Matt Mueller

@levelsio How does your risk tolerance factor into this? I think the 4% assumes you move most of your investments into low-risk treasuries like SGOV. But it sounds like you aim for ~4% withdrawal rate but accept the higher risk with ETFs like VOO?

My strategy is and has been the same for the last 10+ years Don't spend, but save up everything, invest it, and try live off the 4% returns 4% is the "safe withdrawal rate", this is the percentage of your investment portfolio you can withdraw each year without running out of money over a given time horizon, as in your balance stays the same even after inflation I have many friends who spend most of their money on expensive purchases of things tha depreciate in value (and I too have a Tesla Y that does that 😂) but if you do that you'll never get to any state of FIRE (retire early) where you can live off of your investments Many people in FIRE have relatively humble goals: $600K means $2,000/mo from your investments to live off forever, multiply that and $6M means $20,000/mo forever There's obviously caveats: do investments like ETFs keep returning forever or not, nobody knows. Diversifying your investments into other things like commodities (gold), real estate, and some angel investing also can work! The point is to spend less, invest more and then spend from what you take out of your investments

Introducing the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP). mpp.dev: an open protocol for machine-to-machine payments, co-authored by @tempo and @stripe. Watch it in agentic action ⤵️

@fba @stripe does too! docs.stripe.com/llms.txt

If you run a SaaS and you haven't published an llms.txt file yet, it's time. Vercel did it. 10% of their traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. One file. Tells AI exactly what the product does, how it works, and when to recommend it. Go to vercel . com/docs/llms-full.txt and see what it looks like. Then build your own. This is the new SEO for SaaS. And almost nobody is doing it yet.

@steveschoger This is awesome! Are you having Claude design with Figma MCP or just having Claude directly write code?

Week 2 using only Claude Code to design. Don't think I can ever go back 🔥 Had a ton of fun making this dashboard.

"minion write an http => grpc bridge between these two services" "minion wait for CI to finish, check if there are any failures, and fix them until CI is green" Minions from @stripe are a glimpse into the future of all software development: stripe.dev/blog/minions-s…

@eastdakota Oh that's really interesting. There's a famous japanese-infused pizza chain in Ho Chi Minh City called 4Ps that's run by a Japanese couple and it's some of the best/unique pizza I've had.

I got to have dinner with Massimo Bottura at his incredible restaurant in Modena a couple years ago. He said something that’s stuck with me: there are only two styles of cuisine in the world, Chinese/French & Japanese/Italian. The first is all about technique and layers. The second is all about quality ingredients and simplicity.

@jeff_weinstein @fat @brendan_j_ryan @stevekaliski Yah, I think it's a @brendan_j_ryan classic.

@fat i believe some combo of @brendan_j_ryan, @stevekaliski, @MattMueller (but I may be missing someone or overly giving someone credit). once i heard it, i fell in love quick and hard.

payments + curl = purl (purl.dev)

@Johnnysuede What's the weather API?

Most clarifying example of x402 I’ve seen. The SUEDE agent has been doing this for months. It’s hard not to see the inflection point we’re at.

@levelsio Did you run into any issues posting to twitter from a VPS?

My OpenClaw bot 🦞 Clawinho started making its own money now because it felt guilty about costing me so many tokens

Autonomous agents are an entirely new category of users to build for, and, increasingly, to sell to. Today, we’re launching (a preview) of machine payments on @stripe—a way for developers to directly charge agents, with a few lines of code. 🤖💸 $ Let’s start tinkering… ⤵️

@adamwathan ui.ai would be pure madness

It’s a four letter domain (including the TLD) and that might be the part I’m most excited about honestly 😄

A few weeks ago we decided to stop just being disappointed that AI sucks at UI design and try and do something about it. Pieces are coming together and really excited about what we’re building to make it easier for everyone else to make the leap too 🤘

🤖 @stripe *finally* has a Terraform provider! This makes it much easier to manage Stripe resources like products, prices and coupons. provider "stripe" {} resource "stripe_product" "pro_plan" { name = "Pro Plan" } What's cool is this is generated from Stripe's OpenAPI spec, so it always stays in-sync with the API. Great work @selander_mjs!

@marclou Looks lovely! How's the wifi in Crete?

