The Man Who Backed Coinbase, Robinhood, and Nubank Just Made His Biggest Bet Yet

At age six, Micky Malka wrote a letter to the tooth fairy asking for US dollars instead of Venezuelan bolivars.

That sounds like an adorable childhood story. It was actually the first documented trade of a career that would produce some of the most consequential fintech investments of the last decade. The kid who sensed his country's currency was broken grew up to back Coinbase when Bitcoin was under $100, Robinhood when stockbrokers still charged $10 per trade, and Nubank when Brazilian banks charged customers just for existing.

Now Malka, the founder of Ribbit Capital and a five-time Forbes Midas List investor, has made a move that is confusing some people and electrifying others. He personally launched an AI agent token called TIBBIR on Virtuals Protocol, using his own ETH wallet, with zero VC allocation and zero pre-sale. A billionaire fintech kingmaker, stealth-launching a token that spelled his own fund's name backwards.

This is either the strangest mid-life crisis in venture capital history, or the opening move of something much larger.

The evidence overwhelmingly points to the latter.

The Ribbit Playbook: Three Bets That Changed Finance

To understand why TIBBIR matters, you first need to understand how Micky Malka operates. Because the man does not make random investments. He follows a pattern so consistent that, in hindsight, his biggest wins look inevitable.

Coinbase (2013): The Infrastructure Bet

When Ribbit co-led Coinbase's Series A in 2013, Bitcoin traded below $100. Crypto was considered a fringe hobby for cypherpunks and libertarians. Every serious venture firm in Silicon Valley had either passed on crypto or not considered it at all.

Malka's conviction did not come from hype. It came from friction. Ribbit's first fund had invested directly in Bitcoin earlier that year. Not in a Bitcoin company. In Bitcoin itself. The experience revealed every pain point: custody was terrifying, converting to fiat was miserable, and security was a nightmare. Coinbase solved all three.

Ribbit did not frame Coinbase as a "crypto startup." Internal materials from that period described it as "financial infrastructure." Storage, on-ramps, compliance, and trust. The same words you would use to describe a bank, just built for a new asset class.

By April 2021, Coinbase went public via direct listing at an $85 billion valuation. Ribbit still held roughly 4% of the company. That single position was worth more than the entire first fund, many times over.

Robinhood (2014): The Behavioral Bet

One year after Coinbase, Ribbit backed Robinhood's $13 million Series A. At the time, every major brokerage charged $7 to $10 per trade, and the industry considered this normal. Robinhood's pitch was simple: zero-fee stock trading on a mobile app.

Most investors saw a feature. Malka saw a generational shift. An entire cohort of young people expected their financial tools to look and feel like consumer apps, not 1990s desktop software. Robinhood was not competing with Schwab on price. It was competing with Instagram on experience.

Malka joined Robinhood's board. Ribbit was not a passive check-writer. By January 2021, Robinhood had 31 million users and a $20 billion valuation. By its IPO later that year, it reached a $46 billion valuation on opening day.

Nubank (2016): The Global Bet

If Coinbase proved Malka could spot infrastructure and Robinhood proved he could spot behavioral shifts, Nubank proved he could replicate the pattern globally.

Brazilian banks in 2016 were charging customers monthly fees just for holding accounts. The largest five banks controlled over 80% of deposits. Customer satisfaction was among the lowest of any industry in the country.

Malka saw the same dynamics he had spotted in US brokerage (overpriced, poor experience, ripe for disruption) but in an even larger market. Ribbit backed Nubank and watched it grow from a credit card startup to Latin America's largest independent digital bank, serving over 100 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.

At its 2021 IPO, Nubank was valued at $41 billion.

Three investments. Three different markets. Three different products. One identical pattern: find the structural break in financial infrastructure, back the builder, get in early, and hold through the noise.

"Fintech, As We've Known It, Is Dead"

That quote is directly from Malka. He said it back in 2014, at a time when fintech was the hottest word in venture capital. What he meant was specific: the era of wrapping a slightly better interface around the same financial plumbing was ending. The next wave would rebuild the plumbing itself.

He was right. The companies that won were not prettier banking apps. They were new infrastructure: Coinbase rebuilt how assets are custodied and traded. Robinhood rebuilt how retail investors access markets. Nubank rebuilt how banking works in emerging economies. Stripe rebuilt how internet businesses accept payments.

In June 2025, Malka published what insiders call the "Token Factory" letter to Ribbit's investors. The thesis: everything is becoming a token. Not in the speculative 2017 ICO sense. In the structural sense that tokens are machine-readable claims on identity, assets, and expertise. And the entities that will transact with these tokens most fluently are not humans. They are AI agents.

The letter frames the future of finance around three primitives:

Tokens as machine-legible claims. Your identity, your financial history, your credentials, your reputation: all tokenized so that software can read, verify, and act on them instantly. No more PDFs. No more "please wait 3-5 business days." Machine-readable everything.

Agents as the new economic interface. The intermediary between you and financial services is no longer a bank teller, a financial advisor, or even an app. It is an AI agent that acts on your behalf, holds your credentials, executes transactions, and negotiates terms. The "Visa for AI agents," as some in the community have called it.

Capital formation at internet speed. Launching financial products should not take 18 months and a team of compliance lawyers. Token-based structures let new products go from idea to market in days, test demand in real time, and iterate based on actual usage. Virtuals Protocol's "60 Days" framework, which lets founders launch a reversible token trial and wind it down if traction does not materialize, is one early implementation of this idea.

TIBBIR: Where The Thesis Meets The Token

Here is where it gets interesting. Five months before the Token Factory letter, in January 2025, Malka personally launched TIBBIR on Virtuals Protocol. Not through a fund. Not through a foundation. Through his own Ethereum wallet.

