Engineer turned founder building payment infrastructure at the intersection of fintech, crypto, and AI. Writing about stablecoins, DeFi, MPC wallets, and cross-border payments.https://miikey.com/https://miikey.com/blog/2019-01-why-cross-border-payments-are-broken/https://miikey.com/blog/2019-01-why-cross-border-payments-are-broken/Swift was built in 1973. We landed on the moon in 1969. Yet moving $100 across borders still takes 3-5 days and costs 6%. Something is fundamentally wrong.Mon, 14 Jan 2019 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2019-09-acquiring-landscape-what-they-dont-tell-you/https://miikey.com/blog/2019-09-acquiring-landscape-what-they-dont-tell-you/A frank breakdown of payment acquiring — interchange, scheme fees, merchant discount rates, and why the numbers rarely work out the way the sales deck says.Wed, 18 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2020-04-covid-accelerated-digital-payments/https://miikey.com/blog/2020-04-covid-accelerated-digital-payments/In twelve weeks, contactless payment adoption did what ten years of industry evangelism could not. Here is what changed, what will stick, and what the payment industry looks like on the other side.Wed, 22 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2020-09-defi-first-six-months/https://miikey.com/blog/2020-09-defi-first-six-months/I spent six months going deep on Aave, Compound, Uniswap, and Yearn. Here is what I actually learned about the infrastructure, the risks, and why I think this matters for payments.Mon, 07 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2021-02-defi-summer-retrospective/https://miikey.com/blog/2021-02-defi-summer-retrospective/DeFi Summer 2020 produced a thousand projects and a billion dollars of value locked. Twelve months later, here is an honest look at what actually survived and why.Wed, 10 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2021-06-nft-infrastructure-that-will-last/https://miikey.com/blog/2021-06-nft-infrastructure-that-will-last/Everyone is looking at the JPEG prices. I am more interested in what on-chain ownership primitives mean for payments, identity, and programmable assets.Tue, 29 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2021-10-managing-engineering-teams-bull-market/https://miikey.com/blog/2021-10-managing-engineering-teams-bull-market/When token prices are up 10x and your engineers are getting cold-called daily, people management gets complicated. Here is what I learned running an engineering team through the 2021 crypto bull market.Thu, 14 Oct 2021 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2022-06-luna-collapse-lessons/https://miikey.com/blog/2022-06-luna-collapse-lessons/The Terra/LUNA collapse erased $40 billion in value in 72 hours. As someone who had tracked algorithmic stablecoins closely, here is what I think we should learn from it.Wed, 08 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2022-11-ftx-crypto-infrastructure/https://miikey.com/blog/2022-11-ftx-crypto-infrastructure/The FTX collapse is the largest exchange failure in crypto history. But the lesson is not that crypto is broken. It is that custody and infrastructure design matter more than most people realized.Wed, 16 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2019-04-building-card-issuance-api/https://miikey.com/blog/2019-04-building-card-issuance-api/Card issuance sounds straightforward until you actually try to build it. Here is what six months of BIN sponsorship negotiations, EMV certification, and scheme compliance actually looks like.Wed, 03 Apr 2019 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2022-12-building-in-the-bear/https://miikey.com/blog/2022-12-building-in-the-bear/Two collapses in one year. A market down 70%. Regulatory pressure everywhere. This is exactly when the infrastructure worth building gets built.Mon, 05 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2023-03-llm-changed-engineering-process/https://miikey.com/blog/2023-03-llm-changed-engineering-process/Three months into daily LLM use, here is what has actually changed in how I build — not the hype, the real behavioral shifts and where the limits are.Tue, 21 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2023-07-llm-stack-what-to-build-on/https://miikey.com/blog/2023-07-llm-stack-what-to-build-on/Six months into the LLM boom, the stack is becoming clearer. Here is my current view on which layers are commodity, which are differentiating, and where the value actually accrues.Wed, 12 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2023-11-ai-augmented-product-teams/https://miikey.com/blog/2023-11-ai-augmented-product-teams/We have been running AI-augmented product development seriously for nine months. Here is what actually changed, what did not, and what I wish I had done differently.Tue, 28 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2024-01-bitcoin-etf-institutional-entry/https://miikey.com/blog/2024-01-bitcoin-etf-institutional-entry/The SEC approved spot Bitcoin ETFs in January 2024. Here is what this actually means for market structure, infrastructure, and the crypto payments thesis.Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2024-05-mpc-wallets-crypto-needed/https://miikey.com/blog/2024-05-mpc-wallets-crypto-needed/Multi-Party Computation for key management is not a new idea, but it is finally practical at scale. Here is why MPC wallets matter and what the architecture looks like.Tue, 07 May 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2024-09-ai-agents-demo-vs-reality/https://miikey.com/blog/2024-09-ai-agents-demo-vs-reality/Agent demos are compelling. Production agents are a different problem. Here is what building and running AI agents in a payment context actually looks like.Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2025-01-stablecoins-having-their-moment/https://miikey.com/blog/2025-01-stablecoins-having-their-moment/After years of being the infrastructure story nobody wanted to write about, stablecoins are going mainstream. Here is why 2025 feels different and what the payment infrastructure implications are.Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2025-06-cross-border-payments-evolved/https://miikey.com/blog/2025-06-cross-border-payments-evolved/Six years after writing about why cross-border payments are broken, here is an honest assessment of what has improved, what has not, and where the next inflection points are.Tue, 10 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2025-10-ai-meets-fintech-reality/https://miikey.com/blog/2025-10-ai-meets-fintech-reality/Not the pitch deck version. The practical reality of deploying AI across payment operations, risk management, and product development in a regulated financial services context.Tue, 14 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2026-02-building-0xmiikey/https://miikey.com/blog/2026-02-building-0xmiikey/Seven years of building payment infrastructure, crypto protocols, and AI products. Here is why I finally started writing it down.Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2026-03-ai-agents-need-wallets/https://miikey.com/blog/2026-03-ai-agents-need-wallets/The next frontier for agentic AI is not capability — it is economic identity. Agents that can reason, plan, and execute still cannot pay. That is the missing primitive, and it matters more than most people realize.Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2026-03-agentic-commerce-infrastructure/https://miikey.com/blog/2026-03-agentic-commerce-infrastructure/Stripe just shipped the Agentic Commerce Suite. That is not a product launch — it is a signal that the foundational infrastructure for AI-driven commerce is being built right now. Here is how I think about the full stack.Thu, 12 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2026-03-ai-pace-of-change/https://miikey.com/blog/2026-03-ai-pace-of-change/In 18 months, we moved from asking whether AI would be useful to treating it as production infrastructure. The rate of change did not just accelerate — it changed the nature of the problem for anyone building serious systems. Here is how I think about what actually shifted.Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2026-03-machine-payments-protocol/https://miikey.com/blog/2026-03-machine-payments-protocol/Stripe and Tempo just published the Machine Payments Protocol — an open standard that lets AI agents pay for things directly, without human intervention. This is not a product launch. It is the protocol layer for the agent economy arriving on schedule.Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://miikey.com/blog/2026-03-harness-design-ai-evolution/https://miikey.com/blog/2026-03-harness-design-ai-evolution/Anthropic just published their most instructive engineering post yet — on how they build harnesses for long-running AI agents. The real insight is not the architecture. It is the methodology: every component encodes an assumption about what the model cannot do, and those assumptions expire. Here is what that means for anyone building production AI systems.Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT