BCG: "Global fintech revenues surpassed half a trillion dollars in 2025, growing 22% year over year. That also means fintechs outgrew traditional financial services four-fold and now account for approximately 4% of total global financial services revenue".

We may be approaching one of the biggest changes in how money moves since the internet went mainstream. Our CEO @davidmarcus shared some thoughts on this in a conversation with @hopeking at @Money2020 yesterday. A few takeaways from their conversation:

The Lightspark team is headed to Money20/20 Here's where to find us 👇 > @CallMeGillette at Brainfood Roundtable, Venetian > @davidmarcus, Exchange Stage > @davistrazza with @Thunes, Intersection Stage > Happy hour with @turnkeyhq, 1923 Prohibition Bar, Venetian See you there!

One of the core challenges that traditional financial institutions face when growing adoption of their crypto-related products has been the ability to reach KYCed customers who want to purchase these products. However, onchain KYC itself has not fully been solved. I did a deep dive of current onchain KYC solutions, along with corresponding regulatory frameworks, alongside my @a16zcrypto partner @MicheleKorver. We also discuss the forthcoming Know Your Agent (KYA) landscape and emerging solutions.

Wrote a short piece over the weekend about the death of UI and what it means for money...

I think crypto founders’ lack of long-term ambition did more to erode this industry’s talent density than we admit. Crypto is fundamentally trust infrastructure. Building something that meaningfully improves the financial system is a (long) compounding game. It takes a decade of focus. But when prices go crazy every year, there are endless ways to make stupid money: speculation, advisory gigs, scattered investments, farming. It’s been very easy to get distracted. The good news: it’s gotten SO MUCH better. Many short-sighted founders and projects have moved on. Tangible impact attracts the best people. And we’re finally seeing concrete improvements in payments, financing, and trading from bringing them onchain. As an industry, we should do more to make those improvements visible. Our “ChatGPT moment” will come when people open their financial app and feel a step change in what they can do and at what price, without needing to know that stablecoins, DeFi, or tokenized stocks made it possible. I think we’re close. That’s what will drive the next wave of adoption, and make the most ambitious people want to build here.

Money that works like a file. Drag it into Finder. Send it in a message. Put it on physical media. Pass it between two phones. We pushed @lightspark's docs and infra to explore what money could do beyond a traditional wallet. Here's a video of what we made ⬇

"If you plug into Lightspark, you access 65+ markets in real time in their local fiat rails." "Pix in Brazil, SEPA in Europe, UPI in India. We just launched Turkey a few weeks ago. We launched Colombia. We launched Israel. Just keep on launching these new corridors." — @davistrazza, Chief Business Officer at @lightspark

Live at 12:00 PM ET / 9:00 AM PT. Today's lineup: - @MorganKrupetsky, @avax / @avalabs - @rpasquinjr, @CryptoworthApp - @oxranga, @solomon_labs - Brian Luscombe, @zeroclick - @saunders3000, @xpticket The Great Rail Shift Report - Mark Walsh and Jack Luttrell, Delos Financial - @berhanko, @keyrails - Bassam Elshorafa, @ARPdigital_io - Alex Garn, @borderlessxyz - @davistrazza, @lightspark - @chrismaurice, @yellowcard_app xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1yxBePAjd…

Türkiye is now live on Lightspark US companies imported $16.4 billion in goods from Türkiye last year. Now they can pay those suppliers in lira, in real time Send money, pay suppliers, and convert stablecoins to lira docs.lightspark.com

Love this Visa card issuance playground from @lightspark. Amazing to see all of the ways that stablecoins and a new class of enablers have lowered the barrier to entry for developers to issue Visa cards across the world. docs.lightspark.com/cards/de…

Adding stablecoins, cards, virtual accounts, or global payouts to your stack? That's the conversation we're bringing to @money2020. We're on stage twice, hosting a happy hour with @turnkeyhq, and taking meetings all week.

i keep thinking about how payments will work when agentic commerce becomes the norm. we spent the last 10-15 years making payment credentials persistent and invisible. agentic commerce may be taking us in a different direction. tokenization at the psp level, and more recently at the network level, was a big part of making one-click checkout possible and setting the standard for payments ux. think uber, amazon, etc. payment credentials basically disappear into the background. you’d expect agentic commerce to build on the same foundation. and some solutions do. but an interesting part of the first wave is the use of transaction-specific credentials, from single-use cards to tokens scoped to a specific purchase, even when there’s a persistent payment credential underneath. there are good reasons for this. these instruments give agents tighter spending controls and limit the exposure of the underlying payment credential, but they also come with tradeoffs. persistent payment credentials have historically been one of the signals merchants use to recognize shoppers over time. that matters for loyalty, risk management and personalization. transaction-specific credentials can remove some of that continuity at the payment layer. the same person can show up looking like a new customer every time, which means identity and other signals may need to be passed in different ways. from a merchant’s perspective, that's a big deal. i’ve been playing around with a lot of the solutions being built. in more than a few flows, the agent pays fine and from what i can tell the merchant still has almost nothing reusable on the other side. i’m very bullish on agentic commerce. at the current pace, i think we’ll soon look at checkout forms the same way we look at fax machines today. but what replaces them will come down to how much control over data and the customer relationship merchants want or need to keep. my sense is they’ll give up more of it than they expect.

I’ve built a custom @Lightspark Grid connector for @Muse in less than 10 minutes. Now it can send payment in realtime to 63 countries 24/7! @davistrazza got BRL in his 🇧🇷 account in 2 seconds!