Building @calenpay (We’re growing!). Ex World Bank. Driving stablecoin adoption in Africa.
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Advancing artificial intelligence and financial technology safely, openly, and in service of humanity’s long-term interests.
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korea's first won-backed stablecoin, KRW1, is going onto injective. reserves sit in escrow at woori bank and only approved institutions can mint or redeem
the number in the announcement that got me: korea's top five exchanges have had 18 straight months of stablecoin outflows to overseas platforms, about $10.4bn. a lot of korean money already went onchain, it just went in dollars
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the information says a 10 point jump in model intelligence now wins about 20% more developer traffic. in late 2025 the same jump won nearly 69%
cognition's president called a lot of coding "intelligence saturated". once two models both pass your tests, price and speed decide
the exception is long work that's hard to check, where paying for the smarter one still makes sense
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the japan bit is my favourite. JPYC charges shops no processing fee, some passed the saving on as discounts, then owners got nervous it might break their card contracts and JPYC had to take the question to the fair trade commission
first real fight at the till and it's over a clause in a merchant agreement 😂
$6B a year in card payments funded by stablecoins, through one Singapore company.
A yen stablecoin taking payments at 150+ points across Japan.
In Asia, stablecoins are reaching the till. Here’s what happened this month 🧵👇
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sensor tower numbers on meta's muse, shared by deedy das: 73% of new users opened it again the next day, almost double chatgpt's 41%. by day 14 it was 22.5% against chatgpt's 26.8%
being pushed inside instagram and facebook gets you that first reopen. coming back in week two depends on whether it did something useful the first few times
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stand with crypto counted 10,092 complaints to uk banks in 90 days about transfers to fca registered crypto platforms. lloyds got the most at 2,297
the limits are all over the place. barclays and hsbc allow £2,500 a transfer, natwest £1,000 a day, six banks block it completely. lloyds and revolut publish no limit and still got complaints, so their customers find out the rule when the payment fails
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then july alone came in at $947m per cbn, about a third of the whole first half in one month
cbn credits the market rate and the non resident bvn. my guess is a lot of this is money that always came home, now coming through official channels because the rate gap got too small to be worth the hassle
Data from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) shows that international money transfer operator (IMTO) inflows rose by 38.2% to $2.85 billion between January and June 2026, up from $2.07 billion recorded in the corresponding period of 2025.
See the monthly breakdown in our chart.
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cbn data had pos transaction volume down 19.9% in q1 while mobile payments grew 28.6%. one agent in the piece says even yam and tomato sellers now take transfer
the agents who last probably end up less like a cash point and more like the person you run to when a transfer has said pending for 3 hours
Nigeria’s vast Point-of-Sale (PoS) agency banking network is facing growing pressure as consumers increasingly abandon cash withdrawals in favour of direct mobile transfers, raising concerns about the long-term sustainability of thousands of PoS businesses across the country.
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anne boden sold her last 2.7% of starling at a £1.7bn valuation, per sky news. last year it was reportedly seeking up to £4bn in a share sale
£759m of starling's £887m revenue last year was interest income, about 86%. the bank of england cut rates and revenue fell 5.6%. so a lot of that valuation is really a bet on where uk rates go next
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programming the automation for one station on a factory line can take three to six months and close to $1m. a new phone is at full production for about four months. so by the time the robots are ready, the phone they were built for is old
that's the gap bob mcgrew's arda raised $230m to close, and why fast changing hardware still gets built where people can be retrained in a day
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44% can't show a return on the AI they've already got, and the top plan is more of it 😂 measuring what the first few agents actually saved would be my step one, it's just a lot less fun to announce
half of ceos say putting ai agents to work as employees is a top way to get money back from ai, says a new @Gartner_inc survey. 44% say they can't show ai returns yet.
gartner:
"Fifty-two percent cited aggressively deploying AI agents as employees, while 47% cited unlocking or reallocating capital through significant business restructuring."
gartner's david furlonger says the fix is to change how the company works, not add more ai to the old way.
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the reversal had its own lag too. uganda's cabinet agreed on 16 july 2018, two weeks in, to cut it to 0.5% on withdrawals only. the amended law only took effect on 16 november, so the 1% kept getting charged for four and a half months after everyone heard it was going away
In July 2018 a 1% tax on mobile money cut one Ugandan aggregator's payments to farmers by a third in a month. Rich countries learned the hard way that predictability is infrastructure. Part 7 of The Constraint Tax.
