Simon Taylor

🚨 BREAKING: SoFi just moved its entire $25bn card program onto stablecoin settlement with Mastercard. For context: SoFi Bank, N.A. holds a national charter and is regulated by the OCC. It issues its own stablecoin, SoFiUSD. From today its debit and credit transactions settle with Mastercard in SoFiUSD, on-chain, seven days a week. Visa's whole stablecoin settlement book ran at $20bn annualized this month, spread across 160+ card programs. One bank now settles more than that on its own. Will merchants go for this? CEO Anthony Noto says they receive settlement into a SoFi Bank account and can withdraw to cash around the clock at zero cost. But do they want another bank account, or settlement into the one they already have? I think this pattern of settling in your own coin (or a coin where you keep the yield) will become the default as Open USD (the new initiative from Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Coinbase) begins to gain traction. Today every other issuer settling on-chain uses someone else's coin. Rain and Reap run roughly $3bn and $6bn annualized on Visa in USDC. Cross River, Lead Bank and Nuvei are lined up on Mastercard with USDC, PYUSD or RLUSD. They don't keep that yield. The onchain volume hasn't happened yet. So let's see how this does in production. But it has the potential to be HUGE. Every bank with a card book now has a choice to make. Pay Circle or Paxos for the settlement asset, or issue your own and keep the yield.

🚨 BREAKING: SoFi just moved its entire $25bn card program onto stablecoin settlement with Mastercard. For context: SoFi Bank, N.A. holds a national charter and is regulated by the OCC. It issues its own stablecoin, SoFiUSD. From today its debit and credit transactions settle with Mastercard in SoFiUSD, on-chain, seven days a week. Visa's whole stablecoin settlement book ran at $20bn annualized this month, spread across 160+ card programs. One bank now settles more than that on its own. Will merchants go for this? CEO Anthony Noto says they receive settlement into a SoFi Bank account and can withdraw to cash around the clock at zero cost. But do they want another bank account, or settlement into the one they already have? I think this pattern of settling in your own coin (or a coin where you keep the yield) will become the default as Open USD (the new initiative from Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Coinbase) begins to gain traction. Today every other issuer settling on-chain uses someone else's coin. Rain and Reap run roughly $3bn and $6bn annualized on Visa in USDC. Cross River, Lead Bank and Nuvei are lined up on Mastercard with USDC, PYUSD or RLUSD. They don't keep that yield. The onchain volume hasn't happened yet. So let's see how this does in production. But it has the potential to be HUGE. Every bank with a card book now has a choice to make. Pay Circle or Paxos for the settlement asset, or issue your own and keep the yield.

🚨 BREAKING: SoFi just moved its entire $25bn card program onto stablecoin settlement with Mastercard. For context: SoFi Bank, N.A. holds a national charter and is regulated by the OCC. It issues its own stablecoin, SoFiUSD. From today its debit and credit transactions settle with Mastercard in SoFiUSD, on-chain, seven days a week. Visa's whole stablecoin settlement book ran at $20bn annualized this month, spread across 160+ card programs. One bank now settles more than that on its own. Will merchants go for this? CEO Anthony Noto says they receive settlement into a SoFi Bank account and can withdraw to cash around the clock at zero cost. But do they want another bank account, or settlement into the one they already have? I think this pattern of settling in your own coin (or a coin where you keep the yield) will become the default as Open USD (the new initiative from Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Coinbase) begins to gain traction. Today every other issuer settling on-chain uses someone else's coin. Rain and Reap run roughly $3bn and $6bn annualized on Visa in USDC. Cross River, Lead Bank and Nuvei are lined up on Mastercard with USDC, PYUSD or RLUSD. They don't keep that yield. The onchain volume hasn't happened yet. So let's see how this does in production. But it has the potential to be HUGE. Every bank with a card book now has a choice to make. Pay Circle or Paxos for the settlement asset, or issue your own and keep the yield.

