Fuse Network Doubles Down on Its veteran L1 Blockchain to Power AI-Enabled Payments and Last-Mile Commerce
Tel Aviv, Israel, May 12th, 2026, Chainwire
Seven-year-old L1 chain unveils infrastructure roadmap positioning the chain as the settlement layer for AI-native commerce and last-mile payments.
Fuse Network just published its roadmap, built around a single conviction: the missing piece in last-mile payments isn’t regulation, isn’t adoption. It’s the right infrastructure. And AI agents are what finally makes that infrastructure viable at scale.
The end game of blockchain payments was never cheaper rails for Visa. It was giving every business and every person a private key, and letting them interact directly with financial infrastructure without paying a cut to anyone in the middle. The long tail of the global economy, the street vendor, the freelancer, the local delivery network, has always been the real market. They just never had access to the technology, and integrating it required developers, budgets, and technical expertise that most of them will never have.
AI changes that last part. The development bottleneck that kept blockchain infrastructure out of reach for smaller players is gone. For the first time, the average business can plug into programmable payments, loyalty tools, and on-chain settlement without a technical team. That is what last-mile payments on blockchain actually means, and that is what Fuse is building for.
That alignment is not incidental. The same rails that serve a local business serve an AI agent settling a microtransaction in under 200ms for fractions of a cent.
Fuse is integrating native support for the emerging agentic payment standards, including x402, MPP, UCP, ACP, and ERC-8183, and is developing a dedicated Fuse MCP server to expose this infrastructure to any AI tool or agent built on the network.
“What we want to enable on Fuse is a business that gets a point of sale for free, an e-commerce storefront for free, the ability to sell online with zero friction, and no dependency on centralized platforms taking large percentages,” said Mark Smargon, CEO and Co-Founder of Fuse Network. “The end game isn’t onboarding institutions. It’s giving every business and every user a private key. That changes everything.”
Powering the consumer demand layer is Solid, Fuse’s non-custodial neobanking application combining stablecoin and Ethereum yield with a Visa debit card accepted in 49 countries. Every Solid user generating yield, spending with their card, or accessing any financial product on the platform produces sustained on-chain activity on Fuse. The roadmap extends Solid into lending, insurance, index funds, and equities, all on the same non-custodial stack.
Doubling down on the L1
Fuse Chain has run without a single hour of downtime since 2019. Seven years, through every market cycle. The validator network is currently doing a major upgrade, and transaction fees remain consistently cheap.
The infrastructure cycle of the past two years produced more chains than users and pushed major networks toward L2 architectures. Fuse explored that path and made a deliberate choice: L2 technology remains insufficiently decentralized and operationally unstable for the use case Fuse is building toward. The L1/L2 distinction is collapsing anyway as sovereign chains converge on execution, ownership, and economics. The market is returning to where Fuse has been.
Fuse is doubling down on its L1 because the infrastructure for programmable, agent-native, last-mile commerce requires exactly what Fuse Chain already is: fast, cheap, seven years live, and built for real payments.
More information at: https://news.fuse.io/fuse-network-roadmap-update/
About Fuse Network
Fuse Network is the first EVM-compatible blockchain built for real-world payments, launched in 2019 with a vision to make stablecoins practical for everyday businesses and their customers. Fuse built a vertically integrated stack designed for the last mile of payments, enabling SMBs, everyday users, and AI agents to transact seamlessly on the same rails.