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The conversation around stablecoins has shifted. It's no longer a question of whether institutions will adopt them — it's a question of how fast.

At ETH NYC, held at the Javits Center in New York, Rain CEO Farooq Malik sat down with Yueqi Yang, Crypto Reporter at The Information, for a conversation that cut through the speculation and landed squarely in the present tense. What Malik described wasn't a future state. It was already happening.

"This has probably been the most surprising thing to see over the last year or so. Even before some of the regulatory clarity started coming into the United States with the passing of GENIUS, we were starting to field inbound from some of the largest companies in the world that were already thinking about stablecoins as a way to improve their capital efficiency."

Rain, which powers stablecoin card programs across more than 100 markets globally, has watched enterprise demand evolve in real time. The inbound, Malik noted, isn't coming from crypto-native startups. It's coming from public trading companies, banks, remittance platforms, and global marketplaces — organizations that see stablecoins not as a speculative asset but as operational infrastructure.

The business case, as Malik framed it, is straightforward: reduce the cost of servicing clients while expanding the universe of clients you can actually reach.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive data point Malik shared was about geography. Conventional wisdom holds that stablecoin adoption is primarily an emerging markets story. The reality Rain is seeing is more nuanced.

"While many people think that stablecoins are primarily being adopted outside the United States, the largest destination of all consumer transactions and B2B transactions that we are seeing in the market are all ending up in the US — US merchants, US customers, US bank accounts, US economic participants — which is in many ways flying in the face of what a lot of people expect."

The implication is significant. Stablecoin adoption in the US isn't presenting itself as a crypto product. It's presenting as embedded financial services — faster to launch, more modular, and more cost-effective than legacy alternatives. With GENIUS passed and institutional demand accelerating, the question Malik's session raised wasn't whether stablecoins would go mainstream. It was whether the infrastructure could scale fast enough to meet the moment.

Gabrielle Judge didn't coin "lazy girl job" because she wanted to work less. She coined it because she wanted to build something more.

At the Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit, the founder of Miss Anti-Work — the media company that has generated tens of thousands of worldwide media mentions — sat down to unpack one of the most misunderstood phrases to come out of the Great Resignation era.

"I'm a huge high achiever. I'm a huge workaholic. I have been since before I had a job. And so what was really hard for me was to get a quote-unquote lazy girl job — which was still a really good job."

At the time, Judge was an account manager at Wix. The role was a lateral move, not a step up. But it gave her something more valuable than a title: time. She was completing her responsibilities in two to four hours a day — and building Miss Anti-Work with everything left over.

The term, she explained, means something different to everyone who uses it. Some people take lateral roles because they aren't careerists and simply want balance. Others, like Judge, take them as low-risk launchpads for something bigger.

"Those three keywords together are quite controversial. I knew that going into it. I thought it was fun. That's like Gen Z humor."

The result was a viral moment that became a media company, a brand, and a genuine cultural conversation about what ambition is actually supposed to look like. For the founders and executives in the room at the Fortune summit, the subtext was hard to miss: the most entrepreneurial move Judge made wasn't quitting her job. It was keeping it — just long enough to build something that didn't need it anymore.

The fear that artificial intelligence will eliminate jobs has dominated the public conversation around the technology for years. Darian Nwanko, who has worked directly with organizations building AI systems, has a different framework entirely.

"You shouldn't think about this as AI replacing you. I think about this as AI recruiting you."

The distinction isn't semantic. It's structural. Nwanko walked through the mechanics of how large language models are trained — specifically, the process of reinforcement learning from human feedback. "They literally gather thousands of experts in each of these respective domains," he explained, "and create curated datasets to teach these models how to perform each one of your respective roles particularly well."

In other words, the expertise already in the room isn't being made obsolete by AI. It's being absorbed by it. The models are built on human knowledge, refined by human judgment, and most effective when used by people who bring domain expertise to the interaction.

Nwanko offered a personal example: as a self-employed person navigating tax season, he used an AI tool to work through IRS documentation before meeting with his accountant. "My accountant thought I was particularly smart, but I'm like, 'I'm not that smart. I actually just interacted with an AI tool to expedite my learning.'"

"The rate at which you learn increases. It just depends on how you use it."

For the founders, operators, and executives at AI Next, the message was a reframe with real stakes. The question isn't whether to engage with AI — it's whether you're using it to grow faster than the people who aren't.

The creator economy has always moved faster than the brands trying to work within it. At the ANA Creator Marketing Conference in Las Vegas, Lyle Stevens — co-founder of Later and now its Chief Innovation Officer — laid out a vision for where the industry is heading that was equal parts practical roadmap and provocation.

Stevens opened with a framework that reframed how brands should think about creator content entirely. The social feed, he argued, is no longer the destination. It's the starting point. Brands that are still measuring creator success by likes and reach are measuring the wrong things.

