Revolut is reportedly discussing a new incentive package for CEO Nik Storonsky tied to a future $500 billion valuation. With the company already valued at around $115 billion in a secondary transaction, we discuss how far Revolut can go and what could happen when it eventually enters the public markets.

Visa is spending $2.4 billion to acquire BioCatch as AI makes scams, account takeovers and digital fraud easier to scale. We look at what behavioral biometrics adds to Visa’s fraud stack and whether the technology will remain as useful as payments move toward AI agents.

Google is making major changes inside its AI business. Demis Hassabis is moving away from the day-to-day leadership of DeepMind and taking a broader role across Alphabet. We discuss why Google has struggled to dominate the AI conversation despite its research, infrastructure, distribution and talent.

Then there is the stablecoin race. Visa and Mastercard have joined Circle’s Arc while also participating in other stablecoin initiatives. Their strategy increasingly looks like being present across the infrastructure regardless of which network wins.

We also get into OpenAI’s legal fight with Apple over former employees and alleged trade secrets, OpenAI’s decision to publish private communications from the dispute, and the growing competition around AI hardware.

Finally, Klarna is expanding its US distribution through JPMorgan Payments, giving merchants access to its Buy Now, Pay Later product through JPMorgan’s commerce platform. We discuss what this partnership says about the relationship between fintech companies and the banks they were once expected to disrupt.

A $16B AI hedge fund lost two-thirds of its value in ~72 hours this week and got sold overnight. That's where this week's episode starts. Six stories:

1/ Situational Awareness — @leopoldasch's AI fund — fell 67% as chip and tech equities pulled back. Facing margin calls from @GoldmanSachs, @jpmorgan, @BankofAmerica and @Citi, he moved a $16B equity book to Ken Griffin's @Citadel at a steep discount in a single 24-hour negotiation. Outbid @JaneStreet and @Millennium. The fund is still +80% YTD. It's abandoning bank leverage entirely and keeps a $5B @AnthropicAI stake. The lesson isn't "young manager blew up." It's short-duration prime broker debt.

2/ @elonmusk launched X Money on @X. 6% yield on deposits ($1k min), 3% cashback, real-time transfers, a @Visa debit card. Not a bank — it runs on @CrossRiverBank rails. Nobody has explained who funds the 6%.

3/ @Meta raised full-year capex guidance to $72B, with $17B in the quarter. Multi-gigawatt clusters. $14.3B for 49% of @scale_AI, plus @alexandr_wang and researchers poached from @OpenAI and @GoogleDeepMind at up to $200M a package. He said he wouldn't rent the data centres out. He's renting them out.

4/ @circle bought @IBM's blockchain patent portfolio — ~1,000 patents, 680+ families. Goes from near-zero to America's largest holder. IBM backs Open USD, the rival standard. It just sold its patents to USDC.

5/ Visa cut ~7% of staff — roughly 2,600 roles, mostly tech and product — citing AI. Same quarter: revenue up 14%, beating estimates. Not cost-cutting. Reallocation. @Mastercard, @PayPal and @Block all cut this year too. Real displacement, or AI-washing a post-COVID correction?

6/ An early @stripe engineer bought a bank. Darragh Buckley's @increase acquired Twin City Bank in Longview, WA — $114.6M in assets, single branch — and rebranded it Increase Bank. His infra already processes ~$500B/yr for clients including @tryramp and @GustoHQ. @Klarna applied for a charter. @Wise got rejected. Buckley just bought one instead.

Stripe is reportedly bidding $10B for OpenRouter, 8x its valuation from two months ago. Alphabet beat Q2 estimates across the board and the stock still fell. And Revolut just hit a $115B valuation in a secondary sale, worth more than Barclays. Otabek and Sam break down what's actually driving these moves.

