Snippings

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in a court filing from last week, Google admitted that “the open web is already in rapid decline,”

From: Google admits the open web is in ‘rapid decline’ | The Verge.

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Edi Rama, PM, says digital assistant Diella will make Albania ‘a country where public tenders are 100% free of corruption’

From: Albania puts AI-created ‘minister’ in charge of public procurement | Albania | The Guardian.

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The battle is taking place among users of Hyperliquid, a fast-growing decentralized crypto exchange. They are considering reducing their use of Circle’s USDC, the main stablecoin on Hyperliquid. Competitors are rushing in, offering far better deals to Hyperliquid’s customers.

The Takeaway

• Crypto platform Hyperliquid users may lower use of Circle’s stablecoin
• Hyperliquid users hold 8% of Circle’s stablecoin, potentially hurting revenue
• Paxos, Agora, Native Markets among those bidding to issue new stablecoin
Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies that are typically pegged to the dollar and keep most of their assets in safe investments such as U.S. Treasurys. They have been embraced by crypto traders as a way to park money for use as collateral and for international money transfers.

The fight is bad news for Circle, the stablecoin issuer that had a blockbuster initial public offering earlier this year. Stablecoins have become very lucrative businesses because they don’t pay interest they earn on their investments to their customers. Circle does share about half of its interest payments with select exchanges such as Coinbase that use its token, while Tether, the biggest stablecoin issuer, keeps all of its interest payments.

The stablecoin legislation that passed Congress banned stablecoin issuers from directly paying interest to end users. It does allow stablecoin issuers to share their revenue with exchanges, which then reward investors who hold the stablecoins.

Now, Hyperliquid has started a price war. Stablecoin issuers hoping to steal Circle’s business are offering to share an increasing portion of their revenue, in some cases all of it, with Hyperliquid. The fight could quickly turn stablecoins into a commodity business where profits are under constant pressure.

From: Crypto Exchange Sets Off Price War for Stablecoins — The Information.

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Revolut, the global fintech with over 60 million customers globally, and hundreds of thousands of business customers, has today announced the launch of Pay by Bank as an option on the Revolut Gateway. This new feature enables businesses to accept fast and secure payments directly from a customer’s bank account, providing a seamless experience for consumers and significant benefits for merchants.

From: Revolut adds Pay by Bank option to their Payment Gateway | Revolut United Kingdom.

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The term “agent” or “agentic” has become so ubiquitous in the business world that it can now seem to mean everything or nothing at all.

From: The Seven Kinds of AI Agents — The Information.

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ut one could easily imagine a flight to safety into which crypto companies like, say, Tether (which has more US Treasury holdings than Germany) must sell T-bills into a down market to cover redemptions. Then you’ve got a fire sale, higher borrowing costs, and yet another disastrous situation in which Main Street is under pressure to bail out speculators.

From: The coming crypto crisis.

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As we will explore in further detail in our upcoming client alert, the ability of appropriately qualified non-banks to issue payment stablecoins in order to settle or redeem payments provides a powerful tool for fintechs.

But just because a fintech uses stablecoins to redeem or settle payments, does that mean it would no longer need state money transmitter licenses? Yes, that appears to be the case.

From: Will Payment Stablecoins Mean the End of State Money Transmitter Licensing? – FinTech and Blockchain Law Watch.

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Respondents ranked improved fraud detection, simplification of regulatory compliance and easier account onboarding as the key areas in which potential efficiencies and savings would justify the expense. Half those surveyed said Digital Company ID would lead to more secure payments and avoid payment scams. Just under 60% thought it would help reduce the time taken to submit company accounts, complete tax returns or apply for a license or permit for compliance purposes. And 65% thought it would save money when opening a bank account.

From: Most SMEs would pay for a Digital Company ID service.

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The report indicates that people aged 45-plus have a preference for physical debit cards, while people aged 18 to 44 were more likely to favour digital wallets. However, despite digital payments being the default option for some people, more than half (51%) of those surveyed said they had used cash in the past week.

From: Majority of UK adults no longer carry a wallet or a purse.

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This leads us back to Stripe, and a question that hangs over the entire project: can it avoid repeating Libra’s fate? What happens when the antibodies of the financial system—the powerful incumbent banks and card rails—identify Tempo as a new threat and begin to swarm?

What makes the situation fascinating is the paradox at its heart. After a decade of spectacularly failed attempts to build their own private blockchain clubs, the big banks are finally, grudgingly, coming around to the idea that open, permissionless networks are the only way forward. At the very same moment, a new generation of challengers, led by Stripe and Circle, are betting everything on the opposite idea: that the future belongs to slick, branded, proprietary chains.

From: Stripe’s Tempo And The Ghost Of Facebook’s Libra’s Past.

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