We're backing @tarecredit because the credit system is old, expensive, and ready for an upgrade. Credit is heavily intermediated with slow and opaque manual processes and the plumbing alone costs borrowers and investors north of $100B a year. It's finally become possible to rebuild the entire value chain around a single source of truth, using stablecoins, smart contracts and AI. Led by co-founders @humancapitol @lucasvo and @keerthimoudgal, Tare is the perfect team for the job. Kevin helped build one of the first onchain private credit funds at Blocktower Credit after an extensive career in credit before, Lucas co-founded Centrifuge and is a pioneer in RWAs, and Keerthi was Head of Product at JP Morgan's institutional blockchain platform Kinexys. We're thrilled to announce that we led their seed round alongside a great group of funds and angels including leading private credit firms like Apollo and Janus Henderson and founders like @StaniKulechov of Aave. @jonah_b and I wrote more about our thesis below.

Nasdaq Ventures is investing $100M in Payward as we advance tokenization together with the @Nasdaq Equity Token (NET) framework. Equities on-chain only works if it's built to institutional standard from day one. We're building it with the company that's run public market infrastructure for decades. → payward.com/press-release/pa…

Today, we are at a crossroads. As I write this, AI is saving lives by helping doctors identify diseases faster, and making education more accessible to people everywhere. It’s also being used to inflict harm on a global scale. TRM’s AI-in-Crime Adoption Index found that, in 2026, criminal adoption of AI rose 40% year over year. Today’s threat actors are using AI to execute scams, cyber attacks, and other forms of digital crime at unprecedented speed and scale. In the last 90 days, we’ve also seen a growing number of incidents where AI agents themselves have gone rogue. Business titans and religious leaders are sounding the same alarm: to realize AI’s promise, we need to protect people from its harms. The first line of defense is prevention. Model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are building stronger guardrails, and governments are exploring rules for how AI can be safely used. We call this the prevention layer. At TRM, we’ve spent nearly a decade fighting crime, from fraud and cybercrime to human and wildlife trafficking. That experience has taught us one thing, if nothing else: the prevention layer is essential, but never enough. Criminals will break through. When they do, it’s critical that crimefighters can identify the harm done, find the people and machines behind it, and take action: support the victim, freeze the funds, take down the infrastructure, arrest the offender, disable the agent, dismantle the network. The world needs a new layer of protection. We call it the disruption layer—and it's what we're building, right now. The operating system for crimefighters In 2018, we founded TRM to help crimefighters map how threat actors were using cryptocurrency. We analyzed petabytes of data, mapping over a 100 types of crime. Government agencies and financial institutions worldwide now use TRM to investigate complex criminal networks and combat financial crime. The more cases we supported, however, the more we realized: if we were going to equip crimefighters to disrupt AI-scale crime, crypto would be 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 of the story, but not the 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦 story. To build a successful case, investigators must source intelligence not just from the blockchain, but also corporate records, cyber threat data, the dark web, and dozens of other domains. Today’s crimefighters need to use natural language to search across siloed domains, connect the dots and unearth buried insights, automate the rote work, and coordinate with partners across public and private sectors—all while preserving auditability and human judgment. In short, crimefighters need an operating system for the AI era. So we built it. For years, we’ve been developing this OS alongside the investigators who use it. Now, we’ve just announced a new round of funding, valuing TRM at $2 billion, to propel our work—and this fall, we’ll unveil the OS publicly, for the first time. If your organization needs to fight AI-scale crime, please reach out. We want to work with you.

"The old business model for the internet was a distraction" @samrags_ worked on Google Ads, a business that generates $300 billion a year. Every dollar of an ads business depends on getting a person to look at an ad shown to them while they are shopping for something else, whereas an agent doing the same shopping doesn't care for ads. Checkouts, flight bookings and product searches were never designed for agents to use in the first place. "It was actually built to block bots." He and his co-founder @rsproule started @merit_systems two years ago, after a stretch at Google and a16z. Merit built x402scan on top of Coinbase's x402 payment standard. It is a directory of what an AI agent can buy on its own. Sales teams can pull contact details through it, hedge funds can buy satellite imagery, and developers can even rent GPUs. It launched with about 100 items and now has close to 50,000. They then built AgentCash, the wallet the agent can pay from. The same balance on AgentCash works on both of the available machine payments standards - x402 and MPP. "The universe of agent payments today is very, very small. We're in the first inning, and we're talking 100 to 1000x growth in the next five years." Sam's full conversation with @_zacharyhughes: 2:46 - Choosing software over mechanical engineering 4:27 - How the internet got built in 1997 5:20 - How the web almost charged for every page 6:29 - Working on Google Ads, and the 2016 report 7:41 - Why the old internet ran on distraction 8:56 - Why agents will not use browsers or websites 9:35 - Why Instagram and TikTok are safer than Google 13:48 - What agents still cannot buy 15:49 - Where AI money went before ChatGPT 17:02 - Why your agent should answer to you 20:31 - Launching x402scan, and the boom that followed 22:32 - Inside AgentCash 24:12 - Buying data that only coders could reach 25:05 - Why checkouts block agents 27:35 - The business model for agent payments 32:21 - Why stablecoins fit agent payments 34:38 - What is holding stablecoins back 37:02 - Who Amazon's shopping assistant works for 38:00 - Open checkouts or private platform deals Episode 0056. Presented to you by @altitude

Allow illiquid founders to pledge shares with a loan from the government to pay tax. The loan period is long but not infinite (e.g. 10 years). The loan is non-resource: at the end of the period, the loan is either paid back in cash, or the government assumes the shares.

Our CEO, Chris Maurice, joined @Bloomberg 's "The Close" to talk about our $40M raise, bringing total funding to $120M+. We build the infrastructure: direct liquidity across Africa, LatAm & Asia, no dollar detour. Watch the full interview here👇 bloomberg.com/news/videos/20…

Before 'the container', ships spent more time docked than at sea. Our GPs @CremeDeLaCrypto and @alekslarsen joined @TrustlessState on @Bankless to discuss the power of standardization. What the container did for supply chains, the token aims to do for global markets.

A genuinely remarkable individual @HesterPeirce. Her writing and opinions are always exceptionally well-written and reasoned. What I appreciate most though is her courage to stand not for any one cause but for well reasoned first principles beliefs. She states those opinions clearly and is pleased to discuss/debate them. While I don't know her personally, I have only seen her operate with the highest level of integrity. The American public is fortunate to have had such an impressive figure within the SEC.

Why did @coinbase open source x402 instead of pushing a proprietary standard for agentic commerce? Why promote infrastructure that competitors can use too? Is this altruism? Not quite. Below, I dig into the strategic reasons companies give away valuable software for free.

The @GLFOP now supports the Clarity Act! Today's progress didn't happen by accident. It's the result of countless conversations, meaningful engagement, and real changes made to address law enforcement concerns while preserving innovation. Three titles, 25 provisions, numerous thoughtful conversations about how to address illicit finance. Thank you to the Senators, their staffs, and the White House for working together to move this forward.