US Financial Services Blockchain Business Dev. Named top 100 to follow in payments fintech. Read a lot tweet a few. Tweets do not represent IBM.
Atlanta
Joined December 2010
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Hey @elonmusk if Texas doesn’t want you. We will take you in Alabama. Huntsville has a great space workforce.
Dave Maddox retweeted
Chase and Wells Fargo write AI agent liability into customer agreements.
From Oct 27, if Chase customers’ External AI “exceeds the authority you gave it,” they assume the risk. Wells Fargo follows on Nov 24.
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buff.ly/Es3XJap
Dave Maddox retweeted
I get in a room with 2,000 bankers and ask two questions.
First: how many of you have closed a primary financial relationship in the last five years?
Virtually nobody raises their hand.
Then: how many of you have opened an account at a fintech, a neobank, or an organization that didn't exist 10 years ago?
Virtually everybody.
That gap is silent attrition.
Our attrition rate still reads 1 to 2%, so we say we're okay. The account didn't close. It just isn't used the way it was. I haven't closed my account either. I'm sending money to Acorns, to Robinhood, to SoFi.
You won't see it unless you measure it. The good news is it's available today. Funds flow analysis can be close to turnkey through various vendors if you ask for it. Then you have to understand what you're looking at.
❓ How many of your "primary" customers are still primary?
I broke this down with Lee Wetherington of @JH_Fintech, walking through their 2026 Strategy Benchmark Study, on Banking Transformed. Link in the first comment.
📌 Full episode: youtube.com/watch?v=mkMRQe2J…
Dave Maddox retweeted
Block owns the bank and the acquirer.
Its pitch to Square sellers: sales land instantly, idle cash earns 4.25% (on $10K+), and loan offers run on real-time sales data.
Bank + acquiring under one roof is the moat.
buff.ly/Haptgdf
Dave Maddox retweeted
🤝 Fiserv is adding Raj Seshadri, senior strategic advisor to Mastercard’s CEO and a 10-year Mastercard veteran, to its board on Nov. 30.
Full story on PYMNTS. hubs.ly/Q04Cf32B0
So if humanoid robots take over 50% of the jobs. How will the governments replace the loss in income taxes?
Dave Maddox retweeted
M2020. Top Recaps - Part 1. Stripe is not only the payment engine for Muse, they are actually core to Meta's economics. The 300bps linked card is providing meta with ~100bps of revenue. Card networks are enabling the economics of Agentic. This works beyond Stripe merchants, and beyond Link wallets. The linked card creates alignment with Meta and Stripe. While Stripe may be capable of creating an alternative payment network, they can't create the economics (merchant acceptance of a 300bps card for stripe and non-stripe merchants).
Big retailers are set to block this card (and "wallet") due to price, most of the large merchants require customer auth with merchant. The merchant friendly solution to Muse and agent integration is form @LoginID_io. A fantastic merchant friendly integration to their Auth. Expect a presentation w/ MRC.
Dave Maddox retweeted
UPDATE: Fireblocks has denied this rumor or any knowledge of it!
Quite emphatically.
Visa is in late-stage talks to buy Fireblocks for ~$2.5bn (Axios)
That is roughly 70% below the $8bn valuation Fireblocks raised at in 2022.
Fireblocks runs custody and wallet infrastructure for 2,400+ institutions, including BNY Mellon and BNP Paribas, and says it has secured over $10tn in transfers. It has become the biggest player in digital asset custody.
But increasingly it's expanding in more directions and product cross-sell, while underneath, competitors like DFNS are winning market share and mind share. Fireblocks hasn't raised in a while.
Visa's stablecoin settlement crossed a $20bn annualized run rate in September, up 15x in a year, with 160+ stablecoin-linked card programs live. They're arguably ahead on stablecoin-linked cards.
Then Mastercard bought BVNK, Visa's settlement and OTC partner. While Fireblocks isn't a like-for-like (Visa now partners with many in that space), it does take custody, arguably a harder piece to do in-house.
And the strategy here is fascinating to observe
To my mind, Visa wants to be the provider of choice for any FI going onchain, especially the big banks. Fireblocks is a large book of enterprise clients and fits exactly where I think Visa is going.
Cards are where stablecoins drive Visa today.
As settlement for non-card payments starts to go onchain, Visa needs the wallet and custody plumbing underneath those flows. Fireblocks then looks like a logical play.
