Institutional Caroline D. Pham said.

By combining Decent’s routing and bridge infrastructure with MoonPay’s existing fiat rails and compliance stack, the company is positioning itself as a vertically integrated platform for tokenized asset markets.

Blackstone and Google Launch $5 Billion TPU Cloud AI Infrastructure Venture

Blackstone and Google are forming a new U.S.-based TPU cloud venture backed by an initial $5 billion equity commitment, aimed at expanding access to AI infrastructure and accelerated compute outside of Google Cloud’s native platform.

The partnership combines Blackstone’s hyperscale data center and energy infrastructure capabilities with Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), custom AI chips that already power Gemini and many frontier AI workloads.

Jon Gray, President and COO of Blackstone, said: “We see a generational opportunity to invest capital at scale building AI infrastructure. This new company has enormous potential as it helps to meet the unprecedented demand for compute. We are incredibly proud to partner with Google – bringing together their world class TPUs and AI capabilities with Blackstone’s exceptional strength in energy and digital infrastructure.”

The company plans to bring its first 500MW of AI compute capacity online by 2027, creating a dedicated compute-as-a-service platform optimized for AI model training and inference at hyperscale. As demand for AI infrastructure continues outpacing traditional cloud capacity, the deal reflects a broader shift toward specialized TPU cloud platforms where capital, energy access, networking, and proprietary silicon are converging into vertically integrated compute ecosystems.

Hyperliquid HYPE ETF Inflows Push HYPE Token Above $60

Hyperliquid’s HYPE token surged above $60 for the first time, becoming the top-performing large-cap crypto asset as institutional demand accelerated following the launch of spot HYPE ETFs from Bitwise and 21Shares. U.S. spot Hyperliquid ETFs pulled in a record $25.5 million of inflows in a single day, bringing cumulative inflows to roughly $54 million within their first seven trading sessions.

The rally is increasingly being driven by institutional capital rather than retail momentum alone, with firms like Bitwise committing to purchase and stake HYPE using ETF fee revenue, while Grayscale-linked wallets reportedly accumulated more than $41 million worth of HYPE tokens over the past week. As crypto ETF products expand beyond bitcoin and ether, Hyperliquid is emerging as one of the first alternative blockchain ecosystems attracting sustained Wall Street allocation through regulated crypto investment products.