Agentic Payments: When Is a Payment (Un)Authorized?

Who actually holds power in the global financial system, and how is digital money quietly rewiring it? To find out, Stefan sits down with Marieke Flament, an independent board director, strategic advisor and co-author of Currency of Power, who has had a front-row seat to almost every chapter of money's transformation. She was Managing Director for Europe at Circle, the company behind the USDC stablecoin, ran the digital bank Mettle and led the NEAR Foundation, and today serves as an independent board director, including on the euro-stablecoin venture Qivalis. With her co-author Nicolas Colin she writes Currency of Power, some of the sharpest analysis anywhere on the geopolitics of money. The through-line is her thesis that money is power, and that power is shifting. Marieke explains what she means by a great monetary reset: how the dollar became the world's reserve currency and why that role is now being questioned, from the 2008 break in trust and the 2014 turn to sanctions to the birth of Bitcoin. She shows why the US is leaning into dollar stablecoins as a way to create fresh, retail-driven demand for its Treasuries, and why that is a different instrument from a tokenized bank deposit: stablecoin issuers behave like narrow banks that hold one dollar of safe assets for every token, while banks run fractional reserves. Along the way she makes plain why long-term US yields at a nineteen-year high, and Japan and Norway rattling the sabre over selling Treasuries, actually matter. From there the conversation opens out to the other great powers and to Europe. Marieke unpacks China's full-stack strategy and its gold-backed rails, why de-dollarization is far less simple than it sounds when the Hong Kong dollar is pegged to the greenback, and why Europe is caught in between. She argues that a well-designed euro stablecoin is a must-have rather than a nice-to-have, driven by agentic AI commerce and the tokenization of financial markets, and explains what the 37-bank Qivalis consortium is really for: cross-border flows, corporate treasuries and the network effects Europe cannot afford to cede. The episode closes on how wholesale central-bank money, tokenized deposits and stablecoins might stack like layers of a cake, and on Marieke's hope that the shift now underway stays a peaceful one. A big-picture, plain-language conversation about money as power. Enjoy the episode.

Co-host Michael Blaschke’s solo stocktake after Sonja Davidovic (IMF) and Peter Grosskopf (AllUnity). Where stablecoins win, where cards keep chargebacks, and why PSD2 can’t tell you if your agent’s payment was authorized.

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AllUnity’s Peter Grosskopf joins us on agentic payments. From launching a euro stablecoin (plus Swiss franc and Swedish krona) to real-world use cases, hear where machine-driven payments are heading.

Every crypto holder relies on one thing and rarely thinks about it until it fails: how the keys are kept safe. Just days after the Coldcard hack drained over $100 million from users who appeared to do everything right, Ledger's Head of EMEA Kasper Luyckx joins Stefan to explain what really keeps digital assets safe, from hardware signers to bank-grade HSMs. Kasper, who has seen custody from both sides after years at UBS and Crypto Finance, walks through what actually went wrong at Coldcard (a seed generated in software instead of the secure chip, with far too little randomness), why it was an isolated firmware failure rather than an indictment of self-custody, and how Ledger's in-house attack lab, the Donjon, works. From there the conversation opens up: the real gap between retail and institutional custody, where multisig, MPC and HSMs fit, and the big shift from simply storing crypto to on-chain payments and tokenized securities. They also dig into AI on both sides of security, including Ledger's new Agent Stack, where AI agents can propose transactions but a human still approves each one on the device. The throughline: as AI makes vulnerabilities cheaper to find, keeping a human in the loop matters more than ever, and most people will end up holding value in a hybrid of self-custody and trusted custodians. Enjoy the episode.

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