Pete Cooling

the world is ready to be tokenized and crypto as a technology is winning

Nothing better than spending time in nature with one of the best collaborators in the payments space, @sherazshere

Not long ago, everyone thought you had to go to work physically. You had to work in an office. You had to hire people nearby, or relocate them. Now we know that’s simply not true. The whole transformation via remote work happened in a matter of years, and we’re never going back. This is about to happen with payments and money. Real-time payment rails offer faster, cheaper options for regional markets. Major brands now have stablecoins to connect those local rails together to form a global network. And this means anyone who believes payments will remain stuck in siloes is in for a major surprise. It’s not about kicking out the banks or the payment networks. It’s about everyone working together to participate the way they’d like. And this is exactly what @atumhq provides, a network where anyone can send and receive money according to their preferences. Atum is an open payments network that connects payment initiators, settlement providers, and payment rails allowing businesses to keep their customers and their stack. It’s more than payments. It’s about commerce. Everybody having a platform to exchange value the way that they want. Isn’t that the kind of freedom we need in commerce? That future is not guaranteed. We do it together.

There is so much flexing about headcount right now. And that’s an outcome of how much the world around us has changed. But let’s not oversimplify it. Successful businesses don’t happen without people. You can hire more contractors and outsourced teams and say you have fewer employees, sure, but that is not a flex. At Atum, we think in terms of partners: people with real ownership, accountability, and “skin in the game.” Count those people, then measure what the business produces. I have always said that net profit per person is the ultimate measure of Atum’s success. We are not there yet, but just wait. So my ethos remains: build a fast-growing, efficient business in terms of revenue or profit per person, but adjust for spend non- “employees”. Without the adjustment, headcount remains nothing more than a vanity metric.

I started @atumhq because exchanging money should cost less: for everyone, everywhere. Right now, payment processing fees are embedded into virtually everything we buy and sell. These are real costs that reach into every household, and until we make major changes, these costs are not going away. These expenditures come first. Only after payment companies are paid, can necessities like food, clothing, and shelter be provided. We all desire a more abundant and gratifying life. Individuals and businesses deserve to keep more of the money they earn. People deserve to work more for themselves, and less to cover the costs of an outdated payments infrastructure. To me, this is about the meaning of freedom. And without the freedom to exchange our hard-earned money without penalty, we suffer a curtailment of our liberty. We’re building Atum to be the open payments network for global money movement for exactly this reason. Because I personally believe >100% of legacy payment system costs businesses incur are passed through to consumers. You can call it an indirect fee, a hidden cost, or even a tax on commerce. Whatever you call it, it’s real - and it’s embedded in the price of nearly everything we buy. Do you think it’s more or less? Why?

Do you know how to harness your imagination? If you want to work at @atumhq, you’ll need to. The scarcest resource in the world today is the ability to imagine what does not yet exist and figure out how to make it possible. It’s a distinctly human capacity that combines technical proficiency and creativity. At Atum, our hiring approach emphasizes more than pure analytical ability. We are builders who pair strong reasoning skills with creative spirit, intuition, curiosity, and big-picture thinking. Because the best ideas come from seeing possibilities that logic alone almost always misses. Today, AI can produce analytic work better and faster than most of us had ever imagined. Tomorrow’s inventors will be an abstraction above, guiding the ship toward destinations that even the most sophisticated models can’t reach on their own. The question is no longer: which candidate is the top technologist? At Atum, it is: where can we find the world’s next Da Vincis? If the unconventional attitudes we cultivate at Atum permeate across tech (which they should), it will transform the products we build, the ways we live, and what becomes possible. The road ahead at Atum will not be easy. But I’ll be damned if it isn’t imaginative, creative, and above all, fulfilling. We do it together, and that is why we will win.

gm quick PSA - Atum is not in Singapore at Token. We are heads down building the future of payments. The team is locked in, laser focused on our mission to bring you money the way it ought to be. Nothing else matters.

Not possible.

We create nothing that isn’t created together. So excited to see what people build with @atumhq .

A week has passed since @atumhq launched. The moment has been special, yet it's only the first of many more to come. We have been flooded with payments, partner requests, and direct requests from enterprises and the developer community. We are thrilled with everyone’s participation 🙏 You all will shape what we build next. I want to hear from you: - what topic are you most curious to learn more about? - where are you blocked while onboarding? - what would you build on Atum first? This is the fun part. We do it together. Check out the docs: docs.atum.xyz/

Welcome to Atum. That’s what we tell every new partner when they first touch the network. And now we’re saying it to you. Because today, @atumhq, the open payments network, a first of its kind, is live. We picked the date intentionally. Today, September 22, marks the autumnal equinox (in the northern hemisphere), a threshold through which the world passes, from one season into another. Atum occupies a similar boundary: between light and darkness, chaos and order, ending and renewal. Atum, as a platform, is positioned at the transition from closed, institution-specific payment systems to an open, programmable network. Atum is also the creator god symbol in ancient Egypt. Atum is the first, the primordial, and the originating god of creation. Atum provides the basic building blocks for payments and commerce - the infrastructure, tooling, products and services that make money move the way it ought to. Our team is comprised of leading payments and onchain experts from companies like @Visa, @coinbase, @chainlink, @CashApp, @tempo, and more. It’s a new world for payments and commerce. And it is my ultimate pleasure, passion, and life’s purpose to introduce Atum, the open payments network. We are so glad you’re here. Welcome to Atum. We do it together. → atum.xyz/

👀 huge news is coming tomorrow. Get ready. We do it together.

