Steven Zeiler

Built payment infrastructure at Ripple. Now building decentralized trading infrastructure at @Yellow.
The trust model is the bottleneck. Collateral fixes it.

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

When we built payments at Ripple, trust became a hurdle pretty quickly.

Imagine you develop innovative technology, you come to a bank, and they're ready for an upgrade.

But their correspondent bank is skeptical of the new system. So the deal tanks.

Trust issues like that show up throughout time and space.

At Yellow, we've learned the lesson taught by the correspondent banking, and so we designed an escrow mechanism that requires no trust between counterparties.

Yellow is innovative by design.

[Alexis Sirkia @AlexisYellow]

To trust or not to trust — that is the question shaping agentic economy and its products.

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

@kryptoreenx Yeah! Very glad about that.

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

Just gave my buddy an upgrade from OpenClaw to Hermes. Thankfully he has the same brain as before since we saved his gbrain in postgres on supabase.

He was able to restore his SOUL.md and core memories without much fuss.

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

Another challenge is to hold the agents to sticking with decisions made and not getting distracted.

But the same goes with leading people!

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

We started a new company from scratch with an AI-native approach where as many decisions and actions as possible are taken by our AI agents.

Our mission is to build an AI that helps companies grow revenue faster.

Thanks to Hermes and OpenClaw this has already been super fun and illuminating.

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

The rule of law is one of humanity's most critical inventions, but for the vast majority good law has been always out of reach.

We are going to see the cost of justice drop by 99% and everyone will be able to benefit legally in the way that only the richest corporations could before.

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Legal AI superempowers normal individuals with no legal background to fight big institutions in bureaucracies and in courts on a level knowledge/skill playing field, for the first time in human history. As such, it is one of the most inspiring applications of AI.

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

What's with the massive XLM pump this week?

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation announced a partnership to enable tokenized versions of traditional assets like stocks, ETFs, US Treasuries and corporate bonds issued directly on Stellar blockchain.

Same tech as XRP too.

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

@jeremykauffman Thiel likely knows much more presciently what insanity is coming our way.

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

@StefanMolyneux dehydration probably

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

@DH_OnChain_dev Fixing it one post at a time! Retweets work too :)

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

When I was a teenager, my great-grandmother gave me a bag of old American coins.

She had been a banker in her day. The coins were pre-1965, back when US dimes, quarters, and dollars were 90% silver. Real money. She had quietly accumulated them over decades.

I noticed something strange.

A 10-cent piece from her collection was worth around five dollars. A quarter was worth more. The silver dollars people had gifted me for Boy Scout achievements were worth more again.

The coins hadn't changed. But the dollar had.

So I started reading. I wanted to understand what had happened to American money. I read about the Federal Reserve, the Bretton Woods system, the closing of the gold window in 1971. Look up the chart of US wages versus purchasing power. They tracked together for decades, then suddenly diverged. That's the year.

Before 1971, Americans were getting richer fast. Almost everyone. After 1971, real wages stagnated and never recovered. People became objectively poorer.

Most Americans still don't know this happened. They feel it. They can't explain it. They blame the wrong things.

This is what started me on the path. Studying gold. Studying monetary economics. Eventually finding Bitcoin and realizing it had every property of great money, in a form that no politician could ever take away.

People used to know that you save money to protect your future. That was normal. That was the default. We can get back to that. We're going to get back to that.

[Alexis Sirkia @AlexisYellow]

Growing up in Andorra before the Euro, money was anything but abstract.

Every shopkeeper had cash drawers overflowing with French francs, Spanish pesetas, and Deutschmarks. Because local banks were slow to update their rates, price discrepancies happened every day.

My grandmother noticed and started doing FX arbitrage on the road.

She’d withdraw a stack of pesetas from one bank, walk three streets over to another, and sell them for more francs than she started with. Then she'd do it again and again.

Looking back at the success of GSR and now Yellow, I realize just how much that Pyrenean environment shaped my beliefs about markets, and how it helped attract the right people.

@modernfintech had a similar spark when his grandmother gifted him a cache of silver coins. It forced him to look past the surface and understand the true nature of value. That curiosity eventually led him to Bitcoin, Ripple, and now, his quest continues with us.

Obvious in retrospect, it takes a steady mind to remain persistent and push through with an idea that will only bear fruit in five or ten years.

Until then, you just focus on doing it well today.

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

2013 was the year. I wasn't quite sold yet on quitting my job to dive into Ripple. It was a tiny startup, and they were hosting a side event at Money20/20 in Las Vegas.

Stefan Thomas, the CTO, was presenting his vision for smart contracts on Ripple and the plan to build programmable money directly into the Ripple ledger so you could run all kinds of applications.

The minds behind 'Colored Coins' were there too, some of whom ended up at the Omni Protocol and, later, Tether. Can't forget a certain editor from Bitcoin Magazine back then, Vitalik Buterin, who was exploring smart contracts with Stefan and David Schwartz.

