Pd (zoth)#stablecoinbanking

zPayments is live on @base. Businesses can now pay out across borders in local currency, to 171 countries. One rate, shown before you send. Money settles instantly on supported corridors. We carry the compliance. We ran this by hand for over a year, moving $500M+ at a 99.1% success rate, before we opened it to anyone. Now the gates are open. Founding Access opens today 👉 zoth.io/zpayments

Lets push

The decisions I don't delegate Not every decision deserves a founder's involvement. But some can't be undone. At @zothdotio, getting custody wrong, onboarding the wrong counterparty, or underwriting a flow we don't fully understand isn't a mistake we can roll back. Someone's capital is already at stake. That's why I believe founders should delegate based on reversibility, not importance. Pricing, positioning, and product decisions? My team often makes them better than I do. My involvement can slow things down without improving the outcome. Some decisions carry consequences beyond the business itself. How we manage risk, safeguard assets, and communicate yield expectations are decisions I believe deserve my direct attention. The same applies to criticism. Dismissing every critic as noise is dangerous when you're responsible for people's capital. Sometimes, criticism is a warning long before it becomes an incident. My rule is simple: be firm on risk, custody, and disclosure. Stay flexible on almost everything else. The best founders aren't those who never change their minds. They're the ones who know exactly which opinions they should change and which they can't afford to.

Founders rarely talk about what went wrong while it’s still fresh. That’s what made the “Real Startup Disasters” panel at Founders Connect worth being part of. I shared the stage with two founders who had their own near-misses to tell. A few things from my side of the conversation are worth writing down. Budgets break. We recently planned an investment in a licensed company in Canada, and the cost doubled, largely on legal fees. Most founders I know get budgeting wrong, so we now plan for contingencies beyond what we expect to need. Cash flow and runway should be numbers every founder knows by heart. Most startups that fail simply run out of cash. Hiring needs two kinds of people. We think in terms of missionaries, generalists deeply aligned with the mission who tend to stay long-term, and mercenaries, specialists who come in to do a specific job and may or may not stay. Both are valuable when you’re clear about which one you’re hiring. Something will always go wrong. As a solo founder, I’ve found it helps to focus only on what I can control. If a raise is slow, go after more leads. If a customer stalls, find more customers. And I start the day with exercise: one hard thing done before the world wakes up. None of this makes the hard days disappear. It makes them easier to get through. What’s one habit that has kept you steady through a rough patch?

In my conversations with @torabyou family is the real strength.

A great product doesn't automatically make a great business. And in financial infrastructure, that distinction matters more than most people realize. You can build impressive technology, you can launch a product or even you prove that it works. But none of that guarantees adoption. The real test begins when people have to rely on what you've built. - Can businesses integrate it into their existing operations? - Can transactions settle reliably? - Can the infrastructure meet compliance requirements? - Can users find a genuine reason to keep coming back? These are not the most exciting parts of building a financial product. Rather they're often the most important. At @zothdotio, this is a distinction we think deeply about. The opportunity in stablecoins, payments, agentic finance and tokenized assets isn't just about putting financial products on-chain. It's about building the infrastructure that makes them useful in the real world. Because technology creates possibility. Execution creates reliability. And sustained adoption is what turns infrastructure into a business. The goal isn't just to build something that works. It's to build something people can depend on.

