How Marqeta Built the $400B Modern Card Issuing Platform, with CEO Mike Milotich

How Marqeta Built the $400B Modern Card Issuing Platform, with CEO Mike Milotich

In this episode, Lex chats with Mike Milotich [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-milotich-7b78402/] — Chief Executive Officer of Marqeta, the modern card issuing platform that processed nearly $400 billion in payments volume in 2025, and is certified to operate in 40+ countries, growing over 30% for the third straight year. They discuss how Marqeta's separation of bank, processor, and brand armed fintech's largest winners across buy now pay later, on-demand delivery, neo-banking, and expense management with the Lego blocks to build their own card programs.  Mike explains how the company's growth is shifting from enabling new use cases to displacing volume on legacy bank platforms, and they explore why card issuing is going multinational, what the agentic commerce wave actually requires to clear security and behavioural hurdles, and how Marqeta's continued growth runs through embedded finance, real-time personalisation, and the forced modernisation of the banks themselves. NOTABLE DISCUSSION POINTS: 1. The BNPL business model is flipping from merchant rails to consumer cards. Marqeta originally solved the merchant scale problem for buy now pay later via virtual cards, removing the need for tens of millions of merchants to integrate a new button at checkout. The current shift is more important: BNPL players are now issuing consumers their own physical and virtual cards usable anywhere cards are accepted, turning BNPL from a merchant-acceptance game into a direct consumer value proposition. BNPL volume has grown over 50% year-on-year for Marqeta in recent quarters. 2. Card issuing is going multinational, and that breaks the legacy bank model. Banks have always been local on the consumer side, with only a handful multinational on the commercial treasury side. The next generation of card issuers, neo-banks like Revolut and Nubank, plus large global platforms embedding financial products into existing user bases, are global by default. A single platform that issues cards, and is certified to operate across 40+ countries, becomes the strategic moat, and legacy processors built to serve domestic bank programs aren’t structured to compete. 3. The growth story is moving from expanding the pie to displacing the incumbents. To date, Marqeta has mostly powered new card use cases that didn’t exist before — on-demand delivery, BNPL, neo-banking, expense management. Mike’s forward thesis is a phase change: pressure from fintech winners is forcing banks to modernise, and the next leg of growth comes from displacing volume sitting on legacy bank-controlled platforms. Real-time personalised rewards, where the same card delivers different offers to different cardholders based on live data, is the wedge that legacy infrastructure can’t deliver. TOPICS Marqeta, Visa, Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, Payments, card issuing, embedded finance, fintech, BNPL, neobank, agentic commerce, e-commerce, crypto, stablecoins, programmable money, machine economy, agentic AI   ABOUT THE FINTECH BLUEPRINT 🔥Subscribe to the Fintech Blueprint newsletter to stay at the forefront of Fintech and DeFi: https://bit.ly/3hyhlC2 [https://bit.ly/3hyhlC2] 🤝 Partner with Fintech Blueprint through sponsorships: https://bit.ly/3UZllsV [https://bit.ly/3UZllsV] 👉 Twitter: https://twitter.com/LexSokolin [https://twitter.com/LexSokolin]   TIMESTAMPS 1’04: From Math Brain to Payments Career : Finding the Nuance in How Money Actually Moves 7’05: The Narrative Gets Ahead of Reality : Why Agentic Commerce Will Move Slower Than the Technologists Think 10’08: Global But Local : The Balancing Act That Kept Visa on Top of the Payments Network for Decades 12’58: Carve It Out or Watch It Get Trampled : How Visa Incubates Mobile, Crypto and Agentic Without Killing Them 15’03: $400 Billion in Volume, 30% Growth, Three Years Running : The Numbers Behind Marqeta's Compounding Scale 17’05: The Pandemic Poured Gasoline on Everything : Why DoorDash, BNPL, Expense and Neo-Banking All Exploded at Once 24’24: The Lego Blocks for Payments : How Marqeta Armed the Innovators Who Couldn't Build Through Banks 29’19: Visibility as a Weapon : Why Being Public Helps Marqeta Win Customers Against Private and Embedded Competitors 33’15: Fewer Bets, Higher Probability : How Public Market Discipline Reshaped Marqeta's Risk and Profitability Model 36’35: The Legacy Platforms Were Built for Banks : Why Embedded Finance, Multinational Card Issuing and Personalisation Reshape the Pie 41’50: Prompted, Not Replaced : The Ten-Year View on Whether Volume Comes From People or Robots 43’56: The channels used to connect with Mike & learn more about Marqeta Disclaimer here [https://www.fintechblueprint.com/disclaimer] — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD. Contributors: Lex [https://twitter.com/LexSokolin], Laurence [https://twitter.com/lesmith96], Matt [https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewjameslow/], Farhad [https://www.linkedin.com/in/farhadhuseynli/], Mike [https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-hurrell-823643171/], Daniella [https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniella-seberini-273aa6205/] Want to discuss? Stop by our Discord [https://discord.gg/tmHR6tCJv8] and reach out here with questions [https://www.lexsokolin.com/contact].

