Founder @firmacash | tech arbitrage over competence arbitrage | UTXO stablecoins & performant stacks
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Competence arbitrage: clone finance, execute better than banks
Technology arbitrage: build rails they can't
Most of crypto is the first one dressed up as the second
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most fintechs are winning with competence and speed, not tech
tailwind from declining legacy finance
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BytesOfMan retweeted
Weekly Top Gainers
1️⃣ eCash (@eCash): +30.32%
2️⃣ KAITO (@KaitoAI): +27.83%
3️⃣ Lido DAO (@lidofinance): +19.73%
4️⃣ Decred (@decredproject): +19.38%
5️⃣ Audiera (@Audiera_web3): +17.84%
6️⃣ Virtuals Protocol (@virtuals_io): +15.37%
7️⃣ Ondo (@OndoFoundation): +13.69%
8️⃣ Pyth Network (@PythNetwork): +12.15%
9️⃣ Stable (@stable): +11.52%
🔟 OriginTrail (@origin_trail): +10.76%
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Most crypto startups are competence arbitrage
- take an existing financial service, re-implement the same thing with "crypto"
- have a lean, competent team with a higher give-a-shit factor vs incumbents
this works but it's not really the point of using crypto as a tech
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BytesOfMan retweeted
It’s particularly important to be a student of tech/venture business history, we’re seeing the same themes being repeated over and over, in relatively short time frames.
The first fintech wave of 2015-2020 looks almost identical with the feature launches, adoption cycles, competition and saturation points, acquisitions and consolidation, as well as shut downs, as this cycle from 2021-2026.
The same is true for SaaS and other plays. Study old TechCrunch articles, tweets, fundraises. History is repeating itself.
As an example, FX and payments is the first fintech product to be saturated in both cycles. It’s the biggest global market, the easiest to launch, and always a race to the bottom. Those that build themselves to be the bottom (TransferWise, Revolut from the first era, and OpenFX in the 2nd era (alone for now imo), in the 2nd era) will win.
Neobanking takes off in parallel. First with a few winners that launched early and found a focus, followed by dozens, if not hundreds that launch later and dwindle away with time as they have no focus. Neobanking is largely a first mover advantage game, but it turns into a niche focus, which Mercury vs Ramp vs Meow have showed. TBD which niches win for this stablecoin neobanking wave 2 era.
Similar niches can be seen in lending (FundingCircle is a great use case of spraying and praying to oblivion to parallels we are seeing in the 2nd wave), as well as remittances, cards, etc.
If you’ve seen other parallels I’d love to hear them
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BytesOfMan retweeted
Great progress and resilience by the Prospera team!
The world needs bastions of freedom.
The future is built brick by brick, building by building…
@ProsperaGlobal is built by and for The Builders: entrepreneurs, industrialists, creators, defenders of freedom!
@gabedelgadoa @syrtsov_ivan @mikeHND @RubenFajardoM - you’ve got the vision and the grit, keep building!
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in crypto, so much money is going into re-engineering legacy finance with extra complexity
still value here because legacy finance has both competence and regulatory capture problems
weird spot where crypto tech overhead is "worth it" for unrelated benefits
Crypto payments have a billion-dollar problem: once you send @USDC, there's no refund. No chargeback. No buyer protection. That’s why most real-world businesses still won’t accept it.
@circle just solved it.
The Refund Protocol - on-chain escrow, three refund paths (including gasless EIP-712), and automatic debt recovery when the escrow is empty. Non-custodial. No intermediary can steal funds. Enforced entirely by the smart contract.
I wrote a full technical deep-dive on @Arc House breaking down every piece - architecture, payment lifecycle, dispute resolution, the debt system, and a builder integration guide.
Also created 5 animated explainer videos covering each concept visually.
This is post 3 in my Arc House series. Post 1 covered CCTP. Post 2 covered App Kit. This one covers the missing piece: what happens after someone pays.
Refunds are the last primitive on-chain payments were missing.
Full post here:
community.arc.network/home/f…
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This is potentially true
But it's also why we won't learn the answer from any journalist
The reason I think it will be figured out this year is because AI is finally good enough to sift through the enormous quantities of data required. And there's only a few hundred people it could possibly be.
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Main takeaway from the Adam Back NYT fumble is that no one making these cases today was paying attention at any point from 2008-2015
New generation, new baseline
The culture tho has been quite static, especially for BTC
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Lots of "ghost" behavior even on dominant chains like $BTC
for example, nLocktime is basically never used
it could support enforced hold periods by freezing coins until a certain date ... enhancing the standard narrative use case
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unfortunately nobody is actually using UTXO chains for interesting things, so older features, even powerful ones, are ignored for EVMs
narrative has evolved toward something like "using is bad"
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quality of most services is way down but you can get to-go margaritas at the airport now
bad money has its perqs
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serious malaise around crypto.
even industry vets feel like they have to apologize for involvement because of all the scams.
"That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen"
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