The choices that built Zoth Life is a choosing problem A few weeks ago someone shared Mathurah Ravigulan's essay on choosing well, and I haven't stopped thinking about it. Her argument is that the shape of a life comes down to a handful of choices, and that choosing well rests on three things you can actually work on: luck, alpha and judgement. She opens with a disclaimer that she hasn't yet seen outlier returns on her choices. I can't write that disclaimer, though not because every bet I made worked. I've been part of an angel syndicate whose portfolio produced two unicorns. So this is less a framework than a ledger: the choices I've made over roughly twenty years, which ones compounded, which ones cost me, and what each taught me. Some context if we haven't met. I studied engineering at MNNIT Allahabad and spent the first stretch of my career inside large companies: Mahindra & Mahindra, Unilever, Kimberly-Clark, and finally AB InBev, where I ran fintech and Web3 for emerging markets. Along the way I co-founded a food tech company called Pasto and an angel syndicate called Eagle10 Ventures. In January 2023 I went all in on Zoth, which today is a stablecoin neobank for the Global South. Luck: it started with $100 a month Some luck has no explanation. But when I trace my luckiest breaks backwards, most of them lead to one small habit I started about fifteen years ago: investing roughly $100 a month. The money itself didn't matter. A hundred dollars a month changes nobody's life. What mattered was what the habit did to my surface area. Investing made me curious about companies, which made me want to talk to founders and other investors, which slowly turned into a community of people pooling money and opinions. That community became Eagle10 Ventures, and over time we backed more than 50 startups. I started Eagle10 because I had felt a gap personally. In India at the time, investors appeared once you were scaling, but almost nobody backed you at the very start. Building the thing I wished had existed turned out to be the best surface-area decision I've made. Founders came to us, and so did deal flow and friendships. Years later, many of those people were among the first to believe in Zoth. The other habit is rooting for people publicly. Crypto is a small industry where everyone is a few introductions apart, and other people's wins genuinely lift you. When I mean it, I say it out loud. That generosity comes back to you. The founders you cheer for become the people who make the introduction when you need one, and warm introductions have done more for Zoth than any cold outreach campaign we've run. Alpha: seeing it before it's obvious For years my LinkedIn header has said that the future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious. In my experience alpha is rarely secret information. More often it's a different reading of facts everyone already has. More recently I backed FirstClub, a quick commerce startup started in 2024 by Ayyappan R, the former Cleartrip CEO. At the time, every player in the category was racing to shave minutes off delivery. FirstClub made a different bet: that Indian households would pay for quality and trust, not just speed. Since then it has raised a seed round, a Series A and, in June 2026, a $55 million Series B. Nobody had hidden anything from the market. The difference was in reading what customers actually wanted, sooner than most. Zoth came from the same kind of seeing. At AB InBev I spent a lot of time with small business owners in Latin America and Africa. Almost all of them had a wallet on their phone, most had no bank account, and many were holding dollars. They didn't care about crypto. They were protecting themselves from their own currency. That was the moment for me. Stablecoins were going to change how money moves, but the market was concentrated in a couple of issuers. Anyone could issue a stablecoin. The hard part was distribution and real utility, and that's where we decided to build. The deepest alpha, though, comes from doing the work long enough that you know things a pitch deck can't tell you. Before zPayments was a product, we ran it by hand for more than a year. That year taught us which corridors break, where compliance slows things down, and what a business owner needs to see before pressing send. The same instinct shaped how we grew. We built a community of millions of wallets before the product was finished, and we went multichain early, because customers won't come to you. You have to go to where they already are. Judgement: the expensive lessons My first lesson in judgement came before I had any. I started my career as the 2008 crisis was unfolding, and lived through several more downturns after that. If you watch enough cycles, you learn that neither good times nor bad times last as long as they feel like they will. Two rules came out of that for me. If something looks too good to be true, it isn't true. And sometimes the best decision is to not move yet. I tested the second rule on Zoth itself. We could have started in November 2021, at the peak of the bull market. I chose to wait, because building then would have cost millions in hype premium for no real advantage. We finally started a few months after FTX collapsed, and I won't pretend I was calm about it. I genuinely wondered whether starting a crypto company at that moment was the right call. It was. Costs were sane, and a skeptical market forced us to build something with real value underneath it. Then came the most challenging phase of my career. In early 2025 Zoth went through a series of setbacks that tested the company, the team and me. People had trusted us, and the responsibility for making things right was ours. It would've been easy to walk away. But we didn't build Zoth to be fragile. That difficult phase taught me more about resilience, transparency and leadership than any good year has. What changed afterwards sounds simple and is much harder to live by. We stopped looking for the next big leap and put everything into execution, getting 1% better every day. Trust isn't rebuilt with one grand gesture. It's rebuilt by showing up, day after day, and doing the small things right. The other half of judgement is borrowed. Morgan Housel's writing on money shaped my view that wealth is really freedom, and that you should always invest before you spend. Real happiness is being able to do what you want, when you want. Our advisors have shown us patterns we would have taken years to learn alone. But borrowed judgement is an input, not a decision. Listen widely, then own the call. And keep the cost of being wrong low. I'd rather try something quickly and treat it as a sunk cost if it fails than spend months on a strategy nobody has tested. What I'm choosing now Zoth has been a series of choosing problems. We began with tokenizing real assets, moved into stablecoin infrastructure, and then into what we're building now: a full-stack stablecoin neobank. zPayments is live on Base, paying out in local currency to 171 countries at one rate shown upfront. zMAG7 now lets one stablecoin deposit hold the seven largest US tech stocks as tokenized shares, in your own wallet. The person I keep in mind is still that shop owner with a wallet on her phone and no bank account, holding dollars to protect what she earned. More and more of finance will move onchain, especially the business of moving money from one place to another. I believe Zoth can be one of the largest players in that, globally, not just regionally. Parting words Luck puts you in the room. Alpha is what you notice once you're there. Judgement is what you do about it, especially when the choice is uncomfortable. Hard work runs underneath all three, because it's what turns $100 a month into a community, a year of manual payouts into a product, and a difficult phase into a stronger company. If you want to start this week, do one thing for each. Start one small habit that puts you around interesting people, and cheer for someone publicly. Spend an hour with an actual customer instead of a report about them. Then write down one decision you're facing, whose judgement you'd borrow on it, and where you'd overrule them. I can't control which opportunities show up. I've learned I can control how many I'm around for, and how honestly I choose between them. What's worked for you? I'd love to hear it.