🚨 BREAKING: SoFi just moved its entire $25bn card program onto stablecoin settlement with Mastercard. For context: SoFi Bank, N.A. holds a national charter and is regulated by the OCC. It issues its own stablecoin, SoFiUSD. From today its debit and credit transactions settle with Mastercard in SoFiUSD, on-chain, seven days a week. Visa's whole stablecoin settlement book ran at $20bn annualized this month, spread across 160+ card programs. One bank now settles more than that on its own. Will merchants go for this? CEO Anthony Noto says they receive settlement into a SoFi Bank account and can withdraw to cash around the clock at zero cost. But do they want another bank account, or settlement into the one they already have? I think this pattern of settling in your own coin (or a coin where you keep the yield) will become the default as Open USD (the new initiative from Visa, Mastercard, Stripe and Coinbase) begins to gain traction. Today every other issuer settling on-chain uses someone else's coin. Rain and Reap run roughly $3bn and $6bn annualized on Visa in USDC. Cross River, Lead Bank and Nuvei are lined up on Mastercard with USDC, PYUSD or RLUSD. They don't keep that yield. The onchain volume hasn't happened yet. So let's see how this does in production. But it has the potential to be HUGE. Every bank with a card book now has a choice to make. Pay Circle or Paxos for the settlement asset, or issue your own and keep the yield.

Amazon just blocked Meta's Muse AI agent from shopping on Amazon. com Meta launched Muse launched on Sept 8 and hit No. 1 in the US App Store within a week. But what Amazon doesn't like is that it shops by logging into a site as you, through its own browser. Since Sunday night, Muse users on Amazon see a popup saying an "unauthorized AI agent" breaks Amazon's Conditions of Use. Amazon gave three reasons: 1. Meta never told Amazon that Muse would shop its store 2. Muse doesn't identify itself when it browses 3. Muse appears to capture and store customer logins Meta says logins sit in secure storage where Muse can use them without seeing them. Amazon is probably the biggest pool of shopping demand on the planet. Meta wants Muse to be the place where that demand starts, but if that happens, Meta INTENDS to monetize those transactions with fees (Zuck even said so in interviews). Amazon doesn't like extra fees. Amazon has a lot to lose if it lets Muse on the website. It would hand a rival the visit, the search data, the login, and the purchase history. It would also lose the page views behind an ads business that made over $68bn last year. Amazon sued Perplexity and blocked shopping agents from Google and OpenAI. Merchants are revolting against big tech agents, or anything that looks like a bot. And suddenly the magic of "just ask my agent to do it" vanishes. The way out of this is for Amazon to get paid. The WSJ and New York times got paid by the big labs. Amazon will get paid. This can get fixed. Amazon's three complaints read like the terms of that deal: announce the agent, identify it, keep logins out of it. Once again, reminding us we need Know Your Agent (KYA) And guess what? Visa, Mastercard and Ant International began work on a shared Know Your Agent framework on Sept 10 to do the identity part. The sad thing is that Amazon can afford to turn away Muse's orders. Most merchants can't. The power dynamic in commerce is kinda messed up. Agents will get negotiated access at the merchants big enough to block them, and they will log in through the browser at the rest.

The ECB's Pontes is LIVE. Banks can now settle tokenized securities trades in central bank money. President of the ECB Lagarde also pushed again for a digital euro to compete with stablecoins. This I'm a little more dubious about. 1. Pontes: Pontes acts as a bridge connecting market distributed ledger technology (DLT) platforms directly into TARGET Services (the Eurosystem's wholesale gross settlement engine). This follows the 2024 trials, which included 64 institutions. Pontes launches with standard operating windows before gradually expanding toward 24/7 settlement, with full rollout expected by 2028. 2. The Digital Euro ECB President Christine Lagarde also pushed hard for the Digital Euro legislation, which is now in final talks between the European Parliament and member states. She wants it done by December. Her aim is geopolitical. A digital euro is a defensive move against US private stablecoins potentially gaining more of a foothold on the continent, one that is heavily reliant on Visa and Mastercard today. This has preoccupied European leadership for a while, but became especially pressing in June, when the US Government used export controls to cut foreign nationals off from Anthropic's Fable 5 model overnight. Access came back 18 days later. Sovereignty over payments is sensible, especially when you consider that launching a EUR stablecoin to compete is pretty hard. Under MiCA, at least 30% of your reserves must sit in commercial bank deposits (60% once you're a significant issuer), and there's no "Eurobond" equivalent to US Treasuries. The business model for a European stablecoin isn't there. But the problem is, a sovereignty policy objective isn't always what the market or citizens want. Banks don't want a cash-like Euro for consumers competing with their deposits. Consumers who use stablecoins today would probably like to continue to have something as simple, 24/7 and flexible. If what they launch is essentially a closed-loop form of digital cash that can't be moved 24/7 across borders, you've launched something that doesn't solve the problem you're worried about. Which makes Qivalis even MORE interesting to me. 37 banks are building a EUR stablecoin that would work like a stablecoin, but could potentially connect to Pontes so the banks behind it settle in central bank money. Put another way, 1 EUR = 1 EUR. That hasn't always held for 1 USDC and a dollar. Europe isn't sitting on its hands. Pontes is fascinating, and I think the Fed could take a lot of notes from it. But I still don't get the digital Euro 🤷‍♂️

