Episode Details

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Presented collaboratively by Early Riders & Onramp Media…
Final Settlement is a weekly podcast covering capital markets, dealmaking, early-stage venture, bitcoin applications and protocol development.
This week Michael, Liam, and Brian open on the open-versus-closed AI debate: Jensen Huang's first-ever tweet and NVIDIA's letter backing open models, the new Security Alliance consortium, the researchers quietly wishing they could slow it all down, and NVIDIA's reported $250 billion financing for OpenAI's Ohio data center. They dig into Jack Dorsey's Buzz, the open-source workspace built on the same Noster and Bitcoin primitives as BitChat, and what shared compute and censorship-resistant protocols mean as BitChat downloads spike 32-fold in India. The guys run through a stack of payments deals: Stripe's talks to buy OpenRouter near $10 billion, Cursor, Ramp, and Meta building model routers, and Natural Pay's $30 million Series A for agentic payments. They get into their favorite topic, the DATs: Mallers exiting 21 Capital as Tether's XXI merger collapses, Strategy's first Stretch buyback, and the new Bitcoin security consortium taking on quantum. They close on Augustus's $180 million raise, Worldcoin, and Travis Kalanick's return with Adam.
Chapters
00:00 - Introduction and overview of AI and open models
02:10 - Jensen Huang's first tweet on open models and global cooperation
09:08 - Discussion on slowing AI development and game theory
18:03 - Jack Dorsey's Buzz: Open source workspace and primitives
24:55 - Shared compute, decentralized protocols, and open standards
35:02 - Regulatory landscape and geopolitical implications
45:11 - Impacts on privacy, security, and censorship resistance
54:03 - Recent deals and industry movements in AI and crypto
01:02:08 - The future of Bitcoin, open protocols, and decentralized data
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