See the latest releases for America.gov at america.gov/releases

I have a lot of respect for @ScottWu46 and other Olympiad competitors. I competed in math Olympiads in China myself. But I’m fed up with mathematical talent being reduced to mental arithmetic and Sudoku, then somehow treated as evidence that someone will be good at running a company. I get why it works as founder marketing. It has the same appeal as the “he doesn’t even speak English” quant scene in The Big Short. It caters to a very shallow idea of what mathematical talent looks like, and personally, I find leaning into that stereotype pretty unappealing. A good business should be compelling without anyone knowing your IQ.

Over the summer, we counted who paid for an account with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude. OpenAI ended the summer with about four times as many paying accounts, but the average Anthropic customer spent about three times as much each month.

this is my quant

How committed is Jalen Hurts to football? After initially being diagnosed with a superficial blood clot in London, doctors told him not to sleep as a precaution, so he had been awake for roughly 36 hours when he started against the Jaguars, throwing for 220 yards and a TD.

FT Exclusive: Citigroup said it would not permit ‘third-party AI agents or assistants to log into a customer’s account or transact directly within our digital banking platforms'. ft.trib.al/MSxEt9u

Watching big companies scramble to glue together a stablecoin payments stack they never actually built together is painful. At Polygon we’ve never had that problem. We built the Open Money Stack as one product from the very beginning, with one team and one roadmap. Even acquisitions immediately fit into it. When someone wants to talk about onramps and then has questions about wallets or cross-chain transfers, they stay with the same people. You want a custom chain, same team. You want dedicated blockspace, same team. You want a stablecoin checkout flow in your app, same team. You want an insanely crazy custom unique solution that requires multiple domain experts to work together--again, same team. There’s no handoff, no separate wallet team or chain team or checkout team, and no one telling them to talk to someone else. We’re smaller, we move faster, we're more global and we came out of crypto with deep payments experience already in the building. That combination is difficult to assemble after the fact, and it’s why the conversations we have with customers tend to stay in one place from the first call to the last.

Today is probably a good time to check in on things with @privy_io, which became part of @stripe just over a year ago. Our acquisition was predicated on three factors: stablecoin growth, self-custody as a key enabler of broader global coverage, and rapidly increasing demand for programmable financial infrastructure. As we said at the time, "money has to reside somewhere, and Privy builds the world's best programmable vaults." Since then, the Privy team has executed exceptionally well: assets in Privy wallets have grown ~25x, monthly active developers are up ~3x, revenue is up ~9x, and Privy now facilitates nearly $25B of monthly transaction volume. @tryramp, @Deel, @Klarna, @felixpago, @HyperliquidX, and thousands of other businesses are building embedded banking functionality on Privy. At Stripe, we're deeply integrating Privy into Treasury, @Link, and Connect. In each case, it's accelerating our global expansion, and enabling us to build better functionality faster. (Coming soon: @Link balances.) We're also seeing that Privy's wallet infrastructure is the ideal substrate for agents to transact and earn -- live today with @merit_systems, @orthogonal_sh, @Nevermined_ai, @prlnet, and more. Developers prefer programmable financial infrastructure, but agents need it. We expect that the agentic economy will continue to grow extremely quickly. The Privy team has maintained remarkable product velocity, with major launches this year including deposit addresses, earning on Privy balances, digital asset accounts, custodial wallets, and Stripe's own stablecoin cards. It's also been neat to see how Privy has been accelerated by Stripe, with better onramps, @stablecoin payment rails and licenses, Stripe's fiat capabilities and issuing stack, and integration with @Tempo. Together, we're building one API for holding stablecoin balances and earning yield, moving money in and out of fiat, and orchestrating spend with cards. We still have a lot of work to do, not least in integrating everything across Privy, Bridge, and the rest of Stripe -- there's been so much feature and functionality expansion that we haven't yet had much time to reconcile everything. Overall, though, I'm very happy with how things are going, and excited by where these capabilities are headed. If you're interested in working on the future of stablecoins, agentic payments, and crypto's deployment in the real world, you should get in touch with @sternhenri (now leading all of @StripeCrypto) or others on the team.

new chapter being written at @americanspend moving to nashville to help write it

new chapter being written at @americanspend moving to nashville to help write it