Pie Man

@xbraqzen @stripe @tempo @Visa @base Yeah I've been working on confidentiality for 3-4 years for that reason myself and that's kinda part of the silent message of my article, crypto is only meaningful if it's actually delivering its USPs around privacy and decentralization, not competing with cards and visa only

@Pememoni @stripe @tempo @Visa @base They're all another anti-crypto, transparent, corpo, ai buzzwords psyop getting you used to the claws of the old world proliferating into the cypherpunk movement. Only needed payments system is for completely private and anonymous txs, like Monero.

WTF is MPP, Visa, Agents, 0x402, Tempo and how do they all relate? @Stripe and @Tempo launched MPP and mainnet today. Then @Visa announced Visa CLI for agents. @base has been leading with 0x402 for almost a year now. Are these the same thing? Are they all using stablecoins? Will there be a single winner across all applications? One way to understand this space is to separate two different debates that often get mixed together. One debate is about crypto rails vs cards, and one debate is about MPP vs 0x402. 1. The settlement debate: card rails vs crypto rails This is the more familiar dimension. It is about the financial infrastructure that ultimately moves money. Traditional card networks remain powerful because they are simple, global, and deeply integrated into the merchant ecosystem. Programmable interfaces that expose card payments to software agents make it possible to automate purchases without redesigning existing business workflows. For larger or occasional transactions, this model is still efficient. Accounting is clear. Compliance is built in. Acceptance is nearly universal. Crypto rails introduce a different set of properties. Stablecoins enable instant global settlement, low fees, and programmable balances that agents can manage directly. This becomes important when payments are small, frequent, or continuous. Machine workloads often involve metered usage rather than discrete purchases. In these environments, streaming or batched micro-settlement is structurally easier to implement with blockchain-based rails. The key point is that settlement choice is largely economic. Developers will select the rail that best matches payment frequency, size, and operational complexity. 2. The protocol debate: 0x402 vs MPP A second debate is happening one layer above settlement. This is about how agents actually express intent to pay. Both 0x402 style flows and MPP build on the long-unused HTTP 402 Payment Required semantics. The shared idea is that payment should become part of the normal request-response cycle of the web. An agent asks for a resource. The server issues a machine-readable payment challenge. The agent proves authorization. Access is granted. 0x402 implementations tend to focus on stateless payment challenges. Each request can include a payment requirement, making the model simple and composable. This approach has gained traction in ecosystems such as Base where low-cost execution supports high-frequency interactions. MPP introduces a more structured framework through payment sessions. An agent can open a spending mandate with defined constraints and settle usage incrementally over time. This reduces transaction overhead and fits well with continuous service consumption such as inference, data feeds, or automated workflows. The relationship between MPP and Tempo today is similar to the relationship between early 0x402 deployments and Base. A preferred execution environment exists, but the protocol itself is not tied to a single chain. MPP is designed to be payment-method neutral and can operate across stablecoins, cards, bank rails, or custodial systems. Stripe’s own experimentation with multiple standards suggests the long-term stack will remain multi-protocol. Combining the two layers Once these dimensions are separated, it becomes clear that they can be mixed in different ways. A developer could use crypto settlement coordinated through 0x402 challenges. Another system might use MPP sessions with stablecoin rails. In some cases, agents may even coordinate payment using HTTP-native standards while settling through card authorizations or off-chain balances. In practice, not every combination will be equally natural. High-frequency machine interactions tend to align with crypto rails and session-based coordination. Larger, discrete purchases often align with card networks and simpler authorization flows. The important insight is that the ecosystem is exploring both axes simultaneously rather than converging on a single design.

@elonmusk MatEnerInte 🫃🏻

Matter, Energy & Intelligence

Bitcoin is OG OpenAI Ethereum is Anthropic Open-source models are L2s, cheaper faster alts What about Solana? Hyperliquid? There's room for one consumer/degen AI (better Grok), and one AI-for-AI stack focused on building better models, infra, and hardware with AI itself

@dberenzon it's really not, it's another big cryptographic buzzword that most technical people know is not close to actual products. There are always teams claiming that it's now solved/practical, but experiments/results are full of assumptions

Indistinguishability Obfuscation (iO) might be the onchain privacy solution we've been looking for.

