AEON has teamed up with Ultima in a move designed to push crypto out of the portfolio and into the pocket. The strategic integration announced today brings support for the $ULTIMA token across AEON’s global payment rails, letting users pay with $ULTIMA at checkout via AEON Pay, AEON’s Web3 mobile payments product, both online and at physical stores. The partnership positions $ULTIMA for everyday spending, from coffee runs to service purchases, while folding the token into AEON’s longer-term vision for AI-native economic systems.
Under the deal, AEON Pay users will be able to transact directly from wallets and exchanges that already hold $ULTIMA, opening up practical spending scenarios that many crypto holders have long wanted: offline shopping, dining, transit and daily purchases without first converting to fiat. AEON says the integration already supports payments at more than 50 million merchants across markets, including Southeast Asia, Nigeria, Mexico, Brazil and Georgia, with further rollout planned across wider regions in Africa and Latin America. That merchant footprint joins a growing laundry list of AEON collaborations that aim to make QR-code and bank-transfer-backed crypto payments a real alternative at the point of sale.
Web3 Payments Scale Up
Accessibility was a clear priority for the two teams. AEON Pay is available through the Telegram Mini App and is already accessible via a variety of leading wallets and platforms, including Bitget Wallet, Binance Wallet, OKX Wallet, Solana Pay, TokenPocket, KuCoin and Bybit. That broad compatibility, advocates say, lowers the friction for people who already hold tokens on popular custodial and non-custodial platforms and want to spend them without extra steps.
For Ultima, the move is more than a payments partnership: it’s a practical step toward turning the token into a medium of exchange rather than only something to stake or trade. Ultima, launched in March 2023, supports an expanding suite of blockchain products, from staking mechanisms that can pay rewards in $ULTIMA to marketplaces, payment tools and trading services.
The project says its community now spans millions of users across more than 120 countries, and its roadmap includes physical debit cards, an exchange and travel and crowdfunding platforms. By weaving $ULTIMA into AEON’s on-the-ground payments infrastructure, the token gains real-world velocity: consumers can buy goods and services directly with $ULTIMA, and merchants can accept it as payment without adding complicated crypto rails.
Both sides also framed the deal as preparation for the machine-driven markets that many technologists expect to emerge. AEON has been an early proponent of standards intended to let autonomous agents and AI-native applications transact on-chain, and it is experimenting with payment and identity standards such as x402 and ERC-8004 so that intelligent agents can earn, spend and settle value natively. Integrating ecosystem tokens like $ULTIMA into these rails means the token could be used not just by people but by future software agents acting on users’ behalf.
AEON points to real traction: by 2025, its AI payment and Web3 mobile payment solutions processed millions of transactions and hundreds of millions of dollars in volume across tens of millions of merchants in emerging markets. That history of deployments and integrations gives the partnership immediate heft and a plausible pathway from niche crypto payments to everyday utility.
The combined message from AEON and Ultima is straightforward: if crypto is to move beyond volatile speculation, it must become useful in daily commerce. This partnership tries to do exactly that, turning a token launched in 2023 into a tool people can use at checkouts today, while building the underlying rails that could let human and machine economies interoperate tomorrow.
