Notes and articles
Ideas, observations, and dispatches from the intersection of culture, money, and interaction. Four essays. Settlement, distribution, gathering, and play.
Stablecoins
Why stablecoins are becoming Africa’s enterprise settlement layer, and why the interesting part was never the coin
Almost everything written about stablecoins in Africa is a retail story. Having built in this space, Mercy reads it as a settlement migration — the volume that matters is businesses paying other businesses. A long read on correspondent banking collapse, on-ramp economics, and why boredom is what infrastructure earns.
P2P Markets
What Binance taught me about informal distribution, and the collision it can’t avoid
What Binance taught me about informal distribution; How merchants, trust, local liquidity, and growth loops shape adoption in markets where products must work before they can be explained.
Culture
Fired & Iced, third places, and why a restaurant can be an investment thesis
If you underwrite a restaurant as a food business, you will lose. The numbers are not subtle. But Fired & Iced is not a food business — it is a third place. A read on Ray Oldenburg, Danny Meyer, and why the question an investor should ask is not whether the food is good.
Play
Games as civic and cognitive infrastructure, and the loop that cuts both ways
We file games under entertainment and then act surprised when they teach better than our schools. But the same loss-aversion loop that teaches a child to read can keep an adult pulling a lever. The mechanic has to teach the thing — or you have not built a learning game, you have built a slot machine with homework attached.
Too cultural for finance. Too financial for culture. Too playful for serious people. Send it in.