Why We Chose USDC — and Added Card Payments Too

Early on, one real design decision was whether to build a fully custom internal ledger for tracking agent wallet balances — our own numbers, our own settlement logic, everything in-house. We didn't. USDC on Base, settled through Alchemy's infrastructure, did the job better on every axis that actually mattered: it's programmable without us having to build settlement logic from scratch, it's auditable against a real public ledger rather than just our own database's word for it, and it's interoperable with the wider ecosystem an agent might eventually need to interact with, instead of a closed number only meaningful inside Valta.

A custom ledger would have meant we were also implicitly claiming to be trustworthy about balances in a way that's much harder to independently verify. With USDC, a deposit is a real on-chain event before it's ever a row in our database — we're recording what happened, not asserting it from a position of trust.

That covered the crypto side well, but it left a real gap: not every business wants to hold or move crypto, and requiring it as the only way in was a real barrier for a lot of the people Valta is actually for. So fiat card deposits — both local and international — are now live through Paystack, a licensed payment processor. Same principle as the crypto side: Valta doesn't hold or move the money itself, a licensed party does, and Valta's role is deciding whether an agent's spend is allowed, not custodying funds.

The two paths exist for genuinely different situations, not as a hedge. A team already operating in USDC gets programmability and on-chain interoperability. A team that just wants a card-based on-ramp gets one, without needing to think about wallets or gas or network selection at all. Both end up governed by the exact same policy engine and audit trail once the money's in — the deposit method doesn't change how spending gets controlled downstream.

Fiat withdrawals are the one piece still ahead of us — deposits work both ways today, but sending money back out through a bank rail is real infrastructure we haven't built yet, and we'd rather say that plainly than pretend it's further along than it is.