#karma is real.

In 2023, One top VC from Korea told me stablecoins and RWA’s are no alpha and have no future. #Token2026 was all about Stablecoins & RWA’s Most VC’s are consensus driven. Follow what you believe in and have unique insight on.

I can criticise India. I can demand better governance, better infrastructure and better public services. I can be frustrated with her bureaucracy and regulations. But my affection for her runs deeper than my frustrations. And perhaps that is what people who constantly compare India with the West fail to understand. A country is not merely the quality of its roads, the efficiency of its bureaucracy or the size of its paycheques. There is also a sense of belonging, a civilisational connection and a peace of mind that cannot be measured on a spreadsheet.

If i would have listened to my investors @zothdotio won’t be around today. So true.

A few years ago I spent a lot of time sitting with small business owners in Latin America and Africa. Almost all of them had a wallet on their phone. Most did not have a bank account. They were holding dollars, not because they cared about crypto, but because their own currency was losing value faster than they could sell their stock. That is where @zothdotio came from. Not a crypto product, a stablecoin neobank for people the banking system had already skipped. What took longer to see is how short the list stays. They could hold dollars. They could move them. They still could not own a share of the companies whose apps were on the same phone. zMAG7 changes that one thing. The Magnificent Seven as tokenized stocks, equal weight, each one backed by a real share in regulated custody, and no account to open. Built on @coinbase Tokenized Stocks on @base. It is not a yield product. There is no APY and no target return. The value moves with the underlying stocks and it can fall below what you put in. It is live today for eligible users outside the US. Owning a piece of the companies you use every day should not depend on where you were born. zMAG7 is where we start.

Great conversation with the @base team on bringing more real-world financial activity onchain. At @zothdotio, we’re building on @base and @coinbase to make tokenized assets and stablecoin-powered financial infrastructure more accessible to everyone. Thanks @jessepollak and @brian_armstrong for pushing this ecosystem forward.

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