Pet

The commanding heights - just read the whole thing. Took me about an hour to read, is the talk of the AI and Wall St crowd and essentially argues. - The US and China will be the two countries with AI, which creates a cold war condition. - The US durable advantage is compute and capital, with 70% of compute compared to 5% in China meaning they can stay at the frontier. - The US state will see this as a coming cold war, and look to own more of these companies, just as threatened states have historically in war conditions - China will not monetize its models because it won’t let its currency float, meaning even Chinese models will be better monetized by the dollar. - The most neutral dollar is a stablecoin, which while not always controlled by the US as tightly as the fiat dollar, will enable global debasement - AI labs will make such a massive portion of the K shaped economy, the government needs them to continue to grow - Therefore the capex must continue to go up and the US Government will backstop that, and potentially, put a limit on the yield from US Treasuries to ensure funding can continue into capex. - Therefore the US government look to own these companies either via a golden share or gifted equity. - AI will inextricably replace labor, causing developing economies to enter economic hardship, but the US will be partly insulated by government ownership enabling some level of redistribution - The value of AI will not accrue to labs which will become government subsidized utilities, or the existing AI supply chain bottlenecks, but the other industries that emerge because AI exists. Some thoughts. 🧠 This is dystopian as hell. And while the chain of logic is rational, it's also not confidence-weighted. There are several thousand words devoted to Ravi, who works in India, who’s basically seeing all of his friends out of work and is ultimately laid off via WhatsApp. The evidence is the gap between Tata Consulting Services Headcount and profitability. And *sure* there's a bit of this, but it doesn't have to end in riots on the street. Woof its dark. 🧠 They call the Wall St leveraged buy out firms of the 1980s “buyout artists.” This is clearly a play to attract capital to raise a sort of permanent capita / hedge fund vehicle for buyouts. It also speaks to the viewpoints of the writers. The piece regularly quotes scripture and is self-indulgent and elitist as hell, from the font to the tone, to the worship of Leopold. That creates its single biggest blindspot. Pragmatic realities. It's a well studied, well reasoned piece but distorted. 🧠 The link for stablecoins is perhaps the best I've seen. Person in Argentina wants to get paid and pay for AI, stablecoin linked cards are a great way to do that. China won't let its currency be debased and lacks the compute to serve even open-weight models. And yes, a person in Argentina is using stablecoin-linked cards today... But. China is building compute capacity. And stablecoins are so early - I think it's hard to credibly say this is an inevitability. 🧠 People are saying this is bullish for certain stocks, while hyperscaler share prices are cratering. As I write this Amazon stock is down 15% over the week, Google 16.7%. That could be the essay’s thesis, that value is moving away from those who own the rails. But its more about these companies entering negative free cash flow and AI impacting their ads business. I don't get how this is anything other than a play for investment dollars. If you're seeing something else here lmk, but convince me you read the whole thing first. 🧠 I don’t buy that existing incumbents are sitting ducks here. Regulation exists, network effects exist. Someone like an Amazon or JP Morgan can block AI agents, and will do so, and will bring people to the negotiating table.

Ramp is worth $60bn and 70% of its R&D team is working on products it hasn't released yet. I sat down with @eglyman in New York to discus Why he thinks of @tryramp as a productivity company more than fintech The 7,000 pull requests their non-engineers wrote last quarter The trust charter, stablecoins, and whether an AI agent would choose your business. Full conversation 👇 00:00 Introduction 03:16 Is fintech dead? And why Ramp considers itself a productivity company 04:41 Why AI token costs are turning software into financial products 07:27 How Ramp's Inspect lets non engineers ship code using AI 11:51 Why AI is becoming the third major category of business spend 18:43 What justifies Ramp's valuation and its accelerating revenue growth 27:07 How AI is transforming employee productivity and customer support workflows 39:54 Why Ramp applied for an OCC national trust bank charter 43:15 How stablecoins enable faster cross border payments and protection against currency volatility 47:23 Will autonomous AI agents replace Ramp or choose its financial infrastructure? 51:01 The future of agentic companies and Ramp's mission to eliminate waste

Instinct now lets you give your AI agent a balance to spend within limits. That balance sits in stablecoins. The purchase can still run through Visa. But your bank should watch where you keep the money between purchases.

