How AI Just Made Money A Back End Technology | Alfonso Gomez-Jordana

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Final Settlement Interview Series: a one on one interview series hosted by Liam Nelson, Partner at Early Riders. One guest, and a deep conversation on the deals, the capital and the technology moving through bitcoin, so you can hear how the people actually doing the work think about where the future is going.

Liam sits down with Alfonso Gómez-Jordana, co-founder and CTO of Crossmint, who built Google's "I'm not a robot" captcha as an intern and now builds the payment rails those bots use. His argument is that money is becoming a back end technology: agents will hold the card, pick the rail, convert into stablecoins when an endpoint demands it, and inside of ten years most people will stop looking at prices or approving transactions at all. They get into why MoneyGram is replacing its core with stablecoins and finally monetizing float it never touched, why standing up stablecoin acceptance is now easier than getting a Stripe account, what breaks when a prompt injected agent is spending money that is not its own, and whether Bitcoin stays the neutral settlement asset once data centers find something better to mine.

Chapters

00:00 - Alfonso Gómez-Jordana, co-founder and CTO of Crossmint

01:37 - Building "I'm not a robot" at Google, then Firebase and WhatsApp

06:12 - Why an economy of agents needs programmable money

07:53 - Inside Crossmint: wallets, tokenization, licensed fiat swaps

09:50 - The clients: trading apps, MoneyGram, payroll, agent platforms

12:57 - Do stablecoins help remittances, or do they monetize the float

17:59 - The principal agent problem when a bot holds your money

24:57 - Why accepting a card is harder than accepting a stablecoin

26:52 - Hacks, trust, and who decides which rail gets used

30:47 - Tether, Circle, OpenUSD, and whether one stablecoin wins

34:05 - Bitcoin as neutral money, and the compute mined challengers

38:27 - Could Bitcoin's consensus follow AI compute

40:36 - What the industry got wrong about web3 and consumer crypto

43:47 - From meme coins to real assets and tokenized fundraising

47:18 - Euro stablecoins and why every country needs a strategy

53:13 - Past the singularity, money moves to the back end

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Keep up with Liam:

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https://x.com/alfongj