Founder & CEO @eversendapp | Stablecoin-powered payments & APIs | Global USD/EUR accounts
London
Joined October 2007
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- @Capgemini’s new World Payments Report puts some numbers around how broken cross-border B2B payments still are.
A typical cross-border B2B payment costs about 2% of transaction value.
The full corporate payment journey takes roughly 3.5 days.
And an estimated $4 trillion sits trapped in settlement and liquidity accounts just to keep the system working.
That is an extraordinary amount of friction for something that is fundamentally moving numbers between ledgers.
Capgemini estimates $230 billion of bank payments revenue could be at risk by 2030 as stablecoins, tokenised deposits and other new forms of money reach just ~4% of global payments volume.
That last number is the interesting one.
We do not need stablecoins to replace the banking system for the economics of cross-border payments to change dramatically. They only need to take enough volume from the most expensive and inefficient parts of the stack.
The incumbent system has correspondent banks, prefunding, nostro accounts, cut-off times, reconciliation and several intermediaries all earning something along the way.
Stablecoins collapse a lot of that into software.
The opportunity is removing 200 basis points, 3.5 days and trillions of dollars of idle liquidity from global payments.
🤖 Made with AI
Washington is starting to understand something important: stablecoins are a distribution rail for the dollar.
The US is reportedly looking at using Treasury, State and DFC to push dollar stablecoins deeper into developing markets. The incentive is obvious. Stablecoin issuers already hold roughly $200B in US Treasuries. More dollar stablecoins in circulation means more structural demand for T-bills.
But the interesting part for Africa is that dollar liquidity stops being the scarce asset.
If Washington helps subsidise the distribution of digital dollars across emerging markets, there will be plenty of USDC/USDT-equivalent liquidity looking for somewhere to go.
The scarce infrastructure becomes the last mile: local licences, bank and mobile-money integrations, compliance, FX, liquidity management and reliable off-ramps into local currency.
In other words, the value moves downstream.
No need to issue another stablecoin.
Rather own the rails that turn a dollar stablecoin into spendable money.
STONΞ retweeted
Anthropic’s Economics team is sharing a new model of how AI might affect economic growth, jobs, wages, and more by 2030.
Explore the scenarios, tell us what you think will happen, and see how your answers compare to more than 10,000 Americans. anthropic.com/institute/econ…
- @eversendapp is hiring a Head of Finance for our Uganda Operation. linkedin.com/jobs/view/44592…
Ugandans are scandalised by a few F-bombs. I’m more interested in what the video actually shows: leadership.
A captain firing up his team and demanding more from his men. On a football pitch, that language is hardly extraordinary.
Frankly, the whole thing felt rather King-like to me.
That’s the warrior I’d want as King.
Stablecoin payments in USD, EUR and GBP are almost zero margin.
The money is in converting local currencies where liquidity and settlement are hard and FX has real economics. What many are doing is riding zero revenue hard currencies, raising money on volumes and then planning for emerging markets.
We just started there.
STONΞ retweeted
Nvidia acquires Hugging Face for ~$12.9bn. But who gets the 💰? My usual breakdown below 👇
*Investors are sharing ~$7.3bn of profits on <$400m invested. A cool ~20x blended.*
*1) The single biggest winner here? Lux Capital.* 👑
Lux is taking the crown for the most $ returned in this transaction. The two rounds they led (Series A & Series C) generated ~$2.6bn combined. They also participated in the Series B.
Congrats to @wolfejosh and team. The $15.0m Series A alone will return ~132.5x the capital invested, or ~$2.0bn. The most lucrative round in absolute $ returned.
*2) Backing an exceptional team paid off with a >1,000x return for Betaworks and the angels* 📈
The story few people know: Hugging Face started life as a chatbot for lonely teenagers... You sent it a selfie and a sad emoji, it told you it understood. Quite far from where it landed!
That is why backing an exceptional team in @ClementDelangue, @Thom_Wolf and @julien_c is always the right thing to do. It paid over 1,000x for Betaworks, Kevin Durant and Thibaud Elziere.
*3) Founders and team are crushing it: not taking too much dilution along the way paid off* 👏
I estimate they will share ~$5bn in proceeds, assuming no secondary was taken along the way. A life changing outcome for them and many employees.
Taking a 15% attributed option pool at exit, this would mean ~$2bn for the team and >$3bn to share for the three co-founders. Legendary!
*4) Salesforce Ventures is cementing its reputation as one of the very best corporate VCs.* 🥇
Salesforce is adding Hugging Face to its long list of successful exits: Snowflake, Zoom, DocuSign, nCino, Auth0... Very few investors can claim as many successes, let alone corporates.
The $235m round they led returned $675m in just three short years. Meanwhile, Salesforce's own stock has been flat for the period. Capital well invested!
*5) This is a little bit of a heartbreak: but I wanted to congratulate @joinstationf here:*
Hugging Face walked into StationF as a 4-person team on day one, June 2017. Back when it was a chatbot for teenagers. They went through multiple corporate programs (Microsoft, Ubisoft, then Naver). Unfortunately they were not investing or taking equity at the time - but they contributed to making it possible. And so for that: hats off.
And of course, congratulations to all others involved: Addition, Sequoia, Coatue and many others. No one will be left out!
