~Reng~

KYC/AML is going to be the death warrant of community banking and to a lesser extent the entire banking industry. What happens when billions of ai agents need access to capital? Banks can’t onboard accounts for ai (maybe some sort of sub account system linking to individual/business??? But that’s just more friction). Instead, AI agents will use stablecoins and crypto rails because they can do it quick, cheap and without friction of traditional banking. They can plug in directly and bypass our archaic systems. When the amount of value being controlled by AI increases, the traditional banking system is going to see its light slowly dim until people realize what’s happening and accelerate the inevitable… deposit flight and bank runs. This isn’t deposit flight moving to other banks though… it’s NEVER going back into the traditional banking system and therefore it will be incredibly pervasive and lasting.

@0xArasaky @itslirrato Overseas support/delivery staff - one of the wallets only other bets is on cricket matches.

the Bollywood wallet names (RandiBabuRandi, Kaleenbhaiya) plus the fact that KPMG runs massive audit operations out of India is a pretty loud signal, someone with pre-release access to earnings data across multiple clients decided polymarket was a safe place to monetize it, genuinely incredible opsec failure considering the total haul is under $25k

🚨 A group of wallets on Polymarket keeps making wildly accurate bets on corporate earnings Every single company they bet on shares the exact same auditor: KPMG We are talking about max conviction trades on $HD, $DASH, $KMX, $THO and $SNEX right before the official reports drop If this guy really is an insider, making these bets on a transparent blockchain seems like a terrible idea

@MrinankSharma "what I must do becomes clear". "What comes next, I do not know". kek

Today is my last day at Anthropic. I resigned. Here is the letter I shared with my colleagues, explaining my decision.

At ATH: “The four year cycle is over” Now: “This is a bottom if you look at past cycles”

@DeItaone Terrible read of required reporting. Every single banks allowance for credit losses is a CAM. Are they all committing fraud?

EY FLAGS META’S DATA-CENTER ACCOUNTING AS HIGH RISK Meta’s auditor, EY, raised concerns over a $27 billion data-center deal moved off the company’s balance sheet into a joint venture with Blue Owl. While EY approved the treatment, it labeled it a “critical audit matter,” signaling high judgment and risk. Lawmakers and investors have questioned whether Meta truly lacks control over the venture, which could require the assets and liabilities to stay on Meta’s books. Senators have also cited the deal as an example of opaque AI-related financing.

@Polymarket What could go wrong

JUST IN: Klarna-like “buy now, pay later” may soon be available for Americans renting homes/apartments, per CNBC.

@CloutedMind And where does the yield come from?

@CryptoReng there is plenty of real non levered yield in defi you just dont know where to look

I can personally see some bright sides for the way that CLARITY is going right now 1. stablecoins not being able to pass on yields means that people will be drawn to throw stablecoins into onchain products/pools, bringing more TVL onchain and users onchain 2. if stablecoin issuers can keep yield and not pass it on, which is what banks are lobbying for, unironically stablecoin issuers can become banks, and this will probably lead to a whole wave of fintechs and new companies just around trying to be banks with stables (already happening) and not only brings massive increase in issuance but also probably also further democratizes the field from CIRCLE and Tether 3. Crypto native stables have way more of an advantage/ reg moat against RWA regulatorily issued stablecoins, as they can pass on yields in interesting ways in the future 4. stablecoin issuers will probably be forced to hold treasuries and participate in the new "QE but not QE cause itll be done by banks not the fed style QE" and its overall bullish macro (although i do think this could be a problem later for our industry but nvm for now lets pump first) ty

