aadil

Today is probably a good time to check in on things with @privy_io, which became part of @stripe just over a year ago. Our acquisition was predicated on three factors: stablecoin growth, self-custody as a key enabler of broader global coverage, and rapidly increasing demand for programmable financial infrastructure. As we said at the time, "money has to reside somewhere, and Privy builds the world's best programmable vaults." Since then, the Privy team has executed exceptionally well: assets in Privy wallets have grown ~25x, monthly active developers are up ~3x, revenue is up ~9x, and Privy now facilitates nearly $25B of monthly transaction volume. @tryramp, @Deel, @Klarna, @felixpago, @HyperliquidX, and thousands of other businesses are building embedded banking functionality on Privy. At Stripe, we're deeply integrating Privy into Treasury, @Link, and Connect. In each case, it's accelerating our global expansion, and enabling us to build better functionality faster. (Coming soon: @Link balances.) We're also seeing that Privy's wallet infrastructure is the ideal substrate for agents to transact and earn -- live today with @merit_systems, @orthogonal_sh, @Nevermined_ai, @prlnet, and more. Developers prefer programmable financial infrastructure, but agents need it. We expect that the agentic economy will continue to grow extremely quickly. The Privy team has maintained remarkable product velocity, with major launches this year including deposit addresses, earning on Privy balances, digital asset accounts, custodial wallets, and Stripe's own stablecoin cards. It's also been neat to see how Privy has been accelerated by Stripe, with better onramps, @stablecoin payment rails and licenses, Stripe's fiat capabilities and issuing stack, and integration with @Tempo. Together, we're building one API for holding stablecoin balances and earning yield, moving money in and out of fiat, and orchestrating spend with cards. We still have a lot of work to do, not least in integrating everything across Privy, Bridge, and the rest of Stripe -- there's been so much feature and functionality expansion that we haven't yet had much time to reconcile everything. Overall, though, I'm very happy with how things are going, and excited by where these capabilities are headed. If you're interested in working on the future of stablecoins, agentic payments, and crypto's deployment in the real world, you should get in touch with @sternhenri (now leading all of @StripeCrypto) or others on the team.

Assorted things I've been mulling over regarding agents in the economy: • Companies are in some sense the original superintelligence. It's often the case that they can use their amortized cognitive surplus to advance their interests against those of certain consumers: relative to the optimization capacity of companies, consumers can be inattentive, underinformed, irrational, etc. (Think, say, of some of the classic insurance upsells at the end of a booking process, which is typically priced substantially above what a regular policy would cost.) Herbert Simon introduced the idea of bounded rationality, and firms often end up benefiting from it. Thanks to personal agents, we will probably get somewhat more rational in how we engage with companies. • How exactly will outcomes change? Well, certain kinds of price discrimination will work less well (how do coupons work if every agent hunts fastidiously for them?), and certain kinds of customer cross-subsidy will change (today, people who forget to cancel subscriptions subsidize those who don't). Taken across the economy as a whole, I'm not sure what the incidence of all of this will be. • In corporate strategy, people have long debated the relative importance of distribution and product quality. Perhaps you've made something better, but does anyone know about it? Won't people just continue to buy the ACME Corp Mousetraps? Personal agents will, I think, act as a kind of structural subsidy for product quality. How would markets look different if individuals always spent at least 10 hours researching their purchases? On the margin, focusing on making a product better is, I think, going to become a more effective strategy for companies. This is good! • It true, a corollary is that information about product quality will become more important and impactful. Today, most people have very limited ability to aggregate and integrate such data, but agents will have insatiable thirst for such signals. (It's often said that data is becoming more valuable because it helps in the training of models. That's obviously true, but I think there's a secondary way in which it's more valuable simply as a complement to cheaper intelligence.) • A big question is whether agents will increase superstar effects (rational agents all settle on the same product) or increase dispersion (because everyone has slightly different tastes and preferences, which agents are good at eliciting, finally overcoming the artificial clustering we've been subjected to). • Many internet companies have monetized demand routing, which is in turn often predicated on short attention spans. "I'll click on the first thing I see." This has led to some amount of inefficiency, as companies try to propitiate capricious ranking algorithms and incur various placement fees. It's not all deadweight loss (willingness to pay is itself a kind of signal, which is valuable to buyers), but it's not great. How will the nature and value of this routing change in a world of personal agents? I don't know the answer, but I think that the effects might be pretty big. • Much of what I'm writing hinges on the assumption that personal agents will be on the consumer's side. I suspect that that will be the winning strategy, but whether it's true, and what it means to be true, involves a lot of other questions. Taken as a whole, the market is a massively parallelized, decentralized, and highly imperfect value attribution machine, and, taking stock of all of the effects, it seems to me that the quality point may well be the biggest: that agents will change the nature of the backpropagation such that the rewards for better products increase. Maybe this is too optimistic, but I suspect (and hope) that companies that make things that they're proud of will feel that the universe is a little more partisan in their favor.

Pretty neat: EURR, a new Euro-backed stablecoin, powered by Bridge Open Issuance.