I had a brilliant fintech operator in my office last week, just getting into stablecoins, said something that stuck with me: “Payments is 60% compliance.” It’s easy to focus on UI, speed, fees—but the real moat in money movement is trust. That trust is earned through licensing, audits, AML/KYC, regulatory fluency, and operational rigor. The institutions that have lasted—Visa, Western Union, legacy banks—didn’t just build pipes. They built compliance infrastructure that could scale globally and survive scrutiny. Stablecoins are now trying to rewire global payments from first principles. The tech is exceptional. The liquidity is real. But compliance? Still catching up. The mistake would be thinking that great code replaces great compliance. It doesn’t. If you want to move real volume through stablecoins—fiat on/off ramps, payroll, commerce, cross-border—you’ll run into the same expectations as any traditional financial institution. The unlock is this: treat compliance as a product. Design it, test it, scale it. Build it into the architecture, not as a patch. Just like security became invisible but essential in Web2, compliance will become the defining layer of trust in Web3 and payments. The future of stablecoin infra will be won by those who see compliance not as a bottleneck—but as a distribution and defensibility engine. If you’re building in this space and thinking deeply about how to integrate compliance from the ground up, reach out to me or the team @lateralcap . We want to hear from you.

Doom and gloom tweets about climate change are annoying and more corrosive than they are helpful. But i think it is important we galvanise enough effort to preserve our environment for the future. 🧵

Next DeFi🦄= Real Use Cases + Demand + Infrastructure + Ecosystem Build+ Network Effects + Regulatory Clarity Real use cases = global pain points + cross-border focus 🧑‍🤝‍🧑Users = (Pain Points × Smartphone Penetration) + (Unbanked Population × Digital Infra) Demand = Merchants x Users Infrastructure = Payment Infra + Local Channel Integration 🌐Network effects = Adoption = User Adoption × Merchant Acceptance ⚖️Regulatory Clarity = Licensing and Registration + Financial Stability and Systemic Risk Management

Nigeria’s crypto revolution can be a great blueprint for Africa’s crypto’s movement. Their adoption has been crazy but the features protecting users might be the ones keeping others out.

VC isn't a science with rigid formulas—it's an art of pattern recognition. Behind every investment is a dance of intuition, lived experience, and subtle signal detection.