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The Fintech Blueprint

The Fintech Blueprint

De : Lex Sokolin
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 Finance is being pulled apart by the forces of frontier technology. From AI, to blockchain and DeFi, mixed reality, chatbots, neobanks, and roboadvisors — the industry will never be the same. Here is the blueprint for navigating the shift.2021 The FinTech Blueprint Direction Economie Finances privées Management et direction
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  • The $5.1B Marketplace With More AI Agents Than Human Users, with Whop CEO Steven Schwartz

    The $5.1B Marketplace With More AI Agents Than Human Users, with Whop CEO Steven Schwartz
    Oct 26 2026
    In this episode, Lex chats with Steven Schwartz, CEO and co-founder of Whop, the Brooklyn-based marketplace where almost 100,000 people earn money each month selling software, education, communities, physical goods and clipping campaigns through a single API-first stack.Lex and Steven discuss how Whop went from a license-check tool for a handful of Mac and Windows apps to a global commerce platform settling nearly $500M a month in top-of-funnel income to users, and why Tether’s $200M investment at a $1.6B valuation makes stablecoins the only unifying rail capable of paying earners in Morocco, Nigeria, Vietnam or El Salvador the same way as earners in Brooklyn.Steven explains why Whop treats customer acquisition — not payments or user management — as the real wedge against Stripe and Shopify, why the platform now has more agent users than human users, and how an API that lets an LLM spin up an LLC, a storefront and a running ad campaign in one prompt reframes what “starting a business” means. They explore the trajectory from a billion earners to a public listing, and whether a creator-economy fintech can meaningfully invite its own users onto the cap table.Recorded September 2026. In the weeks after this conversation, Whop closed a $200M Series D at a $5.1B valuation — a 3.2× markup on the $1.6B Tether round discussed in the episode — led by Sequoia Capital and Shopify Ventures, with Tether retaining its February stake.NOTABLE DISCUSSION POINTS:Whop’s wedge is customer acquisition, not payments. Payments, user management and hosting are table stakes already solved by Stripe, Shopify and Discord. What sellers actually struggle with is their next incremental customer — and Whop’s take rate (3% on direct sales, 30% on Discover-sourced sales) only makes sense when read against that top-of-funnel claim.Tether’s $200M isn’t a crypto bet, it’s a global payouts bet. Whop services more countries than Shopify, Stripe, Square or Cash App because stablecoins are the only rail that works equivalently in Morocco, Nigeria, Vietnam and the US. Card-spend, DeFi access and local off-ramps all come “for free” once the balance is USDT; a bank-rail version of Whop can’t exist.Whop has more agent users than human users. On-platform traffic now skews toward LLMs, and Schwartz’s claim that he can tell a Claude instance to spin up a business “in one shot” is the product spec, not a demo. The strategic position is explicit: don’t play the model game, be the stack those models call out to.TOPICSFintech, Stablecoins, Payments, Marketplace, DeFi, Web3, Crypto, Tether, USDT, AgenticAI, AIAgents, LLMs, DigitalAssets, Whop, Hyperliquid, Robinhood, Stripe, Shopify ABOUT THE FINTECH BLUEPRINT🔥Subscribe to the Fintech Blueprint newsletter to stay at the forefront of Fintech and DeFi: https://bit.ly/3hyhlC2🤝 Partner with Fintech Blueprint through sponsorships: https://bit.ly/3UZllsV👉 Twitter: https://twitter.com/LexSokolin TIMESTAMPS1’03: A Playbook for the Post-Cubicle Economy: Why Whop Wants to End the 9-to-53’44: A Decade of Side Projects Before Whop: How Two 13-Year-Olds Found Each Other on Facebook8’31: Everyone Is a Builder: Why the Creator vs. Consumer Divide Doesn’t Hold12’09: The Damaged Perception of Success: What Social Media Took From Builders14’57: Facebook Groups, Discord, and Bitcoin: Selling Software Before Whop Was a Website18’02: Abstracting Away the Boring Stuff: What Whop Took Off Every Builder’s Plate20’04: Top-of-Funnel Income-as-a-Product: Why Whop Isn’t a Normal Fintech22’44: Amazon Is for Search, Whop Is for Discovery: The Next Era of Entrepreneurship25’22: $1.5M a Day in Physical Goods Is the Smallest Segment: Whop’s SKU Explosion29’03: $500M a Month in Earner Income: The Hiring Bar That Kept Up31’33: 200M From Tether to Pay Earners in 241 Countries: Whop’s Stablecoin Bet36’37: Crypto Overcomplicates, Stablecoins Just Work: The Customer-Journey Case39’27: More Agent Users Than Human Users: Whop’s AI Traffic Mix44’05: From 100,000 Earners to a Billion: The Home-Run Case for Whop46’32: The channels used to connect with Steven & learn more about Whop Disclaimer here — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD.Contributors: Lex, Laurence, Matt, Farhad, Mike, DaniellaWant to discuss? Stop by our Discord and reach out here with questions.
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    47 min
  • How Stripe's Tempo is Rebuilding On-Chain Cash Settlement, with Head of Market Development Simon Taylor

