Payments remain the big unsolved use case of the internet. When we buy something online, we generally use a traditional payment method, like a credit card, which isn’t “native” to the experience. Your ability to transact with a merchant is verified by a third-party (like a bank), which raises costs and adds a lot of inconvenience for buyers and sellers.

Despite the huge growth of commerce online in the last three decades, most transactions occur outside of the browser. Marc Andreessen, who created Netscape, has referred to this as the internet’s “original sin.” “One would think it was the most obvious thing to do to build into the browser the ability to spend money, but you may have noticed that didn’t happen,” he said in 2019. “I think the original sin was that we couldn’t actually build economics, which is to say money, at the core of the internet.”

This matters because the cost is massive and borne by all of us. Economists have calculated the total cost of retail payments in the United States at as much as 2% of GDP, which is almost as much as the U.S. defense budget. Merchants frequently cite the cost of processing credit cards as some of their highest operating expenses, which is why many will ask you to pay additional charges to use a card in a store, or place a minimum on the amount one should spend. The United States, for all its ingenuity, has some of the highest social cost of payments in the developed world, numerous studies show.

We tend to forget that bitcoin was first proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto as a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” because a lot of crypto today isn’t focused on this use case. But maybe the next iteration of crypto development will help fix that.

That’s certainly the hope of Tyler Spalding, the founder of an Anvil, a new decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol that reconceptualizes credit, which is the basis of all monetary systems.

How it works

Anvil is a system of Ethereum smart contracts that manages collateral and secures credit. It lets individuals and companies create letters of credit (LOCs) in lieu of traditional forms of money. You use it by locking up ether or USDC in the Anvil vault and receive an LOC for the specified amount. In effect, the system is a lot like a bank check that’s cashed against your account, except there’s no paper, delays or worries about whether the money will clear.

Spalding sees Anvil as a new form of money collateralized with crypto. “By issuing transparent and generalizable credit, Anvil provides sustainable liquidity — essentially creating trusted money for the global economic system,” he said. “Permissionless decentralized technologies can transform how collateral is managed by making the process more secure and more transparent.”

At the protocol level, there are no fees to transact with Anvil, Spalding said, and the technology is open-source. It’s community owned with 60% of the governance token distribution to partners and users, who can vote on operational matters. Spalding, who previously co-founded Flexa, a blockchain-based payments network, sees use cases for Anvil in traditional loans, DeFi counterparty credit (for exchanges or liquidity providers), asset bridging and payments. Three partners have indicated they want to build services using the protocol: Amdax, a digital asset trading and custody provider; Empowermint, which provides retail cash loans; and Flexa, which is using the protocol for asset collateralization against payments on its network. Because Anvil is open-source, these partners use the protocol freely, building their own services.

Anvil has no investors. The protocol was bootstrapped by Spalding and his collaborators over two years of development. Its systems were audited by Open Zeppelin and Trail of Bits, and Immunefi organized two bug bounty programs to find flaws needing to be fixed. Spalding feels comfortable that the system is safe for its ambitious aim of disintermediating banks from the payments and traditional credit-issuing process.

“We’ve been doing it a long time. We love this stuff,” Spalding said of his goal of bringing native payments to the internet and atoning for Andreessen’s original sin. “We want to get other people to get to use this. It’s a real-world use case. That’s the only thing that matters to me.”

Pocketpair, the company behind last year’s viral game Palworld, has a new venture: publishing indie games. Its first project, scheduled for release later this year, will be an as-yet-unnamed horror game from Surgent Studios, the developer behind 2024’s Tales of Kenzera: Zau.

Palworld, jokingly referred to as “Pokémon with guns,” was a breakout success last year, drawing in more than 25 million players in its first few months. The company’s step into publishing comes at a turbulent time for video games, especially smaller studios; last year, Among Us developer Innersloth announced its own move into publishing to help push projects forward. Pocketpair’s Palworld success, it seems, is allowing them to do the same.

“As the games industry continues to grow, more and more games find themselves struggling to get funded or greenlit,” John Buckley, head of Pocketpair Publishing, said in a press release announcing the new division. “We think this is a real shame, because there are so many incredible creators and ideas out there that just need a little help to become incredible games.”

It’s no surprise, then, that Pocketpair would work with Surgent Studios, which has struggled to find funding following the release of Zau. The developer put its team on hiatus last year as it sought a partner for its next Kenzera game, currently known as Project Uso.

Surgent’s deal with Pocketpair is separate from Uso, founder Abubakar Salim tells WIRED. Unlike the Afrofuturism of Zau, it’ll be a horror title meant to introduce players to something new. “We’re taking a little detour from the Tales of Kenzera universe,” Salim says.

