machines.cash

machines.cash is a virtual card platform that lets cryptocurrency holders spend assets anywhere Visa is accepted, including via Apple Pay and Google Pay, while maintaining a deliberate privacy separation between on-chain identity and real-world purchasing history. The platform launched in late 2025, positions itself not as a bank, neobank, or custodian but as a productivity and control layer sitting above existing wallets and payment networks. It accepts SOL among nine deposit currencies — BTC, Monero, Zcash, SOL, Tron, USDT, USDC, ETH, and EVM assets — all auto-converted to a spendable USD balance. The core privacy problem machines.cash addresses is that on-chain transactions are permanently public. Funding a merchant account directly from a self-custody wallet permanently links that wallet address to the vendor and to every other transaction in the wallet history. machines.cash interrupts that chain with a layered account architecture: funds flow through an alias account and a virtual account before reaching the card, with fresh single-use deposit and withdrawal addresses generated for every transaction. This structure makes it difficult for merchants or blockchain observers to correlate a wallet's broader on-chain activity with any specific purchase. The onboarding flow has four steps. First, users complete one-time KYC with a third-party provider — raw identity documents never pass through or reside on machines.cash servers. Second, users fund an account from an existing wallet using any supported asset. Third, users create virtual cards organized in folders with custom spending limits, labels, recurring-payment caps, and automation rules. Fourth, users spend anywhere Visa is accepted; refunds return automatically to the originating card. A free Hobby tier includes three virtual cards. Cards can be added to Apple Wallet or Google Pay for tap-to-pay use. Common use cases include subscription isolation — creating a separate card per subscription so canceling one does not expose others — per-vendor spending caps, and project-level budget tracking. A notable differentiator is the platform's agentic payment infrastructure. machines.cash exposes a Claude plugin, MCP connectors, Codex integration, CLI access, and a consumer API at api.machines.cash/consumer/v1 so AI assistants can execute purchases on behalf of users. The API uses short-lived scoped session tokens with granular permission scopes covering users, KYC, agreements, cards, balances, deposits, and transactions, and requires idempotency keys for financial writes. Agents must gate purchases with explicit user confirmation and cannot request internal account IDs from users directly. The platform uses AES-256-GCM with random initialization vectors for client-side encryption. No external audit reports are publicly cited. SOL is one of nine supported deposit currencies; there is no Solana-native on-chain component to the service. Interactions with Solana occur only at the deposit step, when a user sends SOL from a self-custody wallet to a machines.cash-generated single-use deposit address. The Solana transaction is visible on-chain but the link between that deposit and subsequent card spending is obscured by the layered account architecture. A MACHINES token exists on the Base network with a total supply of 100 billion tokens; it does not appear to be required for platform access or fee payment based on publicly available information. No team members or founding organization are publicly identified in the platform documentation or marketing materials.