@rynesaxe
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ceo @eco. Building more than tweeting. Elsewhere analog.
Joined July 2023
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The crypto neobank wars are getting hotter. New products, new capital, new incentives.
I will move my financial life to the first one that looks and feels as delightful as this, across the full deposit-earn-spend-loyalty journey.
Still lots of opportunity to differentiate.
This product offering is great for attention and early (vanity) volume growth, but it's incredibly naive and a mistake we see many companies make. Erebor is just the highest profile example lately.
There *is* a way to offer 1:1 UX to your users in a cost effective way. But it doesn't involve assuming an effective forex market trades at par. The way to figure it out is to flow a couple $ billion across this pair and optimize the hell out of those flows.
If this is something you want to offer, talk to @eco.
Erebor Bank attracted crypto clients this year with a pitch -- the bank would convert their Circle and Tether stablecoins to cash for free.
Sophisticated crypto trading firms quickly figured out a way to make an easy profit out of the offer -- at a cost to Erebor.
Story with @MichaelRoddan
theinformation.com/articles/… 1/
But I thought stablecoins were the problem?
I'm going to say this again: The biggest threat to community banking, is the big banks. It's incredibly rich that the bank lobby continues to play this both ways.
More thoughts below if interested🧵
I'm not quite as spicy as @0xMarcB this morning but getting there.
reuters.com/business/finance…
Think about Eco's routing+pricing engines like an LLM, reasoning across chains and markets in real-time. Then think about the combination of our routing SDK/MCP (👀) and our partners' offchain policy engine as the harness.
Together, these enable developers and institutional traders and money movers to navigate onchain markets like never before.
In this analogy, stablecoins are the tokens, but also the compute. More to come on this last part.
Common @eco FAQ: Is Eco a stablecoin clearinghouse?
Answer: No. We enable programmatic onchain routing in/out/thru stables, with JIT liquidity. Clearing is basically a netting algo. You could (and should) use Eco to power the onchain leg of a clearing flow, but that's only one use case for our platform.
gm. Within 2-3y someone will try to include right to advertise in new auto lease terms, and/or owners will be sold some sort of content subscription plan designed for their cars only.
k, back to stablecoins. and analog things otherwise.
Well said.
On people leaving crypto.
The surface area of companies shrinks in a bear market, so there are simply fewer well-paying jobs rn.
If you want to stay in the industry, you're left with a handful of well-funded companies (Coinbase, Circle, @raincards ahem) that can ride things out, or taking less money and a flier on an earlier stage company.
AI-land is the opposite.
Tons of funding, tons of companies hiring and paying top dollar for talent.
And AI is the sexy new thing that crypto was in 2021.
It's hard to resist.
That said, it does seem like this AI cycle is unwinding:
~ Situational Awareness margin call
~ SpaceX IPO 50% off its high
~ OpenAI reportedly pushing its IPO to 2027
~ runaway AI capex increasingly funded with debt
People chasing AI roles right now are likely to experience some thrash should the music stop playing for a while. I saw the same thing happen to people who left cushy finance & FANG jobs for crypto at the end of 2021.
Reasons to stick with crypto
People who join the industry in non-consensus times tend to reap the benefits. Eg the people who stuck around in 2018/19 got paid in 2020/21.
Sentiment is bad right now, and maybe asset prices get worse if the AI trade unwinds, but it's never been more obvious that this is still a 1000x industry.
Stablecoin adoption has hit escape velocity. They're just better and faster in many scenarios (cross-border, global payments, etc). It becomes more obvious every day I spend at @raincards that stablecoins are coming for all of finance.
Cool so dollars on the blockchain work. Next put every stock & bond on them, and suddenly we've swapped out the 1970s back-office software that underlies the financial system with something internet native that's better, faster, stronger. Yahtzee.
Now sprinkle some AI agents on it. That is coming, and crypto x AI is where I'd take a swing if I were earlier in my career.
So TLDR: I get the pull of AI, but crypto is still a more interesting place to be than it ever has been.