Prajjwal C.

Stablecoins are a sandwich. 🥪 Fast, cheap settlement in the middle. Slow, expensive fiat conversion on both ends. The bottleneck isn't at the chain but at the bank. The juice middle costs fractions of a cent and settles faster than you can count to 10. The bread on both sides is where it breaks. Fiat in, fiat out. Median conversion spreads: * 300 BPS in Africa. * 7 BPS in Asia. That's a 40x gap — and it's not a technology problem but a banking access problem. Hiding behind excuses such as KYC, compliance, monitoring, risk appetite. All with the fear of losing that golden ticket - the license that gives you access to play the banking game of red tape and restrictions. It's not their fault either. There is a lot of paperwork and document filing needed to play the game that hasn't evolved with its time. All in the name of compliance and a false sense of monitoring. Guess what now that the sweet juicy middle has been optimised. It's time to take on the bread. It's already happening. Stripe acquired Bridge Mastercard acquired BVNK They're not buying the juicy middle. They're buying the sandwich — and challenging every bank that makes it. The race is now who will make the better sandwich? #Stablecoins #Payments #Fintech

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Imagine Amazon never planned to launch AWS.   It just wanted its own website to stop crashing.   One day the engineers realized: “We built something that every company in the world needs.”   The rest is history — and today AWS brings in more than $100 billion a year and pays for almost all of Amazon’s profits. I think Meesho might be living the same story right now. Everyone looks at Meesho as the shopping app that grew through WhatsApp and referrals.   What most people don’t see is that they had to solve a huge customer-service problem to keep growing: millions of messages every day, in many Indian languages, mostly from smaller towns, at all hours. Normal call centers couldn’t handle it without losing a lot of money.   So Meesho built its own AI system to answer customers fast and cheaply. It worked so well that other companies started asking to use the same system. Spinny (the used-car company) is already a customer. They say it has cut their support costs a lot, especially outside big cities, and customers are happier. If Meesho decides to offer this tool to more companies, it could become a proper new business for them — one that started only because they needed it for themselves. From a tool that saved them money → to something that makes them money (maybe a lot of money). The full details and early numbers are in a new report by Arc. It’s worth reading if you’re interested in Indian startups or customer service. Link: https://lnkd.in/gMWQhRjd Big thanks to the Arc team for spotting this first and doing all the hard work.

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Want to hear about something posted today on X? Someone tried to buy $50M of AAVE using USDT in a single DeFi swap today. The interface warned about extreme slippage. The user had to check a confirmation box acknowledging the risk. They proceeded anyway. The result: $50M → 324 AAVE. At roughly ~$100 per AAVE, that’s about $32,000 worth of tokens. So what happened? Most DeFi swaps use AMMs (automated market makers) that price trades along a liquidity curve. The larger the trade relative to the pool size, the more the price moves during the trade itself. When you push a $50M market buy into a pool that only has a few million dollars of effective liquidity: • Each portion of the trade moves the price higher • The algorithm keeps adjusting the price as the trade executes • By the end of the swap, you’re buying at dramatically worse prices In other words, the trade walked the entire liquidity curve. There was no exploit and nothing “broke.” The system behaved exactly as designed. How large traders avoid this: • Split orders across time (TWAP) • Route across multiple pools and venues • Use OTC desks or RFQ systems for size • Always check liquidity depth before swapping DeFi is permissionless, which means anyone can push the button. But if you send institution-sized orders into retail-sized liquidity, the curve will happily take the other side.

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One product, two markets.... Stablecoins are being pulled in two directions as institutional teams want settlement speed and liquidity control and retail users still need trust, utility, and simple on and off ramps. When one product tries to serve both, the roadmap gets confused. You either build for compliance and treasury flows, or you build for consumer habit change. They are not the same job, and they do not need the same messaging or commercial model. Many teams are attempting to launch both at once, which usually means neither is great. The institutional roadmap gets slowed by consumer UX debates, and the retail roadmap gets slowed by governance requirements. I do not see enough clarity on this split. If you had to choose one market to win first, which would you pick, and why? #stablecoins #payments #fintech

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