    How Stripe's Tempo is Rebuilding On-Chain Cash Settlement, with Head of Market Development Simon Taylor
    Sep 28 2026
    In this episode, Lex chats with Simon Taylor, who heads up market development at Tempo, the payments-native blockchain built by Stripe as a high-performance settlement layer for stablecoins and tokenized money. Simon is also the founder of Fintech Brain Food, one of the sector's most widely read newsletters. They discuss why there is no Fedwire for the internet, and why the next wave of on-chain volume is coming from enterprise money movers like Deel rather than crypto-native builders. Simon explains why tokenized deposits, stablecoins and TradFi settlement will converge on a single chain, why agentic commerce is still stuck in its WAP-phone era, and how the Machine Payments Protocol is being designed as an IETF-grade standard that can settle across Tempo, Stripe or any card network.NOTABLE DISCUSSION POINTS:The AI productivity gap is an operating-model gap, not a tooling gap. MIT found nine in ten companies get zero productivity gain from AI, while Ramp’s own data shows the heaviest users generate 2x higher revenue on 40% less capital. What separates them is four ingredients: AI evals as a cultural default, a shared library of skills (Ramp has 350+), non-engineers shipping production code (12% of Ramp’s human-initiated PRs), and treating AI fluency as the primary staff learning curve.Agentic commerce is in its WAP-phone era. Nobody is actually paying for things with agents at any scale - Walmart’s ChatGPT checkout converts worse than its dotcom, Target has told customers they are 100% liable for anything an agent buys, and Walmart and Amazon block third-party agents outright as fraud. The real volume is in B2B finance teams automating PDF-invoice-to-payment flows through Ramp and Brex, which is where Machine Payments Protocol and x402 will first find product-market fit.On-chain cash settlement is less than 0.1% done, and Tempo is being positioned as the missing Fedwire for the internet. The pitch is not a new L1 competing on TPS benchmarks - it is a settlement layer designed by payments veterans who understand that payments are all edge cases, with permissionless issuance combined with opt-in receive policies (TIP-20 upgrades on ERC-20, block/allow lists, embedded compliance) that let enterprises finally clear their RFP checklist.TOPICSFintech, Stablecoins, Tokenization, DigitalAssets, Payments, Settlement, RWA, DeFi, TradFi, CapitalMarkets, AgenticCommerce, AgenticPayments, AIAgents, MachinePayments, Ethereum, Canton, Blockchain, Web3, Tempo, Stripe, Anthropic, Ramp, Brex, Deel ABOUT THE FINTECH BLUEPRINT🔥Subscribe to the Fintech Blueprint newsletter to stay at the forefront of Fintech and DeFi: https://bit.ly/3hyhlC2🤝 Partner with Fintech Blueprint through sponsorships: https://bit.ly/3UZllsV👉 Twitter: https://twitter.com/LexSokolin TIMESTAMPS0’57: How do you ground-truth the digital world: Why AI ultimately runs on a digital asset substrate5’46: The two-speed transformation: Why customer-facing tech is competitive and back-end plumbing is industry-led9’47: Limit the blast radius: How JPMorgan, HSBC and Citi turned tokenized deposits into a client retention play14’46: Finance is globalised, not global: Why Stripe built its own chain instead of stitching together every other one18’21: There is no Fedwire for the internet: The missing global settlement layer Tempo is built for21’18: On-chain cash settlement is less than 0.1% done: Why Tempo is where stablecoins and tokenized deposits converge26’20: The WAP-phone era of agentic commerce: Why nobody is actually paying with agents yet33’07: Everyone is your frenemy: Why Stripe and Coinbase both showed up to the agentic payments market36’44: 9 in 10 companies get zero AI productivity gain: What separates the enterprises that don't43’54: Harnesses and model routers: Where the durable value sits in the enterprise AI stack46’05: The channels used to connect with Simon & learn more about Tempo & Fintech Brain food Disclaimer here — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD.Contributors: Lex, Laurence, Matt, Farhad, Mike, DaniellaWant to discuss? Stop by our Discord and reach out here with questions.
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    47 min
  • How zerohash won Morgan Stanley's crypto business

