🚀 Developer experience

We have written a lot about Stripe in this newsletter. A lot is because of the exciting products they continually push out, but mainly because of their focus on developer experience (DX) – something many companies seem to forget. Once again, I'll link to their state of the art documentation, guiding you each step of the way.

This week Stripe launched a plugin for Visual Studio Code – one of the most popular code editors. By bringing Stripe inside code editors, they move Stripe-specific information inside the context where developers already are when they build. They believe this will reduce context switching and friction and make it faster to integrate, build, and test with Stripe. As an example, this plugin makes it possible to:

• Test webhooks on your local server

• Easily see the payload as JSON

• Generate code samples

• Monitor that you don't check API keys to source control

• Integrate API-references into the editor

I believe this is something we'll see a lot more of from API providers in the years to come! You can read more about Stripes plugin here.

Plaid 💔 Visa

One year ago, Plaid announced that Visa was acquiring them for $5.3bn – twice their previous private valuation. Last week, they decided to stop the merger after the Department of Justice (DOJ) in the US sued to block the deal in November. DOJ claimed it would eliminate Plaid's future ability to compete in the online debit market, thus giving Visa a monopoly.

That is the official version of why they went their separate ways, but it has been speculated that Plaid used the DOJ suit as an escape hatch because they knew they were worth way more after a year of Covid.

🤖 Visa crunching numbers

Speaking of Visa: they have just filed an interesting patent for building a global AI platform that can quickly generate predictions for their clients. Given Visa's position as an intermediary for transactions, the company accumulates a vast dataset of transactions taking place all across the world. Both past and present. Using AI, Visa can leverage all this data to make precise predictions for clients, like how many movie tickets will be sold in a given region six months into the future. The AI could be a new income stream for Visa, considering that it would be very interesting for Hedge funds and similar to subscribe to its predictions.

🔑 The key to blockchain..

..is remembering your key!

I keep getting fascinated by blockchain, and it's strange contrasts. On one side, its followers praise it as the future of banking: programmable money, not controlled by the government. On the other side, we frequently hear about people locked out from fortunes of Bitcoin for forgetting their passwords or throwing away their hard-drives years ago. "Not your keys, not your coins" is a saying that gets passed around a lot in the crypto-communities, but the fact is that people tend to lose or forget their keys. This week we read multiple stories of this:

• One programmer has two guesses left to access £175m of Bitcoin in his wallet.

• One guy mined 7 500 Bitcoins in 2009, but stored the private key on a hard drive, and then in 2013 accidentally threw away the hard drive. The lost Bitcoins are now worth over £200m, and he offers his council 25% of the money if they help find his hard drive in the landfill.

• The CEO of the Canadian cryptocurrency trading platform Quadriga died two years ago, taking passwords to $214.6 million worth of client money with him since he was the only one who knew the private keys. Now lawyers for his victims want to explore that possibility by digging up his body to make sure he is dead.

☄️ Year in review

In Stacc, we also had to write a little year in review of what we managed to do last year despite this weird situation in the world. Read on if you want to see our image-heavy post from what we've done over the previous year.

💬 Quote of the week

😉 Sharing is caring!

Like what you read? Please pass it on to your friends and colleagues! They can sign up here: nyhetsbrev.stacc.com

Marius Hauken, partner Stacc X