Instinct now lets you give your AI agent a balance to spend within limits. That balance sits in stablecoins. The purchase can still run through Visa. But your bank should watch where you keep the money between purchases.

This interview with @nubank CEO @velez_david is now over 20k views on YouTube 🔥 Catch the full thing below or search for brainfood wherever you get your podcasts.

Nubank has more than 140 million customers. Now it’s taking its playbook to the US. I sat down with David Vélez, Founder and Global CEO of @Nubank, live at Nu Stadium, the day after the US launch. We get into the US launch with Lead Bank, Nu’s conditional OCC approval, and what’s under the hood of Nu Global, including Sygnum, Circle, Mastercard and Stripe. Plus AI credit models, banking agents, and the efficiency numbers that make other bank CEOs read and weep. Full interview below 👇 0:11 Nubank’s scale, efficiency, US launch, tokenization and AI 2:14 Chuck Feeney’s philanthropy and influence on David Vélez 4:13 Smart efficiency culture and Nubank’s branchless cost advantage 7:10 Hidden US banking costs and the underbanked opportunity 9:44 Nubank’s US strategy, Hispanic customers and incumbent competition 12:13 Customer obsession, NPS and long-term loyalty economics 16:48 Nu Global, stablecoin savings and international money movement 22:00 NuFormer foundation models for credit decisioning and financial AI 27:20 AI banking agents, financial guidance and cautious customer rollout 30:34 AI-driven workflow reinvention and Nubank’s flatter organization

Brainfood went and did a little rebrand. I hope you like it? (Play the video with sound!) The first time I heard the phrase “Fintech is Dead,” I got a little offended. A little hurt. I mean, this was the thing I, we, attached a professional identity to, a sense of community and a shared enjoyment of the idiosyncratic weirdness that is technology in financial services in 2026. I wondered: how can it be dead when it’s only 4% finished? But over time, I became convinced that what got us here won’t get us where we’re going. There are no trillion-dollar fintech companies after all. So, last Thursday I published an essay arguing that fintech is dead as an investment category because the technologies that made “fintech” are table stakes now. A mobile-first neobank, running on the cloud, or an API-first infrastructure won’t disrupt the status quo. It will take something else. Speak to any investor, and you’ll hear a similar thing: an identity crisis, but a recognition that the financialization of compute, payments companies routing AI tokens, and the wave of tokenization coming to Wall St. show another phase is coming. Today’s massive companies, and tomorrow’s giants, are all leaning into AI and tokenization to solve new problems in new ways. So Fintech Brainfood is now Brainfood. But don’t worry, Brainfood will still hit your inboxes every Thursday and Sunday. Thursday Rants make sense of the big themes in tech and finance, while Sunday gives you news, 4 new companies, and some reading recommendations. But now we’re doing more too. A bigger brand to bring together Tokenized, Brainfood, and the work the team has been doing behind the scenes: - Brainfood Media, which encompasses all of our media properties. - The Brainfood podcast, relaunching tomorrow with a HUGE guest. Also on YouTube. - Tokenized, the podcast on stablecoins and tokenization with Head of Crypto @ Visa Cuy Sheffield. Now part of Brainfood Media. - Predicted, a newsletter on the business of prediction markets, created by my cofounder Pet Berisha. Our fastest-growing media property is up 150% in subscribers in the last 8 weeks… - Brainfood Advisory, co-led by co-founder Jeff Tijssen, formerly global head of fintech at Bain. Because an adult needs to help me, help you. We even got a swanky new homepage: brainfood.xyz/ (Would love feedback! Please reply with thoughts) And if you want to see us in person… we’ll all be at NerdCon in San Diego (I do not apologize for this plug). So that’s Brainfood 2.0. Bigger. A few more people. And a lot more to come. ST. PS. The essay is here if you want to tell me where I'm wrong. I'd like that. lnkd.in/ebmv4BXc PPS. Check out the audio in this video 🤓

Stripe acquired OpenRouter. Ramp launched Router. Both are leaning into stablecoins. Cloud, mobile, and APIs are now table stakes, not an investable category. The next era of finance is something else.

Re-usable KYC is finally getting traction in the US. Customers don't want the friction of submitting their documents multiple times to open new accounts. Ideally, they could securely share proof that they've done so before. Well. Now they can. Recent Federal banking regulator and FinCEN FAQ guidance clarified how this process works, and they ran a working pilot with large financial institutions. This has been something @SOLOAPI has been working at for years with sponsor banks and fintech companies, but now they're opening their graph to any financial institution and accounting firms too. Georgina Merhom explains how it works below 👇

Anyone got an in with the X support folks? We lost access to the email connected to @TokenizedPod after a recent phishing attack got one of our staff. We contacted X Support immediately but haven’t received a resolution yet. We would really appreciate any help getting this in front of the right team. Please amplify so we can reach @Michaelo

🚨 Ep. 100 of @TokenizedPod: Visa Stablecoin Settlement Hits $20BN - Up 15X @PetBerisha is joined by: - @Elise_X_Digital, Former Regulator, Policy & Regulatory Specialist - @cyril_mathew, Co-Founder & CEO, @rtp - @mattgmarcus, Co-Founder & CEO, @ModernTreasury To discuss: 🚀 @ModernTreasury Treasury launches noncustodial stablecoin wallets with fiat rails - Latitude raises $35 million to connect stablecoins with local rails - OpenFX provides onchain FX liquidity for cheaper stablecoin payouts - MoneyGram launches stablecoin linked Visa card and cash off ramps -@RobinhoodApp expands prediction markets and its fast growing blockchain ecosystem -Prediction markets and global regulation *** Timestamps: 00:00 Introduction 03:00 Modern Treasury launches noncustodial stablecoin wallets with fiat rails 05:13 Stablecoin agnosticism and likely consolidation among leading stablecoins 08:00 Business stablecoin demand across products, liquidity and payment infrastructure 10:11 Dollar denominated stablecoins, dollarization and global monetary sovereignty 13:28 Latitude raises $35 million to connect stablecoins with local rails 18:19 Regulation first stablecoin infrastructure and Latitude’s global licensing strategy 20:28 Stablecoins reducing cross border payment fragmentation and last mile complexity 23:23 OpenFX provides onchain FX liquidity for cheaper stablecoin payouts 27:52 MoneyGram launches stablecoin linked Visa card and cash off ramps 37:36 Robinhood expands prediction markets and its fast growing blockchain ecosystem 51:48 Prediction markets and global regulation *** 👉𝘚𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘤𝘩 '𝘛𝘰𝘬𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘻𝘦𝘥 𝘗𝘰𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘵' 𝘖𝘯 𝘠𝘰𝘶𝘛𝘶𝘣𝘦. 𝘈𝘱𝘱𝘭𝘦, 𝘚𝘱𝘰𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘺 𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘗𝘰𝘥𝘤𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘗𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳! 👈