Visa gets the enterprise relationships and the plumbing in one deal. Fireblocks customers now have a custody vendor owned by a card network, and some exchanges and Mastercard-aligned banks will think twice. DFNS and the rest now compete with a vendor that has Visa's sales team already inside the big banks.
It reminds me that Standard Chartered also said it would take full ownership of Zodia Custody.
Digital asset custody is consolidating into the incumbents.
Visa paid $2bn for CyberSource in 2010 to own the e-commerce gateway. (Arguably no longer *the default* gateway, but certainly one that's very successful at least in part due to Visa's market distribution).
This is that play for onchain.
For Fireblocks, this is a down round and a half if it happens. But not dissimilar from what we've seen in SaaS with bending spoons. A lot of companies got bid up high in the 2021 era, and no matter how successful and how much revenue they pile on, it's still big shoes to fill.
Fireblocks is a talent team, so I wish them well if this is true or not. Either way. Keep doing things.
Visa and Fireblocks both sponsor tokenized, but as you'd hopefully imagine, I have no insight or color on this from either team and haven't spoken to anyone there about it.
Dave Maddox retweeted
Visa is in late-stage talks to buy Fireblocks for ~$2.5bn (Axios)
That is roughly 70% below the $8bn valuation Fireblocks raised at in 2022.
Fireblocks runs custody and wallet infrastructure for 2,400+ institutions, including BNY Mellon and BNP Paribas, and says it has secured over $10tn in transfers. It has become the biggest player in digital asset custody.
But increasingly it's expanding in more directions and product cross-sell, while underneath, competitors like DFNS are winning market share and mind share. Fireblocks hasn't raised in a while.
Visa's stablecoin settlement crossed a $20bn annualized run rate in September, up 15x in a year, with 160+ stablecoin-linked card programs live. They're arguably ahead on stablecoin-linked cards.
Then Mastercard bought BVNK, Visa's settlement and OTC partner. While Fireblocks isn't a like-for-like (Visa now partners with many in that space), it does take custody, arguably a harder piece to do in-house.
And the strategy here is fascinating to observe
To my mind, Visa wants to be the provider of choice for any FI going onchain, especially the big banks. Fireblocks is a large book of enterprise clients and fits exactly where I think Visa is going.
Cards are where stablecoins drive Visa today.
As settlement for non-card payments starts to go onchain, Visa needs the wallet and custody plumbing underneath those flows. Fireblocks then looks like a logical play.
Visa gets the enterprise relationships and the plumbing in one deal. Fireblocks customers now have a custody vendor owned by a card network, and some exchanges and Mastercard-aligned banks will think twice. DFNS and the rest now compete with a vendor that has Visa's sales team already inside the big banks.
It reminds me that Standard Chartered also said it would take full ownership of Zodia Custody.
Digital asset custody is consolidating into the incumbents.
Visa paid $2bn for CyberSource in 2010 to own the e-commerce gateway. (Arguably no longer *the default* gateway, but certainly one that's very successful at least in part due to Visa's market distribution).
This is that play for onchain.
For Fireblocks, this is a down round and a half if it happens. But not dissimilar from what we've seen in SaaS with bending spoons. A lot of companies got bid up high in the 2021 era, and no matter how successful and how much revenue they pile on, it's still big shoes to fill.
Fireblocks is a talent team, so I wish them well if this is true or not. Either way. Keep doing things.
Visa and Fireblocks both sponsor tokenized, but as you'd hopefully imagine, I have no insight or color on this from either team and haven't spoken to anyone there about it.
Dave Maddox retweeted
After last night’s debate, the differences between Letitia James and me could not be more clear.
I joined Fox & Friends this morning to discuss what’s at stake in this election, our sharply different approaches to public safety, and my plan to bring accountability back to the Attorney General’s Office.
Dave Maddox retweeted
Vice President JD Vance on H1-B visas:
"If you’re going to bring in an accountant making $45,000 a year to replace an accountant who is an American making $60,000 a year, that’s not you using the program to bring in a genius. That’s you destroying American jobs and defrauding the American people... my view is the H1-B program is completely broken."
Dave Maddox retweeted
Love this Visa card issuance playground from @lightspark. Amazing to see all of the ways that stablecoins and a new class of enablers have lowered the barrier to entry for developers to issue Visa cards across the world.
docs.lightspark.com/cards/de…
Dave Maddox retweeted
Socrates said the democracy of Rome had a problem. They kept electing politicians that were popular but incompetent. He called them Sophists.
