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Life can be very difficult sometimes. This is my dog eating a cucumber. You’re welcome.
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James Wester
72.5K posts
James Wester
@jameswester
Analyst and writer covering tech, payments, and crypto. Expect opinions on baseball, culture, Saturday morning cartoons, and breakfast cereals. I run slowly.
DFW, TX Katılım Ocak 2009
4.9K Takip Edilen8.3K Takipçiler
@CCPISASSH0E Same. Both of my kids in DFW have only a vague idea that they learned to drive in chaos. “It’s not like this everywhere.”
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I have two driving age teenagers and I’ve told them that if they can learn to drive in DFW, they can drive anywhere. I should probably take them down to Houston for practice because those psychos are even worse 😅
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Driving in Phoenix/northern Arizona solidifies my opinions on Texas roads and drivers. TX is like Mad Max on steroids. Phoenix freeways are much cleaner and well maintained and the drivers don’t drive like they’re on a 3 day coke bender
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I saw Waterworld in a theater and totally enjoyed it. I thought it was completely loopy and wildly entertaining. Dennis Hopper was great. I have seen it a couple of times since then and enjoyed it every time. In fact, I think I'm going to watch it now.
The Gormogons@Gormogons
CZ My wife is the only person I know who saw this in a theater.
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@AlexH_Johnson Per my earlier post...
x.com/jameswester/st…
James Wester@jameswester
I like this post because there's a lot of attention on how we are moving stables and crypto into the future world of agentic buying, and it's a fun topic. But I don't necessarily agree with the idea that x402 and MPP are racing to become THE “internet’s payments layer.” I think some of the recent discussion about “layers” is slightly off, at least in a traditional payments sense. These aren’t layers. Or rails. They don’t sit in the stack as independent infrastructure. You don’t build on top of them the way you would a network or ledger. They’re application-level functions. (Ask yourself: would you have to rewrite your application to swap between them? If you do, they aren't layers.) Both are trying to answer the big question: how does agent-driven software identify itself and manage payments without a human in the loop? x402 does it one way. MPP does it another. But in both cases, the “how” lives inside the application. Why does this matter, besides me getting to be pedantic? Because calling this a “layer” implies the competition between them is about rails or underlying infrastructure, and I don’t think it is. That will matter in terms of who controls what and how they make money. (For instance, I don’t pay to use TCP/IP.) So this is a way to define an interaction model, and I think the hope by Coinbase and Tempo is that we eventually do see it as “infrastructure” and stop questioning how it’s delivered. We will just assume this is how agents buy things. All of that is to say that I don’t think the “layer” discussion is anywhere close to settled yet. There are still real competitors further down the stack who understand payments and will have a say in how this plays out.
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If you think agentic commerce and stablecoins mean Visa is screwed, you don't know ball.
The Rollup@therollupco
"Visa's screwed. They have no way to compete with stablecoins. They know it. If you want to use an agent, they're going to use stablecoins." Andy on Visa's AI agent payment tool.
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The professional sports league with an official gambling partner and prediction market partner cares about integrity?
Now that gambling is embedded, the game is an input and wagers the product. ‘Integrity’ is just risk management.
Mike Selig@ChairmanSelig
Today the @CFTC and @MLB made history by signing the first-ever MOU between a sports league and federal agency. We’ve committed to work together to protect the integrity and resilience of prediction markets relating to professional baseball. Through this partnership, the @CFTC is well-positioned to add additional tools to protect our markets from fraud, manipulation, and other abuses. Thanks to @MLB and Commissioner Manfred for working with us to protect the integrity of these growing markets. Read the full MOU⬇️ cftc.gov/PressRoom/Pres…
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James Wester retweetledi
🚨UPDATE: A fresh (and more optimistic) read on where things stand on the yield/rewards issue following today’s GOP market structure meeting, via @SenLummis’ press team:
“We’re 99% of the way there on stablecoin yield, and negotiations on the digital asset portions of the bill are in a good place. Senator Lummis believes today’s meeting was very productive and positive. We have heard feedback from colleagues on the need to resolve housing and community banking issues, and Senator Lummis is working hard on that.”
