All 33 Fintech posts we have indexed from venture capital blogs and newsletters, plus the highest-scoring pieces of the past year and the people who write about it most.
As AI makes intelligence cheap and abundant, trust becomes the scarce asset. The author argues that new social technologies—costly signals, third-party evaluation, enforcement, accountable humans, and reputation systems—must emerge to manage AI-generated slop and restore trustworthiness, mirroring how finance, law, and science solved earlier trust crises.
Blockchains eliminate the historical supply constraints on financial markets—listing gatekeepers and geographic fragmentation—enabling permissionless creation of both new risk units and novel transfer mechanisms, from prediction markets to perpetual futures on alternative assets.
As real-world assets move onchain, DeFi primitives designed for volatile cryptoassets will give way to new infrastructure—CLOBs, fixed-rate lending, options, dark pools, and portfolio margin—that better serve lower-volatility, institutional-grade assets and unlock orders of magnitude more financial activity per dollar deployed.
Berkeley research shows AI harnesses—the systems controlling agent workflows—determine pricing power: identical models cost 71% less on different platforms with no quality loss. Startups building efficient harnesses achieve 75% gross margins vs. 38% for those calling expensive models directly, creating defensible software businesses through customer understanding, evals, and optimization factories.
As blockchain throughput becomes commoditized, financial markets need stronger guarantees: predictable transaction inclusion and ordering, resilience against gatekeepers, and pre-execution privacy. A16Z Crypto examines what protocol designers must solve for blockchains to serve as core financial infrastructure.
Meritech's August 2026 software industry analysis shows AI tailwinds driving valuation divergence, with growth-adjusted multiples now near pre-ZIRP levels but concentrated in fewer companies; market rewards growth 4.1x more than profitability, and few horizontal SaaS vendors trade at premium multiples without demonstrable AI-driven acceleration.
Google's $10M acquisition of Spirit Airlines' operational data signals a maturing market for corporate datasets as AI training fuel. Early-stage operators—data brokers, liquidation firms, and PE—are positioning in a nascent asset class with no valuation standards yet.
Outside the US, AI-powered fintech startups face dramatically less competition in the same categories saturating Silicon Valley, making geographic arbitrage—combined with AI's ability to support multi-product "compound" platforms—a structural advantage for founders building in LatAm, SE Asia, MENA, and Africa.
A16Z Crypto (6) · Fintech Ruminations (4) · Saastr (4) · Newcomer (3) · A Wealth of Common Sense (3) · Abraham Thomas (3) · Turner Novak (2) · Investing in AI (2) · Conor Witt (2) · Radical VC (2)
Suggest a blog or newsletter for the SandHill index. We track the RSS feed and feature the best pieces in the weekly digest.
The latest theses & analyses from 800+ venture investors, curated into one email. Join 5,000+ investors, founders and LPs.