Jake Kerr (jakerr.eth)

The talent pool in crypto feels perpetually thin. There are only ~50-100 top people on the market at any given time -- and everyone is fighting for the same people. In parallel, some of the best talent with experience in crypto has either (1) retired or (2) started their own company. Meanwhile, the influx of new talent into the space is relatively low. We're starting to see it from payments/TradFi world, but these folks are learning crypto from 0 to 1 and it'll take a few months to ramp. The net result: a very thin, competitive talent pool. Max pain. Has been this way for 2-3 years and will continue unless we find a way to expand the pool and/or attract more folks from web2 tech.

@jayhinz Did you wear your graduation gown to work today?

🚨 BREAKING: Kraken acquires Reap for $600M. Stripe bought Bridge for $1.1B. Mastercard bought BVNK for $1.8B. Now Kraken buys Reap for $600M. $3.5B in stablecoin infrastructure M&A in 14 months. Every category of payments company is racing to own stablecoin rails before they become as foundational as card networks. Reap is Hong Kong-based, founded in 2018, already profitable. They issue Visa corporate cards funded by stablecoins, run cross-border settlement, and serve 22,000+ businesses across Asia. ---- To me it looks like Kraken paid for distribution and licenses in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Mexico. Not for technology they could build in-house. Stablecoins and payments aren't cyclical unlike crypto trading. In a bear market Spot trading margins are collapsing. Every cycle, the spread gets thinner. Exchanges that thrive need recurring revenue from services, not transaction fees from speculation. --- Kraken has now spent roughly $2.7B on acquisitions. - NinjaTrader ($1.5B for derivatives). - Bitnomial ($550M for options). Backed (tokenized equities). And now Reap for stablecoin-powered B2B payments. That looks like a company assembling the pieces of a diversified financial services firm ahead of an IPO. The stablecoin infrastructure land grab is accelerating because B2B stablecoin payment volumes went from under $100M/month in early 2023 to over $3B/month by 2025. A 30x increase in two years. Processors want it (Stripe). Card networks want it (Mastercard). And now exchanges want it too (Kraken). The acquirers keep paying premium prices for the same thing: multi-jurisdictional licenses and live enterprise clients. The regulated plumbing. The stablecoin stack is consolidating fast. And the companies buying it are the ones who understand that the money is in moving money, not trading it.

💰

@Rodairos Everyone wants the same people, its hilarious (I'm crying)

Sales talent in payments and stablecoins? One of the most sought after profiles in crypto right now Multiples roles open across the portfolio, mid-level IC to Senior Director. Location: US (NYC and SF preferred, remote considered for select roles) >> Senior Director of Sales >> Head of Strategic Accounts >> Director of Enterprise Sales >> Strategic Account Manager >> Enterprise Account Executive Apply 👇

Fun time talking agentic payments with @coinbase alum @dwr yesterday at @stripe Sessions. Recapping a few takeaways: 1) Cards and stablecoins can and will co-exist. Stablecoins aren’t a replacement, they’re an expansion. The world has a whole new category of buyers (Agents) who will outnumber humans and drive the internet economy. They will create net-new payment flows (e.g., machine to machine payments, streaming payments) that cards were never really built for — stablecoins are always on, programmable money that are natively designed for these new types of payments. Cards will continue to thrive (and accelerate) with agents driving traditional payment flows. 2) Intents are the new interface. The internet we know is built around a common flow: browse, select, checkout. Going forward, this will be collapsed into an intent (e.g., book me travel) — an figures out the rest. We’re going from visual marketplaces for humans to programmable marketplaces for agents. How humans interact with the interact will fundamentally change. 3) Agents transact differently than humans. Agents don’t have identity like humans do. Agents transact at machine speed and machine scale. Agents are rational and ruthless optimizers (e.g., brand loyalty isn’t a consideration). Agents will optimize across payment rails, choosing the best method for each use-case. Stablecoins are well suited for granular machine-scale payments and programmable transactions. 4) It’s early days. The infrastructure exists, but it’s still early. Agents need more robust standards for identity and authorization, broader acceptance, and trust and safety tooling. It’s early, but watch this space — you won’t want to miss out on the billions of new customers (agents) that are looking to access services on the web.

Privy CEO @sternhenri sees three big trends in stablecoins and the blockchain growing in the future: "First, we're going to see a rise of non-dollar stablecoins as more people embrace them." "Second, I've heard of a few projects that are trying to have an inflation stablecoin. The stable actually grows with inflation, so that you're on purchasing power parity. I think they're really hard to instrument and get quite right, which is why I don't think they've taken off just yet." "Third, there's a company called Pearl that is finding a way to do fast matrix multiplication and back a blockchain on this, so you can issue tokens based on how much compute you've got ready to do useful inference. So there was a question for me of, what other useful work could you back the currency on?

pretty incredible to see @patrickc casually mentioning to @sama the agentic infra we built in January for @tempo and @paradigm to transform how we work. we indeed use this to orchestrate pretty much anything at both companies. neither paradigm nor tempo can live without this now. it feels like the stone age without it. and because our organizations are so workflow heavy / data rich and we are <100 people, these are the perfect organizations to max deploy ai. it is natively multiplayer, harness agnostic, has secure secret management & firewalls, durable workflows, observable so it can self-improve/heal and most importantly - all self-hosted on bare metal & self-built, end to end. no third parties involved. we have two deploys, one for each company on different machines, but they both have a shared core codebase that's modular and extensible for each company's idiosyncracies. we're looking to do way more things with it. proactive agents remains an open problem for us. we hope to open source it very soon as i've mentioned a few times before. we're adding 1 special eng to that team, dm me + your proof of work if you're epic at infrastructure / security and love hacking things quickly.

Such a flex ... on both sides

Announced today: @Meta is adding support for stablecoin payouts to creators via @Link wallets, powered by @Stripe and settled on Tempo. Rolling out in Colombia and the Philippines, expanding to 160+ markets.

We're building Tempo to bring real-world payments onto stablecoins. Today we released new capabilities for: • Subscriptions • Auto-pay • Per-customer deposit attribution • Invoice reconciliation • ... and more. Live on mainnet now. Details in thread.

1/ Today @Mercury received conditional approval from the OCC to establish Mercury Bank, N.A. I started Mercury in 2017 to build the bank I wish had existed as a founder. Nearly a decade later, we’re getting there. 🧵

Stablecoin commerce is on the rise. Monthly collateral across Rain-powered programs (Etherfi Cash, Kast, Wallbit, others) grew from near zero in November 2024 to over 300M/month by early 2026.

Enterprises are bringing stablecoin payment flows into production on Tempo, including @DoorDash, @stripe, @CoastalBankWA, and @arq_finance. We're also launching our Stablecoin Advisory to help more enterprises build real-world payments workloads on stablecoins.

Tempo serves as core blockchain infrastructure powering @Stripe's money management capabilities, letting millions of businesses hold, send, and receive stablecoins directly from Stripe across 101 countries. Read the full story: tempo.xyz/customer-stori…

Blockchains still broadcast every transaction publicly. Every stablecoin payment leaks the amount, the sender, and the recipient. We’re excited to share that Tempo is building Zones for businesses that need privacy: private blockchains that are interoperable with the rest of Tempo for stablecoin use cases like payroll, treasury, and settlement.