A library of snippets
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This week, the situation hit a boiling point when the song “Earrings” by Malcolm Todd surged to number one on a Spotify chart. In a series of X posts, Davies outlined his suspected culprit: “botting,” or scammers who purchase bots to juice streaming numbers. Davies argued that prediction market traders were botting the charts to influence the outcome of related events contracts.
From: Spotify Confirms Streaming Fraud After Kalshi Trader Cries Foul | WIRED.
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Banks keep investing in this segment (and nonbanks like Robinhood and Bilt are entering it) because premium cards are highly effective tools for customer acquisition against which you can gather deposits, originate mortgages, and cross-sell trading and wealth management services.
The lifetime economics of these adjacent products dwarf the card itself.
From: The Illusion of Premium Card Profitability | Flagship Advisory Partners.
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The launch of Open USD is structurally intertwined with the federal GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act). I’ve written extensively about how the GENIUS Act reshapes stablecoin compliance—”We are effectively creating a pathway for the dollar to become the native currency of the internet.”
Open USD was designed from day one to operate as a Permitted Payment Stablecoin Issuer (PPSI) under this federal framework. Its architecture uniquely addresses the joint rulemakings from FinCEN, the OCC, and OFAC that I covered in my 303-page FinCEN/OFAC rule analysis. Rather than the “retroactive policing” model of legacy stablecoins, Open USD implements pre-transaction architectural compliance.
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Open USD (OUSD) is a shared payment infrastructure, rather than a proprietary commercial product. The initial signatory roster spans payments networks including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover; financial institutions such as BNY, BlackRock, Standard Chartered, and DBS; tech giants Google, IBM, and Samsung Electronics; and crypto platforms Coinbase, Solana, Base, and Aave. The breadth of this alliance reflects a consensus that scaling stablecoins for global workloads requires open, low-cost and aligned infrastructure.
Of particular note is that Stripe’s corporate leadership has indicated that OUSD will serve as the default stablecoin for businesses running on Stripe. This is a biggest of big deals, because as Tom Noyes pointed out, Stripe isn’t interested in stablecoin speculation or retail crypto trading. They are laying down new rails for the new economy and their bet on Open USD is a bet that open, multi-stakeholder, regulation-compliant stablecoin rails will win.
The RPIB consultation calls for input on one of my favourite topics, digital identity. The consultation says that digital identity frameworks, including the use Legal Entity Identifiers (LEIs) or other verifiable credentials, could provide opportunities to “enhance users’ payment experiences“. It goes on to note that this may require a complementary trust service layer that makes identities and associated attributes usable, portable and verifiable in real time. Well, you can guess my view on this. The Bank of England and DeliveryCo should treat digital identity as part of a fundamental trust infrastructure for people, organisations and AI agents systems working across all forms of money.
It will be increasingly important that these payment system users can present high‑assurance, reusable digital identities (perhaps held in digital wallets that could interoperate with the European Digital Identity Wallet) to support customer due diligence (CDD) activities. The new core infrastructure should assume that participants will rely on such credential‑based identity schemes, allowing users to prove attributes (eg, age, and residency) selectively rather than having to re‑onboard for each provider, as I just had to do when I changed accountants.
These proofs should be linked not only to traditional accounts but also to digital wallets, providing a consistent trust and liability framework across conventional forms of money, stablecoins and digital assets. This approach could build on common utilities so identity, fraud analytics and sanctions screening become shared services rather than duplicated, siloed functions.
When it comes to the identities of AI agents, as delegated and agent‑initiated payments become more common (whether as personal “copilots” or enterprise agents orchestrating across supply chains) agents will require their own distinct digital identities, separate from the human account holder, tied to cryptographic credentials that can be authenticated and revoked independently. Trust in agents depends on being able to verify not only which human they represent, but also which agent runtime they are, which organisation owns it and what capabilities and constraints have been delegated. The core conceptual architecture should therefore support a model in which humans, organisations and agents are all digital identities, each able to hold and present verifiable credentials binding them to specific roles, permissions and regulatory obligations with a clear separation between authentication (proving who or what is initiating a payment or instruction) and authorisation (what that entity is allowed to do, under what constraints).
In the Bank of England’s “Bank Underground” blog on the subject of agentic commerce, Prem Munday was kind enough to refer to some of my work in this field, observing that the economy needs methods to resolve how humans and their agents interact, “moving from Know-Your-Customer (KYC) to Know-Your-Agent (KYA) for payments, as highlighted by Dave Birch”. Indeed it does. And it needs them soon.
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The focus on drones comes as military planners seek to learn lessons from Ukraine, where officials estimate that around 200,000 drones are used each month. In the recent Iran war, hundreds of offensive drones were reportedly launched daily at the height of the conflict.
From: Keir Starmer says some road and energy projects will be scrapped to pay for £15bn defence plan.
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Brits are being urged to monitor their money carefully with the volume of fake banknotes in circulation surging dramatically, as failing to spot them quickly enough could result in financial loss or even potential criminal charges.
Recent data from the National Crime Agency revealed that last year saw more than double the amount of counterfeit currency circulating compared to 2024. In particular, £20 and £10 notes have emerged as the most frequently forged denominations across the UK.
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Footage played in court shows Kwabena Kissi, 40, carrying a large security briefcase and entering a Santander bank in Brixton, south London, on July 5, 2022.
He is wearing a helmet with the visor down and a face mask with his old uniform from when he worked for the G4S private security company from 2019 to 2020, a court heard.
CCTV inside the bank shows Kissi duping the staff into buzzing him through the secure office, where they unwittingly hand him bags filled with £117,200 in cash.
Kissi then just casually walks out with the money inside the briefcase while the tellers are totally oblivious to the cunning heist.
He is later seen walking along the road carrying a bin bag with the cash inside, after changing his clothes.
Kissi then orders an Uber and is driven away from the scene.
Staff only realised they had been tricked when the real G4S guard arrived to make the regular Tuesday collection.
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Illinois just became the first state in the country to tax the simple act of using digital money. On June 1, in the dead of night and without stakeholder input or notice, the general assembly buried a new 0.2% gross-value levy on digital asset activity inside a $55.9 billion budget. It takes effect in 2027, and it will impose costs on Illinoisans who hold digital assets, whether they make money, lose money, or do nothing at all.
From: A new tax on digital asset transactions will harm consumers in Illinois | American Banker.
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They sold the agents lists of potential customers, charging about $1,800 for 20 leads. The lists were filtered to focus on those over 55 with at least $100,000 in assets.
From: How a Master of Deception Conned Investors Out of $50 Million—in His Own Words – WSJ.
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