STONΞ

Founder & CEO @eversendapp | Stablecoin-powered payments & APIs | Global USD/EUR accounts

[Alex Johnson @AlexH_Johnson]

Can Stripe build Circle before Circle builds Stripe?

There’s an opportunity for someone to use a regulated, USD-backed stablecoin to significantly disrupt the global payments ecosystem.

This is not a big direct revenue generation opportunity because the economics of stablecoins aren’t that good (especially if there’s any competition). However, it is a big indirect revenue generation opportunity if you can stack value-add services on top of a ubiquitous stablecoin rail.

Circle is well on its way to owning that regulated, USD-backed stablecoin rail. More recently, it has been working to build out those value-add services (CCTP, CPN, USYC, agentic payments capabilities, etc.)

Stripe obviously has a ton of value-add payments services already built. It has been working to retrofit those services for stablecoins and to build new, stablecoin-native value-add services.

The problem for Stripe is that it doesn’t control the underlying stablecoin payment rail. Circle does and it has been working to vertically integrate it in order to lock the Stripes of the world out of the more lucrative opportunities higher up in the stack.

Stripe’s initial response was to acquire Bridge and (through Bridge) to issue its own stablecoin (USDB).

What Stripe seems to have realized is that this strategy for building out the Circle side of its business is going to take too long. Circle has too big of a lead.

So, Stripe has taken a page out of the big banks’ book and has launched a consortium (Open Standard) which will develop its own regulated, USD-backed payment stablecoin (OUSD) to compete with Circle. It has convinced quite a few other companies to be a part of the consortium as well, including Adyen, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, U.S. Bank, Coinbase, Google, and Shopify.

Stripe is incentivizing participation by creating a somewhat-decentralized governance structure for Open Standard and is incentivizing adoption by eliminating fees to mint and redeem and sharing nearly all the float revenue with the partners who are using OUSD.

Essentially, Stripe is teaming up with everyone who makes money in any part of the payments stack (except Circle) and creating a new stablecoin business model that makes stablecoin issuance unsurvivable as a standalone business.

This puts Circle in a tough spot, because, unlike Stripe, Circle can’t adopt a consortium-style approach to building out the Stripe side of its business. It needs to own that side of the business, which means it needs to build (or acquire) it itself.

OUSD isn’t guaranteed to succeed. It has some massive execution and governance challenges ahead of it. And regulators will have their say, at some point. But it is an indicator of how important Stripe (and its partners) think regulated, USD-backed stablecoins are as foundational payments infrastructure.

[Garry Tan @garrytan]

The founder in their 40s with taste and discernment is the new gentleman unicorn founder

Because there can be 100x to 1000x of them working at their beck and call via agents and software factories all the time

[Gabriel Jarrosson @GJarrosson]

The age of the 40-year-old founder is back.

Bryant Chou spent 12 years as CTO of Webflow, which now powers something like 1.5% of the entire internet. He's back in the current YC batch with Ploy, an AI marketing platform, and he describes himself as "a bit of a boomer, double the age of the YC founders." But over 13% of his batch is already using his product, within months of launch.

There is a side of the argument which destroyed one of the main edges young founders have, which was being faster and cheaper at building.... speed is everyones game.

If what's left is knowing what to build this is more likely to come from spending 15 years watching an industry up close, collecting the thousand small frustrations that tell you where the real problem is. Bryant can build an anti-slop website tool because he spent over a decade learning exactly why websites are slop.

So I'm updating. I don't think it's young vs. old. I think AI rewards whoever has the most domain knowledge to point it at, and only sometimes is this younger founders who are thinking outside of the box...

[STONΞ @StoneAtwine]

Exciting. A a real MCP server that lets an AI agent operate the Eversend platform safely. 5d.

[STONΞ @StoneAtwine]

This is very exciting.

[Open Standard @openstandard]

https://t.co/NrHlvge3LG

[STONΞ @StoneAtwine]

I’m starting to see how AI separates those who use it and those who don’t. Time to truth.

A company not using AI might do 10 iterations a year. One using AI might do 150 iterations. Even with fractional improvements, the AI company will be miles ahead.

[Simon Taylor @sytaylor]

🚨 BREAKING: 100+ companies just backed Open USD, a dollar stablecoin run by a new independent company, Open Standard. Zach Abrams is interim CEO.

Five-minute reaction (and personal views only.)

The instinct is to count the logos when you see a lot of them. The design choices matter much more.