Monzo built Robinhood's Gold Card for the UK. Then priced it like Amex Gold. Monzo Aura launched today. - £15 a month - Metal card - 1% cashback on groceries and 0.5% on everything else - And the cashback auto-invests into Monzo Investments (this is interesting) - Apple TV, Google AI Plus and two lounge passes bundled in. The card is fine. Those cashback numbers are weak compared to US numbers, but remember UK interchange is 0.3%. So it's generous. --- But it really reminds me of the Robinhood card. Gold Card: 3% cashback, metal, only for Gold subscribers paying $5 a month. Two years on, Gold has 4.8m subscribers, 40% of new funded Robinhood customers join Gold on day one, the card passed 1m customers and $17bn of annualized spend, and ARPU is up 24% to $187. The card won the points-hungry affluent customer, and their cash and retirement money followed. Retirement assets crossed $30bn. Subscription fees are the small line. The balances that follow them are the big one. --- Monzo's version has the same shape. UK credit interchange is capped at 0.3%, so 1% cashback loses money on every grocery swipe. The fee, the 29% APR and the investment balances pay for it. And buried in the terms: Aura makes every Monzo Investment you hold fee-free, including the ISA and GIA you already have. That's a consolidate-your-wealth-here pitch, priced at £180 a year. Distribution is baked in. Monzo Flex customers can switch to Aura with no hard credit search. The 16m UK customer base of millennials are getting older and more asset-rich. The difference between Robinhood and Monzo is the track record. Robinhood had a working brokerage and a cash sweep before it added the card. Monzo killed a £15 a month metal card (Premium) in 2023, and investments and pensions have yet to move the numbers the way Flex and the current account did. Aura is the same £15, the same metal, with a credit line and an AUM funnel attached. Monzo needs a paid product to land. This is the one with the most Robinhood in it. If 10% of Monzo's customers take it, that's over £200m a year of subscription revenue before a penny of interest or AUM. If it goes the way of Premium, it's another metal card in a drawer. My worry is execution. Monzo's app is still, at its core, a really good everyday spend card. But try to manage savings, pots, or other things in there and it all starts to creak pretty quickly. I love the daily driver experience. But now its time to become a multi product company properly. The card is a great start. Lets see how adoption goes.

🚨 Ep. 100 of @TokenizedPod: Visa Stablecoin Settlement Hits $20BN - Up 15X @PetBerisha is joined by: - @Elise_X_Digital, Former Regulator, Policy & Regulatory Specialist - @cyril_mathew, Co-Founder & CEO, @rtp - @mattgmarcus, Co-Founder & CEO, @ModernTreasury To discuss: 🚀 @ModernTreasury Treasury launches noncustodial stablecoin wallets with fiat rails - Latitude raises $35 million to connect stablecoins with local rails - OpenFX provides onchain FX liquidity for cheaper stablecoin payouts - MoneyGram launches stablecoin linked Visa card and cash off ramps -@RobinhoodApp expands prediction markets and its fast growing blockchain ecosystem -Prediction markets and global regulation *** Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 03:00 Modern Treasury launches noncustodial stablecoin wallets with fiat rails 05:13 Stablecoin agnosticism and likely consolidation among leading stablecoins 08:00 Business stablecoin demand across products, liquidity and payment infrastructure 10:11 Dollar denominated stablecoins, dollarization and global monetary sovereignty 13:28 Latitude raises $35 million to connect stablecoins with local rails 18:19 Regulation first stablecoin infrastructure and Latitude’s global licensing strategy 20:28 Stablecoins reducing cross border payment fragmentation and last mile complexity 23:23 OpenFX provides onchain FX liquidity for cheaper stablecoin payouts 27:52 MoneyGram launches stablecoin linked Visa card and cash off ramps 37:36 Robinhood expands prediction markets and its fast growing blockchain ecosystem 51:48 Prediction markets and global regulation *** 👉𝘚𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩 '𝘛𝘰𝘬𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘻𝘦𝘥 𝘗𝘰𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘵' 𝘖𝘯 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘛𝘶𝘣𝘦. 𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘦, 𝘚𝘱𝘰𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘺 𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘗𝘰𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘗𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳! 👈

