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Today we're announcing Walapay's $4.6M Seed round, led by @genventurecap.
@dimitri_borgers and I started @walapay_io because we've felt first-hand how slow and frustrating it can be - even today - to send and receive money around the world. And when we tried to build an app for people like us, we realized we could never solve the problem if we didn't tackle the roots of the issue - the underlying rails where money actually moves.
That's why we built Walapay from the bottom up - owning the licensing, banking rails, and liquidity across our core markets. Today, we're serving >100,000 customers, processing $2.5b in annual TPV, and growth is only accelerating.
A huge thank you to @LexSokolin who backed us early on and made this round happen. Thank you to @shawnlim @Marcosf0401 Kaushik Chakravarti Roger Lim and many others who believed in us from the very beginning.
Thank you to our partners and customers who trusted us early. This round will help us continue to expand our licensing and banking partnerships and assemble the best team to take us forward on our mission.
@CommerceVC @0xPolygon @VerdaVentures @AAF_Management @JSquare_co @reflexivexyz @FGVCapital @NGC_Ventures Knollwood Investment Advisory @BigBrainVC Contribution Capital Kronos Research
tomborgers.eth retweeted
Excited to support @thomasborgers, @dimitri_borgers, and the @walapay_io team.
Walapay is one of the most promising teams we’ve seen in global payments, and we’re excited to be part of the journey as they build the next generation of payment infrastructure. Big congrats! 🚀
Today we're announcing Walapay's $4.6M Seed round, led by @genventurecap.
@dimitri_borgers and I started @walapay_io because we've felt first-hand how slow and frustrating it can be - even today - to send and receive money around the world. And when we tried to build an app for people like us, we realized we could never solve the problem if we didn't tackle the roots of the issue - the underlying rails where money actually moves.
That's why we built Walapay from the bottom up - owning the licensing, banking rails, and liquidity across our core markets. Today, we're serving >100,000 customers, processing $2.5b in annual TPV, and growth is only accelerating.
A huge thank you to @LexSokolin who backed us early on and made this round happen. Thank you to @shawnlim @Marcosf0401 Kaushik Chakravarti Roger Lim and many others who believed in us from the very beginning.
Thank you to our partners and customers who trusted us early. This round will help us continue to expand our licensing and banking partnerships and assemble the best team to take us forward on our mission.
@CommerceVC @0xPolygon @VerdaVentures @AAF_Management @JSquare_co @reflexivexyz @FGVCapital @NGC_Ventures Knollwood Investment Advisory @BigBrainVC Contribution Capital Kronos Research
tomborgers.eth retweeted
One of the hardest questions in stablecoins shouldn't be:
"Who else is building and where?"
Today we launched a completely rebuilt Stablescape to help answer that.
- 6,000+ stablecoin companies
- Interactive market maps
- Rich company profiles
- And more
You can now submit your company, claim an existing one, and play around with interactive charts.
See it for yourself here: stablescape.xyz
tomborgers.eth retweeted
all technology brothers should have a birthright trip to paris to see how good certain things can get and all the axes of civilization they don’t think about. they should also get one to singapore to witness the hollow Disneyland feigned joy of technocratic perfection
tomborgers.eth retweeted
Stablecoins aren’t the side story anymore. They’re becoming the financial layer for global markets.
Introducing Stablescape - a live dashboard tracking how stablecoins are actually being used across the world.
3,929 companies tracked across 12 categories, 7 regions, and 136 countries.
Check it out here: stablescape.xyz/
Not sure of the methodology here but based on our numbers at @walapay_io alone, I can tell you with certainty that there is >$1b in annual stablecoin TPV originating in LATAM + Africa.
tomborgers.eth retweeted
I am a Web3 Ambassador at World Liberty Financial.
There are 12 of us on the team page. 4 are named Trump. 3 are named Witkoff. The page calls us "the passionate minds shaping the future of finance."
600,000 wallets bought our memecoin. They lost $3.87 billion. The family collected $350 million in trading fees. It launched 3 days before the inauguration. 80% of the supply went to CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC. I did not choose the names. I designed the allocation, the vesting, the timing, and the distance between the product and the President.
The distance is my best work.
I am the reason these events are unrelated.
World Liberty Financial sends 75 cents of every dollar to DT Marks DEFI LLC. That is the family entity. Zero capital contributed. Zero liability assumed. I wrote this into the Gold Paper. Page 14. The lawyers bound it in white leather. The binding cost more than the due diligence.
Justin Sun invested $75 million. He was facing SEC fraud charges. The SEC dropped the case. He is now our advisor. These events are unrelated.
Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to federal money laundering violations. He received a presidential pardon. The SEC dropped its lawsuit against his exchange the same week we listed our stablecoin. Then the exchange settled a $2 billion deal entirely in that stablecoin. These events are unrelated.
Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed of BitMEX pleaded guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations. All 3 received presidential pardons. Then the company itself was pardoned. $100 million in fines. Gone. An American first. These events are unrelated.
