Ankur Banerjee

Things I wish I could do with AI (that is still surprisingly hard) 🧵

One of the wildest design quirks you’ll find in Indian e-commerce (especially on the Indian Railways booking site) is that the UI forces the user to choose the payment processor. At a glance, it looks like bad UX. Why make the user choose between PayU, Razorpay, or NTT Data? If the goal is resiliency, shouldn't automated "smart routing" just dynamically handle failovers behind the scenes? But if you scratch beneath the surface, it’s actually a masterclass in market-specific engineering. It's actually quite clever: 1. Mind-boggling scale: About 50% of ALL online payments globally happen in India. By comparison, US's share of online payments is ~1-2%, Europe is about ~3-5%. India's real-time transaction volume is huge: 100+ billion transactions yearly! That number is greater than the transaction volumes in the US, UK, Canada, France, and Germany combined...and then multiplied by eleven. (Where India's share is smaller is transaction value. If you want an insight into the future of micropayments, look here. Because the sheer infrastructure strain is immense, no single traditional payment processor can guarantee 100% uptime.) 2. Power-user overrides: If a Stripe payment fails on a regular e-commerce site, waiting 10-15 minutes while the system figures out what happened is annoying but fine. But on Indian Railways, high-demand tickets sell out in seconds. You're competing with thousands of people for a fixed number of seats releasing at a specific moment. Those 10-15 minutes could be the difference between getting the ticket or not. So, counter-intuitively, users want to be power users. They'd rather immediately retry with a different processor, than wait for automated fallback logic to catch up. 3. Anti-monopoly by design: On publicly-funded services such as this, locking into a single payment processor would hand one company a dominant position over an enormous share of transaction volume...and the processing fees that come with it. The multi-processor setup avoids creating that winner-takes-all dynamic. In fact, the order in which these payment processors are shown is also randomised on every page load, so that the order on the screen itself doesn't disproportionately drive volume to a single processor. 4. Transaction costs aren't always absorbed by the merchant: Unlike the West, where merchants quietly absorb a 2-3% card processing fee, in India the processing fees are often directly passed to the user as a "convenience fee." Different processors negotiate different rates with specific banks, and some pass on the savings to the users, which creates a live competitive market. Users actively pick the processor with the lowest fee for their transaction based, or cashback provided based on special promotions. It's a local version of pointsmaxxing. There's enormous richness and complexity in India's payments ecosystem, and more broadly across the global south. It is a fascinating look at high-velocity financial infrastructure built under real constraints: scale, competition, scarcity, that Western fintechs largely never had to contend with. But that same ecosystem is also ripe for disruption. Moving payments and finance onchain will be a generational shift in speed and cost, but only if the privacy problem gets solved. No national or local payments infrastructure can run without that, as financial data is some of the most sensitive data there is.

No brainer indeed. What I find compelling here is providing privacy/confidentiality to individuals, while still being able to offer data at a macro-level on tokenomics such as unlock schedules, total/circulating supplies and so on which crypto holders rely on to assess projects.

Can anyone give me a reasonable argument why token distributions should be fully public rather than selectively per project definition of private/public info? To me this sounds like an obvious "how did no one build this? how is this not the norm?" kind of a situation.

Best feature ever, and I wonder why other LLMs do not implement this besides Claude.

Things I wish I could do with AI (that is still surprisingly hard) 🧵

The THORchain $10.8M is gone - let's protect the next protocol or wallet. Here is a short list of ECDSA TSS protocols and libraries that should not be in production right now. The list exists. The deprecations are documented publicly, please follow them:

@ajrgd I didn't even question it. Maybe you can do a GDPR data download and check?

This bug don't impress me much. I remember joining Spotify in early 2009, and it agrees — May 2009. But then says I listened to my first song in October 2009. And I don't recognise it as my first song. Who would download Spotify and not listen to a song immediately?

Hard to believe my first song ever on Spotify was Shania Twain 😂

@paularambles Discovered this about a year ago and car journeys have never been the same

unironically the best feature apple has ever released

@candicekteo I’ve seen this happen! The specific document requested keeps changing, which I think is a way of a bureaucrat bouncing the dossier to someone else. 🫠

@ankurb Latest: Got a letter to regularise my situation. Sent my proof of residency + the letter (docs requested). Got the same letter 2 months later. Called CPAM. Said I needed to send proof that I've resided here for 6 out of 12 past months. That was NOT in the list of request. 🙄

Me too, Golshifteh. The new story I *really* want to read is about how she fared with French bureaucracy like CPAM (the health insurance system). 12+ months and waiting to have things finalised by them. 🫠 “She had previously indicated her intent to leave France, explaining that she was severely impacted by the bureaucracy and banking system.” And on top of that, I do think it’ll be extremely tough for an Iranian person with all the sanctions to deal with French bureaucracy.

