Browse all takes

Most coverage asks if Stripe is becoming a crypto company. Snapcrackle argues it's the inverse — Stripe is trying to make crypto disappear by burying it inside enterprise payments infrastructure. The customer never has to say wallet, gas, bridge, validator, or chain. The stablecoin is there. The blockchain is plumbing.

The stack assembled in 18 months:

• Bridge ($1.1B, Oct 2024) — stablecoin orchestration. Open Issuance lets Phantom, Klarna, Hyperliquid, and MetaMask spin up branded coins. "App store economics for stablecoins" — Bridge shares majority of reserve yield with each issuer rather than absorbing it; Stripe owns the platform, not every coin.
• Privy (June 2025, ~$230M) — 110M programmable wallets. Kept chain-agnostic as the insurance policy — already powering Germany's BaFin-licensed EURAU.
• Tempo (mainnet March 2026, $5B Series A with Paradigm) — purpose-built payments L1, no native token, stablecoin-native gas, ISO 20022 memos, dedicated payment lanes. Visa / Standard Chartered / Stripe as anchor validators. Permissioned-L1 with named-FI validators is a compliance interface — Visa/Zodia/Stripe is something a bank risk committee can underwrite.
• Machine Payments Protocol — HTTP 402 standard for AI agent payments. Supports stablecoin AND card rails so card interchange isn't bypassed. The "embrace and absorb" play vs Coinbase's x402.
• OCC trust bank charter (conditional Feb 2026) — Bridge as platform-bank, not just reserve holder. Federal regulatory legitimacy without becoming bank-regulated.

Three structural insights:

Stripe is willingly building the thing that hollows out its own card-interchange business — and ensuring whichever rail wins terminates in Stripe's balance/compliance/reporting layer. Most incumbents protect the existing revenue and hope new tech takes longer to arrive. Stripe is doing the opposite.

Circle independently arrived at the same architecture with Arc. Two of the largest crypto-adjacent companies converging on permissioned-L1 + named-FI validators is the strongest "category" signal in crypto. The architecture isn't single-winner; the political postures are. Circle accumulates regulator capital (Davos, IMF, central bank panels). Stripe accumulates developer/enterprise distribution (Stripe Sessions). 18 months from now when stablecoin frameworks get written in Brussels or Singapore, Allaire is in the room and the Collisons aren't.

The OCC's March 2026 yield-sharing rule protects Bridge's model. Non-affiliate profit-share (Bridge sharing yield with Klarna's licensed Swedish bank) is left intact; affiliate yield-routing (Coinbase USDC rewards) is presumptively prohibited. "Stripe's position is GENIUS-aligned by construction." The most under-reported regulatory detail in the piece.

6-month ground-truth piece across Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Peru. Most fintech LATAM decks get the corridors, the user, and the product all wrong. Eight findings:

(1) Mexico is plateauing, Central America is exploding. Total LATAM remittances hit $174B in 2025 — but Mexico fell 4.5% (first time in 11 years) while Guatemala +15%, Honduras +19%, El Salvador +18%. Driven by deportation-risk panic-sending. The unfought territory: non-US corridors (Venezuela→Colombia, Spain→Ecuador, Argentina→Bolivia) — barely served by US-licensed MTOs.

(2) Wrong customer. Actual user is 40-60yo, sends $131-648/month (6-23% of income), 80% goes to groceries, half send to mom. Not a 25yo crypto trader. Trust > features. WhatsApp + mobile-first beats web every time.

(3) The stablecoin balance IS the product, not the transaction. Argentina is full digital dollarization (USDT+USDC = >70% of crypto purchases). Brazil at ~90% of crypto volume is stablecoin-tied. Colombia at ~52% (driven by peso depreciation + Colombia's $5K minimum on USD bank accounts). Users want to hold dollars, not transit them. Three problems they're solving: inflation hedge, capital controls, cheap cross-border. The transaction is a side effect.

(4) Western Union collapsed, only Remitly is winning so far. US-LAC share 2020→2024: WU 29%→17%, Remitly 14%→23%, MoneyGram flat. Bitso processes ~10% of US-Mexico flow on stablecoin rails. Felix Pago has done $1B+ via USDC-to-SPEI through WhatsApp.

(5) Cost wedge. Banks lose 3-5% to FX spread. Crypto rails compress total cost <2%. For a $300/month sender, that's a month of groceries per year. Worst legacy economics = where stablecoin disruption hits first (Venezuela went P2P-stablecoin years before any regulation).

