hosting a small padel tournament for token 2049 looking for some intermediate/advanced players who are keen to play ps: other people will also be welcome, there’ll be a chill area, wellness activities, padel intros for beginners etc. dm if you wanna participate in the tournament

user activity has been steadily increasing day after day in the first weeks cohort over the next days we'll start onboarding more users and roughly double our user size and then again and again and again until we've onboarded the roughly ~10,000 users on the waitlist

A neobank that owns the float (Ethena / USDe) can charge less than a neobank that doesn't own the float. This is a classic strategy we see in across all types of financial businesses. You can only win this game with float and massive economies of scale.

everytime i use Apple Pay i cant stop thinking how good the UX is and how it has just silently wrapped the majority of card txs in the world today Apple earns ~ 0.15% every time you tap your phone/watch against a payment terminal. they don’t disclose the exact revenue figures and only publish them as part of their “Services Revenue” but its estimated to be around $30/b a year and growing year by year. It’s interesting to look at how they did it given most other attempts to replace Visa and Mastercard have failed. There were many attempts: - girocard in 🇩🇪 - pin in 🇳🇱 - eftpos in 🇦🇺 All of these went head to head with Visa and Mastercard and eventually had to face the harsh reality that it is close to impossible to rival the network effects of Visa and Mastercard. Visa and Mastercard have been built up over decades, work worldwide, comprise millions of merchants and tens of thousands of issuing banks. Where do you even start to compete with that value proposition? Apple realized this and instead decided to work *with* Visa and Mastercard. More precisely they inserted themselves between the user and their issuing bank. Before Apple Pay: User > issuing bank > visa > merchant bank After Apple Pay: User > apple pay > issuing bank > visa > merchant bank But why did Visa and Mastercard let Apple in on their juicy duopoly? The answer is simple: because Apple had something really interesting to bring to offer. In 2006 Apple released TouchID. With TouchID, Apple had a biometric sensor that allowed them to tie a device and active session to a unique user. This not only made iPhones more secure, it was also a really compelling feature for Visa/Mastercard to bring chargeback, fraud and theft numbers down for online payments. Around that time already online payment volumes started skyrocketing and millions of stolen card numbers were circulating on the darknet. fraudsters would make online payments using those stolen cards and sometimes users lied about their card having been stolen to get some products for free and in both cases the card shemes would foot the bill with TouchID (later FaceID) otoh every payment is cryptographically signed and guaranteed to be made by the rightful owner. Visa and Mastercard saw that they could save billions per year in chargebacks and reduced fraud cases and agreed to the partnership that would let Apple in. Moreover, Apple already had a large payment surface with its sprawling ecosytem of mobile apps. Developers were keen to integrate a 1-click payment option that increased their conversion rates. And around the same time, Apple announced the NFC chip enabled iPhones to trasmit data to payment terminals for in-store payments obviously not all banks agreed to participate from the get go as they had to forfeit some of their revenue to Apple. but it was enough for Apple to have a few partnerships to start. the benefits were so clear, and the UX so smooth that consumers were switching banks if their bank didn’t support it

"I see a lot of takes on twitter that crypto neobanks are just a Rain Wrapper" "I think this is very far from the truth" A non-custodial neobank is "actually everything that a crypto wallet is, like Rabby, MetaMask, but just harder to build." "No one would say building a crypto wallet is easy, right?" "This is a crypto wallet on top with integrated virtual banks accounts, cards and so on" "Like a crypto wallet on Hard mode" @litocoen, GTM Lead @ethena on the live show today.

.@EthenaPay launched last week across 49 countries on @avax, backed by @ethena which holds $4.8 billion in TVL. GTM Lead @litocoen, says the team is experiencing unprecedented demand for the product. "The reception has been incredible, supportive, and we certainly didn't expect that much hype." "I think it has been our biggest product launch in terms of virality and demand." "Right now, we have too much demand...which is a good problem to have."

The cashback on @EthenaPay is insane. So far, I’ve had a great experience using the product. Even though it’s still in beta and not very feature-complete, it definitely has the potential to be one of the top neobanks once it’s available to everyone.

a lot of people have asked me what it’s like working with Guy since i joined as an early backer and supporter, i always had a high opinion but it’s actually way more impressive once you see it from behind the scenes the ability to blaze full steam ahead and operate a hundred threads in parallel - while being involved at an insanely granular level in all of them - is absolutely mindblowing to witness generational founder imo listen to him spelling out the thesis behind Ethena Pay

E184: @ethena CEO - Why @EthenaPay Feels Like Revolut, Not MetaMask @gdog97_ is the founder and CEO of Ethena. He stumbled into DeFi in 2019 when a friend showed him MakerDAO - taking out a $5,000 loan against $10,000 of ETH with no one standing in the middle of the transaction. Six years later he's running Ethena, which scaled to $15 billion in stablecoin supply faster than anything else in crypto history, and his thesis is that a dollar with a yield in an app that doesn't feel like crypto is what finally brings 100 million new users in. Timestamps 0:00 Intro 2:37 Which Of Guy's Plans Fell Apart 5:37 Where Actually Are The Users Everyone Wants 7:10 What Got Guy Hooked On Crypto 9:20 PayPal vs Revolut vs Neo Banks 12:43 Partnerships: @variational_io @Bitwise 13:36 Revolut vs Stablecoin Neo Banks 15:58 Is Switching To Neo Banks Really A 10x 18:00 EthenaPay, Explained Simply 21:21 Why Build Another Crypto Neo Bank 23:53 Will Crypto Banks Fight Over The Pie 25:55 How Ethena Wins Users By Helping Everyone 32:47 What Actually Makes Ethena Different 36:51 Ethena's Cashback System Revealed 38:32 How Ethena Cuts Fees 39:39 How Ethena Finds The Best Yield 45:16 Guy On Dealing With FUD 48:35 Why Guy Stays Quiet 49:29 Partnership: @KASTxyz 50:17 Ethena's KPI Targets 51:55 The Holy Grail For A Stablecoin Neo Bank 52:31 Partnerships: @JupiterExchange Ethena 53:14 If Everyone Does The Same Thing, Who Wins 55:23 What's Next For Ethena After EthenaPay 56:36 Is EthenaPay Basically USDe 58:04 Closing Thoughts