Nvidia is reportedly buying Hugging Face for $12.9B. A few days ago Stripe bought OpenRouter for $7B. Both are AI layers routing spend away from OpenAI and Anthropic. Visa's Head of Crypto Cuy Sheffield on why that layer had to exist: "But then you have this like structural conflict that, you know, if you're Anthropic or if you're OpenAI, like it's not in your interest to like make it super easy for people to like reduce and optimize their token spend by routing away to like cheaper models" "And I think companies like OpenRouter are building amazing products to have like a single integration that can then give you access to 200 plus models"

🚨 Ep. 97 of @TokenizedPod: Every Correspondent Bank Will Support Stablecoins @sytaylor & @cuysheffield are joined by: 👉 @annabelleacta, CBO, @DinariGlobal 👉 @FerdiDabitz, Co-Founder & CEO, @augustus_bank To discuss: 🤝 Stripe’s OpenRouter acquisition and model orchestration strategy 🤖 Stablecoin payments for AI inference through MPP 💰 Financing AI compute infrastructure and rising private credit demand 💳 Stablecoin card settlement lowering barriers for smaller issuers 🌐 Trapped liquidity, cross-border payments and emerging market stablecoin adoption 🏦 Modernizing correspondent banking with stablecoin liquidity rebalancing 📊 Tokenized stock models, ownership rights and synthetic instruments 🪙 24/7 tokenized securities, lending markets and index products ⚖️ SEC crypto offering rules, token issuance and liquidity 🛤️ 24/7 financial rails, Fedwire limitations and operational bottlenecks *** Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 03:23 Stripe’s OpenRouter acquisition and model orchestration strategy 08:54 Stablecoin payments for AI inference through MPP 11:00 Financing AI compute infrastructure and rising private credit demand 14:26 Stablecoin card settlement lowering barriers for smaller issuers 16:38 Trapped liquidity, cross-border payments and emerging market stablecoin adoption 20:44 Modernizing correspondent banking with stablecoin liquidity rebalancing 26:24 Tokenized stock models, ownership rights and synthetic instruments 30:29 24/7 tokenized securities, lending markets and index products 35:58 SEC crypto offering rules, token issuance and liquidity 39:06 24/7 financial rails, Fedwire limitations and operational bottlenecks *** 👉𝘚𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩 '𝘛𝘰𝘬𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘻𝘦𝘥 𝘗𝘰𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘵' 𝘖𝘯 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘛𝘶𝘣𝘦. 𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘦, 𝘚𝘱𝘰𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘺 𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘗𝘰𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘗𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳! 👈

Impressive onboarding flow from Instinct. First agent that I’ve had automatically research who I am in the background before the first conversation. Expect this becomes a default expectation for agent experiences

🚨 Ep. 96 of @TokenizedPod: Deel Goes Live With Stablecoin Earn in 80 Markets @sytaylor & @cuysheffield are joined by: 👉 @LucaProsperi, Co-Founder & CEO, @m0 👉 @ryanbozarth, Co-Founder & CEO, @dakota_xyz To discuss: 🛤️ Rain acquires Ansa to put branded wallets on stablecoin rails 🥇 Tokenized loyalty points become liquid, interoperable and convertible with stablecoins 💳 Stablecoin linked cards become table stakes for neobanks 🌐 Global co-brand cards could combine loyalty with onchain credit ↔️ Brazil imposes 24-hour holds on large stablecoin transfers 👛 Brazil rules may push stablecoin flows toward self-custodial wallets 🌎 Deel expands stablecoin payroll and earn products across 80 markets 🤔 Vault products raise questions around collateral, risk and scalability 📈 Nasdaq acquires Level Markets to advance 24/7 capital markets 🕸️ Stablecoins connect capital markets, payments and corporate treasury management *** Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 1:10 Rain acquires Ansa to put branded wallets on stablecoin rails 2:44 Tokenized loyalty points become liquid, interoperable and convertible with stablecoins 6:55 Stablecoin linked cards become table stakes for neobanks 11:20 Global co-brand cards could combine loyalty with onchain credit 14:45 Brazil imposes 24-hour holds on large stablecoin transfers 18:45 Brazil rules may push stablecoin flows toward self-custodial wallets 25:37 Deel expands stablecoin payroll and earn products across 80 markets 30:54 Vault products raise questions around collateral, risk and scalability 45:04 Nasdaq acquires Level Markets to advance 24/7 capital markets 48:50 Stablecoins connect capital markets, payments and corporate treasury management *** 👉𝘚𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩 '𝘛𝘰𝘬𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘻𝘦𝘥 𝘗𝘰𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘵' 𝘖𝘯 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘛𝘶𝘣𝘦. 𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘦, 𝘚𝘱𝘰𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘺 𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘗𝘰𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘗𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳! 👈

Agent traffic is starting to outpace human traffic on the internet, and that breaks the old ad model for publishers. @cuysheffield on the latest episode of Tokenized with cohost @sytaylor and guests @natalyathakur and @TuongvyLe12 said: Cloudflare's answer is a payment gate for bots. Block them, or let them crawl for a fee. “Yeah sure you can crawl my site but I'm gonna charge you one cent or 2 cents you know for doing that.” The harder problem sits on the buy side. Give an agent its own wallet, spun up from a parent account, so it can pay its way across the web when it hits a paywall. 🎙️ Listen to the latest on tokenizedpod(dot)com

Today, agentic commerce doesn’t exist in any meaningful way. However, I have more conviction than ever that 24 months from now agents will become economic actors that drive billions of dollars of spend across the world. We have an incredible opportunity at Visa to help build this future and we are hiring AI-native talent across our agentic product and partnerships teams. DMs open if interested

Crypto payment cards remain a small market next to traditional card networks, which process trillions of dollars per month. But the trend is growing as stablecoins make greater inroads into the global financial system, including by piggybacking on existing major card network rails. For the tracked programs, this is happening almost entirely through Visa.

Thanks @Jun__Yoo for covering Visa’s stablecoin strategy. We’ve made a lot of progress over the past 8 years but still feels like we’re just getting started. Excited to help continue to accelerate stablecoin-linked cards alongside onchain infrastructure for banks