What Stripe Bought for $1.1 Billion
Stripe paid 5.5 times Bridge's valuation for a contract stack and a 60-person team that, within about a year, shipped a stablecoin and an issuance platform and won a conditional federal charter.
Amex Sees Both Sides of Every Transaction and Still Missed $13 Billion
The company with the most complete transaction picture in US payments aimed its AML program at the wrong product line for a decade.
analysisAfrican Fintech: The Map
African fintech raised $4.1 billion in 2025, but the opportunity moved from payments and lending to the infrastructure underneath both.
engineeringThe Maker-Checker Pattern for Fintech Ops
RBAC confirms the person has the right role, but it can't confirm the action is correct.
anatomyWhy Your Bank Spends More on Workarounds Than on Banking
Mid-market banks spend more on technology every year only to lose more customers to neobanks.
analysisTokenized Collateral Is Live and the Plumbing Is Already Splitting
BNY completed the first tokenized Treasury triparty repo with Citadel, and five other US institutions launched competing settlement platforms in the same quarter.
analysisThe Stablecoin Stack for Engineers
A dollar-backed stablecoin touches six layers of infrastructure between mint and redemption, and most of them have nothing to do with a blockchain.
analysisThe Ledger Is Becoming the Control Plane
Three companies approached fintech infrastructure from different directions and arrived at the same architecture: the ledger as the single enforcement point for financial constraints.
engineeringFour Protocols Are Solving Agent Identity for US Banks
Four protocols are converging to solve how an AI agent proves who it represents, what it can touch, and what the customer actually approved.
analysisThe Seam Where Instant Payments Stop Being Instant
FedNow settles the U.S. leg in seconds, but the foreign leg still runs through correspondent banks that settle in hours or days.
analysisOne Sentence, Twenty-One Charters
The entire crypto trust bank wave rests on a single sentence Congress added in 1978 to validate one charter for one estate trustee.