The $6B Decentralized AI Network, with Yuma CRO Evan Malanga

In this episode, Lex chats with Evan Malanga [https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-malanga-a5904244/]— Chief Revenue Officer of Yuma, a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group focused on growing the Bittensor ecosystem. They discuss how Bittensor's $6 billion protocol incentivises AI builders worldwide through token emissions across 128 competing subnets, and why the network has produced real commercial outputs — including a 72 billion parameter model trained on-chain and a coding agent rivalling Claude at a fraction of the cost. Evan explains Yuma's role as the institutional gateway to Bittensor through its validator, accelerator, and asset management products, and they explore why the concentration of AI in OpenAI and Anthropic is a systemic risk, and whether Bittensor's future extends beyond AI into a broader coordination engine for decentralised work. NOTABLE DISCUSSION POINTS: 1. Bittensor has crossed from experimentation into shipping benchmark-competitive work at a fraction of centralized cost. Three recent proof points: Templar (subnet 3) completed the largest decentralized pre-training run of a 72B parameter model using only the network’s token incentives. Ridges, an AI agent platform, is hitting 88–90% on software engineering benchmarks, on par with Claude-class agents at ~5x cheaper, built by a 3-to-5-person team under $10M of token emissions. Score (subnet 44) is doing computer vision 200x faster than centralized counterparts. Small distributed teams are producing outputs competitive with frontier labs without raising venture capital or hiring staff. 2. Dynamic TAO restructured emissions from validator-curated to market-curated, making each subnet its own tradeable asset. Previously, dominant validators assigned weights that determined how the 7,200 daily TAO emission flowed across subnets. Under Dynamic TAO, each of the 128 subnets has its own token denominated in TAO, and any holder can buy or sell into specific subnets, pricing them like a market rather than a committee vote. Subnet owners, miners, and validators earn fees in the respective subnet token. Distribution has settled into a power law: the top ten subnets hold ~80% of market cap. This is the move that turned Bittensor from “decentralized AI protocol” into a financial hyperstructure with hundreds of tokenized work markets layered on top. 3. The economics for subnet owners are genuinely unusual — hundreds of millions in annual incentives, fully subsidized labor, no fundraising. A subnet owner gets access to up to ~256 miners globally competing to satisfy their problem statement, with miner compensation paid by protocol emissions rather than the subnet owner. At current TAO prices, annual incentives across the network run into hundreds of millions; at higher prices, this approaches $1B/year up for grabs. No hiring, no benefits, no recruiting, the network runs as a continuous adversarial competition where validators rank miner outputs. This is the mechanical answer to “why would an AI researcher choose Bittensor over Silicon Valley”, and explains why researchers at Meta and Google reportedly mine Bittensor on nights and weekends, with top miners on subnets like Ridges earning ~$30,000/day. TOPICS Yuma, Bittensor, Digital Currency Group, DCG, OpenAI, Anthropic, Foundry, Templar, Ridges, Bitcoin, Meta, Google, BlackRock, JPMorgan, Decentralized AI, Crypto, Blockchain, AI, Tokenomics, Decentralized Science, DeSci, AI Agents, Computer Vision, Proof of Work, Tokenization, Real World Assets, RWA, Machine Economy   ABOUT THE FINTECH BLUEPRINT 