@davidmarcus I didn’t feel it was my place to speak. Until 12 years later 😂

A few thoughts about PayPal, nearly 12 years after I left. I woke up this morning to dozens of messages from former PayPal colleagues. It pushed me to finally speak up. I never spoke publicly about the company after I left. Part of that was loyalty to John Donahoe, who gave me an unlikely opportunity, handing the reins of PayPal to a startup guy who, on paper, had no business running a then 15,000-person organization. But part of it was something else: I had left. I chose not to stay and fight for the changes I believed in. Speaking from the sidelines felt like armchair commentary. Easy opinions without the burden of execution. So I stayed quiet. But twelve years of silence is long enough. And today's news makes it clear the pattern I've watched unfold isn't self-correcting. I left PayPal in 2014 because I was deeply frustrated. We had executed a silent turnaround of a company that had lost its soul. We brought back engineering talent, shipped good products quickly, and acquired Braintree and Venmo. The company was on a tear. So much so that Carl Icahn felt compelled to accumulate a position in eBay and push for a PayPal spinoff. At the time, eBay decided to fight Icahn. It was a difficult period for me, caught between what I felt was right for PayPal and my loyalty to the eBay team. This is when Mark Zuckerberg approached me to join Facebook. The combination of his conviction that messaging would become foundational, the appeal of going back to building products at scale, and my growing exhaustion with the internal politics at PayPal and eBay eventually convinced me to leave and join one of the best teams in the world, one I had admired for a long time. In the summer of 2014, I met John in a café in Portola Valley and told him I had decided to leave. During that conversation, he told me that Icahn had effectively won the fight, that PayPal was going to become an independent company, and he tried to convince me to stay on as CEO, but I had already said yes to Mark, and my word is my bond. There was no turning back. After my departure, the board scrambled to find a replacement, and it took a few months for them to land on Dan Schulman. The leadership style shifted from product-led to financially-led. Over time, product conviction gave way to financial optimization. Much of the momentum we had created still persisted and carried the company forward, mainly driven by Bill Ready, who came over in the Braintree acquisition and rose to COO. Under his leadership, Venmo grew exponentially, and total payment volume (TPV) accelerated quickly. But the shift under Schulman became more pronounced after Bill's departure at the end of 2019. With him went the product conviction that had defined the post-spinoff momentum. Then, for a period, COVID-fueled online shopping hid a lot of the company's new weaknesses. During that period, the company made a fundamental miscalculation: it optimized for payment volume instead of margin and differentiation. It leaned into unbranded checkout, where PayPal had the least leverage, instead of branded checkout, where the margin, data, and customer relationship actually lived. Visa masterfully structured a deal that effectively ended PayPal's ability to steer customers toward bank-funded transactions, which had been a core driver of PayPal's economics. Not long after, PayPal lost a significant portion of eBay's volume. Over time, it saw its share of checkout among its most profitable customers steadily erode as Apple Pay and others continued to execute well. The same pattern repeated itself across lending, buy-now-pay-later (BNPL), and new rails. On lending, PayPal missed the opportunity to turn it into a platform weapon. Products like Working Capital were conservative, short-duration, and optimized for loss minimization. Lending never became programmable, never became identity-driven, and never became a reason for merchants or consumers to choose PayPal over something else. The missed opportunity in BNPL was even more striking. Klarna, Affirm, and Afterpay didn't just offer installment payments, they built consumer finance brands, persistent credit identities, and new shopping behaviors. PayPal saw the BNPL turn, entered the market, and had every advantage: distribution, trust, and merchant relationships. But BNPL was treated as a defensive checkout feature rather than an offensive category. There was no attempt to turn it into a core consumer relationship, no super-app behavior, and no meaningful differentiation for merchants. Others built platforms, PayPal added a feature. The failure to lean into building and owning new rails followed the same logic. After the spinoff, PayPal had a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build a global, at scale payment network. Instead, the company focused on building on top of existing networks and third-party rails. More recently, that mindset carried over to PYUSD. Technically, the product was sound. Strategically, it launched without a compelling transactional reason to exist. PYUSD had distribution, but no organic demand. It was not embedded deeply enough into flows to become a true settlement layer, a cross-border merchant rail, or a programmable money primitive. It sat adjacent to the product instead of inside the core of it. Acquisitions during this period followed a similar pattern. Honey was not a strategic acquisition for PayPal. It added activity, but not leverage. It lived outside the transaction, monetized affiliate economics rather than payment economics, and never meaningfully strengthened PayPal's control of the customer or the checkout moment. Xoom solved a real problem in remittances, but it never compounded PayPal's advantage. It scaled volume without changing the underlying rails, identity graph, or settlement model, and as importantly, it didn’t cater to a high-value, high-margin customer archetype. None of these were bad companies. They were just a wrong fit for PayPal and became unnecessary distractions. The board eventually recognized the problem. In 2023, they brought in Alex Chriss, an Intuit veteran with a strong product background, explicitly to restore product conviction. It was the right instinct. But Alex came from software, not payments. He understood SMB product development. He didn't have the muscle memory for transaction economics, network effects, or settlement infrastructure. In hindsight, he also made an error: clearing out much of the leadership team that understood payments deeply. Executives with years of institutional knowledge departed within his first year. This morning, Alex was removed as CEO. Branded checkout grew 1% last quarter. The board tapped another operator, Enrique Lores, the former HP CEO who's been on the PayPal board for five years. I don’t know Enrique. And he might be a great leader, but on paper at least, he’s a hardware executive. For a payments company. The common thread through all of this is incentive design. Once PayPal became independent, short/medium-term predictability beat long-term vision and ambition. Stock performance mattered more than platform risk and network opportunity. Financial optimization replaced product conviction. I'm not claiming I would have made every call differently. Running a public company at scale involves tradeoffs I didn't have to make after I left. But the pattern, choosing predictability over platform risk, again and again, was a choice, not an inevitability. Over time, the company that had every advantage and could’ve become the most consequential and relevant payments company of our time, lost its mojo, its product edge, and its ability to compete in a market that’s being rewired and reinvented in front of our eyes. That's the part that's hardest to watch for a company I care so deeply about.

Ok. but why not last itme

@TheBlueMatt Maybe people aren't talking about the work being done because y'all do a shit job at making it known you're doing any work.

