story from fundraising season:
founder shows up with ugly product, weird market, insane customer pull.
vc passes because the deck doesnโt map cleanly to last cycle.
that is literally where the money is.
Affirm CEO @mlevchin explains how credit became so exploitive:
"Buy now, pay later is a fairly old concept."
"For a long time, until the Middle Ages, you had a fairly well self-governing [system]."
"The Code of Hammurabi describes things like: don't screw your borrower, don't overcharge them."
"In the last 100 years or so, we've rapidly left the whole 'don't screw your customer' idea."
"You've gone from interest that's easy to estimate because it's simple and doesn't compoundโto only really doing compounding interest."
"The majority of American banks derive a disproportionate percentage of their income from late fees."
"At some point, someone said, 'Wait a second, that's a 100% gross margin product. When I charge you a late fee, you just pay me more money. There's no cost.'"
"Over time, credit just started skewing more and more into this bucket of doing things that are not at all pro-borrower. They're just great for revenue."
"Affirm was founded in many ways to fight all of that and destroy the ridiculous and the exploitive."
To elaborate further:
There are many merchants that would prefer to accept stablecoins, but the current state-of-the-art simply fails them.
It shouldn't be this way in 2026.
Crypto payments have a billion-dollar problem: once you send @USDC, there's no refund. No chargeback. No buyer protection. Thatโs why most real-world businesses still wonโt accept it.
@circle just solved it.
The Refund Protocol - on-chain escrow, three refund paths (including gasless EIP-712), and automatic debt recovery when the escrow is empty. Non-custodial. No intermediary can steal funds. Enforced entirely by the smart contract.
I wrote a full technical deep-dive on @Arc House breaking down every piece - architecture, payment lifecycle, dispute resolution, the debt system, and a builder integration guide.
Also created 5 animated explainer videos covering each concept visually.
This is post 3 in my Arc House series. Post 1 covered CCTP. Post 2 covered App Kit. This one covers the missing piece: what happens after someone pays.
Refunds are the last primitive on-chain payments were missing.
Full post here:
https://t.co/3KZV6bvmbB