We're growing the customer ops team at SpherePay! This role is the connective tissue between us and our users, owning the full customer lifecycle from onboarding to ongoing support for fintechs and institutions moving money across borders US-based Portuguese fluency required

🦔Microsoft canceled its internal Claude Code licenses this week after token-based billing made the cost untenable, even for a company with effectively infinite cloud resources. Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products. My Take The AI subsidy era is ending in real time. The same company that put $13 billion into OpenAI and built the Azure infrastructure powering most of Anthropic's compute just looked at the bill from a competitor's coding tool and decided it was not worth paying. That is not a productivity failure on Anthropic's end. Token-based pricing is forcing every enterprise customer to confront the actual cost of running these models at scale, and the number turns out to be far higher than the flat-rate experiments suggested. This ties directly to my Gemini Flash post yesterday. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months. Two outcomes look likely from here. Either enterprises scale back AI usage to fit budgets, which slows the revenue ramp the labs need to justify their valuations ahead of IPOs, or the labs cut prices and absorb the losses, which makes the unit economics worse at exactly the wrong moment. Both paths land in the same place, the numbers stop working, and somebody has to take the writedown. Hedgie🤗

Tokenized securities are the largest opportunity in crypto The cryptoeconomy runs on network effects. Without enough users and volume, there’s no liquidity, no security, and few reasons for anyone to stick around. Despite its global reach, crypto’s network effects have felt stagnant relative to its potential. Countless hours spent on financial engineering and protocol design have ultimately failed to attract more users and create new value. There are ~200M monthly active crypto addresses today, less than 10% of the monthly users on platforms like Instagram. After years of false promises, this dynamic is finally changing. New users and unprecedented value are now entering the cryptoecomomy and tokenized securities are the catalyst. Stablecoins’ rapid expansion demonstrates that assets defined by simplicity and governed by clear rules can achieve massive scale. The stablecoin market cap is over 240 billion dollars (1% of global money supply) because digital dollars are easy to comprehend. Crypto’s value proposition of permissionless finance is simple as well: open participation and trustless agreements are both concepts you could explain to a 10-year-old. But despite a great narrative, crypto always lacked simple assets and simple rules everyone could follow. The recent passing of the Genius Act by the U.S. Senate has provided the industry with a framework of rules. It’s a watershed moment because it creates legal clarity and safety. By removing the murky legal gray zone, banks, fintechs and enterprises can integrate stablecoins into payment rails, unlock cheaper/faster cross-border transfers, and innovate without fear of surprise enforcement. Now that stablecoins have proved this idea in payments, tokenized securities are the logical next step. The Genius Act is a green light for institutions and enterprises to adopt a new financial system, a compliant pipeline for crypto-native capital to flow into dollar-backed assets. By bringing straightforward, familiar assets on-chain, tokenized securities pave the way for crypto’s next major wealth effect. Over the last few years, Bitcoin has distanced itself from the pack as a true macro asset and digital store of value. Historically, BTC's strength was positive for alt coins because the pool of buyers was crypto-native and they’d rotate profits into other projects. This cycle, we haven’t seen liquidity flow down the risk curve because the pool of ETF buyers is focused on BTC and doesn’t care about alts. Today, most of these buyers have no desire to use other crypto services. Companies are now launching tokenized securities to reduce transaction costs and improve efficiencies, increasing the incentives for more users to expand outside of Bitcoin and transact familiar names on crypto rails. Instead of relying on risky, digitally native tokens to highlight valuable primitives, crypto can now leverage trusted assets with decades of proven returns to showcase the power of open finance. There are over 200 trillion dollars of highly desired equities, bonds, and derivatives that will benefit from cheaper settlement, increased liquidity, and broad access enabled by crypto. Bringing even 1% of these assets onto blockchains would trigger an exponential boost in usage and monetization across the ecosystem. Tokenized securities are a new rising tide that can lift all digitally native boats. While a few visionaries recognized that open, permissionless protocols could transform value exchange as dramatically as they did data, most of the world hasn’t caught on. Tokenized securities will help change the perception of crypto from speculative experiments to invaluable infrastructure powering the future of financial services. Trillions of dollars of value will leverage crypto rails and applications to accelerate crypto network effects, increasing interest and capital at all layers of the stack. Imagine buying Tesla stock as easily as we swap tokens. Rather than telling the world how great crypto can be, tokenized securities will show them.

We looking to bring on a VP of Product and a VP of OPs at @sphere_labs , please reach out if interested. Background in payments is a major plus along with being crypto native!