- No mint or redemption fees by default
- No arbitrary caps when you scale from $10k to $10m
- Reserve yield shared by default (issuers used to keep it)

This is clearly about scale, and going after the larger, industrial-grade payments volume.

Open Standard runs like a financial market infrastructure. It remids me more of things like SWIFT, the card networks, the clearing houses. Owned broadly, governed by a board, a little "boring" on purpose.

---

Credible neutrality is the whole game.

One company's coin is a product. A coin a hundred competitors agree to share becomes a standard. The cap tables of SWIFT and the early clearing houses were the incumbents of their day in one room. This rhymes.

Look at the breadth too. Banks, card networks, crypto natives, fintechs, big tech, on one coin. A global PSP, a community bank, an international long-tail player. Everyone finds an animal in the picture that looks like them. That breadth is the ultra significant bit.

---

For stablecoins to get beyond their current use cases, we needed something that got rid of the penalties for scale (like mint burn fees) and could handle massive volume.

Today's stablecoin use cases are a rounding error against what's coming. with ~$300B in circulation. SWIFT instructs an average of 5 to 6 trillions a day. The card networks settle trillions. Capital markets, QUADRILLIONS. The prize is moving those flows on-chain, 24/7, with the settlement guarantees regulated money actually needs.

If you build payments, capital markets or treasury, this is the rails question of the decade.

Read the design choices first. The logo wall is the easy story.

[Cuy Sheffield @cuysheffield]

1/ Today, we announced Visa is joining Open Standard alongside Stripe, Coinbase, Mastercard, American Express, Blackrock, US Bank, BBVA, Standard Chartered and 100+ initial partners with the mission of issuing Open USD, a shared stablecoin designed for the global financial system.

[Borderless @onBorderless]

Could someone sitting in London or Silicon Valley quickly understand what you’re building and why it's important?

That's a question every founder should be able to answer.

Watch the full conversation with @StoneAtwine here: https://t.co/fsudr6adCl

[Open Standard @openstandard]

Introducing Open USD: a stablecoin built for the internet economy, designed by the businesses growing it.

https://t.co/jqgDRs6mKf

[STONΞ @StoneAtwine]

This is F1.

My GOD!!

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

Many smart people/AI insiders are saying GLM-5.2 is the first Chinese AI model to match and often beat the American big lab public AI models with no compromises. Incredible timing given current events.

[Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong]

How to keep AI spend flat while token usage grows exponentially: Not with friction and spend alerts. With better defaults, routing, and caching.

Better Defaults (not Usage Caps) – Engineers can choose any model they want, but defaults matter. We’re experimenting with defaulting to open weight models like GLM 5.2 and Kimi 2.7 through our LLM gateway, while still encouraging engineers to choose the right model for the task. 91% of our employees were never hitting their usage caps, so instead of lowering caps and driving up alerts, we're moving to cheaper defaults. Note that code reviews use a diversity of models, so they can check each other's work.

Better Routing – In our custom harnesses, we preprocess prompts and route to the best model for the job, considering cache hits and model pricing. For instance, you may want a frontier model for planning, but not for execution where they can be overkill. Ultimately, humans shouldn't be choosing models - AI can automate this task.

Better Caching – Cache misses are the easiest way to drive your cost up. All of our requests are cache aware, so we’re reusing a warm cache wherever possible. For example, our cache hit rate went from 5% → 60% in LibreChat once properly implemented.

Keep Context Lean – Start fresh sessions when switching tasks. Scope file context narrowly. Disconnect unused tools. Don't just compact. The goal isn't fewer tokens used, it's fewer tokens wasted.

Better Visibility – Our engineers can use as many tokens as they want, from whatever model they want, but we’ve made usage visible – and the more you spend on AI, the more impact we expect.

The goal isn't to suppress usage. It's to build the infrastructure that makes exponential growth sustainable.

Putting this into practice has cut our AI spend nearly in half, while our token usage continues to grow.

[STONΞ @StoneAtwine]

Back to the London office and I’ve heard the word agentic 3 times in less than 40 minutes.

[STONΞ @StoneAtwine]

Lewis Hamilton.

[STONΞ @StoneAtwine]

LW is back.

[STONΞ @StoneAtwine]

After Fable 5, Opus 4.8 is a peasant.

[STONΞ @StoneAtwine]

@weskambale @IRichardK256 @EversendHelp

[STONΞ @StoneAtwine]

All the growth is in private markets.

[STONΞ @StoneAtwine]

Office wall for live @eversendapp transactions.