Simon Taylor✓

Obsolete Sony @ObsoleteSony

In 2005, Sony Ericsson unveiled the W800, the world's first Walkman phone.

jack @jack

We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.

Tempo @tempo

1/ Stablecoins provide banks with an opportunity to grow deposits. As businesses get paid in stablecoins, they'll move idle balances into tokenized deposits, which count as cash and support credit lines. Banks that offer them early win that business.

Noah Shinn @noahrshinn

Give your Instinct a budget Built with @Stripe and @link, we're launching Link balance in @instinct. You can now set a budget for your Instinct to make purchases on your behalf, and Instinct does the rest. You choose how much money to add and set a limit for each purchase. Your Instinct can spend within those limits, without needing access to your credit card or asking for approval every time. That means buying tickets as soon as the presale opens, picking up your size when the trail runners restock, or reordering your favorite coffee beans every other week. Link balance is rolling out to Instinct users across the US starting today, with New York coming soon. Ask your Instinct to set up Link balance and it’ll send you a link to get started.

Eric Seufert @eric_seufert

Meta Q3 2026 earnings: interpreting early Muse metrics I don’t think I’ve ever been tagged in as many X posts as I was yesterday when Mark Zuckerberg stated on the Meta earnings call that shopping is the most common use case for Muse, and that the average Muse transaction size is $200. At first blush, this seems to undermine my 'Agentic commerce is a mirage' thesis. But I believe that deconstructing Zuckerberg's statements reveals a different interpretation. I've made my Q3 2026 earnings analysis for Meta free; no paywall.

niran @niran7

Based. Not many founders/CEOs have the balls to do brand marketing. Most just live in a perpetual cycle of performance ads. @NStoronsky on @davidsenra’s podcast. “If you’re a digital bank, you don’t have branches. People don’t see you physically, so they trust you less by definition compared to HSBC, Lloyds, JP Morgan Chase." "So how do you build trust? In performance marketing you pay per impression, and there are a lot of spaces in the physical world you can buy that also produce impressions, at a much cheaper price. We bought almost 50% of all airports in Europe. Simple math. How many times a year people travel, how many times they’re in the airport, how many impressions we produce, how much it costs us. There is arbitrage to performance marketing.”

Max Karpis @maxkarpis

Bank of England orders review of Revolut’s product approval processes The Bank of England’s PRA has ordered a Section 166 review of Revolut’s product approval processes, according to the Financial Times. The order came earlier this year, around the time Revolut finally secured its full UK banking licence in March. The aim is to examine the risks around rapid launches of new financial products and better understand the robustness of the group’s internal systems. A Section 166 forces a firm to appoint external experts—accountants or lawyers—to examine its controls and produce a report with recommendations. It is an evidence-gathering tool. If failures are found, regulators can then impose penalties or take other action. This follows earlier action by the European Central Bank. Last year the ECB found “deficiencies” in Revolut’s new product approval processes and ordered a third-party review of its risk, compliance and legal functions governing new product launches in Europe. The move came after CEO Nik Storonsky said he likes employees to act like “self-guided missiles” with little oversight when developing products. Revolut’s wait for a full UK licence was already the longest of any bank in the country. With the licence now granted, the Section 166 shows regulators still want extra safeguards in place before Revolut pushes further into core banking products. The practical question is how far this slows product velocity. Whoever leaked the detail has also made visible a level of supervisory attention we normally don't know about.

