Founder & CEO @eversendapp | Stablecoin-powered payments & APIs | Global USD/EUR accounts
London
Joined October 2007
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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…
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!
STONΞ retweeted
Can Stripe build Circle before Circle builds Stripe?
There’s an opportunity for someone to use a regulated, USD-backed stablecoin to significantly disrupt the global payments ecosystem.
This is not a big direct revenue generation opportunity because the economics of stablecoins aren’t that good (especially if there’s any competition). However, it is a big indirect revenue generation opportunity if you can stack value-add services on top of a ubiquitous stablecoin rail.
Circle is well on its way to owning that regulated, USD-backed stablecoin rail. More recently, it has been working to build out those value-add services (CCTP, CPN, USYC, agentic payments capabilities, etc.)
Stripe obviously has a ton of value-add payments services already built. It has been working to retrofit those services for stablecoins and to build new, stablecoin-native value-add services.
The problem for Stripe is that it doesn’t control the underlying stablecoin payment rail. Circle does and it has been working to vertically integrate it in order to lock the Stripes of the world out of the more lucrative opportunities higher up in the stack.
Stripe’s initial response was to acquire Bridge and (through Bridge) to issue its own stablecoin (USDB).
What Stripe seems to have realized is that this strategy for building out the Circle side of its business is going to take too long. Circle has too big of a lead.
So, Stripe has taken a page out of the big banks’ book and has launched a consortium (Open Standard) which will develop its own regulated, USD-backed payment stablecoin (OUSD) to compete with Circle. It has convinced quite a few other companies to be a part of the consortium as well, including Adyen, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, U.S. Bank, Coinbase, Google, and Shopify.
Stripe is incentivizing participation by creating a somewhat-decentralized governance structure for Open Standard and is incentivizing adoption by eliminating fees to mint and redeem and sharing nearly all the float revenue with the partners who are using OUSD.
Essentially, Stripe is teaming up with everyone who makes money in any part of the payments stack (except Circle) and creating a new stablecoin business model that makes stablecoin issuance unsurvivable as a standalone business.
This puts Circle in a tough spot, because, unlike Stripe, Circle can’t adopt a consortium-style approach to building out the Stripe side of its business. It needs to own that side of the business, which means it needs to build (or acquire) it itself.
OUSD isn’t guaranteed to succeed. It has some massive execution and governance challenges ahead of it. And regulators will have their say, at some point. But it is an indicator of how important Stripe (and its partners) think regulated, USD-backed stablecoins are as foundational payments infrastructure.
STONΞ retweeted
The founder in their 40s with taste and discernment is the new gentleman unicorn founder
Because there can be 100x to 1000x of them working at their beck and call via agents and software factories all the time
The age of the 40-year-old founder is back.
Bryant Chou spent 12 years as CTO of Webflow, which now powers something like 1.5% of the entire internet. He's back in the current YC batch with Ploy, an AI marketing platform, and he describes himself as "a bit of a boomer, double the age of the YC founders." But over 13% of his batch is already using his product, within months of launch.
There is a side of the argument which destroyed one of the main edges young founders have, which was being faster and cheaper at building.... speed is everyones game.
If what's left is knowing what to build this is more likely to come from spending 15 years watching an industry up close, collecting the thousand small frustrations that tell you where the real problem is. Bryant can build an anti-slop website tool because he spent over a decade learning exactly why websites are slop.
So I'm updating. I don't think it's young vs. old. I think AI rewards whoever has the most domain knowledge to point it at, and only sometimes is this younger founders who are thinking outside of the box...
STONΞ retweeted
The age of the 40-year-old founder is back.
Bryant Chou spent 12 years as CTO of Webflow, which now powers something like 1.5% of the entire internet. He's back in the current YC batch with Ploy, an AI marketing platform, and he describes himself as "a bit of a boomer, double the age of the YC founders." But over 13% of his batch is already using his product, within months of launch.
There is a side of the argument which destroyed one of the main edges young founders have, which was being faster and cheaper at building.... speed is everyones game.
If what's left is knowing what to build this is more likely to come from spending 15 years watching an industry up close, collecting the thousand small frustrations that tell you where the real problem is. Bryant can build an anti-slop website tool because he spent over a decade learning exactly why websites are slop.
So I'm updating. I don't think it's young vs. old. I think AI rewards whoever has the most domain knowledge to point it at, and only sometimes is this younger founders who are thinking outside of the box...
STONΞ retweeted
🚨 BREAKING: 100+ companies just backed Open USD, a dollar stablecoin run by a new independent company, Open Standard. Zach Abrams is interim CEO.
Five-minute reaction (and personal views only.)
The instinct is to count the logos when you see a lot of them. The design choices matter much more.
- No mint or redemption fees by default
- No arbitrary caps when you scale from $10k to $10m
- Reserve yield shared by default (issuers used to keep it)
This is clearly about scale, and going after the larger, industrial-grade payments volume.
Open Standard runs like a financial market infrastructure. It remids me more of things like SWIFT, the card networks, the clearing houses. Owned broadly, governed by a board, a little "boring" on purpose.
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Credible neutrality is the whole game.
One company's coin is a product. A coin a hundred competitors agree to share becomes a standard. The cap tables of SWIFT and the early clearing houses were the incumbents of their day in one room. This rhymes.
Look at the breadth too. Banks, card networks, crypto natives, fintechs, big tech, on one coin. A global PSP, a community bank, an international long-tail player. Everyone finds an animal in the picture that looks like them. That breadth is the ultra significant bit.
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For stablecoins to get beyond their current use cases, we needed something that got rid of the penalties for scale (like mint burn fees) and could handle massive volume.