🔥Subscribe to the Fintech Blueprint newsletter to stay at the forefront of Fintech and DeFi: https://bit.ly/3hyhlC2 [https://bit.ly/3hyhlC2] 🤝 Partner with Fintech Blueprint through sponsorships: https://bit.ly/3UZllsV [https://bit.ly/3UZllsV] 👉 Twitter: https://twitter.com/LexSokolin [https://twitter.com/LexSokolin]   TIMESTAMPS 1’09: The World Wide Web of Intelligence : How Bittensor Turns AI Into Open Competition 9’48: Decentralized AI or Financial Hyperstructure : Unpacking Bittensor's Tokenomics and the Shift to Dynamic TAO 15’04: 256 Miners, Zero Payroll : How Bittensor Subsidizes the Labor Behind Every Subnet 18’03: The Olympics of AI : How Subnet Competitions Replace Bitcoin's Proof of Work 20’09: The Grayscale Playbook for Bittensor : How Yuma Is Building the Institutional On-Ramp 23’19: AI Is the Wedge, Not the Ceiling : Bittensor's 3-to-5-Year Path to Coordinating All Work 28’03: Right but Early : Why the Vision for Decentralized AI May Take 15 Years to Realize 30’52: Decentralized Science as the Next Wedge : Why DeSci Could Be Bittensor's Most Underrated Use Case 34’10: $30,000/Day Mining on Nights and Weekends : Why Meta and Google Researchers Are Quietly on Bittensor 35’56: The channels used to connect with Evan & learn more about Yuma and Bittensor Disclaimer here [https://www.fintechblueprint.com/disclaimer] — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD. Contributors: Lex [https://twitter.com/LexSokolin], Laurence [https://twitter.com/lesmith96], Matt [https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewjameslow/], Farhad [https://www.linkedin.com/in/farhadhuseynli/], Mike [https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-hurrell-823643171/], Daniella [https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniella-seberini-273aa6205/] Want to discuss? Stop by our Discord [https://discord.gg/tmHR6tCJv8] and reach out here with questions [https://www.lexsokolin.com/contact].

Inside Mercury's $650M Revenue Machine, with CEO Immad Akhund

In this episode, Lex chats with Immad Akhund, [https://www.linkedin.com/in/iakhund/] CEO and founder of Mercury, a leading neobank for businesses. Immad shares his entrepreneurial journey, explaining how frustrating banking experiences inspired Mercury's creation. They discuss Banking as a Service, open banking, embedded finance, and core banking systems. Immad details Mercury's product philosophy, team structure, and migration away from Synapse before its collapse. He also outlines Mercury's impressive growth, with 300,000 customers, $650M in annual revenue, and three years of profitability. The conversation concludes with Mercury's future plans, including lending expansion, a bank charter application, and hopes for smarter AI-driven regulatory compliance. NOTABLE DISCUSSION POINTS: 1. Banking-as-a-Service Has Been Completely Restructured - and the Original Model Is Dead: The fintech BaaS layer that enabled the 2019–2021 neobank boom - middleware providers like Synapse, Unit, and Bond sitting between fintechs and partner banks - has effectively collapsed. The replacement model is banks themselves exposing modern APIs directly, with Column Bank and Lead Bank emerging as the new infrastructure layer. Mercury navigated this shift early, moving entirely off Synapse months before its April 2024 failure, but the broader lesson is that the hundred-program BaaS model broke under the weight of compliance and reconciliation complexity. 