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
- Tweets5.8K
- Following4.8K
- Followers9.7K
- Likes826
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.
Subscribe to my weekly newsletter 👇
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
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
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
Dave Maddox retweeted
Armstrong is telling you AI agents need crypto because they can’t use banks, and nobody’s noticing that Visa, Mastercard, Google, Stripe, and PayPal already built the answer.
Visa completed hundreds of agent-initiated transactions in live pilots last year. Mastercard launched Agent Pay with tokenized credentials across all U.S. issuers. Google shipped an entire Agent Payments Protocol. Santander and Mastercard ran Europe’s first regulated AI agent payment two weeks ago.
The “agents can’t open bank accounts” framing sounds clean, but it skips what’s actually happening. Visa’s Trusted Agent Protocol uses cryptographic signatures to authenticate AI agents the same way it authenticates human cardholders. The agent gets a token linked to your account. No bank account needed for the agent. No KYC for the bot. The human already passed that gate.
This tells you everything about how the payments industry views this race. Coinbase’s x402 protocol has processed 50 million transactions since February, which sounds like scale until you realize Visa processes that volume roughly every 90 minutes. Visa is working with 100+ partners across six continents. Mastercard launched an entire Agent Suite in January with 4,000 advisors. These companies process 3.4 trillion transactions annually and they’re retooling all of it for agents.
The real constraint for AI agent payments is liability. When an agent books the wrong flight or buys the wrong size, who eats the cost? Visa’s Ramachandran said it directly: agents are now a fifth party in the dispute chain. Crypto has no dispute chain. No chargebacks. No consumer protection. For a billion agents making mistakes at machine speed, that’s a feature for Coinbase and a problem for the person whose agent just bought 400 economy seats to Mumbai.
Coinbase wins the long tail. Agent-to-agent micropayments, DeFi, on-chain operations where no merchant exists. That’s a real market. But “agents can’t use banks” is a 2024 take running on a 2026 timeline where Visa is telling merchants to prepare for AI agent checkout by holiday season.
The incumbents aren’t sleeping through this one. They’re spending more, moving faster, and they already have the merchants. Crypto becomes a rail for agents. Visa and Mastercard are betting their entire product roadmap it won’t be the primary one.
Dave Maddox retweeted
🚨The CEO of Coinbase just said something nobody's taking seriously enough.
AI agents will outnumber humans in transactions. Soon.
> "They can't open bank accounts. No ID. No SSN. Banks literally cannot serve them."
> "But they already own crypto wallets."
So the biggest economy of the next decade won't run through banks at all. It'll run through blockchains. Not because crypto won. Because banks physically can't onboard a customer that isn't human.
Banks weren't built for what's coming.
Dave Maddox retweeted
Stripe's CEO never studied finance.
Instead, he reverse-engineered PayPal’s docs—and built a $95 BILLION company at 22.
How? A learning method so powerful, it's now taught in colleges.
Here's his genius framework for learning anything fast: 🧵
Dave Maddox retweeted
Guys I have bad news.
Extraordinarily bad news.
We have 30 to 50 years before we get to full Post-Labor Economics.
The bottleneck isn't intelligence, or even robotics.
It's economic scale.
We ran all the numbers, and ran them again.
The primary question: "how long does it take to build a billion humanoid robots?"
Even if we double production capacity every 3 years, it takes two decades.
But there are multiple constraints: rare earth metals for batteries, actuators, and sensors are the biggest one by far.
Next is economies of scale.
For comparison, it took 92 years for the automobile to reach full saturation: 1900 to 1992. Now, we had a car culture by the 1950s... But that's still five decades and two industrial wars worth of innovation.
We did everything we could to speed it up: pneumatic hybrid robots are a no go. Air tanks need to be swapped every 20-30 minutes.
The ONE saving grace might be exotic actuators like electropolymer muscles. Right now, they just aren't strong enough. BUT, if we can make them stronger and cheaper, our petrochemical industrial base could accelerate the deployment of humanoid robots by a decade or two.
So what does this mean?
We'll hit AGI and ASI long before we can automate away all human labor. We might even hit the Singularity before we can scale up enough robots to replace all jobs.
Here's my current timeline:
2025 to 2030: Collapse of knowledge work. The "KVM Rule" applies: any job you can do entirely with a keyboard, video, and mouse will be fully replaced.
2030 to 2040: Droid scaling up starts to really make a dent.
2040 to 2060: We'll finally reach global labor substitution with robots.
What does this mean? There are a few jobs that are going to stick around for the foreseeable future:
1. Skilled labor. Robots will be able to do your job as a mechanic or welder very soon. However, there simply won't be enough robots to go around.
2. High Accountability Jobs: doctors, lawyers, comptrollers, financial advisors - all jobs that require license, insurance, and accountability. Also called statutory jobs (law requires a human or does not contemplate non-human labor)
3. Meaning Jobs: authenticity and sentimental premium. Celebrities, performers, influencers, athletes, priests, philosophers, and some educators, caretakers, etc
4. Complex Relationship Jobs: politicians, diplomats, negotiators, governance, account executive.
5. Capitalists. The ownership class will be fine. Always is.
So what can you do?
Upskill and reskill. Join the meaning economy or get into skilled trades. All you smart desk jockeys would make great HVAC techs, mechanics, linemen, and more. But just keep in mind you're going to have a lot of stiff competition.
There are a few silver linings to this news:
FIRST it means that we have longer to adapt to total economic upset. Yes, AI and robots will hypothetically be able to take all jobs within 5 years, but human bodies are still more abundant, more portable, and more energy efficient. This is a VERY deep moat.
SECOND it means that a Terminator style takeover is economically impossible. MIL-SPEC and NIST standards mean that ASI can't hack our hardware and even if we have a few AI bots, tanks and aircraft, humans win on sheer volume for many decades to come - more than long enough to solve alignment.
HOWEVER it means we'll have ordinary jobs for a lot longer than we'd like. Deployment will be uneven, so some economies will saturate with robots sooner than others.
BUT this gives PLE an avenue. Create ESOP and cooperatives that own a bunch of robots. That means we collectively buy, own, and operate robots for everything from construction to leasing to businesses, and we collect the rent. Or we tax the crap out of them.
What do you think? Can we figure out a faster way to ramp up humanoid robot production or are we doomed to skilled and unskilled blue collar work for the next generation?
Dave Maddox retweeted
Struggling to keep up with the fast-moving world of cross-border payments? Asia is leading the charge, and #Money2020Asia is where you’ll get ahead! RSVP for the #1 cross-border payments show in Asia: buff.ly/42Q0C28
Dave Maddox retweeted
The acquiring landscape is evolving, and software-integrated payments are at the center of this transformation. As acquirers look to stay competitive, key trends are reshaping the market.
🔹 Embedded finance is expanding—shifting beyond payments to include new financial services.
🔹 Merchant relationships are changing, with software partners playing a bigger role in retention and growth.
🔹 Strategic partnerships & M&A are becoming critical for acquirers looking to scale and differentiate.
What does this mean for the future of acquiring? Find out here: tsgpayments.com/exploring-th…
#TSGPayments #Payments #EmbeddedFinance #SoftwareIntegratedPayments #Acquiring #StrategicPartnerships #FutureofPayments