Simon Taylor @sytaylor

Visa is in late-stage talks to buy Fireblocks for ~$2.5bn (Axios) That is roughly 70% below the $8bn valuation Fireblocks raised at in 2022. Fireblocks runs custody and wallet infrastructure for 2,400+ institutions, including BNY Mellon and BNP Paribas, and says it has secured over $10tn in transfers. It has become the biggest player in digital asset custody. But increasingly it's expanding in more directions and product cross-sell, while underneath, competitors like DFNS are winning market share and mind share. Fireblocks hasn't raised in a while. Visa's stablecoin settlement crossed a $20bn annualized run rate in September, up 15x in a year, with 160+ stablecoin-linked card programs live. They're arguably ahead on stablecoin-linked cards. Then Mastercard bought BVNK, Visa's settlement and OTC partner. While Fireblocks isn't a like-for-like (Visa now partners with many in that space), it does take custody, arguably a harder piece to do in-house. And the strategy here is fascinating to observe To my mind, Visa wants to be the provider of choice for any FI going onchain, especially the big banks. Fireblocks is a large book of enterprise clients and fits exactly where I think Visa is going. Cards are where stablecoins drive Visa today. As settlement for non-card payments starts to go onchain, Visa needs the wallet and custody plumbing underneath those flows. Fireblocks then looks like a logical play. Visa gets the enterprise relationships and the plumbing in one deal. Fireblocks customers now have a custody vendor owned by a card network, and some exchanges and Mastercard-aligned banks will think twice. DFNS and the rest now compete with a vendor that has Visa's sales team already inside the big banks. It reminds me that Standard Chartered also said it would take full ownership of Zodia Custody. Digital asset custody is consolidating into the incumbents. Visa paid $2bn for CyberSource in 2010 to own the e-commerce gateway. (Arguably no longer *the default* gateway, but certainly one that's very successful at least in part due to Visa's market distribution). This is that play for onchain. For Fireblocks, this is a down round and a half if it happens. But not dissimilar from what we've seen in SaaS with bending spoons. A lot of companies got bid up high in the 2021 era, and no matter how successful and how much revenue they pile on, it's still big shoes to fill. Fireblocks is a talent team, so I wish them well if this is true or not. Either way. Keep doing things. Visa and Fireblocks both sponsor tokenized, but as you'd hopefully imagine, I have no insight or color on this from either team and haven't spoken to anyone there about it.

Joe Weisenthal @TheStalwart

MAYBE I WAS WRONG ABOUT BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY I wrote about how I always used to make fun of the guys who said things like "Bitcoin is speculative, but the underlying blockchain technology is interesting." And now I think maybe they kinda had a point.

Tom Noyes @noyesclt

M2020. Top Recaps - Part 1. Stripe is not only the payment engine for Muse, they are actually core to Meta's economics. The 300bps linked card is providing meta with ~100bps of revenue. Card networks are enabling the economics of Agentic. This works beyond Stripe merchants, and beyond Link wallets. The linked card creates alignment with Meta and Stripe. While Stripe may be capable of creating an alternative payment network, they can't create the economics (merchant acceptance of a 300bps card for stripe and non-stripe merchants). Big retailers are set to block this card (and "wallet") due to price, most of the large merchants require customer auth with merchant. The merchant friendly solution to Muse and agent integration is form @LoginID_io. A fantastic merchant friendly integration to their Auth. Expect a presentation w/ MRC.

Jeff Weinstein @jeff_weinstein

Early @claudeai Duet users, Your new fancy agent can securely buy across the web using @link, with your approval. Give it a whirl and give us feedback.

Claude @claudeai

We’re opening a research preview of Claude Duet, a new app where Claude works as a proactive agent. It comes to you with what needs your attention, completes tasks you ask of it, keeps working when you step away, and checks with you before it acts on your behalf.

market participant @LaurelonCapital

Ramp is valued at $60B at ~30x rev. Nubank is valued at $60B at ~2.5x rev. They are VERY different businesses. And this is not a knock on Ramp. Ramp is an AI winner / enterprise fintech AI neolab, with myriad innovations and advantages vs incumbents like AMEX / Brex / etc. They are just executing and taking share and winning. Nubank is (perceived as) AI neutral by the market, with credit cycle / EM risk overshadowing AI tailwinds. What if Nubank is Ramp for consumer finance, a neolab in its own right? "Advances in artificial intelligence and Nubank's low-cost operating model could enable a dramatic expansion beyond Latin America... [I envision] a global financial institution serving as many as 1 billion customers across 100 countries, operating with just 5,000 employees." - @velez_david