Today's stablecoin use cases are a rounding error against what's coming. with ~$300B in circulation. SWIFT instructs an average of 5 to 6 trillions a day. The card networks settle trillions. Capital markets, QUADRILLIONS. The prize is moving those flows on-chain, 24/7, with the settlement guarantees regulated money actually needs.
If you build payments, capital markets or treasury, this is the rails question of the decade.
Read the design choices first. The logo wall is the easy story.
STONΞ retweeted
1/ Today, we announced Visa is joining Open Standard alongside Stripe, Coinbase, Mastercard, American Express, Blackrock, US Bank, BBVA, Standard Chartered and 100+ initial partners with the mission of issuing Open USD, a shared stablecoin designed for the global financial system.
STONΞ retweeted
Could someone sitting in London or Silicon Valley quickly understand what you’re building and why it's important?
That's a question every founder should be able to answer.
Watch the full conversation with @StoneAtwine here: bit.ly/4aC4CGE
STONΞ retweeted
Introducing Open USD: a stablecoin built for the internet economy, designed by the businesses growing it.
joinopenstandard.com/blog/in…
STONΞ retweeted
Many smart people/AI insiders are saying GLM-5.2 is the first Chinese AI model to match and often beat the American big lab public AI models with no compromises. Incredible timing given current events.
STONΞ retweeted
How to keep AI spend flat while token usage grows exponentially: Not with friction and spend alerts. With better defaults, routing, and caching.
Better Defaults (not Usage Caps) – Engineers can choose any model they want, but defaults matter. We’re experimenting with defaulting to open weight models like GLM 5.2 and Kimi 2.7 through our LLM gateway, while still encouraging engineers to choose the right model for the task. 91% of our employees were never hitting their usage caps, so instead of lowering caps and driving up alerts, we're moving to cheaper defaults. Note that code reviews use a diversity of models, so they can check each other's work.
Better Routing – In our custom harnesses, we preprocess prompts and route to the best model for the job, considering cache hits and model pricing. For instance, you may want a frontier model for planning, but not for execution where they can be overkill. Ultimately, humans shouldn't be choosing models - AI can automate this task.
Better Caching – Cache misses are the easiest way to drive your cost up. All of our requests are cache aware, so we’re reusing a warm cache wherever possible. For example, our cache hit rate went from 5% → 60% in LibreChat once properly implemented.
Keep Context Lean – Start fresh sessions when switching tasks. Scope file context narrowly. Disconnect unused tools. Don't just compact. The goal isn't fewer tokens used, it's fewer tokens wasted.
Better Visibility – Our engineers can use as many tokens as they want, from whatever model they want, but we’ve made usage visible – and the more you spend on AI, the more impact we expect.
The goal isn't to suppress usage. It's to build the infrastructure that makes exponential growth sustainable.
Putting this into practice has cut our AI spend nearly in half, while our token usage continues to grow.
STONΞ retweeted
We’re now officially a fully licensed bank in the UK.
As a bank, we’ll soon offer accounts protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) up to £120,000 per person on eligible deposits.
It also means we’ll be able to launch more banking features in the future — so keep an eye out for updates.
STONΞ retweeted
Introducing Sovereign AI, the Government’s new £500m venture fund.
Sovereign AI will support founders from day one to start here, scale here and win everywhere.
sovereignai.gov.uk
STONΞ retweeted
Friendly reminder: only 4% of startups make it to $1 million in revenue. If you get here you are absolutely crushing it.
STONΞ retweeted
Stop letting your capital sit idle. 🛑
@StoneAtwine breaks down the "Level 4" architecture @eversendapp uses for Just-in-Time funding. It’s the pragmatic evolution of e-money: moving value with the speed of M-Pesa, but on open, borderless rails. 🌍⚡️ Link in comments
STONΞ retweeted
Everyone’s saying OpenAI got the “same deal” Anthropic was banned for.
Read the fine print. They’re not the same:
On weapons:
Anthropic asked for “no fully autonomous weapons without human oversight” = a human involved in the decision.
OpenAI’s deal says “human responsibility for the use of force” = someone accountable, which can happen after the fact.
Oversight ≠ Responsibility. One requires a human before the trigger. The other requires a name on the paperwork after.
On surveillance:
Dario said explicitly: current law hasn’t caught up with AI. The government can already buy your movement data, browsing history, etc without a warrant. AI can assemble that into a complete picture of your life, at scale. That’s mass surveillance without breaking a single law.
Anthropic wanted protections beyond current law.
OpenAI’s deal says the Pentagon “reflects them in law and policy.” That’s existing law as the safeguard, the exact law Anthropic said is insufficient.
Same words. Different agreements. Read them carefully
STONΞ retweeted
We’ve identified industrial-scale distillation attacks on our models by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax.
These labs created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude, extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models.
STONΞ retweeted
In 10 years, there will be two classes of people.
Economists call it the "K-shaped economy" - and the next 2-3 years will decide which line you're on.
• An overclass that uses AI as a lever to build wealth, automate income, and make decisions at a speed no human can compete with alone.
• And an underclass that gets managed by it.
This isn't just "coming". It's already happening.
Some mind-blowing stats:
• Workers with AI skills earn 56% more than the same job without them. That premium doubled in a single year.
• Industries adopting AI are seeing 3x the revenue growth per employee.
• Meanwhile, 90% of workers haven't taken a single hour of AI training.
• Goldman Sachs estimates 300 million jobs will be affected by AI by 2028. That's 24 months from now.
If you're reading this now and you haven't built systems with AI - haven't automated a single workflow, haven't used it to create anything that makes you money or makes you irreplaceable - you are currently on the wrong line.
That's not an insult. You have the agency to change your trajectory right now.
But six months from now, the gap will be twice as wide. And a year from now, it may not be crossable.