People need to stop giving this guy's FUD the time of day. Literally *the* top two Bitcoin research orgs (Blockstream Research and Chaincode) have each put resources into figuring out what a post-quantum Bitcoin change should look like, and have had some interesting results! That *is* what it looks like when devs take a problem seriously - research into available options, new cryptographic primitives that are better for Bitcoin than available standard PQC options, etc. Yes, its not overnight, and its not generally people going on stage at a conference and talking about it. Yes, many bitcoiners mostly espouse cope rather than talk about the work being done, but that's because the work is mostly done by people who don't spend all their time posting about it on here. That doesn't mean its not happening.

@brian_armstrong @newlimit can you regrow bone and get rid of this joint replacement.

Imagine if you could wake up and feel 25 again That's what we're trying to build at @NewLimit

This is all great and fun but even your analysis points out the problem. "thats it - if it doesnt end bitcoin - it becomes a decade of resistance point ending" If it doesn't end bitcoin... The fact that's a non-zero possible outcome is the problem. If your serious you have to consider this. Sometimes perception matters more than technical accuracy and becomes reality.

I think quantum is misunderstood as many here just use that word to link to the concern but most who don’t get it assume bitcoin at large is all corruptible without realising it’s about the exposed wallets The actual idea it goes to 0 is extremely implausible even in worse case scenario

What if the reason Bitcoin is selling off is as simple as Institutions do not want to be long something that has a non-zero chance of going to zero overnight due to quantum computing? Perception is everything, so even if that is unlikely, it is a huge risk in an already deemed risky asset.

@rukky_nate Buy usdc, worry about it later with more time.

You’re given $2m. You have 20 minutes to spend it. You can’t spend it on cars, airplanes, yacht or a house. You can’t spend it on golds or diamonds either. What will you buy?

@MortachThomas @GiantEagle @baseapp @rektdrinks @megaeth @Somnia_Network Were you able to do multiple in one transaction and get multiple codes? Or 1 redemption code per transaction.

I got you for how easy it is to head to your local @GiantEagle to pick up & Get $REKT Become a REKT Millionaire with the @baseapp with just scanning the QR code. With just a few clicks sit back relax & enjoy your sparkling water of @rektdrinks & Coin.

@BitcoinMagazine As if Maduro had the ledger with the reserve up his butt.

JUST IN: CNBC says "Venezuela may have quietly amassed a Bitcoin reserve worth tens of billions of dollars." 👀 🇻🇪 "If the US seizes those coins and adds them to its own strategic reserve, you're looking at potentially substantial supply of BTC getting locked up for years." 🚀

@GovTimWalz Oof. Early retirement coming.

This is Trump’s long game. We’ve spent years cracking down on fraudsters. It’s a serious issue - but this has been his plan all along. He’s politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans.

@CryptoHayes Proof of reserve report is not the same as their financials (audited or otherwise). Equity doesn’t need be reported here.

The Tether folks are in the early innings of running a massive interest rate trade. How I read this audit is they think the Fed will cut rates which crushes their interest income. In response, they are buying gold and $BTC that should in theory moon as the price of money falls. A roughly 30% decline in the gold + $BTC position would wipe out their equity, and then USDT would be in theory insolvent. I'm sure some large holders and exchanges will demand a real-time view of their B/S so they can assess the solvency risk of Tether. Get out your popcorn, I expect the MSM to run wild with this, especially all the editors with TDS who want to shit on Lutnick and Cantor for backing this stablecoin.

Responding that Elons net worth isn’t liquid isn’t really helpful. It’s true, obviously, but nobody that says he should give it all away cares about facts. They should be educated on value creation and that they are effectively saying we should never progress as a society because nobody should have nice things they’ve earned until everybody does. Not that they’ll listen to that either…. Second thought, just ignore them and keep working to make the world a better place on average.

@Square @dangerblue Can someone with lightning expertise explain if this is related to maintaining open channels and ultimate settlement on main?

@dangerblue As you receive bitcoin it will be stored in your Square bitcoin wallet. If you'd like to move it into self custody, you'll be able to do so manually (max $15k per day or $50k per week).

Bitcoin payments are now live 🟧🚀 squ.re/acceptbitcoin

@seabiscuitfan @1WingedHussar @Pro__Trading @IndyNanner What are you rambling about? @grok - please define hurdle rate for this lost soul.

@CryptoReng @1WingedHussar @Pro__Trading @IndyNanner You can make fair assumptions. Otherwise it will just devolve into hand-waving about how "wonderful" everything is. I assumed a perfectly normal scenario of mortgage amounts and interest rates.

Only 2% of 30 year mortgages ever reach maturity. What percentage of 50 year mortgages do you think would reach maturity? Almost 0% Because almost everybody would refinance probably multiple times or sell the house at some point. It's just an asset that is going to appreciate that gives you a hedge against rising rent prices. It's not "debt slavery" when I can refinance or sell tomorrow.