We went to Google headquarters in Mountain View a few times to meet with their secure compute team. They had a product called NaCl, a secure sandbox for executing untrusted code safely inside Chrome. We were working with them to figure out how to leverage that technology to execute code in a trustless way on the Ripple system.

But the organization was growing rapidly, and the decision was made to pivot to a pure payments model. Our primary customers would be banks, which meant we needed to freeze the Ripple protocol. To ensure the absolute security and stability of the platform, arbitrary code execution and smart contracts were taken off the table.

In other words, the business side didn’t really buy into the vision for programmable money. They asked us to spin smart contracts out into a separate R&D project and just merge them back into the main Ripple code later.

Right around that point, Vitalik launched Ethereum.

Ethereum exploded because programmable money and trustless execution were the real paradigm shift. At the time, XRP was the number two coin by market cap, but Ethereum quickly surpassed it by an order of magnitude.

The lesson we learned later at Ripple was just how massive of an opportunity we had missed.

The value of public, auditable code that is guaranteed to execute exactly the same way every time is immense. It virtually eliminates counterparty risk. Certain categories of human friction are entirely wiped out when you can place your trust in code.

[Farhad @fatkhuloff]

https://t.co/XwdZAVNG1g

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

@jeremykauffman @corymassimino loooll

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

Bull case for crypto by 2030: there's nothing stopping the inflation train, first of all.

AI agents are going to be using a lot more money and it's a lot easier for them to use blockchain wallets than it is to use bank accounts.

Anyone can give agents money with blockchain.

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

Validator committees and the correspondent banking problem are driven by the same root cause: a lack of trust.

Trust has been a bottleneck building payments at Ripple, and it remains a blocker today.

Yellow's escrow replaces trust with code, making settlement much more reliable, predictable, and scalable.

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

Money constantly evolves and opportunities to improve it and profit will always abound.

[Alexis Sirkia @AlexisYellow]

Growing up in Andorra before the Euro, money was anything but abstract.

Every shopkeeper had cash drawers overflowing with French francs, Spanish pesetas, and Deutschmarks. Because local banks were slow to update their rates, price discrepancies happened every day.

My grandmother noticed and started doing FX arbitrage on the road.

She’d withdraw a stack of pesetas from one bank, walk three streets over to another, and sell them for more francs than she started with. Then she'd do it again and again.

Looking back at the success of GSR and now Yellow, I realize just how much that Pyrenean environment shaped my beliefs about markets, and how it helped attract the right people.

@modernfintech had a similar spark when his grandmother gifted him a cache of silver coins. It forced him to look past the surface and understand the true nature of value. That curiosity eventually led him to Bitcoin, Ripple, and now, his quest continues with us.

Obvious in retrospect, it takes a steady mind to remain persistent and push through with an idea that will only bear fruit in five or ten years.

Until then, you just focus on doing it well today.

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

@RealAlexJones cities *

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

@CoachDanGo I am satisfied targeting 1g per pound ideal body weight.

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

@AlfieJCarter 31

[Farhad @fatkhuloff]

How can AI agents interact with each other without trusting each other?

@AlexisYellow and @modernfintech break down what it means to have trustless, P2P architecture with state channels.

What's Covered:

- $20 trillion dollar problem of trust in an autonomous AI agent economy.
- Why decentralization by itself is entirely meaningless
- Smart contracts + escrow to remove counterparty risk
- Issuing credit cards directly to autonomous AI agents to execute retail transactions.

Highlights

00:00 Introduction to TEAMZ Summit 2026 in Tokyo

00:09 Flipping a joke about shoes into a serious discussion on the mechanics of trust

00:30 A personal story of unexpected trust and car keys in a college dorm room

02:03 Tracing the shift from emotional human connection to trust in a digital economy

02:23 Losing a quarter-million dollars to a lunar-shoe Kickstarter scam

02:58 How PayPal pioneered the broker escrow layer for Web 1.0 strangers on eBay

03:21 Quantifying the massive twenty trillion dollar autonomous AI agent market space

04:05 Buying twenty thousand Ethereum in 2014 and fighting traditional finance mindsets at GSR

05:04 Why state channels provide the ultimate scalability for automated machine transactions

05:47 Live demo of an autonomous AI agent booking a flight ticket from Barcelona to Tokyo

06:37 Defeating malicious network actors through smart contract deposit slashing mechanics

07:20 Why decentralization is merely a means to achieve absolute trustlessness

08:32 Measuring developer traction and active ecosystem apps on the Yellow platform

09:10 Breaking down the retail vs institutional split in autonomous commerce projections

09:21 Acquiring an EMI license to issue functional credit cards directly to AI agents

10:14 Deep dive into the core team's enterprise backgrounds at Ripple, GSR, Polkadot, and Bybit

12:00 Opening the Yellow SDK to the global developer community

[Steven Zeiler @modernfintech]

@DiegoMYellow @Yellow @Ripple 😉🤭