@candicekteo I have finally figured out that I might have 5-6 different dossiers and had to write to the mediator 🙈 3 years is insane though!

@ankurb CPAM triggered. They lost my dossier 3 times and it took me about 3 years to finally get my carte.

Due to the extremely archaic ways sanctions screening works, any names common in certain communities e.g., from the Middle East get entirely debarked because of partial/fuzzy hits against sanctions lists.

As crypto matures into financial infrastructure, moats will be defined by security posture, compliance enablement and confidentiality. We keep treating privacy as a silo - a category or a chain you go to. Security stopped being a product the moment it became table stakes. Privacy will have the same arc, and those that embrace this sooner than later will own the rails everyone else ends up renting.

The team has been working hard on this one. It's not a refactor or a rewrite, it is a totally new product that is helping multiple teams deliver @zama protocol integrations in record times.

It’s 2026, and it’s still not possible to provide Gemini with custom instructions/customisation. In the long line evidence of “Google does not understand how to build consumer apps” 🫠

This has been an exciting project to work on in the past few months, to reimagine what building on Zama Protocol looks like. The core design principle our team had in mind: how close can we get the developer experience to, say, something like ERC-20? Not “how do we expose FHE to developers” but “how do we make FHE invisible to them.” Confidentiality on blockchains shouldn’t require a developer to understand the internals of advanced cryptography and mathematics – the same way they don’t need to understand the full HTTPS stack and its library of associated specs to ship a secure web app. That complexity exists; it just shouldn’t be your problem. One north star metric I’ve always used when building products: can someone build a *meaningful* app in under 30 minutes, starting from scratch with no prior background? That benchmark is getting even more interesting with widespread access to AI coding tools. We’ll be releasing official Zama skills for the SDK shortly, enabling anyone to build meaningful, secure, production-ready apps with confidentiality baked in. Faster than 30 minutes. A lot faster. Clear-text in, clear-text out. That’s the principle. Everything else is our problem @zama to solve, not yours.

SHIELDED PREVIEW → Fastest privacy protocol to reach $100M TVS → 45% of circulating $ZAMA staked → #1 app on Ethereum during the Auction Public release tomorrow. Stand by! zama.org/shielded

@zama is the only real option for financial institutions. Hiding something isn't enough. Institutions need infrastructure that lets them operate the way they already do, within their regulatory boundaries, with the controls they're accountable for. Zama delivers confidentiality with no tradeoffs- programmable compliance, security, verifiability, composability. We're building the primitives, locking in the partnerships, and shipping the next wave of onchain finance.

We have a feature in @tursodatabase called Vegas Blackout: erase an entire day of usage for billing purposes. No questions asked. I think a lot of people ended up didn't using it because it was a bit hidden. We have now improved its discoverability. Hoping more people make good use of it!! Mistakes happen! What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas!

@realchriswilder @MetaMask This looks 🔥

One thing is clear: when I set my eyes on a goal, I get it done and I do it well. I’m now 100% finished with the full unwrap flow for my @MetaMask extension integration. I’ve successfully implemented the entire suite—confidential balance tracking, private asset management, and native shielding—all powered by the @zama protocol and the ERC-7984 standard. I cooked this, and I’m proud to be the first to do it. But I’m just getting started. The next target? I asked for guesses, and nobody got it. The next wallet on my list is @Rabby_io. 🐰 I’m currently adding full, native support for Zama protocols and ERC-7984 to the Rabby extension. If you want to see how privacy should look inside your favorite tools, keep your eyes on this space. Building what doesn't exist yet. cc: @ankurb

"For a very long time, institutions have been creating tokenized assets on their own private infrastructure, in silos." — Joachim Lebrun (@0xMuchScience), CTO & Co-founder of @trex_network At the Zama Builder Villa during EthCC[9], we sat down with Joachim to talk about his journey building with Zama and why confidentiality is the missing layer in institutional tokenization. ⬇️