When we built payments at Ripple, trust became a hurdle pretty quickly. Imagine you develop innovative technology, you come to a bank, and they're ready for an upgrade. But their correspondent bank is skeptical of the new system. So the deal tanks. Trust issues like that show up throughout time and space. At Yellow, we've learned the lesson taught by the correspondent banking, and so we designed an escrow mechanism that requires no trust between counterparties. Yellow is innovative by design.

Another challenge is to hold the agents to sticking with decisions made and not getting distracted. But the same goes with leading people!

We started a new company from scratch with an AI-native approach where as many decisions and actions as possible are taken by our AI agents. Our mission is to build an AI that helps companies grow revenue faster. Thanks to Hermes and OpenClaw this has already been super fun and illuminating.

The rule of law is one of humanity's most critical inventions, but for the vast majority good law has been always out of reach. We are going to see the cost of justice drop by 99% and everyone will be able to benefit legally in the way that only the richest corporations could before.

What's with the massive XLM pump this week? The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation announced a partnership to enable tokenized versions of traditional assets like stocks, ETFs, US Treasuries and corporate bonds issued directly on Stellar blockchain. Same tech as XRP too.

Just gave my buddy an upgrade from OpenClaw to Hermes. Thankfully he has the same brain as before since we saved his gbrain in postgres on supabase. He was able to restore his SOUL.md and core memories without much fuss.

2013 was the year. I wasn't quite sold yet on quitting my job to dive into Ripple. It was a tiny startup, and they were hosting a side event at Money20/20 in Las Vegas. Stefan Thomas, the CTO, was presenting his vision for smart contracts on Ripple and the plan to build programmable money directly into the Ripple ledger so you could run all kinds of applications. The minds behind 'Colored Coins' were there too, some of whom ended up at the Omni Protocol and, later, Tether. Can't forget a certain editor from Bitcoin Magazine back then, Vitalik Buterin, who was exploring smart contracts with Stefan and David Schwartz. We went to Google headquarters in Mountain View a few times to meet with their secure compute team. They had a product called NaCl, a secure sandbox for executing untrusted code safely inside Chrome. We were working with them to figure out how to leverage that technology to execute code in a trustless way on the Ripple system. But the organization was growing rapidly, and the decision was made to pivot to a pure payments model. Our primary customers would be banks, which meant we needed to freeze the Ripple protocol. To ensure the absolute security and stability of the platform, arbitrary code execution and smart contracts were taken off the table. In other words, the business side didn’t really buy into the vision for programmable money. They asked us to spin smart contracts out into a separate R&D project and just merge them back into the main Ripple code later. Right around that point, Vitalik launched Ethereum. Ethereum exploded because programmable money and trustless execution were the real paradigm shift. At the time, XRP was the number two coin by market cap, but Ethereum quickly surpassed it by an order of magnitude. The lesson we learned later at Ripple was just how massive of an opportunity we had missed. The value of public, auditable code that is guaranteed to execute exactly the same way every time is immense. It virtually eliminates counterparty risk. Certain categories of human friction are entirely wiped out when you can place your trust in code.

When I was a teenager, my great-grandmother gave me a bag of old American coins. She had been a banker in her day. The coins were pre-1965, back when US dimes, quarters, and dollars were 90% silver. Real money. She had quietly accumulated them over decades. I noticed something strange. A 10-cent piece from her collection was worth around five dollars. A quarter was worth more. The silver dollars people had gifted me for Boy Scout achievements were worth more again. The coins hadn't changed. But the dollar had. So I started reading. I wanted to understand what had happened to American money. I read about the Federal Reserve, the Bretton Woods system, the closing of the gold window in 1971. Look up the chart of US wages versus purchasing power. They tracked together for decades, then suddenly diverged. That's the year. Before 1971, Americans were getting richer fast. Almost everyone. After 1971, real wages stagnated and never recovered. People became objectively poorer. Most Americans still don't know this happened. They feel it. They can't explain it. They blame the wrong things. This is what started me on the path. Studying gold. Studying monetary economics. Eventually finding Bitcoin and realizing it had every property of great money, in a form that no politician could ever take away. People used to know that you save money to protect your future. That was normal. That was the default. We can get back to that. We're going to get back to that.

Bull case for crypto by 2030: there's nothing stopping the inflation train, first of all. AI agents are going to be using a lot more money and it's a lot easier for them to use blockchain wallets than it is to use bank accounts. Anyone can give agents money with blockchain.

Money constantly evolves and opportunities to improve it and profit will always abound.