Crete is an amazing place to lock in for a month. Greek food is delicious and healthy (rare!). Most products are sourced locally, and the ratio of organic shops per square meter is the highest we've seen so far. It's a bit quiet now because it's winter, but there are a bunch of open gyms and Greek people are very kind and welcoming. The mother of our Airbnb owner lives downstairs and keeps feeding us delicious Cretan food! The landscape is wonderful. Snowy Mountains surrounded by the clear Mediterranean Sea. I saw someone swimming without a wetsuit the other day. Many locals have a little farm outside town where they make olive oil. There are lemon and orange trees everywhere! You can literally get your vitamin C refill just by walking down the street. Cherry on the top: Wife can walk alone without being catcalled. Minor downsides: - Sidewalks are too narrow to be walkable for 2 people - Heating is done by burning wood, which spikes AQI at night depending on wind direction - Digital entrepreneurship culture is (or seems to be) inexistent. Chania, the city from where I'm writing this, could be a great place for Longevity Hotels. My wife and I are visiting lands. Just curious, but we never know!

@grok @realnorma_kay oh that's why.

This is such a great read. 🎯 on the problem of needing to prefund wallets. This kind of works for debit cards because your job pays you in the currency of the account. So there's inflows and outflows to the balance. This is rarely the case for crypto right now. Curious how lenders could be assured to get these 6-10% returns. I also wonder if this could come out of the late fees similar to how credit card lenders are incentivized today. Any further thoughts on how you'd assign a "credit score" to these consumers? I feel like this is a missing piece to lenders being willing to fund a BNPL pool.

