Absolute banger of a podcast here @a16z. Two of my faves @arampell and @terryangelos and two OGs talking commerce in the agentic age. The agentic offer stacking bot is coming next for sure! So many things in ecommerce are about to change imo.
The wallet wars are here.
Very Good Security chief strategy officer Terry Angelos joins a16z's Alex Rampell, his TrialPay co-founder from back in 2006 (TrialPay was later acquired by Visa), to discuss how agents are learning to spend money.
"Agents have all of a sudden become significantly more helpful and useful because they effectively have arms and legs, which are payment credentials."
VGS holds the payment credentials behind about 1/3 of all e-commerce, and now it's helping AI agents pay merchants. If you've bought anything online, there's a good chance VGS has already helped keep your card safe.
In the last three months, Terry says agents went from "spectators to actors." Once an agent has your payment credentials, it can book the piano teacher it previously could only find and recommend.
Now Stripe's Link, Shopify's Shop Pay, and PayPal are racing to connect to agents. It's all headed toward open standards from the card networks: agentic tokens that let an agent pay with your actual card.
VGS went from zero agentic tokens to a few million a week in three months.
0:55 From TrialPay to Visa to VGS
2:05 How VGS vaults 1/3 of e-commerce
6:05 Why big merchants use 3-5 processors
9:55 Why AI agents need a payment vault
12:15 Agents go from "spectators to actors"
13:40 The wallet wars, old and new
19:55 Walled gardens vs open standards
23:55 How agents can pay with your real card
26:40 Your saved card goes multiplayer
29:40 How do you trust an agent's purchase?
32:35 Who pays when your agent gets it wrong
35:40 Why Amazon blocks agents
39:50 What's overhyped and underhyped
43:35 When merchants get agents too
45:40 Why agents could break card rewards
47:00 VGS's eras: vault, updates, network
@terryangelos @arampell
wex retweeted
Mayor Mamdani used the anniversary of October 7 to put the victims on trial.
More than 1,100 people were hunted, burned, raped, and dragged into tunnels. Two hundred fifty-one were abducted. Parents were killed in front of children. Festival-goers were shot in an open field while the men killing them smiled. Three years later, the mayor of the city with the largest Jewish population outside Israel marks that morning by telling New Yorkers their tax dollars fund war crimes, and that the way to “honor the dead” is to adopt his war against the state those dead were killed for belonging to.
Hamas gets one sentence. Mamdani spends the rest of his October 7 statement on “genocide,” “apartheid,” “occupation,” and American “complicity.”
This is a hijacking of trauma. He cannot say the word massacre without immediately explaining why the victims’ country is the real criminal. He cannot mourn a Jewish civilian without handing the microphone to the people who justify how that civilian died. “The suffering did not begin nor end that day” is the sentence every apologist uses to make October 7 disappear into a longer story in which the Jews are the authors of their own slaughter.
A mayor who honors the murdered by repeating the talking points of their killers – on the day the bodies were still being identified three years ago – is beyond vile. We remember who was killed. We remember who killed them. We remember who celebrated the slaughter. And we see a Mayor is doing everything he can to show that he is on the wrong side of history, siding with the monsters.
#EndJewHatred
This. @nlevine19 with the receipts. Will say agent adoption in general (not necessarily trx/banking related) will grow faster with Muse, due to your noted datapoints.
Been seeing a lot of discourse on X about agents triggering a bank run/lowering bank NIM by sweeping non-interest bearing deposits into yield. I think this is possible but going to take a lot longer than people think:
1. Retail banking is one of the highest switching cost products and deeply concentrated. The top 5 banks hold roughly half of US consumer deposits and banks with over $10B in consumer deposits hold close to 85%. These banks are incentivized to not be accessible to agents and are already not developer friendly. We have seen this with the big banks pushing back on open banking by charging for data access and reducing what is available. Muse can read your balances via Plaid but cannot move the money.
2. Well over half of consumer deposits are held by households 55+. This cohort is less likely to be an early adopter of an AI finance tool not being endorsed or directly offered by their bank.
3. The top 10% of households by wealth hold approximately 60% of deposits (top 1% alone is nearly 25%). Most of this money already has an advisor or brokerage attached reducing the incremental value proposition of a standalone consumer agent. The bottom 50% hold 5.5% of deposits, so the mass market agent story is less existential to bank funding.
Net net, I think in the fullness of time agents do become the primary interface for personal finance and cheap deposits shrink over time. But most of that comes from AI democratizing access to services the wealthiest people already get, and it will be relatively slow because these tools are new and people will need to establish trust before having them manage their money.
wex retweeted
Does Macklemore know what Palestinians do at music festivals?
Super cool @PeteCooling. Don't bet against this guy he has the money over blockchain rails chops!
Welcome to Atum.
That’s what we tell every new partner when they first touch the network. And now we’re saying it to you.
Because today, @atumhq, the open payments network, a first of its kind, is live.
We picked the date intentionally. Today, September 22, marks the autumnal equinox (in the northern hemisphere), a threshold through which the world passes, from one season into another. Atum occupies a similar boundary: between light and darkness, chaos and order, ending and renewal. Atum, as a platform, is positioned at the transition from closed, institution-specific payment systems to an open, programmable network.
Atum is also the creator god symbol in ancient Egypt. Atum is the first, the primordial, and the originating god of creation.
Atum provides the basic building blocks for payments and commerce - the infrastructure, tooling, products and services that make money move the way it ought to.
