A2A payments will be more important than P2P payments.

@VitalikButerin This is why we started interceptfund.com.

Give your Instinct a budget

Built with @Stripe and @link, we're launching Link balance in @instinct. You can now set a budget for your Instinct to make purchases on your behalf, and Instinct does the rest.

You choose how much money to add and set a limit for each purchase. Your in those limits, without needing access to your credit card or asking for approval every time.

That means buying tickets as soon as the presale opens, picking up your size when the trail runners restock, or reordering your favorite coffee beans every other week.

Link balance is rolling out to Instinct users across the US starting today, with New York coming soon.

Ask your Instinct to set up Link balance and it’ll send you a link to get started.

Introducing Link balance. You can now give your agent a balance to spend on your behalf, even when you’re away or busy.

• Purchase concert tickets while you’re asleep.
• Buy your favorite shoes when the price drops.
• Order your entire shopping list with one prompt.

You o add and set your own limits, your agent does the rest. Rolling out now to @Instinct users in eligible US regions.

I visited Wurster Hall at UC Berkeley today. It was designed by, and currently houses, the architecture faculty.

The UC Berkeley website notes that "Wurster is often voted Berkeley's ugliest building."

I visited because I was curious about whether it would in person seem as in photos. And, in short: it does. It's gaunt, austere, and filmed in grime. On an elysian campus, it stands out for its bleak hostility. It reminds me of the German submarine base in Bordeaux.

The UC Berkeley page agrees that it was never designed to be attractive, quoting the curator of their design archives: “Wurster and his handpicked architects didn’t want anything romantic, or sentimental — they hated the idea of ‘making pretty buildings. They wanted a serious building.”

I guess we have to concede success relative to their stated goals, but it does make one wonder what it all says about architecture as a discipline.

A day later, our first-ever agent-assisted @atlas company was officially incorporated via MCP. (Fortuitously, it's a startup related to robotics.)

New from @arcinstitute: using the latent space representation of genomes from single-cell life to find new candidate functional RNAs.

I think this is cool because: (1) it uses deep learning and model interpretability to productive ends on a totally different kind of "knowledge"; (2) it shows how agents may be able to accelerate discovery in vast combinatoric spaces; and (3) it's an example of the synergy we'll hopefully see in the coming years between computational techniques and wet lab biology.

That means a lot coming from you @eladgil - you set a very high bar for any new @stripepress author with High Growth Handbook!

Delighted to share a landmark preprint from our lab, using genome language models and AI agents for biological discovery and genome mining!

The stretches of DNA between protein-coding genes are often called the genome’s “dark matter,” but they are far from empty. They encode RNA tabolites, regulate genes, and control some of molecular biology's most important tools (such as programmable genome editors e.g. CRISPR/bridge)

Much of this biology is unexplored. One reason is that RNAs can retain similar structures and functions even as their DNA sequences change dramatically, making their relationships difficult to recognize with conventional computational tools

And now you can preorder the NOMAD LETTERS (out December 1!): press.stripe.com/nomad-letters

For years these letters have circulated (at first, unofficially) among investors, acquiring a devoted readership. We wanted to give them a permanent home in print.

Nick and his partner Qais raordinary. The letters are the account of how they got there, featuring everything from studying Amazon and Costco (Nomad’s defining investments)—to visiting cement plants in Zimbabwe, and beyond.

They’re candid about their mistakes and curious about the forces that shape investors’ behavior: incentives, psychology, and the wisdom (or foolishness!) of the crowd.

Since closing the fund, they’ve devoted their time to philanthropy, a journey Nick recounts in the lovely foreword he wrote for this edition.

I’m thrilled to continue adding to the investing corner of our catalogue, and I can’t think of a better work to follow Poor Charlie’s Almanack. ❣️

Ben has for many years been the best analyst in tech. I’m very much looking forward to this new @stratechery + @stripe partnership.

stratechery.com/2026/presented…

Some big personal news: I'm moving to join Works in Progress as executive editor, starting next month. I have been hoping for an opportunity to work with @bswud and @s8mb for more than a decade, and I'm incredibly excited to finally have one.

