AEON Expands to Zambia, Bridging Global Crypto and Agentic Commerce with Local Mobile Money

HONG KONG, July 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- AEON, the settlement layer for the agentic economy, has expanded AEON Pay into Zambia, integrating local wallets Airtel Money and MTN Mobile Money. Zambian users can now spend digital assets seamlessly while merchants receive instant settlement in Zambian Kwacha (ZMW).

This development bridges the gap between decentralized retail financing and established localized payment behaviors, while providing a crucial real-world terminal layer for autonomous AI agents.

Connecting to Africa's Mobile Money Infrastructure

This move responds to Zambia's explosive digital payment growth. According to the Bank of Zambia FinScope 2025 Survey, mobile money adoption has surged to an unprecedented 76.2%. Integrating with Airtel and MTN places crypto utility directly inside daily workflows for millions of consumers.

Accessible via Telegram MiniApps and wallet dApps, AEON's network already powers transactions for over 50 million merchants globally, including McDonald's and UNIQLO. This expansion further scales AEON's footprint across Africa and LATAM.

The Real-World Settlement Layer for Agentic Commerce

Crucially, this integration builds the foundational settlement infrastructure for the agentic economy. For autonomous AI agents to independently execute actions, these AI agents must interface with local payment rails. By integrating Airtel and MTN, AEON provides the programmable API framework these agents need to transact via digital assets while local merchants receive real-time fiat settlement in Kwacha.

As AEON progressively scales into more territories, it constructs a highly distributed, real-world framework. Every localized rail added to the network expands the geographical footprint where AI agents can fluidly conduct business, opening the door to unprecedented machine-to-human economic integration.

About AEON

AEON is building a native settlement infrastructure for the agentic economy, specifically designed to eliminate three major friction points traditional finance networks pose for agent collaboration: fee overhead, programmability gap, and settlement lag.

Leveraging leading agentic protocols such as x402, ERC-8004, Google A2A, and MCP, AEON enables autonomous, verifiable AI agent transactions at scale and bridges Agent-to-Agent (A2A) interactions with real-world settlement and continuous value flows.

Serving more than 2 million users and processing 30M monthly transactions, AEON is backed by YZi Labs and IDG Capital, with participation from investors including HashKey Capital, Stanford Blockchain Builders Fund, etc.

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