Logan

mostly fintech

[Logan @LoganTeix]

Prediction markets aren't betting apps. They're evolving into a new form of asset class with the opportunity to transform their infrastructure to unlock 100x volumes and widespread adoption overnight.

Think about the NYSE, CME, and CBOE. Once chaotic trading floors where people met to trade, now operate as backend exchanges fulfilling order flow from brokers like Schwab and Fidelity. Kalshi and Polymarket are making the same evolution, and will specialize in creating markets, executing settlements, and facilitating disputes, while ditching direct retail for brokerage partnerships.

[Logan @LoganTeix]

FCF is strong and the multiple looks cheap, but PayPal’s revenue growth has slowed to low-single digits amid heavy competition from faster players like Stripe. The core business risks continued share loss as payments evolve. Even with buybacks, without real acceleration it feels more like a slow grind (or shrinking relevance) than a multi-year compounder

[Logan @LoganTeix]

Stripe buying PayPal is a big fat mistake. The last thing this young company growing $1T in payments at 35% YoY needs is a weak legacy company growing 7% YoY.

Sure there’s value to be found in Venmo, the worst managed company on Earth, but it’s not worth the distraction for a turnaround project.

[Logan @LoganTeix]

@KobeissiLetter Besides a snap back to the mean and $SMCI earnings, there’s no reason markets should be up so far this week.

Bearish.

[Logan @LoganTeix]

@PredMTrader Hackney is beast for searching every rideshare app at the same time:

https://t.co/kFp2S83SUP

[Logan @LoganTeix]

Belief and certainty are transferable. In a world that less black and white than you think you can transfer your belief to get things across the line.

This only works if you truly believe it, because people can feel if you don’t.

[Logan @LoganTeix]

I don't know if you get to live more than once, but if you live the right way than once is enough.

[Logan @LoganTeix]

True self-care only comes from doing things for other people.

[Logan @LoganTeix]

NFTs are quietly clawing their way back, and the numbers back it up.

Polymarket bettors just pushed the odds of an NFT "comeback" in 2026 to 65%, the highest ever recorded, up 30 points in a single week. Market cap has climbed back above $3 billion. Trading volume jumped more than 26% in recent sessions. Active participation is up roughly 80% year over year.

This isn't 2021 again, though. CryptoPunks are still down 80% from their peak. Bored Apes have lost 95% of their value. The traders who made fortunes flipping JPEGs during the bull run mostly aren't the ones showing up now.

What's showing up instead is utility. Gaming NFTs now account for nearly 38% of all transaction volume, the largest single category in the market, driven by actual playable titles like Illuvium and Gods Unchained rather than the play-to-earn models that collapsed last cycle. Analysts project the broader market could grow from around $43 billion in 2025 to $60.82 billion this year.

The real story isn't that NFTs are back to being a mania. It's that after years of being declared dead, a smaller, more utility-driven version of the market is finding its floor, built on actual gameplay and ownership instead of the hope that someone else pays more for the same picture tomorrow.

[Logan @LoganTeix]

Your quality of life is how happy you are minus envy.

[Logan @LoganTeix]

being token efficient might be the only way Grok can gain market share

[Lee Robinson @leerob]

Grok 4.5 is really good at React.

It's also very affordable and token efficient!

[Logan @LoganTeix]

FINTECH IS BACK

fintech startups raised 23% more money than last year in the first half of the year at $28.6 billion.

[Logan @LoganTeix]

Kalshi launches prediction markets for drug trials. Interested to insiders come out of the woods from both the FDA and drug company sides.

[Logan @LoganTeix]

Wow seems like a serious opportunity for brokerages to make more of a presence in Brazil. For example in Australia where 33% of adults gamble online, 33% of adults also participate in the stock market. Seems like this appetite for gambling risk should also transfer to an investing appetite.

[Logan @LoganTeix]

The interoperability angle is the real story though. By going open and vendor-neutral, x402 is betting that payments-for-agents becomes a shared internet standard, like TCP/IP or HTTP itself, not a walled garden owned by one payments giant.

Whether it becomes THE standard is still an open question. But when Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, AWS, and Google all show up to the same governance table for the same protocol, that's a signal worth paying attention to.

The agent economy needs rails. This might be them.

[Logan @LoganTeix]

The internet has had a payment problem since day one. HTTP shipped in 1991 with a "402 Payment Required" status code... that never got used.
35 years later, it's finally happening. And it's built for AI agents...

x402 - a protocol that embeds payments directly into web requests. No redirects, no checkout pages, no API keys for billing. Just: agent makes a request, payment clears, data flows back.

Coinbase built it. Now it's going fully open.

[Logan @LoganTeix]

Picture the endgame: your AI agent negotiates a price for a dataset, verifies quality, pays in stablecoins, and reports back; all in the time it takes you to read this tweet.

That's "agentic commerce." x402 wants to be the plumbing underneath it.

[Logan @LoganTeix]

Citadel makes another push into crypto market infrastructure with a $400M investment in Crypto(dot)com.

This follows over a billion dollars invested in Kraken, Ripple, Canton, and other institutional digital asset platforms.

[Logan @LoganTeix]

@cremieuxrecueil the biases of the refs are still priced in