Plato expanded.
Politicians have:
Intelligence without wisdom
Confidence without competence
Persuasive skills without genuine expertise
Essentially, they don’t know what they don’t know
Plato used the example of electing a captain to navigate a ship. One captain has never navigated a ship but confidently tells everyone the trip will be easy and everyone will receive riches beyond expectations. The other captain has navigated the voyage multiple times but explains all the challenges with the trip and risk of failure.
One provides opinion the other knowledge. Unfortunately confident amateurs win over humble experts every time.
The voters of the ship choose the confident captain and the ship sinks. A ship of fools.
This is not a Republican or Democrat problem it is an American problem. @ScottJenningsKY
Socrates said the democracy of Rome had a problem. They kept electing politicians that were popular but incompetent. He called them Sophists.
Plato expanded.
Politicians have:
Intelligence without wisdom
Confidence without competence
Persuasive skills without genuine expertise
Essentially, they don’t know what they don’t know
Plato used the example of electing a captain to navigate a ship. One captain has never navigated a ship but confidently tells everyone the trip will be easy and everyone will receive riches beyond expectations. The other captain has navigated the voyage multiple times but explains all the challenges with the trip and risk of failure.
One provides opinion the other knowledge. Unfortunately confident amateurs win over humble experts every time.
The voters of the ship choose the confident captain and the ship sinks. A ship of fools.
This is not a Republican or Democrat problem it is an American problem. @ScottJenningsKY
Everyone is concerned humanoid robots will take their jobs. What if there was a law that only individual humans could own robots with a maximum of three robots. Then humans could deploy those robots to generate income at factories or at home. @elonmusk
Dave Maddox retweeted
Elon Musk just quietly launched a bank inside X.
6% APY on deposits.
3% cashback on purchases.
But almost no one understands what this actually means...
Here's what everyone is missing about the June 25 update, and why PayPal, Cash App, and Venmo just got put on notice:
X started rolling out X Money to a small group of U.S. Premium+ users.
This is the product Musk has been talking about since he bought Twitter:
The "everything app." Social, payments, transfers, eventually broader banking.
Peer-to-peer transfers powered by Visa Direct for near real-time settlement.
A metal Visa debit card.
For context, the national average savings rate in the U.S. is well below 1%.
The highest yield on the typical big-bank checking account is roughly 0%.
X is offering 6%.
That number alone is enough to make every consumer fintech CFO in America uncomfortable.
Now look at the regulatory groundwork most coverage skipped.
X has secured more than 25 money transmitter licenses across U.S. states.
That is the legal foundation for operating payments at national scale.
It takes years to assemble and millions in legal and compliance work.
Musk has been quietly doing that work for two years while critics insisted X was a dying ad business.
Here's what the media keeps missing:
X Money is designed to make X the place your money lives.
Once your paycheck lands in X Money, your savings earn 6%, your card lives in the app, and your transfers happen inside the same feed where you read the news, the math of leaving gets ugly.
PayPal doesn't have a feed.
Cash App doesn't have a social graph.
Venmo can't offer 6% APY without bleeding cash.
X is the only consumer platform on earth that can run a social network and a banking product through the same login.
For 20 years, you've logged into your bank, your brokerage, Venmo, and your social apps separately.
X is collapsing all of that into one login.
This is the WeChat playbook.
Payments, transfers, commerce, and social all inside one app. WeChat now processes trillions in payments annually inside China.
Musk has said publicly that WeChat is the model. Most people dismissed it as hype.
Retail investors look at headlines and react. The wealthy look at the rails and position.
A 6% APY launching inside a global social platform is a signal about where consumer finance is going.
You can scroll past it and assume it doesn't matter to your portfolio.
Or you can run a system that pays attention to structural shifts instead of headlines.
Surmount helps you automate your investments with rules-based strategies built on data, not narratives...
Dave Maddox retweeted
Why hasn’t the government transitioned from paper cards for Social Security and Medicare to a credit card type chip and pin. No bank would be offering paper credit cards!!
@SocialSecurity @MedicareGov @CNN @smerconish
Why hasn’t the government transitioned from paper cards for Social Security and Medicare to a credit card type chip and pin. No bank would be offering paper credit cards!!
@SocialSecurity @MedicareGov @CNN @smerconish