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The Fintech Blueprint

The Fintech Blueprint

By: Lex Sokolin
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Finance is being pulled apart by the forces of frontier technology. From AI, to blockchain and DeFi, mixed reality, chatbots, neobanks, and roboadvisors — the industry will never be the same. Here is the blueprint for navigating the shift.2021 The FinTech Blueprint Economics Leadership Management & Leadership Personal Finance
Episodes
  • Inside the $1B-a-Day Stablecoin Market Maker for 1,500 Institutions, with B2C2's Cactus Raazi

    Inside the $1B-a-Day Stablecoin Market Maker for 1,500 Institutions, with B2C2's Cactus Raazi
    Jun 22 2026
    In this episode, Lex chats with Cactus Raazi — CEO Americas at B2C2, one of the original and largest institutional market makers in digital assets, serving roughly 1,500 institutions and pricing across more than 40 exchanges globally. They discuss what a market maker actually does, how balance sheet and signal generation underpin roughly $1 billion a day of stablecoin flow at B2C2, and why the two extremes of crypto market making - riskless principal aggregation versus proprietary alpha - produce very different client outcomes that buyers rarely understand. Cactus explains B2C2's 18-month bet that the Circle-versus-Tether debate would give way to a multi-issuer world, the launch of its PENNY product for instant zero-cost cross-stablecoin swaps, and they explore why programmability is the next frontier for digital dollars, why US capital markets have almost no structure for funding genuine risk-taking businesses, and whether the current combination of scale, speed, and complexity makes this the hardest investing environment Wall Street has ever faced. NOTABLE DISCUSSION POINTS: Market makers aren’t a homogeneous category, and clients pay for the difference. At one extreme, a market maker is essentially a riskless agent - aggregating prices across 40+ exchanges and quoting on top with no real view. At the other extreme, a market maker is a proprietary quant shop running alpha signals on horizons from seconds to days, and the price you get is heavily conditioned by where the signal says the asset is going. B2C2 sits in the middle, partly because its public-company parent (SBI) constrains risk appetite. The implication for institutional buyers: who you trade with structurally determines the quality of execution, not just the spread.Algorithmic fixed income market making didn’t fail on technology, it failed on capital structure. US capital markets are excellent at funding venture, growth equity, private equity, and buyouts, but there is almost no domestic pool of “risk equity” - capital comfortable with the possibility that the machines (or the humans) lose money on a given day. Market makers need exactly that kind of balance sheet, and the mismatch between what the business requires and what the US capital base offers is a structural reason firms like Elefant struggled, regardless of execution quality.The Circle-vs-Tether framing is already obsolete; the next product wedge is interoperability. B2C2 made an 18-month-old contrarian bet that the duopoly narrative was wrong and that Stripe (via Bridge), Western Union, Revolut, and many other consumer and platform companies would issue their own stablecoins. PENNY - instant, zero-cost, zero-counterparty-risk stablecoin-to-stablecoin swaps - is the product expression of that view. The deeper claim is that stablecoins are software, and the SaaS analogy (a base layer plus an app store of programmable financial logic) is the real reason institutional adoption accelerates from here, not the transfer-of-value benefit on its own. TOPICS B2C2, Goldman Sachs, SBI Group, Binance, Coinbase, Circle, Tether, Stripe, Kraken, Credit Suisse, Market making, institutional liquidity, stablecoins, fixed income, risk management, algorithmic trading, crypto exchange infrastructure ABOUT THE FINTECH BLUEPRINT 🔥Subscribe to the Fintech Blueprint newsletter to stay at the forefront of Fintech and DeFi: https://bit.ly/3hyhlC2 🤝 Partner with Fintech Blueprint through sponsorships: https://bit.ly/3UZllsV 👉 Twitter: https://twitter.com/LexSokolin TIMESTAMPS 1’17: Rejected by 30 firms: A cold-call advertising inquiry that became a Goldman career 6’43: "I'll go sell jet engines": Complexity as the through line from credit derivatives to crypto 8’53: Scale, speed, and dimensionality: The hardest investing environment in 28 years 12’33: A terrific idea, a brutal execution: Building an automated market maker in 2015 16’22: The used car dealership of bonds: How over-the-counter fixed income actually works 19’51: Price, time frame, and the art of liquidity: What a market maker actually does 24’52: Riskless principal or proprietary alpha: The two extremes of crypto market making 29’54: Priming the liquidity pump: Why new tokens hire market makers and large ones don't 35’40: $1 billion a day in stablecoins: A contrarian bet against the Circle-versus-Tether frame 39’43: 24/7 money movement: The treasurer wish list stablecoins actually deliver 41’04: The channels used to connect with Cactus & learn more about B2C2 Disclaimer here — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD.Contributors: Lex, Laurence, Matt, Farhad, Mike, DaniellaWant to discuss? Stop by our Discord and reach out here with questions.
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    44 mins
  • How Marqeta Built the $400B Modern Card Issuing Platform, with CEO Mike Milotich

