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.
Who Owns the Payment Rails · Part 3
Half-Right, Again: Stripe Just Bid $53 Billion for PayPal
One day after I published a post arguing Stripe couldn't own the payment rail, a Stripe-led consortium reportedly bid $53 billion for PayPal. On the surface, that's my thesis in flames — the walled garden, back and bigger. Read the structure of the bid, though, and it concedes the argument more thoroughly than the headline contradicts it. Updated 21 July: the board has formally rejected the offer and is pushing toward $70.
Who Owns the Payment Rails · Part 2
SWIFT 'Went Crypto', But Not How You Thought
The headlines said SWIFT went crypto and XRP's moment had finally arrived. The fine print says something smaller, quieter, and frankly smarter: a pilot, tokenised bank deposits rather than stablecoins, and a ledger that settles nothing on-chain — yet. Here's what SWIFT actually shipped, and why it's the most strategically sound move on the board.
Who Owns the Payment Rails · Part 1
I Thought Stripe Would Own Payments. I Was Half-Right.
Eighteen months of Stripe acquisitions and its own payments blockchain convinced me it was building a walled garden to own the rail outright. Then Open USD launched as a shared, multi-chain standard — and the reason why runs straight through Visa and Mastercard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.