TLDR Tech / Crypto
The Lending Stack Has Flipped: Who Owns the New Chokepoints?
Artemis maps how the $348T global debt market is decomposing from vertically integrated bank lending into a horizontal, modular stack where specialists own individual layers. This is the same shift from monoliths to microservices that happened in cloud computing. The average cost to originate a single US mortgage has doubled to ~$11K despite AI and tech improvements, settlement still takes ~28 hours, and digital lending platforms represent less than 20 bps of total global debt. The winners in this rebundling are companies that own chokepoints, the layers that other participants cannot route around, rather than those with the largest balance sheets.
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