This interview with @nubank CEO @velez_david is now over 20k views on YouTube 🔥 Catch the full thing below or search for brainfood wherever you get your podcasts.

Nubank has more than 140 million customers. Now it’s taking its playbook to the US. I sat down with David Vélez, Founder and Global CEO of @Nubank, live at Nu Stadium, the day after the US launch. We get into the US launch with Lead Bank, Nu’s conditional OCC approval, and what’s under the hood of Nu Global, including Sygnum, Circle, Mastercard and Stripe. Plus AI credit models, banking agents, and the efficiency numbers that make other bank CEOs read and weep. Full interview below 👇 0:11 Nubank’s scale, efficiency, US launch, tokenization and AI 2:14 Chuck Feeney’s philanthropy and influence on David Vélez 4:13 Smart efficiency culture and Nubank’s branchless cost advantage 7:10 Hidden US banking costs and the underbanked opportunity 9:44 Nubank’s US strategy, Hispanic customers and incumbent competition 12:13 Customer obsession, NPS and long-term loyalty economics 16:48 Nu Global, stablecoin savings and international money movement 22:00 NuFormer foundation models for credit decisioning and financial AI 27:20 AI banking agents, financial guidance and cautious customer rollout 30:34 AI-driven workflow reinvention and Nubank’s flatter organization

Brainfood went and did a little rebrand. I hope you like it? (Play the video with sound!) The first time I heard the phrase “Fintech is Dead,” I got a little offended. A little hurt. I mean, this was the thing I, we, attached a professional identity to, a sense of community and a shared enjoyment of the idiosyncratic weirdness that is technology in financial services in 2026. I wondered: how can it be dead when it’s only 4% finished? But over time, I became convinced that what got us here won’t get us where we’re going. There are no trillion-dollar fintech companies after all. So, last Thursday I published an essay arguing that fintech is dead as an investment category because the technologies that made “fintech” are table stakes now. A mobile-first neobank, running on the cloud, or an API-first infrastructure won’t disrupt the status quo. It will take something else. Speak to any investor, and you’ll hear a similar thing: an identity crisis, but a recognition that the financialization of compute, payments companies routing AI tokens, and the wave of tokenization coming to Wall St. show another phase is coming. Today’s massive companies, and tomorrow’s giants, are all leaning into AI and tokenization to solve new problems in new ways. So Fintech Brainfood is now Brainfood. But don’t worry, Brainfood will still hit your inboxes every Thursday and Sunday. Thursday Rants make sense of the big themes in tech and finance, while Sunday gives you news, 4 new companies, and some reading recommendations. But now we’re doing more too. A bigger brand to bring together Tokenized, Brainfood, and the work the team has been doing behind the scenes: - Brainfood Media, which encompasses all of our media properties. - The Brainfood podcast, relaunching tomorrow with a HUGE guest. Also on YouTube. - Tokenized, the podcast on stablecoins and tokenization with Head of Crypto @ Visa Cuy Sheffield. Now part of Brainfood Media. - Predicted, a newsletter on the business of prediction markets, created by my cofounder Pet Berisha. Our fastest-growing media property is up 150% in subscribers in the last 8 weeks… - Brainfood Advisory, co-led by co-founder Jeff Tijssen, formerly global head of fintech at Bain. Because an adult needs to help me, help you. We even got a swanky new homepage: brainfood.xyz/ (Would love feedback! Please reply with thoughts) And if you want to see us in person… we’ll all be at NerdCon in San Diego (I do not apologize for this plug). So that’s Brainfood 2.0. Bigger. A few more people. And a lot more to come. ST. PS. The essay is here if you want to tell me where I'm wrong. I'd like that. lnkd.in/ebmv4BXc PPS. Check out the audio in this video 🤓

Stripe acquired OpenRouter. Ramp launched Router. Both are leaning into stablecoins. Cloud, mobile, and APIs are now table stakes, not an investable category. The next era of finance is something else.