Snippings

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Bridge’s launch of Stablecoin issuance APIs was drowned in the sea of announcements last week but are worth double clicking on. They allow developers to issue USDB, its internal stablecoin, or spin up white-labeled stablecoins backed 1:1 by USDB. Developers keep most of the yield, and conversions to and from USDC are instant and free.

It is a clean API-first model, but not a new one. Brale already offers this ability across multiple chains. M^0 has enabled over $200M in white-labeled stablecoins like USDN and UsualM. What Bridge brings is distribution. Backed by Stripe and already powering products like stablecoin financial accounts, Bridge could bring this model to a much broader developer base.

More importantly, this launch signals a broader shift: stablecoin issuance is becoming commoditized infrastructure. It is no longer a high-friction product. It is a low-friction primitive. As it becomes easier to launch, operate, and shut down a stablecoin, more developers will use them to solve narrow problems: internal treasury flows, user rewards, marketplace tokens, and closed-loop payments.

Distribution remains the critical challenge, both for the platforms like Bridge and Brale, and for the developers issuing stablecoins. Closed ecosystems, where developers control the user base, are the most obvious fit. In these environments, developers can abstract away minting, burning, and conversion, and capture yield in the process. Open systems are harder. Liquidity and acceptance still favor incumbents like USDC.

From: The Weekly Stable (Vol 17).

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In. January 2025 alone, Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport confiscated 984 counterfeit licenses in less than a week. As Steve Bansbach, a federal Customs and Border Protection spokesman, commented on this, this is about a bigger threat than just kids getting alcohol: the idea that these cards could be used in identity theft and human trafficking.

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Nomi is among a growing number of AI companion platforms that let their users create personalized chatbots to take on the roles of AI girlfriend, boyfriend, parents, therapist, favorite movie personalities, or any other personas they can dream up. Users can specify the type of relationship they’re looking for (Nowatzki chose “romantic”) and customize the bot’s personality traits (he chose “deep conversations/intellectual,” “high sex drive,” and “sexually open”) and interests (he chose, among others, Dungeons & Dragons, food, reading, and philosophy).

The companies that create these types of custom chatbots—including Glimpse AI (which developed Nomi), Chai Research, Replika, Character.AI, Kindroid, Polybuzz, and MyAI from Snap, among others—tout their products as safe options for personal exploration and even cures for the loneliness epidemic. Many people have had positive, or at least harmless, experiences. However, a darker side of these applications has also emerged, sometimes veering into abusive, criminal, and even violent content; reports over the past year have revealed chatbots that have encouraged users to commit suicide, homicide, and self-harm.

From: An AI chatbot told a user how to kill himself—but the company doesn’t want to “censor” it | MIT Technology Review.

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I think some things will change if you come from an eIDAS II- perspective.  I hope that we can make it easier for businesses to use the wallets, especially to ensure that they can be server based in a good way. The eIDAS II is very much built with natural persons in mind so it does not always fit businesses or other organisations.

David Magård, Senior Advisor at the Swedish Companies Registration Office (16th April 2025)

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On February 1 last year Colin received a letter from a company called Insolvency Investigations. It looked professional: a blue and green hexagon logo was in the top right corner, opposite Colin’s address. Scammers had copied all the details from Companies House of the real Insolvency Investigations, a legitimate company set up more than a decade ago.

From: Fraudsters stole £260k from Colin before he died. We called them up.

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While a person might be (and, indeed, was) fooled by a professional logo and nice quality paper, a bot would not be. A bout would be looking for a digital signature, a public key certificate and a resolvable certificate chain. A bot would know that this is not the real company, because the scammers would not have access to the real company’s private key.

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Why should fintech care?

This isn’t about nostalgia or clinging to old systems. It’s about designing a truly antifragile ecosystem, where redundancy is built in and payment continuity is guaranteed in every scenario. Fintech innovators should view cash not as competition, but as a complementary anchor that underwrites trust in the system.

From: When Digital Fails: Why Cash Still Matters in a Resilient Payments Ecosystem | The Cashless Society.

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France is preparing to launch digital national identity cards through the France Identité mobile application by mid-2025. The program will allow citizens to verify their identity and access government services using smartphones, as part of an expanding mobile-first strategy for digital identity. The move builds on existing efforts to digitize identification systems and is expected to advance France’s role in shaping European digital identity standards.

From: France to Introduce Digital Identity Cards via Mobile App in 2025 – ID Tech.

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Now a new trend in fintech is emerging: using AI for deep investment research.

Many companies wading into this space are using AI agents—code that can understand contextual information, make logical decisions and take actions. Agents can perform tasks like making investment recommendations or creating draft PowerPoint presentations. Just over the past month, trading app Robinhood and Arta Finance, a startup that aims to be a digital “family office” by giving wealthy consumers access to alternative investments, have announced new consumer-facing AI features.

From: Fintech’s Latest Trend: AI Agents For Investment Research.

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Introducing Robinhood Cortex, an AI investment tool launching later this year that is designed to provide real-time analysis and insights that help you better navigate the markets, identify opportunities, and stay up to date on the latest market moving news.

“High quality, premium investment and market analysis has historically been reserved for institutional investors and the rich,” said Abhishek Fatehpuria, VP of Brokerage Product at Robinhood. “Over time, Robinhood Cortex will completely transform the Robinhood experience as we strive to bridge that gap and put a premium research assistant right in your pocket.”

This is just the beginning of how we’ll use artificial intelligence to help power your investing experience at Robinhood. At launch, Robinhood Cortex is designed to up-level your trading and investing experience supporting:

Stock Digests: This helps you answer the age-old question of, “Why is this stock going up or down today?” With Robinhood Cortex, simply go to the stock detail page, and we will quickly generate a short summary of what’s happening in the world to impact that ticker.
Trade Builder: It’s a tool designed to simplify the trading process and help you learn about new strategies that align with your goals. For example, it makes the options trading experience more intuitive by helping you translate your beliefs about a stock into a specific options trade and strategy. We’ll use Robinhood Cortex to show you insights about price signals, technicals, market news, analyst reports, and more, and then Trade Builder will screen the market for trades to consider based on your inputs.

Robinhood Cortex is not placing trades for you, but instead helps you gather analysis and insights to inform your market outlook.

From: Introducing Robinhood Strategies, Robinhood Banking, and Robinhood Cortex – Robinhood Newsroom.

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Sweden’s Bank-ID system has experienced service disruptions due to a confirmed cyber attack, specifically a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Bank-ID officials have verified that while the attack has caused instability in the service, no data breach occurred and no user information was compromised.

The DDoS attack flooded the Bank-ID system with excessive traffic, preventing legitimate users from accessing the application. Bank-ID representatives explained that the malicious signals effectively blocked normal user access to the service. These types of attacks have become increasingly common against authentication services, following patterns similar to recent credential-targeting campaigns across Europe

From: Swedish Bank-ID Service Hit by DDoS Attack, No Data Compromised.

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