Ben Milne
I wanted to see if an agent could pay to send me a message. Not a human filling out a contact form. Not a CAPTCHA. An agent with a wallet, a task, and a desire to reach me. I am not unique. I am simply a meat stick a computer might want to say something to. A human can reach me on LinkedIn or X...
Ben Milne
Last week Brale and Visa announced a new project running on Canton. This is somewhat epic for a few reasons. Visa is one of the most important payment networks on the planet. Canton is a privacy-preserving protocol built for traditional financial workflows. Brale is a world class stablecoin issuer...
Ben Milne
I use a simple model when thinking about how value moves across the internet: ValueType defines what is moving – dollars, euros, stablecoins, digital deposits, whatever. TransferType defines how it’s moving – bank transfer, blockchain, card network, protocol, whatever. These abstractions help...
Ben Milne
Fund flows are kind of a pain. Everyone does them, everyone does them differently, and even if you are doing them you probably change your format all the time. As stablecoins are getting embedded more and more into everything, I feel like I’m doing a funds flow or 2 a day. When a Fintech pops up...
Ben Milne
Most accounting systems are based on two decimal systems. Unless you work in a particular subset of technology systems the concept of building with 3 or 18 decimal systems is a borderline ridiculous thing to discuss with someone who does not. Money is for most of humanity a 2 decimal system. I’ve...
Ben Milne
The last post about issuance kicked off a series of emails from friends I thought were kind of interesting. I thought I’d unpack briefly what it all came down to. Quickly understanding who is participating in a card program as one of the following: Issuer Network Distribution (brand) These...
Ben Milne
The Brale team spends an inordinate amount of time these days talking about, thinking about, and working with folks new to DeFi protocols. Most of the world’s CeFi & TradFi leaders still need to wrap their heads around gas fees which frequently come up as a barrier to entry. Showing someone...
Ben Milne
Since I wrote the original value layer blog post, I’ve wanted to expand on the idea and start cataloging the different global systems connected through these primitives. At one point, I had hoped to get folks to contribute to it as an open-source project. Due to time constraints, that never...
Ben Milne
At Money 20/20 last week, a topic that came up over and over in discussions was blockchain performance compared to traditional databases used to ledger transactions. One must be excellent at double-entry bookkeeping and performant state machines to use a traditional database to ledger...
Ben Milne
Sharing observations and findings after spending more time in the DeFi world has been a fun part of the journey. It helps communicate to people inside of traditional finance environments and those outside them. Talking about moving money in a traditional environment very quickly focuses on...
Ben Milne
Matt Harris did this fantastic talk about the verticalization of FinTech a few year ago. The TL/DR for me is that a lot of high-value technology will be built and scaled across several customer verticals. If you have some time, I suggest watching the video below. These horizontal technologies...
Ben Milne
The last v-sum was unique because it was the first time the tech briefings focused on an ecosystem stack or companies working together to solve different layers of a problem. Jessie came up with the idea after being a customer of Lance and loving the product. She wanted to know more about how it...
Ben Milne
The leverage someone or something gets through access to information, a computing system, or a database. When thinking about differences between web2 and web3, this is something that continually sticks out as being unique. Granted access to a dataset or system can change the course of a project...
Ben Milne
Yesterday was V-Sum_Eight, which was great. One of the demos was from Alloy. Their product makes it much easier for banks, FinTechs, and others, to validate an end user’s identity. This has a special place in my heart because I’ve experienced the brain damage of solving the problem first hand in a...
Ben Milne
There are tens of billions of Internet connected devices and a litany of software runs on them. As we all know, many of the apps running on that hardware handle our data at rest differently. HTTPS has solved a massive gap in protecting data in transit but data at rest still needs a bit of help. We...
Ben Milne
CBDC is a fascinating topic. Central Bank Digital Currency is simply digital money but at times this feels perplexing. Perplexing because money is mostly already digital and there are plenty of things to consider when creating a CBDC. When money is printed it’s because a computer said it was...
Ben Milne
The phrase the value layer of the internet is peppered throughout my work. When I say, the value layer of the internet, what I’m speaking to is the immensely complex series of systems that support value exchange across the internet. I’ve come to think about this as being comprised of access,...