Eduardo Lopez 🇨🇺

Big day at @sardine - we’re launching Know Your Human, our protocol to make the human identifiers (device ID, device fingerprint, IP address, email, phone, KYC, ID verification details) available to both merchants and issuers. Demo in the video and details in the thread below:

I am a proud US citizen and founder of a successful startup that employs 94 employees in the US and 180+ employees globally. I was in Dubai on a business trip meeting with financial institutions to help them fight financial fraud in the region, but now I am stranded. I expected the @usgov to do something to get US citizens out but I haven't seen any meaningful action. After 4 days of adrenalin and constant fear, I feel demoralised and abandoned by our government. It’s difficult watching other countries – UK, Israel, Spain, Italy and India – repatriate their citizens or ensure that commercial flights continue operating to bring them home. I became a naturalized US citizen because I believe in the American dream, and the idea that in a crisis, America never leaves its citizens behind. I see that American dream being shattered not just for me, but for tens of thousands of other Americans left stranded. I have 3 requests of our government: 1. Can the @usgov ensure the commercial airlines don't cancel US bound flights? I've booked a dozen flights to leave Dubai and ALL of them got canceled, even as flights to other countries continue operating. 2. If that is not possible, can the USG organize planes, commercial or military, to evacuate Americans out of Dubai and the surrounding region? I saw a very hopeful note from the Assistant Secretary of State for Global Public Affairs which states, “the US State Dept is in touch with 3,000 Americans and that we should call 1-202-501-4444 for assistance with departure options.” But that is unfortunately not accurate. I am enrolled in Step and have only received generic messages. Further, on calling that number, the message you get is: "Please don't rely on the USG for assisted departure or evacuation at this point. There are currently no evacuation flights at this time." 3. With funding cuts to the US consulates and with attacks on US embassies in the region, there’s no one that Americans can reach out to in the broader GCC region. Can we set up an emergency hotline within the US that actually works, and that has someone who is taking down more details? @SecRubio just stated that there are 1500 Americans who have contacted asking for assistance to evacuate. How did they do that because I am completely at a loss on who to call? I called up 1-202-501-4444 and all I got is a generic message. Myself and other Americans need help getting back home.

Early Warning CEO, Cameron Fowler just mentioned that they are adding stablecoin support to Zelle. Zelle already has more volumes than Block's CashApp or Paypal's Venmo. With stablecoins, they will be a legitimate challenger to cross-border fintechs like Revolut or cross-border remitters like Remitly and Western Union. The announcement from EWS CEO is scant on details, however, we can expect both stablecoin based pay-outs and pay-ins being supported. Stablecoin pay-outs and pay-ins bring different risks to the table for EWS. Pay-out to a stablecoin wallet increases fraud risk exposure for Zelle by ORDERS of magnitude. Many folks don't realize but Zelle is not really real-time (most of the time). When you make a Zelle transfer to someone – if both banks support RTP, then the transfer settles instantly. However, with RTP adoption still growing. In the majority of cases, the transfer settles at the end of day over ACH. What does this mean for risks in Stablecoin pay-outs? Stablecoin pay-outs will happen truly instantly. Which means that fraud checks have to happen inline at the time of a payment. And the ability to interdict and stop a transfer is then even more paramount. Pay-ins from a stablecoin wallet bring forth ORDERS of magnitude more due diligence requirements on banks that are not used to doing crypto transaction monitoring. The challenge lies in ensuring that the source of funds for incoming stablecoins is not associated with illicit activities. Banks will be forced to think about questions like – do I allow only pay-ins that are strictly A2A (account-to-account) to control for money laundering risks. That is, Soups should only be allowed to bring in stablecoins from a wallet that the bank knows is also owned by Soups. You’d be right in seeing that A2A restrictions break the promise of open-loop incoming pay-ins i.e. allowing anyone to accept stablecoins from anyone. In order to achieve that true promise of open-loop stablecoin payments, we would need to combine crypto transaction monitoring (to interpret taint associated with the counterparty wallet) together with other activity of the client. And what do you do if you received crypto from a tainted address known to be associated with a money launderer or terrorist financier? Maybe you should have not received them to begin with – therein lies the promise of real-time inline transaction monitoring! The good news is that at @sardine, this is the foundation that we were built upon And that's what we’ve been doing for the past ~6 years working with the top crypto exchanges, fintechs and money remittance companies in the world. Our vision is: - To bring onboarding and transaction monitoring together in one platform - Combine fiat and crypto transaction monitoring in one platform - And do it all in-line in real-time (within 100s of msec) These are truly exciting times. What other open questions do you all have as you think through this EWS announcement?

You can now integrate @sardine Issuing Risk APIs using Model Context Protocol (MCP) and LLMs like Claude or tools like @cursor_ai. If you issue cards, you can implement fraud rules directly from your IDE or LLM. Here's how it works 👇

Today we're announcing Sardine's $70M Series C 🚀 Money moves at the speed of light. Crime moves at the speed of AI. Between these forces, trust is eroding faster than ever. We built Sardine to move faster than the threat - and it's working.

What's the robots.txt for Agentic Payments? As most of you know, A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site. This is used mainly to avoid overloading your site with requests. We need a system via which AI agents that are making payments on behalf of a user, don't get flagged by Anti fraud systems like Sardine Our platform detects automated threats other systems miss, from OpenAI's Operator to Selenium, Puppeteer, BrowserBase and Playwright. For e.g. the GIF below shows us detecting one of the Agentic browser automation frameworks which was instrumented to detect the various form fields to fill out and click. But instead of the Agentic payment companies playing a game of hide and seek with anti fraud players, it would be much better if we could work collaboratively and figure out ways via which they can mark themselves as good! If you are building in Agentic payments, please reach out. We would love a conversation!

We are super excited about our partnership with @IngoPayments @PK_Drew and the IngoMoney team have built the best check fraud prevention product, and at @sardine, we have built one of the best products in preventing fraud via ACH and Debit card (AFT) funding mechanisms. Now fintechs looking to go live with account funding, can get access to the best-in-class fraud prevention for ALL payment methods from IngoMoney (via our partnership)!

Computer-Using AI Agents will soon handle your online bookings and purchases. That's great for convenience—but it means CAPTCHAs are obsolete This week, Anthropic released its beta version of Computer Use, giving LLMs the ability to browse the web, make decisions, and execute tasks autonomously. By the end of next year, tens or even hundreds of millions of people will rely on computer-using AI assistants for daily, mundane tasks: - booking a table at a restaurant, - reserving a seat on a plane, - or managing online orders This shift is about to disrupt bot detection and website security. 🐟 Companies relying on CAPTCHA systems for bot prevention must begin to rethink their approach 👉 LLMs can solve CAPTCHAs (like text or images) 👉There will soon be tools that allow users to avoid click and puzzle CAPTCHAs, rendering them ineffective 👉CAPTCHAs and traditional bot detection mechanisms simply will not stand a chance 🐟 The best way to catch sophisticated bots (agents) is with sophisticated bot detection Things like how the mouse moves, text is entered or the use of VPNs and proxies can be huge tells and giveaways to potential malicious bots. Every booking, every purchase, every form submission will need to be protected against misuse by advanced AI agents It’s going to become a key focus.