Well written—concise and highly readable. Marcus listed five reasons for PayPal’s failures in his scathing tweet, but this article missed one: the 2016 Visa agreement. Marcus originally said Visa “masterfully structured a deal.” That agreement forced PayPal to give up its ability to route users directly to bank ACH transactions—the very weapon it once used to bypass card networks and generate low-cost profits. The Q4 earnings report a decade later was the final reckoning: TPV rose 9%, but revenue only grew 4%. More money flowed through the pipeline, but now every drop had to pay Visa a toll. Some see this concession as fatal; others disagree. I lean toward the latter view, because the Visa agreement weakened PayPal’s cost structure, not its competitive moat. Even if it must now route through card networks and pay tolls, as long as users still actively choose that blue button, PayPal retains bargaining power and can still defend its moat. As a former PayPal president, Marcus understood the Visa deal was an external constraint—an unavoidable reality. This may also be why @withhazelhu chose not to elaborate on it in the article: it was an imposed shackles, not a voluntary choice. But how PayPal strategically navigated within those constraints was entirely its own decision. And then PayPal made a fundamental misjudgment: it chased payment volume over profitability and differentiation. It focused on unbranded checkout—the least negotiable segment—rather than branded checkout, where real margins, data, and customer relationships reside. The result? Branded checkout grew just 1%, and users are forgetting the blue button. Apple Pay proved an alternative path is viable: it doesn’t care whether transactions run on Visa or Mastercard—it cares whether users choose “Pay with Apple Pay.” As long as users select it, Apple owns the gateway, the data, and the brand. As for PYUSD, it’s a perfect symbol of PayPal’s strategic inertia: it “buys” user adoption with near-4% yields, dumping money on Solana to offer double-digit APYs (I still remember the Solana Foundation replying to an enthusiastic user that they didn’t fund it 🤔)—instead of creating indispensable transaction use cases. The result? Velocity is under 20. The gap between PYUSD and USDT is wider than the combined gap between USDC and RLUSD. Even in New York, I don’t use Venmo (why use the fee-based Zelle, right?). PayPal lost its mojo—but it didn’t lose it. It threw it away.