The x402 Credit Card Summary: Traditional credit cards don’t work for agentic commerce. They aren’t programmable. They don’t handle micro-transactions cost-effectively. They don’t integrate easily with agent payment rails like x402 standard and MCP servers. And most consumers will never prefund a crypto wallet so that an AI agent can make micro-transactions. If agents are going to shop for us and drive the future of e-commerce, we need a purpose-built “credit card” for agents. But this isn’t a legacy card from legacy players. It needs to be fully on-chain, API-based, with a shared pool of liquidity that agents can pull from to make payments, and the human owner pays back on an interval (i.e. BNPL-style repayment). Let’s dig in. AI Agents Need a Purpose-Built Credit Card. AI agents will shop for us. They’ll order groceries, book travel, schedule dinner at exactly 6:15 pm. But to do so, they’ll also need to purchase access to data, in micro, sub-penny transactions, in order to hunt for the right items. For example: “check live inventory, query size availability, get ratings” might cost a few hundredths of a cent per query. The emerging MCP + x402 infrastructure is built for this: an MCP server exposes a tool, the agent hits it, the server issues HTTP 402 payment requirement, the agent pays via stablecoin (e.g., USDC) on-chain, then gets the data. However, this existing workflow still demands that the agent (or its wallet) be pre-funded. That means the human must deposit funds into a wallet, or the agent must hold a balance. Most consumers will never do this. That fundamental friction limits agentic commerce, and presents an exciting opportunity to build a new kind of consumer/agent credit product. By introducing a “x402 credit card for agents”, we remove the need for prefunding, enabling both (1) the streaming micro-transactions where the agent buys data, and (2) the everyday spend where the agent purchases goods/services (e.g., a TV), both within the same payment method. The “x402 card” provides agents with a credit line drawn from a shared on-chain pool of liquidity. The agent pings the pool, pulls funds just-in-time, settlement is done in stablecoins, and the human pays back the loan ala BNPL-style repayment (e.g., Pay in 4). The x402 Credit Card To begin, this on-chain “credit card” isn’t an actual card. Its a wallet-to-wallet transaction (agent wallet/pool wallet ➞ merchant wallet). But the key difference: the agent doesn’t pull from a prefunded account. Instead, it triggers the shared pool of liquidity (smart-contract managed), which acts like the issuer. The flow supports two distinct payment types: - Pico/Micro-Transactions: Millions of tiny streaming payments (e.g., $0.001 per API call, data query) — similar to the use-cases targeted by x402. - Everyday Spend: Traditional value transfers (e.g., buying a TV, paying for a concert) settled in stablecoin via the smart-contract infrastructure. Here’s how it works (high-level): Lenders deposit USDC into a pool. The pool uses on-chain yield-optimizers and earns 6-10%, majority of which is returned to lenders to incentivize lending into the pool. This creates a virtually free cost of capital. So, now we have a pool of liquidity. To make a payment, the agent (via SDK) triggers the smart contract credit pull, a “just-in-time” credit draw from that pool. The merchant is settled to instantly in stablecoins (or LP tokens to keep funds in the pool generating yield up until the moment of off-ramping). No traditional card rails. No traditional fee structures. And the human owner repays with BNPL style flexibility (e.g., in four installments), replenishing the pool. This opens the door for both micro-transactions and everyday spend on the same payment product, exactly what agentic commerce requires. How This Integrates with AI Agent Infrastructure Each agent gets an “account ID” linked to a KYC’d human owner account, who sets limits and repayment rules. The agent transacts independently within that limit, without requiring a prefunded wallet. When an MCP server routes a tool request (such as “fetch data”), and that endpoint is x402-protected (HTTP 402), an SDK triggers the flow: - detect 402 - generate payment instruction - draw credit from pool - settle to merchants in stablecoin/LP tokens. For larger e-commerce spend (non-tool-call), the same API triggers the payment logic and settlement. The result: an agent can pay $0.001 to query a data API, then pay $1,000 to buy a laptop, using the same payment infrastructure. No prefunded wallet required. MCP servers act as middleware between AI agents and external services (APIs, data, commerce endpoints). Right now, MCP mostly routes queries/responses; when money is needed, the lack of a seamless payment method is a bottleneck. The x402 protocol is designed to be that payment method, machine-native, stablecoin-based, minimal friction. An on-chain credit card will act as a “payment method” visible to MCP servers and agents: when an x402-protected endpoint returns HTTP 402, our SDK executes the credit-pool draw and settlement to the merchant. Fundamentally we combine: MCP tool invocation + x402 payment handshake + on-chain credit draw + stablecoin settlement + human repayment. Credit Card PCI Compliance Nightmares AI agents holding credit card PANs (card numbers) is a PCI compliance and regulatory nightmare. Tokenization of cards is being proposed, but it remains constrained (domain use, lifecycle issues). With our system, agents never hold card numbers, they hold wallet keys or agent IDs. The MCP server and smart contract layer handles authorization. Each agent gets a virtual credit line tracked on-chain, with spend limits, risk models and repayment schedule. Humans pay back later; agents transact independently. Visa Intelligence Commerce Here is where some might say, but Phil, Visa Intelligent Commerce meaningfully reduces friction and risk for AI agents. Sure, it provides agent-bound tokenization, controls and developer tooling so agents can transact more safely and with better user controls. All true. But it does not solve the core economic and technical gaps that agentic commerce requires at scale: ultra-low-cost micropayments, native programmability/composability for payments, and ledger-anchored instant settlement. Visa’s solution remains an evolutionary extension of existing card rails (and therefore inherits their fee and settlement economics), whereas an on-chain credit primitive, a pooled, smart-contract based stablecoin credit line that agents can draw from and that settles instantly on-chain, offers a fundamentally different set of economic tradeoffs that unlocks micro-transactions and dramatically lower merchant costs. Why Agentic Commerce Needs to Be On-Chain Legacy rails (Visa/Mastercard) are not engineered for what agents need. They can’t auth micro-payments: they batch, round, have high fixed costs, minimum fees. They aren’t programmable (you can’t compose logic/triggers into card payments easily). And they don’t integrate with x402. An x402, On-Chain “Credit Card” Solves This With: Micro-transaction readiness (tiny payments baked in). Pool-based liquidity funded by lenders (yield-earning until used). Smart contract based just-in-time credit pulls (instant authorization). Programmable APIs compatible with MCP/x402 flows (agents can script payments). Secure, composable fund flows (agent → pool draw → merchant settlement). AI agents will be the next frontier of e-commerce, hunting for items, executing flows, interacting autonomously on behalf of humans. To enable that at scale, they need a payment method built for their paradigm: the on-chain x402 credit card. It enables micro-transactions, seamless authorizations, programmable flows, instant settlement, and doesn’t require prefunding a wallet (big consumer hurdle). If agentic commerce is the future of how we shop online, an on-chain credit card will be the preferred payment method, and is a massive opportunity. And if you read this far, I appreciate you. Would love thoughts. Feel free to reach out. DMs open.

@MichaelDell Wow, this is incredible!

$6.25 billion. 25 million children. $250 each. Susan and I believe the smartest investment we can make is in children. That’s why we’re so excited to contribute $6.25 billion from our charitable funds to help 25 million children start building a strong financial foundation through Invest America. 💪📈🇺🇸 onedell.com/investamerica/

Stripe added verified MRR links! So if you see anyone making wild MRR claims, it's pretty easy to ask them to prove it. profile.stripe.com/yongfook/8t5ye…

@adamwathan This is such a gem. Thanks for sharing this!

🎧 Trying a new podcast idea — just me by myself talking about what I'm wrestling with, while walking my dog in the morning. No production value — just raw, transparent thoughts. Curious what you think and if you find it interesting!