    How zerohash won Morgan Stanley's crypto business
    Sep 10 2026
    In this episode, Lex chats with Edward Woodford — Founder and CEO of zerohash, a crypto and stablecoin infrastructure platform that lets banks, brokers, and fintechs embed digital-asset trading, payments, and tokenization through a single API. Four years on from their last conversation, zerohash has settled over $65 billion in volume across 7 million customers, gone global under MiCA and EMI licensing in Europe, and onboarded institutions like Morgan Stanley.They discuss the pivot from embedded crypto to pure-play B2B infrastructure, and why the product zerohash actually sells is trust — with licensing treated as a bar, not a goal — in a world where state actors are now the primary threat.Edward breaks down the three core rails (Trade, Transact at roughly 70% of revenue, and Tokenization), and unpacks the emergence of "on-chain money" as a legally fragmented category — stablecoins under GENIUS, tokenized deposits, tokenized money-market funds, and CBDCs, each a distinct form of dollar created inside twelve months. They explore how velocity of money and just-in-time funding reshape SME payroll, why the new Auth product aims to be the open banking of stablecoins, and where the industry sits on an S-curve Edward insists is still nowhere near maturity. Finally, they take a skeptical pass at the machine economy, landing on agent-to-knowledge payment — not consumer micropayments — as the durable intersection of stablecoins and AI, and on the convergence that will pull traditional and crypto-native payment firms into aggressive consolidation.We recorded the podcast earlier in the year, and everything that Edward teased in his conversation has come to market. The E-Trade integration is live. The staking infrastructure has launched. The Treasury published the first proposed rules under the Genius Act, so you can see how those predictions came to market. Also, Stripe and Visa answered his M&A predictions with something even bigger: 140 Company Stablecoin Consortium.NOTABLE DISCUSSION POINTS:Trust is the product; licensing is just table stakes. Edward’s sharpest framing is that “licensing is a bar, not the goal” - getting licensed actually opens you to new risks to manage at scale. For an FI like Morgan Stanley, whose crypto revenue is trivial next to tens of billions in quarterly profit, the deciding factor isn’t upside but de-risked entry: FIPS/government-grade compliance, an eight-year clean track record, and a threat model that now treats state actors as the primary adversary.“On-chain money” has fractured into distinct legal categories in under a year. Post-GENIUS and MiCA, stablecoins (backed 100% by short-term government debt) are now legally separate from tokenized bank deposits (e.g. JPMorgan), tokenized money-market funds, and CBDCs - each a different form of dollar. Edward predicts this taxonomy keeps multiplying, and treats the resulting complexity, including cross-chain stablecoin interoperability, as a widening moat rather than a nuisance.The real AI-stablecoin use case is agent-to-knowledge payment, not micropayments. Edward pushes back on the popular “sub-penny real-time micropayments” narrative - invoking iTunes, where payments got batched rather than charged per song. The durable edge, he argues, is a globally programmable rail where an agent in Mozambique can settle with a content creator in Brazil, with knowledge released on a DvP basis as payment clears. Sub-penny amounts get aggregated into daily or weekly batches.TOPICSStablecoins, EmbeddedFinance, Tokenization, DigitalAssets, Payments, GENIUSAct, MiCA, AgenticPayments, DeFi, RWA, Web3, Fintech, zerohash, MorganStanley, Gusto, Stripe, Circle, Tether, Plaid, Mastercard ABOUT THE FINTECH BLUEPRINT🔥Subscribe to the Fintech Blueprint newsletter to stay at the forefront of Fintech and DeFi: https://bit.ly/3hyhlC2🤝 Partner with Fintech Blueprint through sponsorships: https://bit.ly/3UZllsV👉 Twitter: https://twitter.com/LexSokolin TIMESTAMPS2’54: From 5% of Ethereum to $65 billion settled: four years of scaling without trading off trust6’19: The everything app comes full circle: from embedded crypto to one infrastructure engine11’29: Interoperability as the value prop: bridging USDC across ETH, Polygon, and Canton16’06: Build, buy, or rent: how zerohash wins the decision inside a firm with billions in profit18’47: Stablecoins are good, crypto is bad: the market's false divide and why zerohash rejects it26’18: Auth, the open banking of stablecoins: killing the two questions that break usability29’55: The next 24 months of consolidation: will Circle, Tether, and zerohash buy the traditional players?37’22: The Fortune 500 is barely penetrated: what usability and distribution unlock next41’10: Agent-to-knowledge transfer: the real intersection of stablecoins and AI, beyond the sneaker purchase46’41: The channels used to connect with Edward & learn more about zerohash Disclaimer here — this ...
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    47 min
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