On those housing/community banking issues, @Jasper_Goodman reports Senate Banking Republicans are now discussing adding community bank deregulatory provisions to the Clarity Act in exchange for the House accepting the Senate’s housing package in its current form. I also confirmed this idea was brought up in today’s meeting.
Link to the @politico story on that below.
Eleanor Terrett@EleanorTerrett
🚨NEW: After a Senate Republican meeting on crypto market structure attended by White House Crypto Council Executive Director @patrickjwitt, @SenLummis told reporters negotiations around yield/rewards are making progress but remain “in a delicate state,” with the focus shifting from imminent legislative text to “who we need to be reaching out to.” “I think some major light bulbs were switched on during this meeting. So, there's a path forward that is not a path that I would have expected to encounter when I walked in the room,” said Lummis. Patrick Witt, who emerged from the meeting looking frustrated, had no comment on the meeting. @SenatorTimScott emerged, smiling as always, but declined to comment, noting he doesn’t speak to reporters in the hallways.
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I like this post because there's a lot of attention on how we are moving stables and crypto into the future world of agentic buying, and it's a fun topic. But I don't necessarily agree with the idea that x402 and MPP are racing to become THE “internet’s payments layer.” I think some of the recent discussion about “layers” is slightly off, at least in a traditional payments sense.
These aren’t layers. Or rails. They don’t sit in the stack as independent infrastructure. You don’t build on top of them the way you would a network or ledger. They’re application-level functions. (Ask yourself: would you have to rewrite your application to swap between them? If you do, they aren't layers.)
Both are trying to answer the big question: how does agent-driven software identify itself and manage payments without a human in the loop? x402 does it one way. MPP does it another. But in both cases, the “how” lives inside the application.
Why does this matter, besides me getting to be pedantic? Because calling this a “layer” implies the competition between them is about rails or underlying infrastructure, and I don’t think it is. That will matter in terms of who controls what and how they make money. (For instance, I don’t pay to use TCP/IP.)
So this is a way to define an interaction model, and I think the hope by Coinbase and Tempo is that we eventually do see it as “infrastructure” and stop questioning how it’s delivered. We will just assume this is how agents buy things.
All of that is to say that I don’t think the “layer” discussion is anywhere close to settled yet. There are still real competitors further down the stack who understand payments and will have a say in how this plays out.
Camila Russo@CamiRusso
Two protocols are racing to become the internet's payments layer: x402 backed by Coinbase Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) launched today by Stripe and Tempo. How are they different? Short answer: x402 is more permissionless. MPP is more payments-optimized. Long answer: Assets - MPP accepts stablecoins on Tempo, plus fiat - x402 accepts all ERC20s, but no fiat. Scale - MPP's sessions primitive lets agents authenticate once, set a spending limit, and settle later, batching payments across many interactions. Better for agent scale. - x402 is still largely per-request, although it’s moving toward prepaid flows Settlement - MPP requires Tempo and Stripe. - x402 permissionless, chain agnostic What's better? imo, if MPP settled on any chain, it would be a clear winner. But it doesn't. And that's a huge drawback esp since it's unclear how decentralized and permissionless Tempo actually is.
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Search has been broken for months. I'm less concerned about the algorithm surfacing content and more annoyed by my own searches being utterly useless.
Elon Musk@elonmusk
Algorithm is better today than 3 months ago?
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@austincampbell "The response from the mayor actually will make it worse because he is showing he doesn’t intend to change course." My question is "doesn't intend" or "doesn't understand the need?"
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Former bond trader here: not financial advice but I would not be a buyer of NY muni debt here. This is not markets punishing Mamdani, it is them predicting the future.