Salim adds that the horror genre “is a fascinating space that taps into primal emotions, immersing audiences in a reality that’s removed from their own yet strikes something deep and dark within us all.” Pocketpair and Surgent gave few details about the game in Thursday’s announcement, other than to describe it as “short and weird.”

“The world is so raw right now, and it feels natural to craft an experience that reflects and feeds off that intensity,” Salim says.

Pocketpair Publishing has not announced any other future projects. The company has been embroiled in legal drama since last year, when Nintendo filed a lawsuit in Tokyo claiming Palworld infringed on its copyright. Nintendo did not respond to a request for comment. When asked if the lawsuit was of any concern to Surgent, Salim says the studio isn’t worried. “We’re really excited to be working with their new publishing wing to bring this game to life,” he says.

Meta and YouTube aren’t the only platforms looking to benefit from TikTok potentially disappearing — Substack wants in on the action, too.

The company announced Thursday it’s launching a $20 million “creator accelerator fund,” promising content creators they won’t lose revenue by jumping ship to Substack. Creators in the program also get “strategic and business support” from Substack, and early access to new features.

“We established this fund because we’ve seen creators who specialize in video, audio, and text expand their audience, revenue, and influence on Substack, where the platform’s network effects amplify the quality and impact of the work they’re doing,” the company said in a blog post.

This pivot on Substack’s part has been in the works for a while — for months, the company has been marketing itself not as a newsletter delivery service but as a creator platform similar to Patreon.

“On Substack, [creators] can build their own home on the internet: one where creators, not platform executives or advertisers, own their work and their audience,” the blog post reads. The post also cites “bans, backlash, and policies that change with the political winds” as a reason creators can’t depend on traditional social media services.

That’s all fine (we at The Verge have been saying this for a while). But creators focusing on Substack are also subject to ebbs and flows depending on what the company is prioritizing: first, it was newsletters, then it was tweet-like micro blogs, followed by full-on websites and livestreaming. For some, Substack’s initial stated mission of giving more freedom to independent writers is fading. And TikTok creators looking to move to Substack will need to rebuild their following all over again — you obviously can’t export your TikTok followers.

The $20 million fund isn’t the first time Substack has offered a pool of money meant to entice creators. Under a program called Substack Pro, the company poached top media talent from traditional newsrooms with higher pay, health insurance, and other perks. That program ended in 2022, with Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie saying the deals weren’t employment arrangements but “seed funding deals to remove the financial risk for a writer in starting their own business.” In other words, welcome to Substack. Now that you’re here, you’re on your own — which is more or less the deal other platforms offer.

In an announcement perhaps timed to divert attention away from OpenAI’s Operator, Anthropic Thursday unveiled a new feature for its developer API called Citations, which lets devs “ground” answers from its Claude family of AI in source documents such as emails.

Anthropic says Citations allows its AI models to provide detailed references to “the exact sentences and passages” from docs they use to generate responses. As of Thursday afternoon, Citations is available in both Anthropic’s API and Google’s Vertex AI platform.

As Anthropic explains in a blog post with Citations, devs can add source files to have models automatically cite claims that they inferred from those files. Citations is particularly useful in document summarization, Q&A, and customer support applications, Anthropic says, where the feature can nudge models to insert source citations.

Citations isn’t available for all of Anthropic’s models — only Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Haiku. Also, the feature isn’t free. Anthropic notes that Citations may incur charges depending on the length and number of the source documents.

Based on Anthropic’s standard API pricing, which Citations uses, a roughly-100-page source doc would cost around $0.30 with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, or $0.08 with Claude 3.5 Haiku. That may well be worth it for devs looking to cut down on hallucinations and other AI-induced errors.

In a landmark move for the crypto industry, President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to establish a dedicated working group focused on digital assets.

Trump has signed an Executive Order establishing the Presidential Working Group on Digital Asset Markets, a new initiative aimed at bolstering U.S. leadership in digital finance, according to Fox Business reporter Eleanor Terrett.

The Working Group will develop a Federal regulatory framework for digital assets, including stablecoins, while evaluating the feasibility of a national digital assets stockpile. 

Chaired by the White House AI & Crypto Czar, David Sacks, the group will include key officials such as the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, alongside other agency heads.

The Executive Order mandates collaboration with industry experts to ensure that cutting-edge insights beyond the Federal Government inform policies.

It also directs agencies to review and recommend changes to existing regulations that impact the digital asset sector. The order prohibits any Federal action to create or promote central bank digital currencies.

SEC crypto task force

In tandem with the executive order, the U.S. SEC announced the formation of a cryptocurrency task force. 

This group is charged with creating a regulatory framework that provides legal clarity for crypto assets, addressing longstanding industry concerns about ambiguous regulations.

The executive order also repeals the Biden Administration’s Digital Assets Executive Order and the Treasury Department’s international framework, citing concerns over their restrictive impact on innovation and U.S. economic competitiveness in global digital finance, according to Terrett.