We need sovereign AI. Now. @atitinstitute

Great discussion with @sytaylor, @nlevine19, and @wbpeck on stablecoins, tokenization, and the launch of @deel’s stablecoin: DLUSD.

If you want a report that WASN'T hallucinated about real use cases Start here. fintechbrainfood.com/p/enter…

The SEC moved to kill Rule 611, the 2005 rule that kept tokenized stocks offshore. This is primarilt market structure story, but tokenization is noteworthy side effect. Rule 611, the "trade-through" rule, made the national best bid and offer the legal default for US stock trade. (I.e.if there's a best price somewhere, its had to be honored) It's also why on-chain equities couldn't trade onshore. An on-chain venue can't respect an order price that only lives on registered exchanges in market hours. They're non-compliant by default, or bolted onto the plumbing it was built to escape. Strip out 611 and best execution falls back to FINRA Rule 5310, a broker-level duty rather than a routing mandate. A broker can meet a duty by routing to an on-chain venue. Nearly all the tokenized equity trading today sits offshore. xStocks issues out of Jersey and Bermuda. Robinhood launched in the EU. The on shore incumbents don't want to be caught flat footed. NASDAQ has approval to tokenize, NYSE is building a venue, DTCC starts tokenized trades in July. 611 existed because retail used to get filled at worse prices than were on offer. With that rule gone, do we get something to replace it or does the consumer lose out?

🚨 JUST IN: Current just raised $80M at a $1.5B valuation. In 2021, a16z valued it at $2.2B. That's technically a down round. But current also the healthiest the business has been. - 6m members - 1/3rd of revenue from lending - already has built a lot internally giving them strong unit economics - 3x years of 70% growth - crossing into profitability this year --- Getting a large round in 2021 was easy for Fintech companies. Making it to 2026 as a growing company that's on track for an IPO is a much harder slog that we should celebrate. The new lead is Springcoast Partners, a growth equity firm taking a board seat. Growth equity prices the cash flows. But this is a growing business... --- Current is gearing up for more lending. The company also expanded its financing partnership with Cross River and extended General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund commitment. That's fuel for more growth. --- This is the 2021 neobank class finishing its round trip. Much of that cohort got acquired, wound down, or quietly stopped growing. The ones still standing look like Chime, now public on Nasdaq, and Current, crossing into profit. They took the valuation reset and got the hard stuff right on purpose.

🚨 Ep. 5 of Stablecoin Stories: KAST: 1M Users on a Stablecoin Neobank With hosts: 💳 @sytaylor, Head of Market Development, @tempo 🔥 @rangoldi, SVP Payments, @FireblocksHQ With guest: ⛓️ @raagulanpathy, Founder & CEO, @KASTxyz In this episode, Sy, Ran and Raagulan discuss: ⛓️ Thesis of building fintech on top of stablecoin rails ❗️ Challenges of scrappy startup fundraising and low salaries 🤝 Early traction through Solana card partnership and trust 🏗️ Building USDK for onchain transparency and trust 🏛️ Plans for licenses acquisitions and raising more capital 🧠 Growth strategy using referrals cashback and better design 📈 Stablecoins will become 30-50% of payments in 20 years *** Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 7:35 Thesis of building fintech on top of stablecoin rails 9:53 Challenges of scrappy startup fundraising and low salaries 11:39 Early traction through Solana card partnership and trust 13:09 Building USDK for onchain transparency and trust 18:43 Plans for licenses acquisitions and raising more capital 22:47 Growth strategy using referrals cashback and better design 27:14 Stablecoins will become 30-50% of payments in 20 years *** 👉𝘚𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩 '𝘛𝘰𝘬𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘻𝘦𝘥 𝘗𝘰𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘵' 𝘖𝘯 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘛𝘶𝘣𝘦. 𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘦, 𝘚𝘱𝘰𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘺 𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘗𝘰𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘗𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳! 👈

Fintechs are doing an amazing job bringing stablecoins to consumers and small businesses. The next big opportunity is for banks to do the same for their commercial and corporate customers 👇🏻

Truth

Recently, we purchased one of each Anthropic/OpenAI subscription plan and randomly ran long horizon coding tasks until we exhausted the weekly limit. It's widely believed that a $200/month plan maxes out at ~$2000/month worth of tokens (assuming API pricing). However, we found that the subscriptions are actually far more generous. (2/4)

.@Visa just gave AI agents their own card credentials. @OpenAI is partnering. Agentic commerce has promised a lot, but delivered very little. Is this finally agentic commerce's mainstream moment? Announced yesterday at the Visa Payments Forum. The headline reads like "AI can shop for you now." The mechanic underneath is the interesting bit. Start with tokenization. It's the technology that takes your 16 digit card number and swaps it for a secure cryptographic token, so your real number never touches the merchant. That's what made Apple Pay work. Visa Intelligent Commerce extends those tokens to agents. Once an agent holds a token bound to it specifically, the agent has an identity on the Visa network. The same rails that already clear 300 billion transactions a year. So when your agent goes to pay: - Visa knows which agent is transacting - The merchant knows it's a recognized, trusted agent operating under your rules - Your bank can authorize in real time, against spending limits and approvals you set Say your agent buys something and you tell your bank you never authorized it. With agent identity on the network, there's a record that it really was your agent, acting inside the guardrails you gave it. That changes agents from being a hostile "bot" to a trusted customer. It also rhymes with every agent problem I keep running into. Autonomy only works when the system can prove what the agent did.