Sheikh Tahnoun of Abu Dhabi paid $500 million for a 49% stake that was never publicly disclosed. Then the administration approved semiconductor exports to his companies over national security objections. These events are unrelated.
Everything is unrelated. I track the unrelatedness on a dashboard I built. The dashboard has 7 columns now. I am proud of the dashboard.
On May 22nd, 220 people paid a combined $148 million to eat dinner with the America First president. Over half were foreign nationals. Justin Sun paid $18.5 million for the first seat. He visited the Executive Office Building the day before. I designed the seating chart. I put it on the Investor Confidence page. That page is doing well.
The team page lists 3 Witkoffs. All 3 are Co-Founders.
Steven Witkoff is the President's Middle East envoy. He testified as a character witness at the President's fraud trial.
His son Zach runs the crypto operation. His son Alex is also a Co-Founder. I have not been told what Alex co-founded.
The father runs the diplomacy. The sons run the platform. The family runs both. That is organizational efficiency.
Barron is 19. His title is Web3 Ambassador. The same as mine. Donald Jr. called the conflicts of interest "complete nonsense." Eric launched a Bitcoin mining company called American Bitcoin. America First. The mining partner is Hut 8. Hut 8 was founded in Canada. America First means the name.
On March 6th, the President signed Executive Order 14233 creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The order directs the government to hold Bitcoin. The President's family holds billions in Bitcoin. The executive order appreciates the President's assets by presidential decree. I did not write the executive order. I made sure it looked unrelated to the portfolio.
Trump Media put $2 billion of Bitcoin on its balance sheet. The ticker symbol is DJT. His initials. The press secretary said it is absurd to insinuate the President profits off the presidency. Forbes calculated his crypto holdings exceed the combined value of Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower. I would call that absurd too. That is my job.
600,000 wallets bought in. 1 of them asked why she could not withdraw her funds. I told her the protocol was experiencing dynamic market conditions. She asked what that meant. I sent her the Gold Paper. She said she had read the Gold Paper. I muted her channel. Dynamic means the conditions change. The condition that changed was her access.
A congressman called us the world's most corrupt crypto startup operation. We put it on a coffee mug. Ironic merchandise. $45. The revenue split on the mug is also 75/25.
My own tokens vest on a different schedule. I wrote that schedule. That is not in the Gold Paper.
The memecoin funds the family. The family funds the platform. The platform funds the stablecoin. The stablecoin funds the deals. The deals require the pardons. The pardons free the partners. The partners fund the platform. The President signs the executive orders. The executive orders inflate the assets. The assets fund the family.
I am the reason these events are unrelated.
tomborgers.eth retweeted
this is correct. my theory has been the same since 2013
back wrote the paper
finney had the idea (back is not smart enough, finney needed a writer)
cipherpunk list made the connection
david klein wrote the software, a gov windows contractor. that explains c wright fooling gavin
Hi. Professional C/C++ programmer here. The open-source code I can find written by Adam Back and Satoshi Nakamoto don't look remotely similar.
Back's code looks typical of academic Unix programmers who also hack their code to run on Windows.
Satoshi code was written by a professional Windows programmer who also wrote for Unix.
Stylistically, they look nothing alike. There's not enough time between 2005 when I can find the newest Adam Back and January 2009 when Satoshi published Bitcoin/0.1 to account for the change. Both are perfectly competent programmers, but stylistically, they are completely different.
The NYTimes tried to compare their English language in posts/emails. I'm compare their C/C++ language in their open-source code. The NYTimes merely points out they both use C++ as if that's another corroborating detail, when the actual code seems to disqualify Adam Back.
Excited to see Danny and Hanafi launch this!
Built with @walapay_io
👀
we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company.
####
today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone.
first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay.
we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly.
i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures.
a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers.
we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.
to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward.
to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow.
jack
👀
🚨 𝘽𝙍𝙀𝘼𝙆𝙄𝙉𝙂: @PayPal replaces CEO after earnings miss.
Here's what we know:
PayPal announced that Alex Chriss will step down, following weaker-than-expected Q4 results and slowing growth in branded checkout.
Chriss will be replaced by HP Inc. CEO Enrique Lores after profit and revenue fell short of expectations. Shares of the firm tumbled more than 12%.
Jamie Miller, the payments firm’s chief financial officer, will serve as interim CEO until Lores takes over on March 1, according to a statement Tuesday.
“While some progress has been made in a number of areas over the last two years, the pace of change and execution was not in line with the Board’s expectations,” newly appointed board chair David Dorman said in the statement.
Key signals:
• PayPal-branded checkout growth slowed to 1%
• Q4 EPS and revenue missed expectations
• 2026 transaction margin dollars expected to decline slightly
Another reminder of how unforgiving public markets are for large-scale payments platforms when growth and execution slow.
Big reset moment for PayPal.
Source/more info: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
