Learning-by-doing · Research · Homework
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There is a line usually pinned on Oscar Wilde — “they say such dreadful things about you; they must be true” — that Wilde never said. The author would quote it anyway, while cheerfully informing you it’s apocryphal. So allow me to perform the public service he is constitutionally incapable of performing for himself, and talk you out of it.
No verdict
No fairy tale
No frameworks
No gossip
Do not read these papers
They say such dreadful things about this book. It must be wonderful.— Oscar Wilde (apocryphal)
2026 · AI infrastructure / compute
2026 · AI futures / social imagination
2019 · PSD2 / banks / fintech start-ups
2012–2017 · annual fintech / blockchain reports
2017 · challenger banking / BaaS architecture
2024 · CBDC / correspondent banking / digital identity
2025–2026 · DID / PoP / World ID / compliance
The recent one
01
you want a verdict
02
you want neutrality
03
you want the usual
04
you came for gossip
05
identity bores you
06
you want hype
07
just tell me
08
keep it short
09
be modest
Europe’s First Trillion-Dollar Startup?
A brutally honest field guide to the people for whom this book is absolutely not intended, and the comforts it stubbornly refuses to provide. If, having read it, you still insist on buying the damn thing — that is between you and your better judgement.
You want a clean answer
Will Revolut become a trillion-dollar company? I don’t know. You don’t know. Revolut doesn’t know. The book asks the more irritating question: what would it have to become for the question to stop sounding absurd?
You want a neutral author
It refuses both worship and prosecution. It admires Revolut and thinks parts of its culture are dangerous — in the same paragraph. Interested criticism, not a verdict for hire.
You want a normal business book
No hero founder, no seven habits, no twelve rules, no neat arc from garage to IPO ending with capitalism and the author’s personal brand shaking hands under flattering lighting.
You want a tell-all
No leaked screenshots. No anonymous “senior leaders close to the matter.” No childhood-trauma bullet points. It hunts patterns of behaviour instead of recycling anecdotes — which, to the gossip-addicted, reads as a personal attack.
You think digital identity is boring
Especially stay away. A bank with tens of millions of verified users isn’t where money sleeps — it’s a mint for trust. Once you see identity as infrastructure, you can’t un-see it. The author seems determined to drag you there.
You want AI hype or crypto slogans
It is rude about beautiful ideas that skipped their compliance homework, and about people who just discovered the word “agent” and now intend to attach it to every object in the universe — coffee machines, municipal bins, possibly grief.
You want to be told what to think
It keeps labelling itself — fact, inference, what-if. Certainty is rationed; doubt gets more pages than is polite. Every time you start to nod along, a label says: speculation zone, proceed at your own risk.
You want a single, short book
Two volumes. One is a rave, not a roadmap. The other is the receipts — the Monday-morning version. The author could not decide between scripture and a spreadsheet, so, with his trademark restraint, he wrote both.
Ambition embarrasses you
A man nobody asked wrote two volumes to seize the attention of a CEO who has never heard of him, recruited four professors as character witnesses, and stamped trillion-dollar on the cover. The audacity is not an accident; it is the argument.
If any of that sounds disqualifying — good. You have been warned, thoroughly and in good faith. You may leave now, with my blessing and your certainties intact.
Truth in advertising
A clean hero’s journey
Leaked Slack screenshots
“Just believe me”
One clever sentence and a meme
A view from nowhere
Identity as a pitch-deck banner
A founder fairy tale
Certainty about the future
What you will not find. And what you’ll get instead.
Every absence in this book is deliberate. Here is the trade you are being offered, stated plainly, so no one can say the label lied.
What you wanted
What the book gives you
A long, uncomfortable argument with itself
Patterns of behaviour, not anecdotes
Fact / Inference / What-if, labelled in the text
Slow, grinding constraint: the US charter, MiCA, seigniorage, regulatory capital
A specific mind, in a specific time, inviting you to stab it
Identity as a messy, expensive asset that may be worth more than any single product
Storonsky as an operating system: cold, curious, relentless, allergic to paying for what can be copied
A serious maybe, filed in public before the future reported its quarter
Above all, do not read it if you happen to be Nik Storonsky. You especially should stay away: it is a stranger’s annotated map of the assets your own company is already standing on, — and nobody enjoys being told what he owns by an uninvited cartographer. You would hate every page.
// (you should, of course, or not.)
Incoming · pre-empted
The accusations, answered in advance.
People will tell you the book is too something. They are right. Here is the charge sheet — received, logged, and reframed before it arrives.
PRE-EMPTIVE CRITICISM · RECEIVED / LOGGED / REFRAMED
Too strange
It declines to resemble the business book you were expecting. Noted, and intended.
Too speculative
It arrives early. History is wildly popular among people who arrive late and call their lateness wisdom.
Too admiring
It likes its subject — as does anyone who has looked closely enough to criticise it well.
Too critical
It is hard on Storonsky precisely because it takes him seriously, not because it doesn’t.
Too long
Two volumes. The argument is long because the object is. Brevity would have been a different, smaller book.
Too early
Some provocations will age badly. Some will look naïve. Some may turn out accidentally useful — the most one can hope for when thinking in public.
Too much
Probably. That is not proof you should read it. But it is not a bad beginning.
If everyone speaks well of it, it stood for nothing. Their disapproval is not a flaw in the book — it is the table of contents.
The turn
What if…
For a very specific reader
Read it only if
- you are willing to be irritated by a serious maybe
- you suspect Revolut is a rough draft of regulated trust at software speed
- you think digital identity may be the next “boring” category that’s suddenly everywhere
- you like books that fall in love with their own ideas, then kill some of them in front of you
- you believe Europe’s first trillion-dollar start-up may not arrive in the costume Europe prepared for it
So: you have been warned, thoroughly and in good faith. The book is biased, overlong, immodest, speculative, and written by a man who misquotes the dead on purpose and the living by accident.
If that is disqualifying, go in peace. If it is not — if a warning this comprehensive has somehow left you more curious than you were a page ago, against your own better judgement — then I am afraid you were always going to read it.
It's always 'impossible'. Until it's 'done'.
Against my advice
Available, regrettably, more or less everywhere.
You were warned. It is, nevertheless, one click away.
Europe’s First Trillion-Dollar Startup? Revolut, not?
Hardcover ISBN 9798184250809 · Paperback ISBN 9798184250588 · E-book ISBN 9798235275867 · ASIN B0H6K7FR4K
Amazon: UK · US · DE · FR · ES · IT · NL · Also: Everand · Smashwords · eBay · Apple Books · Kobo · Bookshop.org · Thalia (DE) · Barnes & Noble · All other stores →
DOI 10.6084/m9.figshare.32782464
Hardcover ISBN 9798184250809 · Paperback ISBN 9798184250588 · E-book ISBN 9798235275867 · ASIN B0H6K7FR4K
Amazon: UK · US · DE · FR · ES · IT · NL · Also: Everand · Smashwords · eBay · Apple Books · Kobo · Bookshop.org · Thalia (DE) · Barnes & Noble · All other stores →
DOI 10.6084/m9.figshare.32782464