Pedro Garcia

Three stories this week show how rapidly the rails underneath digital finance are being rebuilt, and who is paying to do it. Andreessen Horowitz has made its first ever investment in the Gulf, putting $25 million into a Saudi-headquartered company building a single operating system for banks. The same investor has just led a $222 million token presale for Circle's new stablecoin-native blockchain, valuing the network at $3 billion alongside BlackRock, Apollo and the parent company of the New...

Three stories this week show capital and infrastructure both deciding where the next phase of digital finance will be built. The largest bank in the United States has just put its first tokenized money market fund on the public Ethereum blockchain, designed to sit behind the country's emerging stablecoin reserves. A specialist London private equity firm has closed a $1.23 billion fund focused exclusively on financial infrastructure, more than double its previous vehicle. And in Southeast...

Three stories this week show the payments stack being rebuilt at every layer at the same time. AI agents are now shopping and paying on behalf of hundreds of millions of consumers in China. The unglamorous issuer processing layer that authorises card transactions has just attracted 175 million dollars of new capital. And Indonesia and China have switched on a cross-border QR corridor that bypasses the US dollar entirely, connecting 40 million Indonesian merchants with 80 million Chinese QR...