2. Mercury’s 40% Startup Market Share Is Just the Entry Point to a $2 Trillion Opportunity: Mercury captures over 35% of early-stage US startups, but broader SMB banking represents 30% of all banking revenue - a $2 trillion market. The company is now expanding into personal banking (launched December 2025), lending (bank charter application filed), and subscription software. Akhund frames Mercury not as a bank but as a financial operating system - the “Google suite of banking” - where deposits are the entry point to invoicing, bill pay, spend management, and eventually underwriting. 3. Stablecoins Don’t Magically Solve the Ledger Problem: Akhund pushes back on the narrative that stablecoins eliminate reconciliation risk. In practice, most stablecoin providers pool customer funds into shared wallets and run their own abstraction layers and internal ledgers - recreating the same reconciliation challenges that exist in traditional banking. The benefit only holds in the narrow case where users truly own their own keys and wallets, which is rarely how scaled fintech products operate. TOPICS Mercury, Synapse, Chase, Evolve Bank, Column Bank, Stripe, Plaid, Coinbase, neobank, neobanking, banking-as-a-service, BAAS, fintech, fintech regulation, reconciliation, product development, stablecoins, API, blockchain, VCs, embedded finance   ABOUT THE FINTECH BLUEPRINT 🔥Subscribe to the Fintech Blueprint newsletter to stay at the forefront of Fintech and DeFi: https://bit.ly/3hyhlC2 [https://bit.ly/3hyhlC2] 🤝 Partner with Fintech Blueprint through sponsorships: https://bit.ly/3UZllsV [https://bit.ly/3UZllsV] 👉 Twitter: https://twitter.com/LexSokolin [https://twitter.com/LexSokolin]   TIMESTAMPS 1’05: Signing up for six bank accounts and asking for an API nobody understood : how the idea for Mercury was born 4’57: Why depository banking was fintech's last untouched frontier : partner banks, BaaS, and the gap Mercury filled 6’54: BaaS, open banking, embedded finance, and banking cores : a plain-English breakdown of fintech's alphabet soup 13’50: Competing against Chase and Wells Fargo : why Mercury's best advantage is how bad banks still are 18’28: Checkbox banking versus handcrafted product : how Mercury built a unified experience that incumbents can't replicate 20’52: Autonomous product teams and customer-first engineering : how Mercury structures 300 people to ship like a startup 23’21: The right unit of speed : why Mercury bets on autonomy over coordination in product development 26’14: Navigating the Synapse collapse : how Mercury moved off early and reconciled every transaction 29’42: Stablecoins as the new embedded finance : why blockchain ledgers don't magically solve reconciliation 31’52: $650M in revenue and still just getting started : Mercury's vision for the Google suite of banking 35’04: Why profitability beats begging VCs : Mercury's business model and the case for financial independence 37’42: 40% of startups and a bank charter application : Mercury's roadmap inside a $2 trillion market 41’28: The path to a national bank charter : why AI will reshape compliance costs for fintechs 44’00: The channels used to connect with Immad & learn more about Mercury Disclaimer here [https://www.fintechblueprint.com/disclaimer] — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD. Contributors: Lex [https://twitter.com/LexSokolin], Laurence [https://twitter.com/lesmith96], Matt [https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewjameslow/], Farhad [https://www.linkedin.com/in/farhadhuseynli/], Mike [https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-hurrell-823643171/], Daniella [https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniella-seberini-273aa6205/] Want to discuss? Stop by our Discord [https://discord.gg/tmHR6tCJv8] and reach out here with questions [https://www.lexsokolin.com/contact].