WIP is expanding on every front right now. We'll soon begin coverage of business and finance, as well as putting out more reported features. To that end, we'll be hiring more writers and reporters in the year to come. I'm planning to remain based in the US to help build out our presence here.

The print edition of WIP has existed for less than 12 months, but sometime in the next week or so we will reach our 10,000th paying print subscriber. It's a group that now includes people who've been at the highest echelons of government and who run the world's biggest public companies. We’re already on track to 3x that number next year. We'll be in store at Barnes & Noble, Hudson News and independent newsagents next week too.

I think WIP is providing something that people are craving from physical media right now: fewer, extremely well-crafted pieces in a beautifully designed form. Issues now feature an amazing group of columnists, including Tyler Cowen, Dan Wang and Stephen Kotkin. Each edition is better than the last.

You'll see us in more and more places next year too. In January, our new weekly documentary films will launch on YouTube. We're expanding into the events space, with a new series in North America. The sky is the limit from here on out.

These days, I'm struck by how the dominant mood on both sides of the Atlantic toward the other is a kind of pity. Europe frets about the US's supposed slide into autocracy; the US about Europe's pusillanimity and immiseration.

Excellent report on the NSF from Matt Faherty: newscience.org/nsf/. I wish there were more deep investigations and assessments like this of government agencies in the US, the EU, and elsewhere.

potentially a hot take but @Stablecoin is still underrated, such a good product and a world class team that just keeps shipping

I very highly recommend visiting the UK's great cathedrals, e.g. Lincoln and Durham. I did so earlier this year and find myself reminiscing about them quite frequently. Some of the most beautiful buildings in the world.

Today is probably a good time to check in on things with @privy_io, which became part of @stripe just over a year ago.

Our acquisition was predicated on three factors: stablecoin growth, self-custody as a key enabler of broader global coverage, and rapidly increasing demand for programmable financial infrastructure. As we said at the time, "money has to reside somewhere, and Privy builds the world's best programmable vaults."

Since then, the Privy team has executed exceptionally well: assets in Privy wallets have grown ~25x, monthly active developers are up ~3x, revenue is up ~9x, and Privy now facilitates nearly $25B of monthly transaction volume. @tryramp, @Deel, @Klarna, @felixpago, @HyperliquidX, and thousands of other businesses are building embedded banking functionality on Privy.

At Stripe, we're deeply integrating Privy into Treasury, @Link, and Connect. In each case, it's accelerating our global expansion, and enabling us to build better functionality faster. (Coming soon: @Link balances.)

We're also seeing that Privy's wallet infrastructure is the ideal substrate for agents to transact and earn -- live today with @merit_systems, @orthogonal_sh, @Nevermined_ai, @prlnet, and more. Developers prefer programmable financial infrastructure, but agents need it. We expect that the agentic economy will continue to grow extremely quickly.

The Privy team has maintained remarkable product velocity, with major launches this year including deposit addresses, earning on Privy balances, digital asset accounts, custodial wallets, and Stripe's own stablecoin cards.

It's also been neat to see how Privy has been accelerated by Stripe, with better onramps, @stablecoin payment rails and licenses, Stripe's fiat capabilities and issuing stack, and integration with @Tempo.

Together, we're building one API for holding stablecoin balances and earning yield, moving money in and out of fiat, and orchestrating spend with cards. We still have a lot of work to do, not least in integrating everything across Privy, Bridge, and the rest of Stripe -- there's been so much feature and functionality expansion that we haven't yet had much time to reconcile everything. Overall, though, I'm very happy with how things are going, and excited by where these capabilities are headed.

If you're interested in working on the future of stablecoins, agentic payments, and crypto's deployment in the real world, you should get in touch with @sternhenri (now leading all of @StripeCrypto) or others on the team.

Stablecoin-backed cards make make global balances instantly usable at 100M+ businesses. We're looking forward to working with @Plasma to advance the space.

The future of banking will run on stablecoins.
On Plasma, in partnership with @StripeCrypto.

My full fireside conversation with @patrickc at the Science: A New Golden Age Summit.

We discussed building new institutions for discovery, accelerating scientific progress, and how America can move faster on the hardest scientific challenges.