    How Marqeta Built the $400B Modern Card Issuing Platform, with CEO Mike Milotich
    May 25 2026
    In this episode, Lex chats with Mike Milotich — Chief Executive Officer of Marqeta, the modern card issuing platform that processed nearly $400 billion in payments volume in 2025, and is certified to operate in 40+ countries, growing over 30% for the third straight year. They discuss how Marqeta's separation of bank, processor, and brand armed fintech's largest winners across buy now pay later, on-demand delivery, neo-banking, and expense management with the Lego blocks to build their own card programs. Mike explains how the company's growth is shifting from enabling new use cases to displacing volume on legacy bank platforms, and they explore why card issuing is going multinational, what the agentic commerce wave actually requires to clear security and behavioural hurdles, and how Marqeta's continued growth runs through embedded finance, real-time personalisation, and the forced modernisation of the banks themselves. NOTABLE DISCUSSION POINTS: The BNPL business model is flipping from merchant rails to consumer cards. Marqeta originally solved the merchant scale problem for buy now pay later via virtual cards, removing the need for tens of millions of merchants to integrate a new button at checkout. The current shift is more important: BNPL players are now issuing consumers their own physical and virtual cards usable anywhere cards are accepted, turning BNPL from a merchant-acceptance game into a direct consumer value proposition. BNPL volume has grown over 50% year-on-year for Marqeta in recent quarters.Card issuing is going multinational, and that breaks the legacy bank model. Banks have always been local on the consumer side, with only a handful multinational on the commercial treasury side. The next generation of card issuers, neo-banks like Revolut and Nubank, plus large global platforms embedding financial products into existing user bases, are global by default. A single platform that issues cards, and is certified to operate across 40+ countries, becomes the strategic moat, and legacy processors built to serve domestic bank programs aren’t structured to compete.The growth story is moving from expanding the pie to displacing the incumbents. To date, Marqeta has mostly powered new card use cases that didn’t exist before — on-demand delivery, BNPL, neo-banking, expense management. Mike’s forward thesis is a phase change: pressure from fintech winners is forcing banks to modernise, and the next leg of growth comes from displacing volume sitting on legacy bank-controlled platforms. Real-time personalised rewards, where the same card delivers different offers to different cardholders based on live data, is the wedge that legacy infrastructure can’t deliver. TOPICS Marqeta, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, Payments, card issuing, embedded finance, fintech, BNPL, neobank, agentic commerce, e-commerce, crypto, stablecoins, programmable money, machine economy, agentic AI ABOUT THE FINTECH BLUEPRINT 🔥Subscribe to the Fintech Blueprint newsletter to stay at the forefront of Fintech and DeFi: https://bit.ly/3hyhlC2 🤝 Partner with Fintech Blueprint through sponsorships: https://bit.ly/3UZllsV 👉 Twitter: https://twitter.com/LexSokolin TIMESTAMPS 1’04: From Math Brain to Payments Career : Finding the Nuance in How Money Actually Moves 7’05: The Narrative Gets Ahead of Reality : Why Agentic Commerce Will Move Slower Than the Technologists Think 10’08: Global But Local : The Balancing Act That Kept Visa on Top of the Payments Network for Decades 12’58: Carve It Out or Watch It Get Trampled : How Visa Incubates Mobile, Crypto and Agentic Without Killing Them 15’03: $400 Billion in Volume, 30% Growth, Three Years Running : The Numbers Behind Marqeta's Compounding Scale 17’05: The Pandemic Poured Gasoline on Everything : Why DoorDash, BNPL, Expense and Neo-Banking All Exploded at Once 24’24: The Lego Blocks for Payments : How Marqeta Armed the Innovators Who Couldn't Build Through Banks 29’19: Visibility as a Weapon : Why Being Public Helps Marqeta Win Customers Against Private and Embedded Competitors 33’15: Fewer Bets, Higher Probability : How Public Market Discipline Reshaped Marqeta's Risk and Profitability Model 36’35: The Legacy Platforms Were Built for Banks : Why Embedded Finance, Multinational Card Issuing and Personalisation Reshape the Pie 41’50: Prompted, Not Replaced : The Ten-Year View on Whether Volume Comes From People or Robots 43’56: The channels used to connect with Mike & learn more about Marqeta Disclaimer here — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD.Contributors: Lex, Laurence, Matt, Farhad, Mike, DaniellaWant to discuss? Stop by our Discord and reach out here with questions.
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    45 mins
  • The $6B Decentralized AI Network, with Yuma CRO Evan Malanga

