Frontliner 💯

That's @DanyelArenas and me, 15 years into the past and a few years into private equity, right around the time a deal we were working on, involving a new technology, got us talking about building something of our own. We did, and it made us one of the first manufacturers of HOCl. Plenty of people laughed at the idea that a novel small molecule would go mainstream. Today it's distributed almost everywhere across the US and well beyond it. Here's the thing, though: being right about HOCl didn't feel like being right at the time. It felt like being early, alone, and slightly foolish. And that's the real lesson, not that we were correct, but that you can, in fact, be too early to something. Being right and being early can look identical from the inside, and the difference between them is often just survival, whether you can hang on long enough for the world to catch up. That experience burned a principle into me that I now carry into everything we do: It's more dangerous to be complacent than to be misunderstood. Let me explain why that matters right now. Crypto is commoditizing at speed, and stablecoin payments are here. Look closely and you'll see it: most apps share the same infrastructure partners. Most infrastructure partners share the same banking setups. And most banks offer the same underlying FX services. The water flows through different-looking paths — different logos, different landing pages, different pitches — but it's ultimately the same river. And swimming in the same river as everyone else is an inevitable death. You'll compete on price, you'll compete on marketing, and eventually you'll drown in a current you can't out-swim. Being misunderstood is a far better problem to have. Because being misunderstood is fixable. You just keep pivoting the messaging until people finally understand. Complacency has no such exit. So the question we keep asking ourselves is: what does it actually mean to reinvent FX, rather than repackage it? Because repackaging the same river in a nicer bottle is exactly the trap. Reinventing it means building for how money is about to move, not how it moved yesterday. That means designing for agentic payments, a near future where AI is deciding how and when capital moves, at a speed and frequency no human treasury desk was built for. It means value that clears outside of banking hours, same-day, after the close, on weekends — because commerce doesn't stop when banks do, and neither should money. It means direct routes instead of forced detours through the dollar or a chain of correspondents; we've already run client swaps straight from BRL to COP, no unnecessary hops. It means yield baked into resting liquidity, so that money sitting still is still working for the people who hold it. And it means a community that can supercharge liquidity, pooling depth exactly where and when the market needs it most. That's the world we're building for. If the last decade taught me anything, it's that the hard, unglamorous, frequently misunderstood path is almost always the one worth taking. The easy river is crowded. The one worth swimming usually isn't.