Luca Prosperi

Time to put the best on-chain 🧠 on top of one of the greatest digital financial stacks. Time to turbocharge DeFi. Can't wait.

We're partnering with @M0 to bring enterprise-grade stablecoin rails to USDat. Shared infrastructure with M0 ensures digital credit goes global with Saturn.

Cypherpunk blog posts can only get you so far. Instead you can build something customers want and help them move off traditional banking to stablecoin rails. Our mission is to get to end to end stablecoin settlement across all businesses using Altitude because this is how pure velocity and efficiency of money movement is reached. But we have a lot more work to do before we get there. The reality is that most businesses today do require to settle via traditional rails for at least some of their payment volume and we are giving them that option, while they are holding 100% of their balance in stablecoins on the platform. A stablecoin account that connects you to local and onchain rails is how you bridge the gap and fulfill the mission. If you can’t see why this is the way to go, feel free to DM.

Grande Ale.

Sometimes time-gaps are the product.

Excited to share Visa CLI, the first experimental product from Visa Crypto Labs. Check it out and request access here visacli.sh

Incredible - @sershokunin is an absolute star

@capitalsyst @stripe Fair

@LucaProsperi The orchestrator pattern is exactly right and it raises the one question your analysis leaves open. The translation layer is valuable precisely because the rails are fragmented. Legacy fiat on one side, on-chain settlement on the other, dozens of incompatible environments in between. That fragmentation is BVNK's margin. But translation layers are transitional infrastructure by nature. They exist to bridge incompatible systems until one system wins or a new standard emerges. The more successful on-chain settlement becomes, the more the translation layer compresses toward irrelevance. Mastercard is buying insurance against irrelevance but also racing against the scenario where the asset they just paid $1.8B for becomes obsolete faster than the underlying rails consolidate. The $1.8B question isn't whether the translation layer is valuable today. It's whether Mastercard can use BVNK to shape the settlement standard before the standard makes BVNK unnecessary.

Mastercard just paid $1.8B for BVNK — estimated 45x revenue. The largest stablecoin acquisition in history. I don't care about the pricing personally. I care about what this means. Following @stripe 's acquisition of Bridge a little over a year ago, this is the second major acquisition NOT of a stablecoin issuer, but of a so-called orchestrator. A company that moves tokens, not one that manufactures them. That pattern is the signal. I have argued for years that stablecoins (terrible name) are pieces of infrastructure, not payment products. Infrastructure — the kind that rewires how money is created, moved, and settled at the system level. BVNK's infrastructure focuses on the translation layer between legacy finance / fiat and on-chain rails: $30B in volume, 25+ licenses, 370+ enterprise clients. It's in this messy, fragmented connector layer that vast yet dispersed profit centers exist. And you know — your margin is somebody else's opportunity. Analysts have been looking at revenue and revenue multiples for this transaction, but I think this is misleading. True, BVNK's blended take rate on the flows they intermediate is c. 13 bps. But that number hides three very different businesses. FX-premium corridors (NGN, ARS, KES) at 50-150 bps, dollar-to-dollar on/off-ramp at 5-15 bps, stable-to-stable orchestration at 1-5 bps. The reason why the revenue multiple is irrelevant is that most probably the business footprint will change dramatically over the next few years, with new players eating into the lucrative FX weekend premium in EMs, and more volume moving into the on-chain-to-on-chain corridor where a multitude of different tokens, applications, and computing/ consensus environments will emerge. More environments means more connectors. Mastercard processes $9T+ a year. If even 5% of those volumes migrates to novel rails this decade — and it will — they need to own that pipe or get routed through someone else's. At least part of the $1.8B is (cheap) insurance against irrelevance in the fastest-growing settlement layer in finance. Digital value settlement is no longer the purview of crypto-native niche projects. First came the two major issuers @tether and @circle building their own messaging and acceptance networks, then the mobile checkout giants, now the card networks. Alongside those a new crop of digital money infrastructure company like BVNK, Bridge (focusing on fiat translation), @raincards (building around core card competences), @LayerZero_Core (extending their reach from messaging products), and @m0 (starting from on-chain issuance expertise). It's all part of the same thing: efficient value representation and value movement. Every year, a new piece of the puzzle gets connected. Fiat-to-fiat, crypto-to-card, blockchain-to-blockchain. The money creation and money movement layers are blurring. Next comes money programmability. Then the application layer. The financial stack has been rewritten under our eyes. Congrats to @jessehs, the BVNK team, and @Mastercard.

@MacroMate8 Maybe we are underestimating Olaf's ability to spend.

@LucaProsperi my bank bal is negative dont put me into more debt

i got like 10 messages from people confusing me and olaf lmao

Congrats to our portfolio company @BVNKFinance on their acquisition by @Mastercard. The competition to own new financial rails has been building for years, as stablecoin growth continues to accelerate. Excited for Jesse, Don and Chris on this milestone 💪 bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Hi @united…need a little help. Flew from PSP to Florida yesterday and none of my bags arrived. Kind of need them to play in the @MiamiOpen 😉….can you help?

@sytaylor You bring Raags on podcast, it's doping for audience engagement.

Straight BANGER of an episode. 👇

@andyyy Genius-COMPATIBLE, not Genius-COMPLIANT. We love Frax and their wise use of words. Plurality is great.

Another one. Sonic launches a new stablecoin USSD backed by tokenized treasuries from BlackRock, WisdomTree and Superstate. Built using Frax's genius compliant infra, this is the new official stablecoin for Sonic with institutional-grade backing. The verticalization of core applications and primitives from chain ecosystems continues to accelerate, a trend we expect to continue as revenue becomes a moving target for teams looking for token-market-fit. Neo finance.

@nomos_paradox @levelsio I am ready to bet a non-negligible amount that it’s less than 10%.

@LucaProsperi @levelsio Is there any hard data showing what proportion of those who apply for citizenship end up actually moving to Italy within 3 years?

Funniest part of it that this was mostly Brazilians with Italian heritage getting passports A demographic that's high educated and high income and culturally aligned with Italy and Europe, I mean they're genetically Italian! Instead they'll now give away passports to low educated welfare seekers without income from cultures that hate them It seems European governments enemy is immigrants that are a net positive addition to their culture while wanting to bring in more people that want to destroy their societies

* THIS IS A SCAM * and clearly not @m0

@ekryski @zacodil Yeah, unfortunately it's not as easy as launder money through banks. In crypto, everybody is watching.

@zacodil @LucaProsperi This. It’s classic crypto laundering

nobody accidentally swaps $50M into a pool with $36K of liquidity lol. fresh wallet, $50.4M from Binance, zero slippage protection, routed through the jankiest Sushiswap path possible. and then an MEV bot just happens to flash borrow $29M from Morpho in the same block and pocket $9.9M? cmon. 0xngmi called this exact play a year ago - construct a deliberately terrible swap, let a friendly bot extract the value, dirty money comes out the other side as "legit MEV profit." $154K per AAVE isn't a fat finger. it's a laundering fee