TLDR Fintech 2026-02-12

Stablecoins are the fastest-growing segment of the crypto economy with adjusted transaction volume surging to 54% last year to $5.7 trillion. This guide by Bridge shows how nine companies used stablecoin to cut cross-border payment fees by up to 80%.

Read the guide to learn how:

1️⃣ Shadeform grew revenue 10% after adding stablecoin payments, which now account for nearly 20% of its payment volume.

2️⃣ Cenoa onboarded 50,000+ small businesses in emerging markets like Turkey and Nigeria within its first nine months.

3️⃣ Airtm issued 25,000 cards and processed $2M in spending volume in just three months.

Read the full guide

Stripe is arranging a new tender offer that would value the company at at least $140 billion, up more than $30 billion from its $107 billion valuation in a deal last year. The move signals Stripe is likely to keep delaying an IPO, instead using regular tenders to provide employee liquidity while staying private. The company reached full-year profitability in 2024 and has been deepening its payments stack through acquisitions in stablecoin infrastructure and crypto wallets.

Databricks raised $5B in new equity plus $2B in debt capacity at a $134B valuation, as annualized revenue topped $5.4B in the January quarter, up 65% year over year with positive free cash flow. AI-driven products now contribute $1.4B in annualized revenue, reflecting strong demand for data platforms that power custom agents. CEO Ali Ghodsi said Databricks is ready to go public “when the time is right,” but is comfortable staying private amid volatile public markets and a broader software selloff.

Beast Industries, founded by YouTube creator MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson), is acquiring Step, a Gen Z-focused banking app with over 7 million users and more than $500M raised from investors including General Catalyst, Coatue, and Stripe. The deal aligns with Beast Industries' push beyond media into consumer businesses, leveraging MrBeast's massive reach to distribute financial products aimed at helping young people build credit, save, and invest. Step adds to a portfolio where Feastables is the core profit engine, while fintech and telecom are emerging growth bets.

Vertical AI is under pressure as foundation model providers rapidly verticalize, compressing the window for application-layer startups. The defensible winners will be those that own the “long last mile”: delivering outcomes with real-world coordination, regulatory accountability, and liability ownership. Companies that price on trust and certainty, not features, can build compounding moats, while tool-like AI products remain vulnerable to foundation model creep.

A sudden selloff wiped roughly $285B from software stocks after Anthropic and OpenAI showed AI agents replacing entire SaaS workflows, shifting value from per-seat UIs to outcome-driven automation. The real inflection came from agents escaping chatboxes, longer autonomous task horizons, and enterprise-grade governance, unlocking measurable ROI at firms like Goldman Sachs and Norges Bank. The new moat is unique data and strong APIs, while commoditized dashboards face structural repricing as the “seat” model breaks down.

Coinbase is launching “Agentic Wallets,” wallet infrastructure built specifically for AI agents that enable them to spend, earn, and trade autonomously with programmable guardrails. Powered by the x402 machine-to-machine payments protocol and integrated with the Coinbase Developer Platform, agents can execute DeFi strategies, pay for APIs and compute, and participate in onchain commerce without human approval at every step. The pitch: move from AI that advises to AI that transacts, with built-in spending limits, compliance checks, and secure key management.

Stripe's fully unattended internal coding agents, “Minions,” now produce over 1,000 human-reviewed pull requests per week with zero human-written code. Built to operate safely inside Stripe's massive, high-stakes codebase, Minions integrate tightly with internal tooling, CI, and context systems to one-shot tasks from Slack to production-ready PRs. Agentic coding is shifting from assistive copilots to parallelized, autonomous software teams embedded directly in enterprise workflows.

The market is mispricing “software” as a single category, when AI actually creates a sharp split between UI-heavy, seat-based SaaS and usage-based infrastructure. AI agents replace human-facing tools and IT services (the “road workers”) while dramatically increasing demand for APIs, databases, monitoring, and security (the “tollbooths”). The winning trade is long infrastructure and APIs that charge per call, and short human-hours businesses like IT outsourcing and seat-based enterprise software.

Morgan Stanley is bringing back veteran tech banker Michael Grimes as chairman of investment banking, based in Menlo Park, after his stint at the US Commerce Department. Grimes, a longtime dealmaker known for advising on major technology transactions, including Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, will focus on managing relationships with global corporate, venture, private equity, and sovereign clients. His return comes after plans for a US sovereign wealth fund he was set to lead stalled last year.

Major US banking groups are urging the Federal Reserve to delay or restrict direct payment system access for crypto and fintech firms, arguing stablecoin issuers should prove safety over a 12-month period before eligibility. Fintechs and crypto firms like Circle and Stripe say the proposed “skinny accounts” are too restrictive to be viable, setting up a high-stakes fight over control of the Fed's payments infrastructure as new stablecoin rules take shape.

We're in an early, “seems overblown” phase of a rapid AI step-change, similar in vibe to February 2020, driven by a small set of labs whose new models are now completing real work end-to-end with little supervision.

Coinbase aired the only crypto-specific Super Bowl ad this year, turning a 60-second spot into a karaoke sing-along to the Backstreet Boys' “Everybody,” sparking sharply mixed reactions online.