@dwr or even without a chain with Visa?

MPP works on any chain.

@dwr The visa solution is not working with stablecoins or crypto rails, right?

MPP is payment method agnostic and extensible from Day 1. That’s why there are extensions from Visa (cards) and Lightspark (Bitcoin lightning). It only took them *days* to extend. There’s no foundation structure you have to join to influence MPP. Extend the spec to any chain / rail. Just "rough consensus and running code".

But don't you still need ads to convince agents to pay for your service, not the other one? And you spend x dollars, get the attention of agents, e.g. in Reddit and convert % of them The most interesting part for me is getting rid of the cold start problem, you can pay as you use, no need for buying/selling a subscription, but I guess many businesses are actually built on top of selling subscriptions that you may not actually need, and AI agents will reduce their revenue if they only use it once and pay only 10 cents for that

@cuysheffield Does it work with stablecoins/crypto wallets or onchain settlement, or is it giving AI agents access to the current Visa network?

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

"AI inference costs are falling roughly 10x per year. Processing all ~100 million U.S. CCTV cameras currently costs ~$30 billion annually — but falls to economically trivial levels by 2030. This makes privacy-adjacent technology (encryption, anonymization tools) an underappreciated growth sector, and government AI procurement budgets look structurally understated."

AI privacy and safety is #1 concern for everyone right now. But why does crypto payment privacy matter if AI is going to be in a Mac mini or on-prem? Simply because mixnets can't protect your access patterns and info. So we'll need confidential stablecoin payments.

@IsTheBaron no value tbh, just posting stuff to keep competitors and busy reading and agents burning credits

@Pememoni Will not ignore this article sir. High value, high signal, true value add

You Can Safely Ignore Most Startup Advice If you spend enough time building in fast-moving industries like crypto or AI, you eventually notice something uncomfortable. Much of what’s written in business and startup books feels outdated, oversimplified, or just disconnected from how real companies actually win. Sometimes the problem goes deeper. Advisors are not always neutral. They may have conflicts of interest, hidden incentives, or simply lack real operating experience in the environment you are navigating, which means their guidance can be not just imperfect but directionally wrong. The bigger structural issue though is how most startup wisdom is created. It is written after success has already happened, turning messy and uncertain journeys into clean narratives with clear lessons and creating the illusion that there was a repeatable formula all along. In reality, outcomes are often shaped by forces that are harder to package into principles such as timing, market structure, distribution power, access to capital, talent density, regulatory shifts, and platform leverage. These factors frequently matter more than any neatly framed rule about focus, culture, or execution, and the real risk is not learning from past stories but mistaking storytelling for strategy. Another issue is speed. Industries now evolve faster than publishing cycles. Advice that made sense five months ago about products, growth, fundraising, or defensibility can quickly become irrelevant in AI or crypto. Platforms shift, technology resets cost structures etc. This does not mean business books and advice are useless. They are often valuable as mental models, historical context, and pattern recognition tools, just like reading religious books to understand where people are coming from. The mistake is treating them as rules or a source of truth.

One of the biggest misconceptions in the Ethereum community is that "encrypted mempool" is only about bad MEV. But it's much bigger: building trustworthy onchain markets, enabling tx content-level censorship-resistance, or even regulatory-compliance 👇

And yes, you can safely ignore this article as well

@rushil_suri @chamath @hackedintern long overdue

@chamath interview @hackedintern

All In Interview!

@hackedintern @chamath interns of the world unite and book this man

@chamath wen interview intern

The main data center of Iran's largest bank was exploded last night. Best pitch for institutional adoption and decentralized finance. Get decentralized before they decentralize you.

@0xMagmar @cosmos @Mastercard Cosmos is Great Again

We’re scaling @cosmos globally, alongside @Mastercard. By partnering with one of the largest financial institutions in the world, we are exploring using IBC to move money internationally at warp speed. Cosmos everywhere.