EarningArtist

Fintech week, this theme from Bank of China (Hong Kong) is quite interesting.

Visa’s earnings report disclosed that annualized stablecoin settlement volume has exceeded $25 billion, up 10x year over year, with more than 225 card programs linked to stablecoins. A DBS survey shows that 88% of large enterprises are already using or piloting tokenized money. But $25 billion, compared with Visa’s $14.2 trillion in annual payment volume, is still less than 0.2%. Stablecoins haven’t replaced card networks; they’ve been absorbed by them as their own settlement channel.

Xiaohongshu may be the social platform that benefits the most from the iPhone Duo launch. Browsing image-and-text posts in portrait mode is a great experience, and the larger screen makes it easier to zoom in and see image details clearly.

On October 27, Stripe launched Stripe Pay, allowing businesses to transfer funds to one another instantly and for free using their profile handles. The same day, Ripple partnered with C2FO to settle payments to suppliers in seconds using RLUSD on XRPL, while BNY also began custodying RLUSD. Transfers are getting faster and increasingly free, and transfers themselves are no longer profitable. The next battle is over who controls the account entry point; the money is made from account balances and financing.

Now, using vibe coding to build all kinds of web and client products may be an outdated mindset. Agents can meet every need, and the way people interact with information has changed.

OCC releases GENIUS Act rules, effective next January; HSBC launches a Hong Kong dollar stablecoin on PayMe, giving 3.3 million users direct access; Singapore’s BLOOM brings in Visa, Mastercard and 3 central banks. Stablecoins are being brought under regulatory frameworks and card networks. Next year, the competition won’t be about whether to support stablecoins, but about licenses, risk management and local cash-out. Payment companies should brush up on compliance, not issue coins.

Have you all made money with Grok?!

DeepSeek’s latest funding round was approximately 100 billion yuan ($15 billion), making it one of the largest fundraises in China. The fundraising target was raised at least twice during negotiations, from 50 billion yuan to 80 billion yuan and then to its final size; CATL and Tencent were among the largest investors.

You have traveled back from five years in the future. The competition among large models has just ended, and most transactional work can gradually be handed over to AI. Many people have started making AI videos. Blockchain has also become a form of infrastructure; U.S. stocks, forex, and prediction markets can all be traded on-chain, but everything seems to have only just begun. You see tech companies starting to lay off employees, and at this moment you know what you need to do is.......

OPay has applied to list on the NYSE at a valuation of $4 billion. Its founder, Zhou Yahui, previously had a successful company called Kunlun Tech. Nigeria contributed 89.5% of OPay’s revenue in the first half of the year and is also the main market for its self-operated lending business. In the first half of 2026, self-operated loan disbursements in the market totaled approximately $928 million, compared with approximately $305 million in the same period last year.

Making hardware wallets is almost the worst business in crypto. Hardware gross margins are very low, product update and iteration rates are also very low, and there are no long-tail services that can be monetized. Brand equity is fragile, and maintaining brand influence requires much higher marketing costs; the slightest incident can lead to a systemic brand collapse. There are also ongoing R&D costs :（

Ledger had an incident, and everyone started attacking OneKey. What's the reason? Is it because OneKey's boss is Chinese and can understand Chinese?

Sun Ge and Allen Shao both understand that controversy drives traffic, and they both know exactly how to play it. As long as people are talking about them, they’ve already won. Too many things happen every day, attention is extremely expensive, and it is repeatedly harvested.

OTC trading is definitely becoming increasingly low-margin, and a license isn’t much of a moat either. I had a chat with a big shot in traditional payments, and that was his conclusion.

I noticed that Kuaishou co-founder Su Hua, the family office of Meituan co-founder Wang Huiwen, Matrix Partners China, Source Code Capital, IDG, and Innovation Works all invested. Then, astonishingly, Wangsu Science & Technology also came up with 300 million to invest. The other firms’ investments make perfect sense, but Wangsu hasn’t been doing well in recent years—it basically took the little capital it had left and went all in.

This year at Token 2049, I saw many new card issuers, fewer payment companies, and more card-issuing teams. There were companies from Hong Kong and Europe. Visa and Mastercard have improved their support for stablecoins, and many startups now see this as an opportunity again. The logic behind building cards is different from before: it used to be a vague, borderline workaround, but now they market themselves as a product.

Ledger’s incident has dragged all hardware wallet companies into the pit. Hardware wallets can use the best encryption methods and technology, but their distribution systems and logistics processes can still be compromised, leaving backdoors. As it turns out, the best hardware wallet is still the iPhone.