🚨 Ep. 100 of @TokenizedPod: Visa Stablecoin Settlement Hits $20BN - Up 15X @PetBerisha is joined by: - @Elise_X_Digital, Former Regulator, Policy & Regulatory Specialist - @cyril_mathew, Co-Founder & CEO, @rtp - @mattgmarcus, Co-Founder & CEO, @ModernTreasury To discuss: 🚀 @ModernTreasury Treasury launches noncustodial stablecoin wallets with fiat rails - Latitude raises $35 million to connect stablecoins with local rails - OpenFX provides onchain FX liquidity for cheaper stablecoin payouts - MoneyGram launches stablecoin linked Visa card and cash off ramps -@RobinhoodApp expands prediction markets and its fast growing blockchain ecosystem -Prediction markets and global regulation *** Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 03:00 Modern Treasury launches noncustodial stablecoin wallets with fiat rails 05:13 Stablecoin agnosticism and likely consolidation among leading stablecoins 08:00 Business stablecoin demand across products, liquidity and payment infrastructure 10:11 Dollar denominated stablecoins, dollarization and global monetary sovereignty 13:28 Latitude raises $35 million to connect stablecoins with local rails 18:19 Regulation first stablecoin infrastructure and Latitude’s global licensing strategy 20:28 Stablecoins reducing cross border payment fragmentation and last mile complexity 23:23 OpenFX provides onchain FX liquidity for cheaper stablecoin payouts 27:52 MoneyGram launches stablecoin linked Visa card and cash off ramps 37:36 Robinhood expands prediction markets and its fast growing blockchain ecosystem 51:48 Prediction markets and global regulation *** 👉𝘚𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩 '𝘛𝘰𝘬𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘻𝘦𝘥 𝘗𝘰𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘵' 𝘖𝘯 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘛𝘶𝘣𝘦. 𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘦, 𝘚𝘱𝘰𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘺 𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘗𝘰𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘗𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳! 👈

Muse, Instinct, and your AI agent are about to need an ID. Visa, Mastercard and Alipay are writing the spec. Muse, Grok Bot and Instinct all launched in the last few weeks, and all three will spend your money. Grok Bot, Muse and Instinct all get a single-use card from Stripe for every purchase you approve. Early users describe waking up to things their agent bought overnight. --- This works for now. But not every merchant will work with this. They'll want different wallets. And they'll need to know who the person is behind the agent. They'll need to Know Your Agent. We have some experience in Know Your... [Insert entity here], for example: --> KYC (Know Your Customer): before a bank opens an account, it checks that the person is who they claim to be. --> KYB (Know Your Business): the same check on a company, its directors, and whoever ultimately owns it. --> KYA (Know Your Agent) is the version for software. On Thursday Ant International, Mastercard and Visa said they are building a shared KYA framework. --- Each network had already built its own: - @Visa: Trusted Agent Protocol - @Mastercard: Verifiable Intent - @AlipayPlus: Agentic Mobile Protocol Now they're smooshing those together with a framework that checks: Who operates this? Agents are linked to a validated operator, cardholder, or business. Who certified this? Agents are assessed against security and behavioral requirements. What did it do before? Every agent is scored on identity and transaction signals as it goes, and can lose its certification. --- Baking in ongoing monitoring is SMART. KYC happens once at onboarding (although you should do it "continuously"; many still don't, and how monitoring happens varies wildly). KYA happens on every transaction. Ant's CIO says the signals will include capabilities, behavior and execution performance. That looks like a credit file for agents, but one that updates in real time. A good agent builds a reputation it can carry across networks. A bad one gets locked out of all of them at once. Visa and Mastercard's product is trust between strangers buying and selling. Agents are the new strangers. --- Now the scale. Ant International's Alipay+ connects 150 million merchants to 50+ wallets and 2 billion user accounts. Alipay AI Pay, its AI-native payment product in China, passed 100 million users in February and ran 120 million transactions in a single week over Chinese New Year. The agents launched in San Francisco. The rulebook for trusting them is being written in Singapore, on a platform convened by MAS, with both Western card networks and a wallet network of 2 billion accounts at the same table. In a world that feels more polarized than ever, this is a surprisingly global move from Alipay. This is one of those tiny signals that will be a huge deal in a few years time. Pay attention and you can plan accordingly.