🎙️ Chicago Futurist Vol. 15 with Ben Meeder, Co-Founder and CTO of Coinflow

💼 Who’s Hiring this week in Chicago

🧠 How NOTO Uses AI to Deliver Care at Scale

📅 10 Events in Chicago This Week

Payments should be simple. For most businesses, they're not. Cross-border transactions take over a month to clear, chargebacks land on the merchant, and fragmented providers add cost at every step.

Ben Meeder is rebuilding that infrastructure from the ground up with his team at Coinflow: instant settlement in seconds, full fraud protection, and one global API across traditional and crypto rails.

Here’s our conversation:

BM: We didn’t start with a big thesis, we started with a problem we needed to solve.

As we were building Phantasia Sports, a blockchain-powered, peer-to-peer fantasy sports platform, we needed instant settlement and real-time payouts for our own product and no provider could deliver it cleanly. Everything was fragmented, slow, or pushed risk back onto us. The experience for our users was not what we wanted.

So we built it ourselves.

The first year was exactly what you’d expect — a small team, very close to the problem, working directly with early partners and rebuilding payments infrastructure from the ground up. Less theory, more shipping.

That day one mindset hasn’t really changed.

BM: Most people are still anchored to the 2021 version of crypto: volatile, speculative, headline-driven.

What’s actually happening now is much quieter.

Stablecoins are being used as core infrastructure. They’re moving money globally, instantly, and at lower cost — behind the scenes. No one is talking about it because, when it works well, it just feels like better payments.

The future of crypto in payments is less about speculation and more about utility and reliability.

BM: The gap is closing quickly and Coinflow makes it so that “traditional” companies can utilize stablecoins without needing to have deep expertise and knowledge.

Crypto-native companies tend to go deeper, faster. They understand the primitives and adopt more functionality upfront. Traditional companies start with a specific problem. They need faster settlement, better approval rates, and expand from there once they see it working.

Our job is to make that transition invisible. You shouldn’t need to be a crypto expert to benefit from better infrastructure.

BM: Trust arrives in drops and leaves in buckets. Ultimately, it still comes down to reliability, transparency, and how you show up when something breaks. 

The technology has changed. The definition of trust hasn’t.

In payments, especially at scale, things will go wrong. What matters is how quickly they’re resolved, who owns the problem, and whether your partner is actually accountable.

We think about trust as a product. It’s not just something you claim, but something you prove every day.

BM: Slow down on scaling the team. Don’t just fill roles to fill roles.

You don’t need a large org to find product-market fit. Small, focused teams move faster and stay closer to the problem.

Move faster on distribution and do it with precision. Keeping the team tight enables just that.

You can build something technically excellent, but if no one is using it, it doesn’t matter. Getting in front of customers early and often is what compounds.

BM: Chicago gives you range.

You get access to strong technical and financial talent, but you’re not stuck in a single way of thinking. You’re close enough to New York and SF to stay connected, but far enough to build independently.

Chicago is a great place to focus on building real businesses that make real impact, not just narratives and hype. We’re super proud to be building right here in Chicago.

BM: Optimize for signal over noise.

In some ecosystems, it’s easy to confuse activity with progress. Being in a slightly quieter environment can help you stay focused on what actually matters: building something people use.

Where you build matters less than how clearly you can think and make smart decisions.

BM: We’re investing heavily in engineering and compliance. These are the foundations that let us move fast without breaking trust.

On the product side, the focus is simple:

By the end of the year, Coinflow should feel faster to adopt, easier to use, and more ubiquitous across global payments.

There's a startup in Chicago called NOTO that built AI into every layer of mental health care before it was a talking point.

For example, they use data to understand which OCD subtypes or intrusive thought patterns are most searched or discussed, and prioritize writing content that actually meets those needs.

In the community, technology helps NOTO moderate safely at scale - flagging potentially harmful posts, surfacing members who may need additional support, and ensuring discussions remain constructive.

When a member first reaches out, their systems help route them to the right advocate or clinician based on factors like severity, subtype, availability, and insurance coverage

During care, structured tools track outcomes over time and ensure consistency. Behind the scenes, automated insurance verification, billing, and payment reconciliation keep clinicians focused on patients.

The approach: AI as a HIPAA-compliant copilot, supporting the humans who ultimately make decisions, not replacing them.

NOTO is hiring in Chicago, and they're looking for builders who take ownership, have strong product sense, and know how to use AI to improve outcomes, not just move faster.

Think: independently identifying a drop-off in onboarding and prototyping a fix before anyone asks.

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