Fast Partners with Rhuna to Power instant payments for UNTOLD

cointelegraphPublished on 2026-08-07Last updated on 2026-08-07

Abstract

On August 7, 2026, Fast (a payments network by Pi2 Labs) and Rhuna (a live events platform) announced a partnership to provide instant payment settlement for major festivals, starting with UNTOLD. This integration deploys Fast's infrastructure, originally engineered for high-volume, real-time AI agent transactions, to handle the intense payment peaks of festival environments. Rhuna's platform manages consumer-facing wallets and vendor payments at events, while Fast processes the underlying settlements instantly and in parallel, eliminating batching delays. This pilot is a real-world test for Fast's architecture, designed for billions of transactions with verifiable finality. As Rhuna expands globally, the volume on Fast's network will grow, serving as a proving ground for its application in fintech, marketplaces, and the future agentic economy.

August 7, 2026 – Fast and Rhuna are partnering to bring instant settlement to the world’s largest live events. The partnership puts Fast, the payments network built by Pi2 Labs for the agentic economy, underneath the financial and operating engine behind some of the biggest festivals on the planet.

Payment flows from Rhuna-powered events now settle on Fast, with instant finality on every transaction, in one of the first live deployments anywhere of settlement infrastructure built for both people and AI agents.

Both sides bring scale. Fast was created by a former NASA researcher and runs rails engineered to support billions of AI agents transacting in real time, with instant payments clearing across multiple networks. Pi2 Labs was among the first teams in the world to build infrastructure that lets people and AI agents transact directly through chat. Rhuna powers some of the biggest names in live entertainment and brings the most demanding consumer payment environment there is: a festival floor at full capacity.

Settlement under festival conditions

A major festival compresses the economy of a small city into four days. Fans top up wallets and spend in bursts around headline moments. Vendors process thousands of small transactions per hour. Volume arrives in sharp peaks that would strain most payment systems, then drops to near zero overnight.

Traditional settlement handles this with batching and delays. Fast settles each transaction as it happens. Parallel settlement means one vendor’s volume never queues behind another’s, and instant finality means the money is done moving the moment the payment clears.

The partner running it

Rhuna runs the white-label stack behind payments, ticketing, access, and data for some of the biggest names in live entertainment, including UNTOLD, one of the largest music festivals in the world. The platform grew out of more than a decade of operating live events at the highest level, and has processed over $90 million in event volume for more than 2 million attendees. Its roadmap scales past 100 events worldwide over the coming years.

In the pilot, select payment flows from Rhuna-powered events settle on Fast. Rhuna’s rails handle the fan-facing side: wallets, top-ups, and vendor payments. Fast handles what happens underneath, clearing those transactions at machine speed.

Built for agents, proven in the field

Fast was designed for a world where software agents transact constantly: billions of agents, millions of transactions per second, verifiable finality, no bottlenecks. A festival floor is an early preview of that world. Thousands of terminals, wallets, and backend systems transact simultaneously, none of them willing to wait.

That makes live events a natural proving ground. Settlement that holds up when hundreds of thousands of fans spend through a headline set will hold up when agents transact at machine speed. Every peak the system absorbs in the field validates the architecture Pi2 Labs built, backed by the team’s roots in aerospace research.

What comes next

The pilot is the starting point. As Rhuna expands across festivals and live entertainment worldwide, the settlement flows running on Fast grow with it. Each new event adds volume, and each peak adds data on how the architecture performs outside the lab.

For Fast, live events are one deployment among many to come. The same rails serve fintech platforms, marketplaces, and the coming wave of agent-driven commerce, anywhere money needs to move the moment a transaction happens. A network built to carry billions of agents starts by carrying a festival, and scales from there.

Fast is the new payment layer for the agentic economy and AI-native work. The Fast Network is capable of handling millions of TPS, agent-to-agent transparency, and instant finality. Through parallel settlement, Fast enables agents to move money globally and securely at true internet speed. Visit fast.xyz

Media contact
musab@fast.xyz

Related Questions

QWhat is the core benefit that Fast provides to Rhuna and events like UNTOLD?

AFast provides instant settlement with immediate finality for every transaction, eliminating the batching and delays typical of traditional payment systems. This allows payment flows to clear at machine speed, which is critical for handling the sharp, high-volume transaction peaks of large festivals.

QWhy are live music festivals considered a good proving ground for Fast's payment technology?