    The $6B Decentralized AI Network, with Yuma CRO Evan Malanga
    May 15 2026
    In this episode, Lex chats with Evan Malanga — Chief Revenue Officer of Yuma, a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group focused on growing the Bittensor ecosystem. They discuss how Bittensor's $6 billion protocol incentivises AI builders worldwide through token emissions across 128 competing subnets, and why the network has produced real commercial outputs — including a 72 billion parameter model trained on-chain and a coding agent rivalling Claude at a fraction of the cost. Evan explains Yuma's role as the institutional gateway to Bittensor through its validator, accelerator, and asset management products, and they explore why the concentration of AI in OpenAI and Anthropic is a systemic risk, and whether Bittensor's future extends beyond AI into a broader coordination engine for decentralised work. NOTABLE DISCUSSION POINTS: Bittensor has crossed from experimentation into shipping benchmark-competitive work at a fraction of centralized cost. Three recent proof points: Templar (subnet 3) completed the largest decentralized pre-training run of a 72B parameter model using only the network’s token incentives. Ridges, an AI agent platform, is hitting 88–90% on software engineering benchmarks, on par with Claude-class agents at ~5x cheaper, built by a 3-to-5-person team under $10M of token emissions. Score (subnet 44) is doing computer vision 200x faster than centralized counterparts. Small distributed teams are producing outputs competitive with frontier labs without raising venture capital or hiring staff.Dynamic TAO restructured emissions from validator-curated to market-curated, making each subnet its own tradeable asset. Previously, dominant validators assigned weights that determined how the 7,200 daily TAO emission flowed across subnets. Under Dynamic TAO, each of the 128 subnets has its own token denominated in TAO, and any holder can buy or sell into specific subnets, pricing them like a market rather than a committee vote. Subnet owners, miners, and validators earn fees in the respective subnet token. Distribution has settled into a power law: the top ten subnets hold ~80% of market cap. This is the move that turned Bittensor from “decentralized AI protocol” into a financial hyperstructure with hundreds of tokenized work markets layered on top.The economics for subnet owners are genuinely unusual — hundreds of millions in annual incentives, fully subsidized labor, no fundraising. A subnet owner gets access to up to ~256 miners globally competing to satisfy their problem statement, with miner compensation paid by protocol emissions rather than the subnet owner. At current TAO prices, annual incentives across the network run into hundreds of millions; at higher prices, this approaches $1B/year up for grabs. No hiring, no benefits, no recruiting, the network runs as a continuous adversarial competition where validators rank miner outputs. This is the mechanical answer to “why would an AI researcher choose Bittensor over Silicon Valley”, and explains why researchers at Meta and Google reportedly mine Bittensor on nights and weekends, with top miners on subnets like Ridges earning ~$30,000/day. TOPICS Yuma, Bittensor, Digital Currency Group, DCG, OpenAI, Anthropic, Foundry, Templar, Ridges, Bitcoin, Meta, Google, BlackRock, JPMorgan, Decentralized AI, Crypto, Blockchain, AI, Tokenomics, Decentralized Science, DeSci, AI Agents, Computer Vision, Proof of Work, Tokenization, Real World Assets, RWA, Machine Economy ABOUT THE FINTECH BLUEPRINT 🔥Subscribe to the Fintech Blueprint newsletter to stay at the forefront of Fintech and DeFi: https://bit.ly/3hyhlC2 🤝 Partner with Fintech Blueprint through sponsorships: https://bit.ly/3UZllsV 👉 Twitter: https://twitter.com/LexSokolin TIMESTAMPS 1’09: The World Wide Web of Intelligence : How Bittensor Turns AI Into Open Competition 9’48: Decentralized AI or Financial Hyperstructure : Unpacking Bittensor's Tokenomics and the Shift to Dynamic TAO 15’04: 256 Miners, Zero Payroll : How Bittensor Subsidizes the Labor Behind Every Subnet 18’03: The Olympics of AI : How Subnet Competitions Replace Bitcoin's Proof of Work 20’09: The Grayscale Playbook for Bittensor : How Yuma Is Building the Institutional On-Ramp 23’19: AI Is the Wedge, Not the Ceiling : Bittensor's 3-to-5-Year Path to Coordinating All Work 28’03: Right but Early : Why the Vision for Decentralized AI May Take 15 Years to Realize 30’52: Decentralized Science as the Next Wedge : Why DeSci Could Be Bittensor's Most Underrated Use Case 34’10: $30,000/Day Mining on Nights and Weekends : Why Meta and Google Researchers Are Quietly on Bittensor 35’56: The channels used to connect with Evan & learn more about Yuma and Bittensor Disclaimer here — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD.Contributors: Lex, Laurence, Matt, Farhad, Mike, DaniellaWant to discuss? Stop by our Discord and ...
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    37 mins
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