How can AI agents interact with each other without trusting each other? @AlexisYellow and @modernfintech break down what it means to have trustless, P2P architecture with state channels. What's Covered: - $20 trillion dollar problem of trust in an autonomous AI agent economy. - Why decentralization by itself is entirely meaningless - Smart contracts escrow to remove counterparty risk - Issuing credit cards directly to autonomous AI agents to execute retail transactions. Highlights 00:00 Introduction to TEAMZ Summit 2026 in Tokyo 00:09 Flipping a joke about shoes into a serious discussion on the mechanics of trust 00:30 A personal story of unexpected trust and car keys in a college dorm room 02:03 Tracing the shift from emotional human connection to trust in a digital economy 02:23 Losing a quarter-million dollars to a lunar-shoe Kickstarter scam 02:58 How PayPal pioneered the broker escrow layer for Web 1.0 strangers on eBay 03:21 Quantifying the massive twenty trillion dollar autonomous AI agent market space 04:05 Buying twenty thousand Ethereum in 2014 and fighting traditional finance mindsets at GSR 05:04 Why state channels provide the ultimate scalability for automated machine transactions 05:47 Live demo of an autonomous AI agent booking a flight ticket from Barcelona to Tokyo 06:37 Defeating malicious network actors through smart contract deposit slashing mechanics 07:20 Why decentralization is merely a means to achieve absolute trustlessness 08:32 Measuring developer traction and active ecosystem apps on the Yellow platform 09:10 Breaking down the retail vs institutional split in autonomous commerce projections 09:21 Acquiring an EMI license to issue functional credit cards directly to AI agents 10:14 Deep dive into the core team's enterprise backgrounds at Ripple, GSR, Polkadot, and Bybit 12:00 Opening the Yellow SDK to the global developer community

The term "altcoin" is becoming a bit of a misnomer in 2026. I like to think of these tokens as vehicles for promoting ideas, systems, and concepts. Every project needs a token because it’s a vital piece of the marketing toolset. It creates a mechanism where people can profit by growing the application and spreading the word. It allows a community to participate in the upside of the systems they use every day. Whether it's XRP or a new project, these tokens represent the value of an ecosystem. People buy these tokens for the same reason they buy stocks. It makes sense to desire a piece of the future and benefit from the marketing power of a global network.

Steven Zeiler (@modernfintech) began his career as a software architect at @Ripple Labs. Now he's helping new developers in the Yellow ecosystem bring their products to market while maintaining close links with the XRP world.

Global reserve currency.

If you're long on humanity, prediction markets are one of the most promising places to be. Prediction markets already help aggregate diffuse human knowledge into a single probability for election outcomes, policy changes, commodity price moves, and more. Health and longevity markets might be a bit early, but they will catch up. No doubt it's a great opportunity for builders. This very same opportunity brings me to my screen every day. I explain the benefits of liquidity on @Yellow to builders outside the ecosystem, and we work on UX/UI together to unlock value. If you're building in prediction markets, I'd love to participate in any way I can.

"Ripple could have been Ethereum" was brought into the conversation by one of my friends. I said maybe. Maybe Ripple was playing 4D chess all along, or maybe the business people didn't understand what programmable money was all about. They looked at the guys building smart contracts and told them to make a separate product. They wanted them to do research and development on the side, assuming they would just merge it back into the main code later. The business folks couldn't see the vision for it. They let the biggest opportunity in crypto walk right out the door. But look at Ripple today 👀 EVM sidechains are deployed and native programmability hitting the XRPL. Ripple took the long, brutal road through regulatory hell to build institutional trust first. Now, with the foundation set and smart contracts finally coming home, XRP is on the trajectory to becoming a global reserve currency.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in my @Tesla lately, and it’s shifted my perspective on financial technology. When I press the button and let the car take over, my cognitive overhead drops by 99%. I can think about my life and talk to my friends instead of stressing over traffic. We are building that same level of automation for the global markets. Bitcoin is the perfect example because it’s a system that is entirely automated, validates itself, and just works. As we build more of this infrastructure, the efficiency makes everything cheaper. We are moving toward a world where machines handle the driving of our financial systems, leading to a level of abundance that was previously impossible.

Bull thesis for prediction markets is that no one has all the information. It's fragmented, local, dynamic, and often hidden. If information is decentralized, then prices are how society aggregates it. The harder the world is to predict, the more these markets are worth. The only limit is how many questions we bother to ask!

Centralized exchanges kept falling like dominoes: Justcoin, Bitfinex, CoinCheck, Mt. Gox. One morning, my business partner messaged me: "Another is down," and it was the lightbulb moment for me. I realized that many of these exchanges were on a bad quest to spread fragile infrastructure, as @foundersfund puts it. Eventually, @camille_yellow, @0xYellow, and I united to pursue a better quest now known as @Yellow. Yellow lets anyone trade across networks without having to trust a third party.

Latin America is going through such a delightful transformation in finance. It has always been the big problem in Latin America to form and keep capital. Bandits were everywhere to destroy capital and come and take it away, especially when capital markets get taken over by the state. Look at Venezuela. In the old financial system, anyone at any time could yoink your money out of your account if they were involved with the state. That’s why Bitcoin and Ethereum are transformative for Latin America. They provide a rule of law enforced by the cryptography. It is entirely external to the nation-state. Whether you are in Peru, Chile, or Argentina, your assets aren't dependent on the local political party in power. It’s a shift from trusting politicians to trusting math, and in this part of the world, that’s a much safer bet.