Writing

Notes from the delivery side of frontier tech

Occasional writing on blockchain, AI, and fintech — from the perspective of someone who has to actually ship it.

Reserve-revenue model: traditional stablecoin issuers keep the yield; Open USD shares it with partners
7 min read

Agentic Payments · Part 3 of 3

Open USD: The Settlement Layer Just Picked a Side

Four weeks after I argued stablecoins were quietly becoming the agent-native settlement rail, 140+ of the biggest names in payments launched a shared one. Here's what Open USD actually is, why its economics are the real story, and what it changes for anyone building agentic payments.

AIAgentic PaymentsStablecoinsPaymentsBlockchain
The agentic payments failure surface: the intersection of LLM failures and payment failures
11 min read

Agentic Payments · Part 2 of 3

Agentic Payments: How to Build Them Without Breaking Them

Ten ways AI agents with spending authority fail in production — prompt injection, decimal errors, hallucinated recipients — and the six patterns good teams build around them.

AIAgentic PaymentsSecurityLLMsBlockchain
The three-layer agentic payments stack: protocol, network and settlement
8 min read

Agentic Payments · Part 1 of 3

Agentic Payments: Build Now, or Wait?

AI agents are starting to spend real money. Here's where the agentic payments stack actually stood in mid-2026, where it was heading, and how I'd decide whether to build for it now or wait for the dust to settle.

AIAgentic PaymentsBlockchainStablecoinsStrategy
Glamsterdam — Ethereum's next protocol upgrade, featuring ePBS (EIP-7732) and BALs (EIP-7928)
8 min read

Glamsterdam: what's next for Ethereum

Glamsterdam is the biggest structural change to Ethereum since the Merge — enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation, Block-Level Access Lists, and a protocol-layer fix for the MEV and censorship problem I've been watching for years.

EthereumL2 RollupsMEVProtocol UpgradesStaking
Pectra — Ethereum's May 2025 staking upgrade, featuring EIP-7251 (MaxEB) and EIP-7002 (execution-layer exits)
5 min read

Watching Pectra Go Live

The night Ethereum's biggest staking upgrade activated, I was on a livestream with the Pier Two team watching the first transactions land in a tool we'd built for it. Here's what Pectra changed, and the offboarding trick our testing uncovered.

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