In this episode:

Stripe's reported $10B bid for OpenRouter, and what it says about the AI billing land grab

Alphabet's Q2 earnings beat, and why the stock fell anyway on the back of a raised capex outlook

Revolut's $115B valuation and what it means for the IPO timeline

Wise's US banking application rejected by the OCC, and its Genius Act plan B

Nvidia's Jensen Huang breaks his social media silence over open-weight AI models

The Clarity Act's stalled path through Congress

This week on On The Ground, we sit down with Anthony Soohoo, CEO and Chairman of MoneyGram, to talk about MGUSD, MoneyGram's new native stablecoin, and why the company is betting on digital assets to make cross-border payments faster, cheaper, and more transparent. We dig into why MoneyGram built its own coin instead of relying solely on USDC or USDT, how it plans to vertically integrate its network (with an Apple silicon analogy), what role MoneyGram's 500,000+ agent locations still play in a digital-first world, and his take on OpenUSD's 140-company alliance and Swift's new blockchain ledger pilot.

Then Sam and Otabek break down the week's biggest fintech and payments news:

- Stripe and Advent International's $53B+ bid for PayPal, and why PayPal's board says the offer is "inadequate"

- Monzo founder Tom Blomfield leaving Y Combinator to join Anthropic's compute team

- Moonshot AI's Kimi K3, the 2.8-trillion-parameter open model rattling OpenAI and Anthropic

- The European Central Bank's 36-firm CBDC/stablecoin pilot, and whether Europe can catch up to the dollar-backed stablecoin market

Subscribe for weekly conversations with the people building the future of payments, banking, and stablecoins.

#fintech #stablecoins #moneygram #payments #crypto

OpenUSD launched with 140 backers. Bitget Wallet crossed 100 million users. US banks are trying to buy their way around Durbin. And Swift just went live with a blockchain-based shared ledger for tokenized bank deposits. This episode covers all four.

Sam sat down with Alvin, COO of Bitget Wallet, to break down OpenUSD's consortium stablecoin model, why it shifts stablecoin yield from the reserve layer to the distribution layer, and what Bitget's 100 million user milestone actually measures. We also get into why Bitget is betting on emerging markets over the US and UK, how the wallet works without a banking license, and where AI agent payments are headed.

Then Otabek and Sam cover the week's biggest infrastructure news.

JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and PNC are reportedly in informal talks to acquire Star and Accel, the debit networks owned by Fiserv, whose stock has fallen sharply this year. The real motive is the Durbin Amendment, which caps debit interchange fees for large banks when transactions route over an outside network, but exempts banks that own the network itself. It is the same loophole logic behind Capital One's acquisition of Discover, and we discuss whether this leads to more merchant and consumer costs, and whether the payments world is fragmenting instead of consolidating around a few big rails.

We also break down Swift's new blockchain-based shared ledger, now ready for initial use after nine months of development. Seventeen banks across six continents, including ANZ, BNP Paribas, Citi, DBS, HSBC, Lloyds, MUFG, Standard Chartered, and UBS, are piloting live transactions using tokenized bank deposits instead of stablecoins. We get into how this differs structurally from USDT and USDC, why it overlaps with a separate live initiative from Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, and NatWest, whether Swift's 11,500-bank network gives it a structural edge over consortium stablecoins like OpenUSD, and why smaller emerging markets, including Central Asia, are still missing from every major cross-border rail being built right now.

Subscribe for weekly conversations on payments, stablecoins, and fintech infrastructure. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

TIMECODES:

00:00 Cold open

00:54 Bearish on trading, bullish on stablecoins

01:31 Open USD: 140 companies, one stablecoin

02:45 Cathie Wood's warning: can OUSD beat USDT and USDC?

03:40 The three layers: reserve, distribution, network

06:29 Governance: getting 140 rivals to agree

07:38 Trading vs payments — two different games

08:56 Inside Bitget Wallet: 100M users, cards and QR

11:47 Why emerging markets, and the "borderless generation"

13:03 $177B settled, and no banking licence

14:15 Can AI agents make payments?

16:48 Will the wallet become your bank account?

18:48 First time ever: payments overtake trading

21:19 Why not the US, UK and Europe?

23:00 News desk: Otabek is back

23:29 Story 1: Big banks want to own a debit network

27:14 The Durbin loophole and the Capital One precedent

29:28 Story 2: Is SWIFT a monopoly?

30:25 SWIFT's blockchain ledger: 17 banks, tokenized deposits

33:09 Fragmentation — is anyone actually coordinating?