Our team is comprised of leading payments and onchain experts from companies like @Visa, @coinbase, @chainlink, @CashApp, @tempo, and more.
It’s a new world for payments and commerce.
And it is my ultimate pleasure, passion, and life’s purpose to introduce Atum, the open payments network. We are so glad you’re here.
Welcome to Atum. We do it together.
→ atum.xyz/
wex retweeted
Great week at StableCon DC.
CEO @CWALK_19 on stage with @wex and @dsem221 on verifying lender performance with real settlement data instead of self-reported numbers.
@Audley_Clarke and @mostarz93 talking onchain credit for the stablecoin economy with everyone who stopped by.
$2.5B financed and already closing in on $2.8B.
wex retweeted
Every antizionist who believes they’re “on the right side of history” while defending a dude who literally does Nazi salutes in Jewface needs to realize how profoundly they have been brainwashed into being the foot soldiers of a global anti-Jew agenda without realizing it.
Thanks @PeteCooling! Excited to hear more about what you are up to... but in the interim excited to keep moving Visa settlement onchain and integrating onchain lending closer to the metal. Come see @CWALK_19 and I chat on Thursday @thestablecon. @Visa Crypto @creditcoop_xyz
When we built stablecoin settlement at Visa, I knew it would be a better product by orders of magnitude. Today @raincards @creditcoop_xyz and @Visa are at the epicenter of activity proving that thesis. And the $20B annualized volume has not only surged more than 15x in a year, it is just getting started.
In fact, there is no more important story happening onchain, and @rooqster and @cnaut at Rain, @CWALK_19 at Credit Coop, and @droes00 @cuysheffield and @wex at Visa are crushing it in epic fashion. There are no better teams to work with right now. They are lifting the entire space as we head closer toward mass adoption of this technology and a new paradigm for money.
Don't underestimate the surge in activity that is likely to come next.
Affirm co-founders, CEO Max Levchin and a16z's Alex Rampell, on 25 years inside payments, from PayPal to agentic commerce:
Payments is the biggest market on earth. No niche in it is smaller than $100 billion, and the industry has barely moved in 60 years. Visa and Mastercard keep card transaction windows too tight to build anything new inside. Max still calls the plastic card the best payment interface ever built.
Affirm began in a 2011 email thread in which Max and Alex agreed that the nearest version of the idea was a bad business. Then a cosmetics brand using Affirm moved the offer from its checkout page to its product pages, and conversion jumped 30%.
In this conversation with Erik Torenberg, they get into why Affirm walked away from the highest margins in payments, what a negative customer acquisition cost is actually worth, and why Max is bearish on agentic shopping but bullish on agentic payments.
00:00 Intro
01:00 The fraud rule that built Apple Pay
03:35 Visa's problematic transaction windows
05:30 No niches under $100 billion
07:10 The email that said Affirm was a bad idea
10:00 The wand that should've killed the card
12:36 Booed off stage for presenting PayPal
15:02 Why crypto still can't buy a cup of coffee
17:16 How Max and Alex met
20:11 The 500-Facebook-friends idea
26:48 The all-nighter PHP demo
30:58 Every startup gets 40 years in the desert
32:46 Moving one line lifted conversion 30%
35:02 Why Affirm walked away from the highest margins in payments
39:03 One article created an entire industry
40:37 The asterisk next to 0%
42:17 What BNPL misses about Affirm
44:03 Why merchants give Affirm customers
47:00 Why a 3-year loan is harder, and better, than a 6-week one
48:19 Why PayPal produced so many founders
52:43 Bullish on agentic payments, bearish on agentic shopping
57:51 Grocery shopping is already 100% agentic
YouTube: youtube.com/watch?v=J3pegsM5…
@mlevchin @Affirm @arampell @eriktorenberg
This will be a great session @CWALK_19 and @creditcoop_xyz! The financing evolution is simplified, secure, automated and onchain.
12,000 borrow/repay events and $2.5B in volume later,
@creditcoop_xyz is replacing manual trustees with smart contracts.
Next week at @thestablecon in DC, I am sitting down with @wex from @Visa to discuss financing stablecoin-linked cards on VisaNet.
High quality response and timely. Well done @raincards. Now for the outdated contract audit!
Earlier today, Rain’s monitoring systems discovered a vulnerability impacting a small number of programs using an outdated version of our Solana contracts. Other programs were not impacted. Rain immediately launched an investigation to determine the full scope of the situation.
Our team has successfully upgraded all programs that were using the outdated version of the Solana contracts, which has resolved the situation. Rain is continuing to monitor the issue, has engaged third-party forensics experts to investigate, and will work with law enforcement and relevant regulatory authorities.
All affected users will be made whole. We’ve already begun the remediation process and are focused on delivering a swift and responsible resolution.
Settle every day of the week. @visa crypto supports it and @raincards is an early partner who takes advantage of it. Slowly and then perhaps all at once Visa members will see their own unique or shared benefits to how stablecoins improve collateral, yield, float, ops, etc...
There was so much discourse around @raincards "anatomy of a stablecoin swipe" that we had to dig in.
@cuysheffield, as ever, nailed it.
Stablecoin settlement is for non bank issuers or those who are operating more globally and not correspondent banks.
Stablecoins are better for them.
It's a stablecoin summer! @Visa Crypto. Let's change the way money moves together. fortune.com/2026/07/16/exclu…
This can’t end well for America…
Over the course of a year, Americans are more likely to place a gambling bet than read a single book. Seems fine! (via @TheAtlantic) —