How Polygon Became the Payments Chain Moving $2.3T in Stablecoins, with CEO Marc Boiron

In this episode, Lex chats with Marc Boiron [https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcboiron/] — CEO of Polygon Labs. Marc shares his journey from law to blockchain, discussing the challenges of navigating crypto’s evolving legal landscape and the complexities of structuring compliant DeFi projects. He explains Polygon’s strategic pivot to focus on stablecoin payments, leveraging its proven blockchain and global partnerships. Marc highlights Polygon’s real-world adoption, competitive edge, and vision to become the leading platform for on-chain payments. The episode offers insights into regulatory hurdles, industry trends, and Polygon’s mission to transform digital money movement. NOTABLE DISCUSSION POINTS: 1. The Labs-Foundation Structure Is a Frankenstein - and Its Creator Knows It: Marc helped architect the legal frameworks behind major DeFi token launches but openly calls the outcome a “complete Frankenstein.” The arm’s-length separation between labs and foundations was necessary to survive regulatory hostility, but makes coherent execution nearly impossible. He argues projects still copying this structure today are doing so out of habit, not legal necessity. 2. Generalist Blockchains Are Dead - Polygon Is Betting Everything on Payments: As chain architectures converge, Boiron believes differentiation through speed and low fees is over. Polygon analysed its actual usage, found stablecoin payments was the standout vertical - $2.3 trillion already moved, fintechs across LatAm, Africa, and Southeast Asia already on-chain - and went all-in. The thesis is binary: if all money moves on-chain within a decade, even the 50th-best payments chain wins big. 3. Polygon’s Real Moat Is Enterprise Trust Built During the NFT Era: The 2022–23 enterprise NFT push looked like a dead end after FTX collapsed, but it left behind institutional due diligence and credibility. Fintechs evaluating payments chains find that Polygon has years of live production use, Fortune 500 relationships, and Stripe already defaulting to it - a trust advantage no newly launched chain can replicate. TOPICS Polygon Labs, Polygon protocol, blockchain, crypto, decentralized finance, DeFi, legal frameworks, token launches, meme coins, stablecoins, payments, fintech, Ethereum, ICO boom, web3, NFT, Stripe, Circle   ABOUT THE FINTECH BLUEPRINT 🔥Subscribe to the Fintech Blueprint newsletter to stay at the forefront of Fintech and DeFi: https://bit.ly/3hyhlC2 [https://bit.ly/3hyhlC2] 🤝 Partner with Fintech Blueprint through sponsorships: https://bit.ly/3UZllsV [https://bit.ly/3UZllsV] 👉 Twitter: https://twitter.com/LexSokolin [https://twitter.com/LexSokolin]   TIMESTAMPS 1’09: From Spreadsheets to Smart Contracts: The Accidental Lawyer Who Found His Edge in Emerging Companies 4’40: Selling Your Soul for Low-Risk Capital: The Case For and Against the JD MBA 9’41: Fake It Till You Make It: How the ICO Craze of 2017 Turned One Niche Bet Into a Crypto Legal Career 13’01: Read the Actual Law: Why Memorizing the Securities Act Beat 20 Years of Legal Precedent in Crypto 18’19: The Crypto Legal Frankenstein: How Regulatory Survival, Not Business Logic, Built the Foundation-Labs-Token Structure 25’16: From Stockholm Syndrome to Meme Coin Mania: The Disorienting Cost of Crypto's Regulatory 180 30’05: The Dichotomy of Success: How Polygon's Most Celebrated Moment Was Secretly Its Most Broken 36’49: All Money on Chain: Why Polygon Is Betting Its Future on Becoming the World's Payments Blockchain 48’29: The channels used to connect with Marc & learn more about Polygon Labs Disclaimer here [https://www.fintechblueprint.com/disclaimer] — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD. Contributors: Lex [https://twitter.com/LexSokolin], Laurence [https://twitter.com/lesmith96], Matt [https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewjameslow/], Farhad [https://www.linkedin.com/in/farhadhuseynli/], Mike [https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-hurrell-823643171/], Daniella [https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniella-seberini-273aa6205/] Want to discuss? Stop by our Discord [https://discord.gg/tmHR6tCJv8] and reach out here with questions [https://www.lexsokolin.com/contact].