34:42 The corridors nobody serves

37:25 Wrap: the ground is shifting

140 companies just launched a stablecoin to take on Tether and Circle. Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, Amex, BlackRock, Coinbase, Ripple, Google, Shopify, and DoorDash are all behind Open USDT. Unlike USDC and USDT, most of the reserve income gets shared back with partners instead of kept. Stripe already made it the default for its businesses. Circle's stock dropped 17% on the news, and CEO Jeremy Allaire publicly pushed back, calling the model unsustainable.

OpenAI has reportedly proposed giving the US government a 5% stake worth $42.6 billion. Sam Altman wants Google and Meta to do the same, folding it into a sovereign wealth fund-style vehicle. Anthropic has refused any government equity arrangement. A regulator becoming a shareholder is a conflict of interest waiting to happen.

Europe's MiCA rules kicked in July 1, and Tether's USDT just got locked out of EU exchanges, including Coinbase, Kraken, and Crypto.com. Circle's USDC stays compliant. Tether says MiCA's reserve rules, which force issuers into smaller, less capable European banks, could hurt consumers more than protect them.

SpaceX reportedly showed investors an AI phone prototype sleeker than an iPhone, ahead of its IPO. Musk denies it. The device would run on a custom OS built around xAI, and could position SpaceX to take on Verizon and AT&T in wireless. AI hardware has a graveyard already, Humane and Rabbit both flopped.

Klarna just won nearly $2 billion from Google. A Swedish court found Google illegally favored its own shopping service over Klarna's PriceRunner for 15 years. It's the largest antitrust award in Swedish history. Google is appealing.

ElevenLabs doubled its valuation to $22 billion in five months. The AI voice startup holds under 1% of the broader AI voice market, and independent leaderboards rank Google's Gemini TTS and Inworld ahead of it. The valuation is being driven by enterprise distribution, not the best model.

Subscribe for weekly breakdowns of the news shaping fintech, crypto, and payments, and let us know what you think of the new format in the comments.

WorldPay went offline during England vs Ghana. Pubs, restaurants, Tesco — none of them could take card payments for hours. Transaction volumes in bars were up 148% that day. The cause was a third-party power grid disruption. Cash lines formed.

OpenAI is pushing its IPO to 2027. Sam Altman won't go public below a $1 trillion valuation while burning $21B a year and paying Google, Microsoft, and AWS for the compute it needs to compete against them.

Airwallex raised $320M at $11B, up from $8B in December. Revenue grew 74% to $1.3B annualized. A Ramp board member publicly called it a Chinese data backdoor. The CEO rejected it. Make of that what you will.

Meta is building a prediction market app. 3.5 billion daily users, AI-powered, starting with virtual points. The ad revenue and data play is obvious. Kalshi just raised at a $40B valuation, doubling from $22B two months ago.

Starling Bank deployed an AI agent running on Gemini that intercepts payments it suspects are fraud and asks the customer questions before the money moves. APP fraud hit $576M in the UK last year.

Binance suspended EU operations after failing to get a MiCA license from Greece, Latvia, or Ireland. Revolut immediately ran a campaign targeting their customers.

We discuss why the ecosystem nearly doubled in size, where venture capital is flowing, and which categories are emerging as the biggest winners.

We also dive into one of the biggest announcements of the week: Adyen launching Agentic, a new orchestration layer that aims to connect merchants to AI commerce platforms through a single integration. Can Adyen challenge Stripe and become the operating system for agentic commerce?

We also unpack the growing importance of "Know Your Agent" infrastructure, the rise of AI agent security startups, and why investors are pouring money into companies focused on trust, identity, governance, and fraud prevention.

Topics covered:

• Why CB Insights expanded its Agentic Commerce Market Map from 90 to 170 companies

• Adyen's new Agentic Commerce platform and what it means for Stripe

• Why AI agent orchestration is becoming a critical layer

• The rise of Know Your Agent (KYA) infrastructure

• AI agent security, governance, and fraud prevention

• The startup categories attracting the most investment in 2026

• Why trust remains the biggest obstacle to agentic commerce adoption

• Whether consumers will ever allow AI agents to spend money on their behalf

• The future of shopping, payments, and customer relationships in an AI-first world

Subscribe for weekly discussions on fintech, payments, stablecoins, AI agents, digital banking, crypto, and the technologies reshaping financial services.