ALive festivals create an extreme, high-demand payment environment that compresses a small city's economy into a few days, with thousands of simultaneous transactions during peaks. If Fast's settlement infrastructure can handle these real-world human-driven volume spikes, it validates its architecture for a future where billions of software agents transact constantly at machine speed.

QWhat are the respective roles of Rhuna and Fast in the partnership's payment flow?

ARhuna handles the consumer-facing side of the payment process, including digital wallets, top-ups, and vendor payment interfaces for festival attendees. Fast operates underneath as the settlement layer, clearing and finalizing those transactions instantly on its network.

QWhat is the origin and background of the team behind Fast and its underlying architecture?

AFast was created by Pi2 Labs, founded by a former NASA researcher. The team's roots are in aerospace research, and they engineered Fast's rails to support billions of AI agents transacting in real time with instant, verifiable finality across networks.

QBeyond live events, what is the broader vision for the Fast payment network?

AThe vision for Fast is to serve as the new payment layer for the agentic economy and AI-native work. Its high-throughput, instant-settlement rails are designed to power fintech platforms, online marketplaces, and the coming wave of agent-driven commerce, anywhere transactions require immediate money movement at true internet speed.

Related Reads

From Propaganda to Attack Planning: How Terrorists Use Neural Networks

Terrorist organizations are increasingly using artificial intelligence for propaganda, recruitment, security, and operational planning, according to a July 2026 CSIS report. The analysis covers networks linked to al-Qaeda* and the Islamic State* (IS). While traditional weapons like firearms and explosives still account for over 80% of attacks, AI is transforming how extremist structures prepare and promote their activities. Their strategies differ: IS focuses on speed and immediate impact, using AI for content like synthetic presenter videos since 2023. Al-Qaeda affiliates, prioritizing long-term resilience, have used AI-generated imagery and AI-powered translation tools to reach multilingual audiences. Research involving former members of Boko Haram* and its offshoot ISWAP* revealed they sought operational support from AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini in 2025-2026. During that period, ISWAP dramatically increased its attacks in Nigeria. AI lowers organizational costs, enabling smaller networks and lone actors to perform tasks once requiring significant resources. While states gain advanced surveillance tools, terrorists exploit open-source models and bypass built-in safeguards. The technology's spread continues to shift the balance between state monitoring capabilities and the autonomous action capacity of small groups. The pattern mirrors the early adoption of the internet by extremists. A key technical paradox is that restrictions on powerful AI models by major developers protect legitimate users but poorly affect groups using open models and filter bypasses, potentially leading to a new arms race. *Organizations recognized as terrorist and banned in Russia.

cryptonews.ru31m ago

From Propaganda to Attack Planning: How Terrorists Use Neural Networks

cryptonews.ru31m ago

From Text to Voice: Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft Invest Billions in AI Oral Communication

"From Text to Voice: Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft Invest Billions in AI-Powered Spoken Communication" Tech giants Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft are making multi-billion dollar investments in voice AI, anticipating that speech will surpass text as the primary way users interact with artificial intelligence. Data cited by the Financial Times shows venture funding for voice AI startups surged to about $7 billion in Q1 2026, a sevenfold increase from the same period in 2025. Google reports that voice and visual searches now comprise over one in six queries in the US, with image-based requests growing over 40% monthly. OpenAI revealed that more than 150 million of its 900 million weekly ChatGPT users engage via voice or dictation. The company launched its full-duplex GPT-Live models, enabling simultaneous listening and responding, and is reportedly developing a screenless smart speaker. Microsoft introduced MAI-Voice-2, an expressive speech synthesis model supporting 15 languages with controllable emotional tone, for integration into its enterprise products. Key investment areas include voice/image-based search and AI agents, full-duplex dialogue models, dedicated hardware for voice interaction, and emotional speech synthesis for corporate services. This signals a shift from experimental feature to core AI product direction. The AI Opinion section notes a regulatory risk: as companies compete for conversational naturalness, Russian lawmakers have proposed mandating that voice bots disclose their artificial nature immediately. The tension between creating a "human" presence and regulatory efforts to maintain the human-machine boundary could significantly impact the market. Furthermore, while current full-duplex technology represents an advance, the sector must prove it can avoid the cycle of inflated expectations and monetization challenges seen with earlier voice assistants like Siri and Alexa.

cryptonews.ru32m ago

From Text to Voice: Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft Invest Billions in AI Oral Communication

cryptonews.ru32m ago

Trading

Spot
活动图片