"Creating that content, giving them their authentic voice, weaving in the story, then deploying it across multiple places — trying to deploy it after the fact is like pushing a rope. It's really hard to do."

In conversation with Grace Niu, Influencer and Brand Marketing Manager at Quest Nutrition, Stevens unpacked what effective creator briefs actually look like in practice. The answer isn't product-first content or authenticity-first content — it's both, woven together and deployed across multiple channels simultaneously rather than as an afterthought.

His sharpest observation came when he turned to AI. Every time the barrier to creative expression drops, the creator economy expands. AI is simply the latest barrier to fall. And contrary to conventional wisdom, Stevens predicted that job disruption from AI won't shrink the creator economy — it will grow it, just as COVID did.

"I actually think we're going to see a lot of job disruption actually result in many more creators, just like we did during COVID."

His final point shifted the room. Stevens described a near-future — potentially as close as the upcoming holiday season — where the traditional draft-and-approve cycle between brands and creators gets inverted. Instead of a creator submitting a draft for brand feedback, brands will use AI to generate a draft asset using a creator's licensed name, image, and likeness, then send it back to the creator for approval.

"It's going to flip the entire process on its head, and that's going to be a very interesting moment for the creator economy."

For the marketers in the room, the message was clear: the question is no longer whether AI changes the creator relationship. It's whether you're building for the model that's coming or defending the one that's already leaving.

POSSIBLE Miami brought together some of the sharpest minds in marketing, technology, and brand strategy for a conference that didn't shy away from the hard questions. A Founders Corner was on the ground for the sessions that mattered most.

James Merrill, Opolis Optics & Stoked Plastics

"The sustainability claims are everywhere and the proof point is nowhere."

Merrill has spent four years building a solution to a problem the industry largely created for itself. When his team began developing their recycled materials formula, they found brands claiming to be "100% sustainable" were incorporating just three to five percent recycled content. Gen Z consumers were already catching on. Opolis Optics is the proof of concept — every pair of sunglasses pulls four water bottles from the ocean. Every pair of ski goggles pulls ten. The era of the green campaign is over. What's replacing it is data, trackability, and proof that holds up.

Jo Shoesmith, Amazon

Amazon's Chief Creative Officer came to POSSIBLE with a thesis: the most powerful brand stories aren't built on products — they're built on human truths so universal they need no translation. Her examples: a holiday spot about three women recreating a sledding tradition that ran for two consecutive years, and a COVID-era film about a canceled ballet recital that resonated globally because it captured the specific grief of a moment stolen.

"That's that very big human truth that we can tap into and have a piece of work travel."

Harry Kargman, Kargo

Kargo's founder described a shift in real-time creative that AI has now made possible: imagine a water brand serving a hydration message to a live sports audience at the exact moment a player fumbles the ball. Not planned. Not pre-produced. The right creative, in the right moment, triggered by what's actually happening on the field.

"That opportunity didn't exist until, I would say, this year where AI enables that to happen."

Charlamagne Tha God

Charlamagne has watched every platform emerge and every prediction about what would kill radio prove wrong. His message at POSSIBLE was hard-earned and simple: the content is never the variable. The distribution always is.

"You have to meet people where they are. Back in the day, they said 'if you build it, they will come.' That used to be true maybe 20 years ago. But now you have to build everywhere."

There are conversations that happen at Essence Festival that don't happen anywhere else. Bea Dixon, co-founder and CEO of The Honey Pot Company, sat down with journalist Delina Medhin for a conversation about what it actually means to take investment, build wealth, and exit a business you love.

The exchange started with a question that cuts straight to the tension many Black founders carry: when is the right time to take an investor, and how do you know? Dixon's answer reframed the entire premise.

"Once you start to take money, the idea eventually is to sell. How does an investor make their money back? They don't make their money back by just investing and leaving it in your business."

It's a truth that gets obscured in the culture around Black entrepreneurship, where investment is often celebrated as validation without a full reckoning with what it commits you to. Dixon was clear-eyed about what comes next — and about the stigma that can follow a Black founder who sells.

"When you do sell, it can be looked at as a sellout, which is absurd — because this is just how business works. That's how you obtain your wealth."

Medhin pushed further: what's the point of it all? The planes, the sacrifice, the grind, the gut-level intuition that has to hold up under pressure year after year? Dixon stripped out the inspirational packaging.

"You're living under a level of stress that is not normal or natural. You're stretching yourself in your mind in ways you didn't even know were possible. That's the point, right? It should make you wealthy."

For the founders in the audience at Essence — many of them early-stage, navigating the same questions about whether to bootstrap or raise, whether to hold or sell — the conversation offered something rarer than a blueprint. It offered permission. Permission to think about the exit from the beginning. Permission to define wealth on your own terms. Permission to build something extraordinary and then, when the time is right, get paid for it.