(6) Regulatory map. Colombia + Argentina first (faster path), Brazil + Mexico in parallel via licensed local partners, Venezuela via P2P stablecoin already happening organically. The biggest 2025 regulatory shift is the US 1% remittance tax — passed summer 2025, hits roughly half of all senders, digital + crypto exempt. Single biggest stablecoin-rail tailwind in a decade, handed to the industry by US policy.

(7) Winning stack = local rails (Pix/SPEI/PSE/CVU) + stablecoin liquidity + card layer + earn layer (USDC at 4-6% beats every regional savings account) + dead-simple UX. Closed loop: on-ramp → remit → recipient holds USDC or off-ramps → spends via card or earns yield. Banks can't do this. MTOs can't. Pure crypto exchanges can't. Pure neobanks can't.

(8) Three things every team gets wrong: treating LATAM as one market (each country needs different licenses/rails/stablecoins), debating whether stablecoin adoption will happen (it already did), under-marketing on trust (a marketing problem, not engineering).

Harry's thesis: the real "DeFi meets TradFi" story isn't JP Morgan on a blockchain — it's an emerging infra layer that lets neobanks ship "earn" and "savings" features backed by DeFi/RWAs without becoming DeFi engineers themselves. Early DeFi was monolithic (Aave, Compound, Maker each owning UI + liquidity); the new layer abstracts chain routing, normalizes onchain liquidity + tokenized funds, and handles KYC/AML/1099s at scale.

Reference architecture: @blend_money offers white-label earn infra where each user gets their own self-custodial smart-contract account (no co-mingling, funds remain accessible even if Blend disappears), purpose-built earn pages with T-bill yields + DeFi lending, risk ratings translated for compliance officers, and out-of-the-box reporting. The unlock for neobanks: "we'll handle the chains, protocols, bridges, KYC vendors and reporting — you focus on customers."

Market context: DeFi TVL hit $237B in 2025, RWA market grew 380% in 3 years, 400M+ people use neobanks (projected $6.5T deposits by 2030), Standard Chartered projects RWA could hit $30T by 2034. End users want a savings-account experience that pays better — they don't care that crypto is the substrate. The infra companies that absorb the complexity and "let someone else put their logo on the home screen" are the leverage point binding chains, protocols, and consumer trust.

Within the next 24 months, millions of autonomous AI agents will join the global workforce as independent economic actors. They cannot open legacy bank accounts. They need programmable, borderless, instant money. Sana is building the definitive onchain financial infrastructure for the Agentic Economy — the seamless eco

Omar argues Western Union's stablecoin strategy—launching USDPT on Solana this quarter alongside an offramp network and consumer card—offers its best path to survival by converting ~$500M in daily pre-funding float into real-time settlement and unlocking hundreds of millions more trapped across correspondent banking. If the business gains traction, WU reprices materially or becomes an acquisition target for Circle, which could roll it into Arc and consolidate merchant and consumer payment flows across a unified chain.

Morpheus Research's 4-month investigation concludes Figure Technology is a $7.7 billion home equity lender masquerading as a blockchain innovator, with exaggerated or fabricated claims about blockchain-enabled advantages. The company's loan origination system doesn't use blockchain technology—it relies on third-party tools like Plaid and CoreLogic, contradicting repeated executive claims that loans are "native" to blockchain. Figure's blockchain projects including Figure Connect, Democratized Prime, and YLDS have either stalled or are internally propped up, while aggressive underwriting practices reminiscent of pre-2008 lending—full-draw requirements, lax title checks, automated valuations without appraisals—are driving delinquencies to 5.46% in 2025 versus 1.79% for Bank of America, alongside insider stock dumps totaling $120 million despite lock-up agreements.

WU announced USDPT, a USD-pegged stablecoin on Solana via Anchorage Digital Bank (summer). Stock at ~5x P/E, 10%+ dividend yield — priced as value trap. $3.45B in settlement balances could compress cross-border cycles from days to minutes. WU's 'last mile' (hundreds of thousands of retail locations, compliance across 200+ countries) is the irreplaceable edge; GENIUS Act raises the compliance bar but makes WU's infra more valuable. Digital transactions +13% in Q4 2025 (39% of consumer volume). $500M Intermex acquisition adds 6M LatAm customers. Re-rate thesis: from dividend play to digital-payments infra (peers trade 10x+).