Money Is Becoming A Back-End Technology

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