Market knows NYC is losing jobs, seeing outmigration of the wealthy and families, and spending too much on stuff that doesn’t grow the pie.
Therefore it expects less ability to repay in the future. Bond prices go down, yields go up.
This is all rational. The response from the mayor actually will make it worse because he is showing he doesn’t intend to change course.
The danger with bonds is they don’t move linearly. A huge fight to raise taxes and spend way more might move borrowing costs up a bit… or it might double or triple them and cause a bankruptcy.
There is no way to know precisely where the cliff is until you are over it. The wise decision is to keep your distance.
NYC does not appear to be doing that.
New York Magazine@NYMag
Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently got the political equivalent of what baseball players call a brushback pitch — a fastball deliberately thrown dangerously close to a batter’s head in order to intimidate the player, who must flinch or duck to avoid a devastating injury. The mayor is getting municipal chin music from the major bond-rating agencies: Moody’s formally changed its outlook on the city’s finances from “stable” to “negative,” and S&P Global Ratings opined that Mamdani’s budget plan will “make it difficult to sustain budgetary balance beyond fiscal years 2026 and 2027.” The negative outlook from the agencies is a warning, writes columnist Errol Louis. The next step could be a downgrade of the city’s bond rating, which would raise the cost of borrowing money for routine city operations. Mamdani maintains that the decision to revise the outlook is premature, pointing out that the city’s overall credit rating remains strong and has not been downgraded. But the message from Wall Street seemed crystal clear: Unless Mamdani adopts a more fiscally conservative approach, we will punish City Hall in the markets. Read Louis’s full column: nymag.visitlink.me/H057m5
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James Wester retweetledi
Yesterday, two federal agencies coordinated to deliver more crypto clarity in 24 hours than Congress has in years.
Yes, a future administration could revisit these moves. But replicating the coordination and intensity behind them won’t be easy.
The bar for legislation is now much higher imo. No need to rush into codifying something weaker than what’s emerging.
March 17:
>CFTC no-action letter: non-custodial wallets (e.g. Phantom) don’t need to register as intermediaries when giving users access to derivatives --> users can connect directly without a broker/FCM layer. Practically, this compresses the role of traditional intermediaries and weakens part of their moat (distribution + custody + routing)
>SEC interpretive release: finally clarifies how Howey applies to crypto (decentralization + user control matter), and opens formal rulemaking/comment process industry has asked for for years. (Legal durability gets built this way.)
>SEC Chair Atkins: “Reg Crypto” safe harbor framework: tiered exemptions (~$5M early-stage, up to ~$75M larger raises) + a defined path for tokens to exit securities status once decentralization milestones are met; effectively a compliant on-ramp that could bring issuance back onshore
TLDR: distribution layer loosened, classification clarified, capital formation pathway proposed.
Hold the line. Don't settle for a mid bill.
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James Wester retweetledi
Excited to share Visa CLI, the first experimental product from Visa Crypto Labs. Check it out and request access here
visacli.sh
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My comment about "it's 2018 again" wasn't a dig. I think @liamihorne is right: "We were building infrastructure for a world that hadn’t arrived yet."
Liam Horne@liamihorne
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@friedmandave I'd push back and say "today's reality." But markets change, just slowly. Very, very slowly.
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@jameswester It's the type of thing that makes sense on paper but does not really make sense in reality.
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We really are coming back around to 2018 in a major way.
Modern Treasury@ModernTreasury
Real estate investing’s broken, but it doesn’t have to be. Groma’s partnering with Modern Treasury to help more people own a piece of the world. They now automate payments and reconciliation via one API across 125+ properties to grow faster. See how: go.moderntreasury.com/4uCQfKz
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@friedmandave I'm actually not against the idea. (Even back in 2018!) The issue was (and still is) that real estate is--this won't shock you--a very, very old market. It may take a few minutes to change it.
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Please stop putting that Vanity Fair article in my feed. Just stop.
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