Introducing the Metropolis global hackathon Six weeks to build the next generation of startups on Monad. 4 tracks. Over $250K in prizes for builders. Submissions end October 13th.

Today, Bitwise is launching Automated Token Portfolios (ATPs): institutionally designed model portfolios for tokenized stocks that live directly in your crypto wallet—powered by @Coinbase Tokenized Stocks. Bitwise designs the model, you hold the tokenized stocks in your own wallet, and @Glider__ keeps your holdings aligned automatically, without ever taking custody. Only available to non-U.S. persons (as defined in Regulation S of the Securities Act of 1933) in eligible jurisdictions outside of the U.S. 🧵

For years, the advice was to move to San Francisco if you wanted a career in tech. That advice is now wrong. New York has become the most exciting place in the world to build. A few reasons why: 1. The AI labs are here. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and hundreds of others all run meaningful operations in NYC. You can now build a serious frontier-tech career here without giving up anything. 2. Every major industry lives here, and so does its AI counterpart. New York doesn't only have "tech," but finance, media, advertising, fashion, healthcare, real estate, law, and commerce too, with their applied-AI layer counterparts being built on top of each one. 3. The talent pool is unlike anywhere else. SF gives you engineers. New York gives you engineers, plus world-class designers, salespeople, bankers, marketers, operators, creatives, and media people, all at the top of their fields. Companies will need all of them. 4. People actually want to live here. New York is unlike any other city with its density of restaurants, art, nightlife, fashion, and media - and the people working across these sectors. If you're building something and you're more than just tech, I'd argue there's only one city for you right now.

Rewards in the Agora Platform is live. Your rate, your tier, every payout we have made to you, and the address they land on, all in one place. Set your own payout destination. Rewards accrue daily on the AUSD you hold. No lockups & no minimums.

It's truly impressive how much infrastructure you inherit when building on the traditional fintech stack. A good BaaS API will give you accounts, ledgering, statement generation, card issuance, reconciliation, money movement, accounting integrations and even tax documents. A stablecoin native architecture built around programmable accounts does not yet give you the same finished operating layer so today you end up rebuilding many of those primitives yourself. In the short term that is definitely a disadvantage. You have to chew more glass just to reach the baseline that trad fintech gets out of the box. But it compounds and will become an advantage over time (if you can ship and assume that the legacy stack is the legacy stack). Stablecoin infrastructure providers will surely evolve and many of the things that are painful to build today will eventually become standardized primitives in the same way they have in BaaS. But companies building in the space now will have spent years understanding the architecture underneath those abstractions. They will own more of their infrastructure, understand the ledger and financial workflows at a much deeper level and will be way less dependent on third parties for capabilities that directly shape the customer experience. That makes the immaturity of stablecoin infrastructure both the tax you pay for building today and the reason you end up with the deepest technical advantage.

BREAKING: @Stripe and @adventintl are (officially) trying to buy @PayPal 👀 ▶️$53.4B joint offer — $60.50/share cash, ~28% premium ▶️~$50B in bank financing lined up (@JPMorgan, @MorganStanley) ▶️Stripe + Advent would co-own PayPal 50/50, no breakup planned ▶️PayPal's board reportedly thinks the price is too low, hasn't formally responded ▶️Possible fallback: spin off Braintree to Advent to ease antitrust concerns ▶️Backdrop: PayPal stock down 40%+ from highs, brutal "transition year," CEO ousted ▶️Stripe just hit a $159B valuation and wants @Venmo, consumer payments, agentic commerce assets

I think in next 6ish months the market is going to catch up massively to the stablecoin banking opportunity and it’s going to no longer be viewed as this niche crypto card market. I’m biased in believing this but it’s one of the most under appreciated opportunities in all of tech

“Checking accounts are a trap.” In the inaugural episode of The Desk, we talk with Nick (@Nick_van_Eck) about static cash losing 40% of its purchasing power in 20 years and what can push the stablecoin market from $300 billion to $1 trillion. Watch the full discussion here:

As @Nick_van_Eck recently put it: "We recognize the importance of a direct relationship with regulators... Without it, your ceiling is someone else's floor." We're honored to welcome Agora as a Pioneer Partner of the Real-World Asset Summit Brooklyn 2026, and to welcome Nick van Eck, CEO of @withAUSD, to this year's speaker lineup. Agora issues AUSD and provides the platform that enables fintechs, trading firms, and financial institutions to launch and manage digital dollars backed by custodied reserves. Meet Nick and the Agora team in Brooklyn this September 1 - 2.