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france's national assembly voted 38 to 37 to tax crypto to stablecoin swaps at the 31.4% flat rate from 2027, even if the money never touches a bank account. 25 deputies abstained, so one vote decided it
the minister asked for it to be withdrawn because stablecoins don't have a legal definition in french law yet. it still has to get through the rest of the budget and the senate
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daytona just raised $60m at a $1b valuation to rent computers to AI agents. it spins up a sandbox in about 60 milliseconds, where the founder says the big clouds take 30 seconds or more
the founder told fortune that when they pivoted they handed their old customers to competitors and had about three months of revenue left in the bank. revenue run rate is up 25x since january
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€10 a month from age 6 to 18 sounds tiny. germany's finance ministry says it grows to about €2,200 by 18 and roughly €53,000 by retirement with nothing else added
the bit i'd copy is the 1% cost cap with no sales fees until 18. over 50 years the fees decide more than the €10 does. bundestag passed it friday, the bundesrat still has to sign off
🇩🇪 UPDATE: Germany launches Kids Accounts, similar to the US, with €10 monthly state payments toward pension savings for children.
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small print for the 2x speed people: spotify counts the book's normal length against your 15 hours, so speeding up doesn't stretch the allowance 😭 ₦2,300 works out to about ₦153 an hour if you use all of it, and unused hours don't roll over
@Spotify brings audiobooks to Nigeria, with plans starting at ₦2,300.
The new Audiobooks+ add-on offers 15 hours of monthly listening, while Nigerian authors and publishers can use Spotify to reach listeners in over 180 markets.
techpoint.africa/news/spotif…
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mercury launched payroll today, built from the central acquisition they closed in april. six months from deal to live product is quick.
founders in the replies are already doing the maths, one says it's $150 a month vs about $55 on gusto solo. but once your bank is paying your staff and filing your payroll taxes, nobody is switching banks over $95
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anthropic had claude design protein binders against scorpion toxins. labs tested 211 designs and 17 bound their target. same day, radical numerics says its model designed phages that were given to a patient with a drug-resistant infection.
the scorpion one is the one i keep thinking about. 1.2m stings a year and barely anyone builds treatments because they don't earn back the cost. if the design part takes 64 hours, a lot of diseases nobody could afford to work on start to make sense
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the part that stuck with me: former employees found out their shares were worth $0 from a carta email pointing at a 125 page pdf. 17 years and around 1,600 people. when the news is that bad, the least people deserve is a human telling them
Foursquare was acquired last month. The outcome was disappointing. It's taken me a while to write this, but I think I'm finally done grieving it. Here are some thoughts on our final years, an effort to honor the team who helped build & maintain FSQ's legacy, and my attempt to finally get some closure. teendrama.substack.com/p/som…
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so when a coding agent sits there for minutes, the maths took microseconds and the rest was the chip hauling 140gb of weights through memory for every single word. sk hynix saying its 2026 HBM is already spoken for means that wait isn't getting cheaper soon
Every time an AI types one word, a chip somewhere re-reads the entire model from scratch. For a 70B model that's 140 gigabytes, about 35,000 songs' worth, for a single word. Then it does it all again for the next word.
When you hit enter, the GPU reads your whole prompt in one shot and the math units stay busy. Then it starts writing the answer one token at a time, and every token needs the full set of weights dragged through the memory bus before the next one can start. The math takes microseconds, and the rest of the time the chip is waiting on memory.
So the industry's answer has been HBM, the stacked memory bolted onto every top-end accelerator. And HBM is sold out. SK hynix makes around half the world's supply and has said its 2026 HBM capacity is already spoken for.
Now stack agents on top. A coding agent doesn't make one model call per task. It makes dozens, sometimes hundreds, each waiting on the last. Fifty calls with a few seconds of decode each and you've spent minutes watching a cursor blink. Cut the wait on each call and the whole task gets dramatically faster.
I figured the answer was just more GPUs. Turns out you split the job. GPUs take the prompt, a memory-first chip writes the output, and you call one endpoint under one contract. That's what @general_compute is doing with @positron_ai's Atlas systems, with the Titan generation behind it, available Q1 2027.
The bottleneck moved from math to memory a while ago, so whoever moves 140 gigabytes fastest wins inference.
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