4 days to launch. We are so freaking locked in right now.

Base and Solana are the winning chains for payments. USDC + USDT is the forever duopoly for stablecoins. They have a first-mover advantage and will be impossible to displace, just like the card networks, right? WRONG. Anyone who took this view (and some STILL cling to it) has since been awakening to a new reality. Over the past 12 months, new payments-focused blockchains and stablecoins have emerged, forcing investors around the world to reconsider the market’s rapidly shifting landscape. Let me tell you why the market was so slow and, in some cases, still isn’t recognizing what’s happening beneath the surface of this budding industry for payments and commerce. But first, story time… It was March 2025 (pre-Genius Act, pre-Tempo and Arc, and pre-OUSD), and I was fundraising. Still a guy at that time who was just a few “no’s” away from sleeping in my car, yet only one “yes” away from my dream of founding and operating the most ambitious new payments company in the world. My entire life’s journey to that point had prepared me for this moment. I showed up to every meeting with absolute conviction, undeterred if the investor’s views opposed mine. I knew this was a matter of *when*, not *if*, and felt certain it would prove true. Our opinions diverged most widely around three key assumptions: 1. Belief that there would be MANY payments-focused blockchains 2. Absolute conviction that MANY new medium-of-exchange stablecoins would be launched by global brands in the proceeding 24 months 3. Agents would start making payments at volumes not seen since DeFi summer 2020 The response I received was, “We just don’t see any data to support your thesis.” And almost every VC vehemently opposed at least 1 out of 3 of the assumptions above. It was true that at that time there wasn’t data to support the three assumptions. But my experience traversed decades of building payments systems, during which time I observed a repeating phenomenon - fragmentation. Increasing fragmentation in payments always led to outright competition, copying, and little innovation, and that put constant downward pressure on margins. This is why I was convinced it would happen again with stablecoins. An investment thesis is an argument about what is probable, built from a strong inductive reasoning pattern. If the data already proves it, it’s no longer a thesis. As of today, Tempo has surpassed $1B in volume, Arc is live, and more payments-focused chains will follow. At the same time, OUSD launched with 140+ globally recognizable fintechs and 21 banks got together to create their own stablecoin. But the third leg of my thesis is the part that has yet to be proven. And I KNOW it’s coming. Agentic payments will scale so much faster than most people realize. Should I say it louder? AGENTIC PAYMENTS WILL SCALE SO MUCH FASTER THAN MOST PEOPLE REALIZE. The new payments stack was never built JUST for humans. Today people move money by manually clicking buttons. We’ve all felt the pain of acting like a robot logging onto an app, waiting for it to load, clicking a dropdown selector, selecting USDC, authenticating with 2FA, and so on. Oh. My. God. Save us all. This technology was built from the ground up for agents to move money around the world without the need for humans to be present to pay for things online. Agents are programs. Humans get tired and make mistakes. They lose their keys and wallets. Agents need identity and better tooling to prevent fraud. And with the pace of change in AI, there will absolutely be more fraud vectors to protect against. Regardless, the agent will execute the program autonomously according to its ruleset 24/7 and never get tired or need a break. This is the future. It’s like Claude Code vs programming in 2005 applied to payments. If you could see what I see, you’d know that agents are already moving money. Next up, payment volume scales. And the acceleration curve will be faster and steeper than anyone is projecting. More is coming. A lot more, and soon.

NOTHING changes because of yesterday. Everything we built has been designed for the inevitable future that’s coming, and it’s for agents AND humans. Our industry will end up with a much more favorable set of rules than even we were expecting. The only question is when. All I see is more optimism, enthusiasm, and passion rising up to get something meaningful over the line. My guess is we will have an even better deal in the end and more compromise. Until then we remain steadfast and undeterred.

How I’m feeling. In 9 days, we will share the story of our company with the world, wearing our hearts on our sleeves. While the final days of summer countdown, I feel like it’s finally time to slow down for a moment to reflect: Founders doing this for the money have it all wrong. How boring. Life is more adventurous and exciting without money. Money buys comfort and ease. If this is what you’re after as a founder, you have literally zero chance of reaching your desired outcome. Zero. Do it for the beauty, the art, the craft, the creation, the comradery, the growth, the pain, the suffering and only there, in fact past there, is where you win. And by the time you get it, you no longer even need it. By that point you’ve self-destructed your ego to the point where all that is left is perpetual bliss at the endless magic this world has to offer. I want things too. I want to buy all the books I could ever read in this lifetime. I want healthy, fresh, real food. Give me a dojo to train, and a house with good bones and a high vibration where I can work, rest, and play. Not too big, low maintenance. Feng shui. Anything more than this, for me, is theatre - go for it, but don’t expect it will give you anything more than you already are.

Tokenized cards —> tokenized tickets —> tokenized identity —> tokenized money —> tokenized stocks —> tokenized deposits This is the underpinning of the most monumental shift in the history of the financial world, but most will miss it. Are you paying enough attention?