Building Privacy Infrastructure for 35+ Global Financial Institutions, with Matter Labs CEO Alex Gluchowski

In this episode, Lex chats with Alex Gluchowski [https://www.linkedin.com/in/gluchowski/] — Cofounder and CEO of Matter Labs, about the transformative impact of zero-knowledge proofs (ZK proofs) on blockchain scalability and privacy. They discuss Matter Labs’ evolution, the development of zkSync, and how ZK proofs enable secure, private, and efficient blockchain transactions. The conversation explores enterprise adoption, regulatory shifts, and the potential for blockchain to revolutionize global finance by enabling privacy-preserving, interoperable networks anchored to Ethereum, ultimately highlighting the growing role of cryptography in advancing financial sovereignty and innovation. NOTABLE DISCUSSION POINTS: 1. Incorruptibility is Blockchain’s Core Value—Not Consensus: Consensus mechanisms solve network liveness without central operators, but the guarantee that your assets can’t be spent without your permission comes from verification. Bitcoin’s “don’t trust, verify” mantra is literal: every node re-executes every transaction. Zero knowledge proofs achieve the same incorruptibility without requiring universal visibility—enabling both scale and privacy. 2. The Regulatory Shift Has Unlocked an Entirely New Market: The post-Trump regulatory environment represents a “great divide” for crypto. Banks and enterprises that previously couldn’t engage are now actively piloting blockchain infrastructure. Matter Labs is working with Deutsche Bank, UBS, and 35+ global financial institutions through initiatives like Presidio Breakthrough. The focus has shifted from building systems to withstand regulatory hostility to integrating crypto into real business processes. 3. Private Enterprise Chains Settling on Ethereum is the Institutional Path: Banks experimented with consortium blockchains (Hyperledger, Corda, R3) for years but failed due to privacy concerns—participants could see each other’s transactions. Zero knowledge proofs solve this by enabling private chains that interoperate trustlessly through Ethereum as a shared settlement layer. Each institution maintains sovereignty over its operations while gaining cryptographic guarantees when transacting with counterparties. TOPICS Matter Labs, zkSync, Ethereum, Consensys, Hyperledger, Arbitrum, Optimism, fintech, blockchain, zero-knowledge proofs, ZK proofs, privacy, institutional adoption, scalability, cryptography, interoperability   ABOUT THE FINTECH BLUEPRINT 🔥Subscribe to the Fintech Blueprint newsletter to stay at the forefront of Fintech and DeFi: https://bit.ly/3hyhlC2 [https://bit.ly/3hyhlC2] 🤝 Partner with Fintech Blueprint through sponsorships: https://bit.ly/3UZllsV [https://bit.ly/3UZllsV] 👉 Twitter: https://twitter.com/LexSokolin [https://twitter.com/LexSokolin]   TIMESTAMPS 1’14: The Incorruptibility Problem: Why Zero Knowledge Proofs Are the Only Path to Private, Scalable Finance 5’19: From Soviet Ukraine to Zero Knowledge: How Hyperinflation and a Hunger for Freedom Built a Crypto Visionary 14’07: Freedom Has a Cost: Squaring Crypto's Libertarian Promise With a Decade of Market Abuse 17’11: The Post-Trump Paradigm Shift: Why Stablecoins Are the Shipping Container Moment for Global Finance 25’19: ZK Rollups Demystified: How a Few Kilobytes of Cryptographic Proof Inherit the Full Security of Ethereum 31’38: The Bank Stack of Ethereum: How Zero Knowledge Proofs Finally Solve the Problem Hyperledger and Corda Never Could 37’11: Ethereum as the World's Chronometer: Why Trustless Interoperability Lives or Dies Within a Single Settlement Layer 39’46: The channels used to connect with Alex & learn more about Matter Labs Disclaimer here [https://www.fintechblueprint.com/disclaimer] — this newsletter does not provide investment advice and represents solely the views and opinions of FINTECH BLUEPRINT LTD. Contributors: Lex [https://twitter.com/LexSokolin], Laurence [https://twitter.com/lesmith96], Matt [https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewjameslow/], Farhad [https://www.linkedin.com/in/farhadhuseynli/], Mike [https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-hurrell-823643171/], Daniella [https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniella-seberini-273aa6205/] Want to discuss? Stop by our Discord [https://discord.gg/tmHR6tCJv8] and reach out here with questions [https://www.lexsokolin.com/contact].