On 19 October 2026 at Money20/20 USA in Las Vegas, a group of payments companies showed one QR code on an invoice being payable two ways: over US bank rails, or in USDC on Solana. A joint release from Matera, Payfinia and the Solana Foundation calls it the first live public demonstration of X9.150, a new US standard for QR code payments. The stablecoin option comes from Altitude, the business account built by Squads, which described its part of the demo in a blog post the same day. Altitude calls it a proof of concept, and the release says the demo "is not a product launch".
What the X9.150 QR payment standard is
X9.150 is a US standard for how a business creates a QR code that asks for a payment, and how a bank or wallet app reads that code. The Accredited Standards Committee X9, which writes financial-industry standards under the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), published it in July 2026 as "Merchant-Presented QR Codes for Secure Payment". The customer scans the code in their own banking or wallet app and sends the money, a "push" payment, instead of handing over card or account details for the business to pull funds.
The Money20/20 release lists the payment networks an X9.150 code can route to: FedNow and RTP (the two US instant bank-payment systems), ACH credit transfers, the Zelle Network, and "emerging digital payment methods such as stablecoins". According to Altitude, each payment request is digitally signed using public key cryptography supported by the X9 Financial PKI, a shared system of cryptographic keys, so the paying app can check who issued the code and that nobody altered it.
The release names Brazil's Pix as the model, where a single shared QR code became the country's most widely used everyday payment method within a few years. Matera, which helped build the Pix ecosystem, chairs the X9.150 work group through its North America general manager, per Altitude's post. The X9 announcement in July put US volume at roughly 45 million instant payments a month, against billions in Brazil and India.
How one QR code reaches FedNow, RTP or USDC on Solana
In the Money20/20 flow described in the release, a small business sends an invoice with an X9.150 code on it. The customer scans it either with a credit union's banking app, which pays over bank rails, or with Squads' Altitude, which pays in USDC, the dollar stablecoin issued by Circle USDC$0.999-0.3%. The release says funds arrive within seconds and the business's ERP (its accounting system) marks the invoice paid automatically. Payfinia, which the release says provides instant payment services to nearly 30 community financial institutions, built the bank-side QR workflow and says it has tested it with Star One Credit Union's mobile app.
Altitude's own post describes its half of the demo in five steps. Altitude Bill Pay receives an invoice PDF carrying the QR code, reads and verifies the signed payment request, fills in the recipient's details for a person to review and approve, pays in USDC on Solana, and sends a status update back to the invoicing app. In the demo, the FedNow and RTP route runs through the credit union's app, while Altitude Bill Pay settles in USDC on Solana.
Altitude also spells out what the signature does not prove: "Verifying a signed payment request does not establish that the underlying invoice is legitimate or should be paid." The signature confirms who issued the code and that it was not changed in transit. Whether the bill is real and owed is still the business's call, which is why Bill Pay keeps a human approval step before funds move.
X9.150 demo status: a proof of concept with no Altitude launch date
Altitude says it is "working toward general availability in the near future" and gives no date. The release describes the participants as inviting banks, credit unions, fintechs and merchants to pilot X9.150, and names the consortium behind it as Matera, Payfinia, Early Warning's Zelle Network and the Solana Foundation. Matera has released open-source reference software for X9.150. "We open-sourced our X9.150 reference software because a standard only one company can build isn't really a standard," said Carlos Netto, Matera's co-founder and CEO North America.
Every account of the demo so far comes from the participants, who all have an interest in promoting it: the release is a joint announcement and the blog is Altitude's own. No independent outlet had reported on the Money20/20 demo at the time of writing.
What X9.150 means for USDC payments on Solana
For Solana, the draw is distribution. A business that sends X9.150 invoices could accept USDC on Solana as one more way to pay the same bill, without building a separate crypto checkout, and the Solana Foundation's payments lead is making that case alongside a credit-union payments provider and the operator of Zelle. "Solana's job is to make the stablecoin option as easy as the bank option," said Jamal Raees, GM, Payments at the Solana Foundation.
The harder test is choice. If the same code pays over FedNow or RTP from a customer's existing banking app, USDC has to win on cost, reach or convenience, and none of the 19 October materials compare fees or settlement times between the options.
Squads, the company behind Altitude, does bring existing stablecoin volume to the effort. Squads co-founder Stepan Simkin wrote on 18 September that the Squads protocol moves more than $20 billion in annualized stablecoin transfer volume, a self-reported figure we covered at the time. An invoice code that US banks also read gives Altitude a route to American businesses that starts from the bill they already receive.