TIBBIR (RIBBIT spelled backwards) launched with 1 billion tokens, 100% circulating supply, zero VC allocation, zero pre-sale, zero team tokens. A billionaire who could have structured any kind of preferential deal chose the fairest possible launch.

Why?

The answer becomes clearer when you trace the breadcrumbs. And there are a lot of breadcrumbs.

The name itself. TIBBIR is RIBBIT backwards. Ribbit Capital. The firm's mascot is a frog. The AI agent's X handle is @ribbita2012, a reference to Ribbit Capital's founding year. These are not coincidences. They are signals designed to be found by people paying attention.

The Crossmint connection. Two months after TIBBIR launched, Ribbit Capital led a $23.6 million funding round for Crossmint, a company building infrastructure for AI agents to transact onchain. That is the exact infrastructure TIBBIR would need to function as a currency for agent commerce.

Fund Y. Ribbit launched a new fund focused on Agentic Finance and the "Digital Backpack," a portable, tokenized identity and credential layer for AI agents. The fund's early bets include Persona, Privy, and Crossmint: identity verification, authentication infrastructure, and agent transaction tooling. Every piece of the stack that TIBBIR's vision requires.

The Vlad Tenev signal. In February 2026, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev responded to Ribbita on X after 8 months of no interaction. Given that Malka sits on Robinhood's board and was an early investor, this is not a random engagement. The Ribbit-Robinhood-TIBBIR connection runs deeper than most realize.

The Coinbase Parallel

The most striking pattern is the one between TIBBIR and Coinbase. Look at the sequence:

In both cases, Malka started by getting his hands dirty with the asset itself. Not delegating to a team. Not investing from the sidelines. Directly participating so he could feel every friction point firsthand. The same operator instinct that led a teenage Malka to start a broker-dealer in Caracas to exploit weekend interest rates.

What "Digital Backpack" Actually Means

Ribbit's internal language around TIBBIR and Fund Y centers on a concept they call the "Digital Backpack." The idea is straightforward once you strip away the jargon.

Today, your financial identity is scattered across dozens of institutions. Your bank has some data. Your credit bureau has some. Your insurance company has some. Your crypto wallet has some. None of them talk to each other, and you have limited control over any of it.

The Digital Backpack is a portable, token-based container for all of it. Your verified identity. Your credit history. Your credentials and certifications. Your transaction reputation. All tokenized, all under your control, all readable by authorized agents (human or AI) in seconds.

Now imagine an AI agent carrying that backpack. It could:

• Open a financial account in seconds by presenting verified credentials
• Negotiate loan terms based on your actual financial history, not a credit score from 2003
• Execute cross-border transactions by proving your identity to regulators in real time
• Interact with other AI agents in commerce, each one carrying its own verified identity

This is not theoretical. Crossmint (Ribbit-funded) is building the transaction layer. Privy (Ribbit-funded) is building the authentication layer. Persona (Ribbit-funded) is building the identity verification layer. Virtuals Protocol provides the agent framework. And TIBBIR sits at the center as both the token and the proof of concept.

The "Why Now" Question

Why would Malka make this move in January 2025, specifically?

Three converging forces:

AI agents reached commercial viability. 2024 was the year AI agents went from demo to deployment. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all shipped agent frameworks. Virtuals Protocol launched an ecosystem for tokenized agents. The infrastructure finally existed.

Regulatory clarity began emerging. The US saw its first meaningful crypto regulatory frameworks take shape through 2024-2025. Europe's MiCA regulation went live. For the first time, a token-based financial product could operate with some legal clarity.

The agentic finance thesis matured. Ribbit spent 2024 running the Agentic Finance hackathon, funding Crossmint, and quietly building conviction that AI agents would become the primary interface for financial services. By January 2025, Malka had enough signal to act.

The timing also mirrors Ribbit's historical pattern. Coinbase was backed when crypto was dismissed. Robinhood was backed when free trading seemed like a gimmick. Nubank was backed when Brazilian banking seemed untouchable. Ribbit moves when consensus says it is too early, because by the time consensus catches up, the position is already built.

What This Means for TIBBIR's Price

This article is not financial advice, and the crypto market is brutal to predictions. But the structural case is worth stating plainly.

TIBBIR currently sits around a $100-130 million market cap. If even a fraction of Ribbit's thesis plays out, if AI agents become a meaningful interface for financial services, and if TIBBIR is the token layer for that ecosystem, the current valuation prices in approximately zero of the upside.

For comparison: Coinbase reached $85 billion. Robinhood reached $46 billion at its 2021 IPO. Nubank reached $41 billion. These were Malka's previous "too early" bets in financial infrastructure.

Nobody is suggesting TIBBIR reaches those numbers. But if this follows Ribbit's historical pattern, where early conviction in structural infrastructure produces outsized returns, then the current price reflects a market that has not yet connected the dots between a frog meme token and a billionaire's decade-long thesis on the future of money.

The Skeptic's Case

Fair is fair. Here are the legitimate risks:

No official confirmation. Ribbit Capital has not formally announced TIBBIR as a fund project. The connections are strong but circumstantial. Malka could, theoretically, walk away from TIBBIR tomorrow.

Crypto market risk. Even well-founded projects get destroyed in bear markets. TIBBIR is not immune to the broader cycles that have crushed tokens with strong fundamentals before.

Execution risk. The "agentic finance" thesis requires multiple pieces of infrastructure to come together: identity, payments, compliance, agent frameworks. If any piece stalls, the timeline extends.

Competition. TIBBIR is not the only project targeting AI agent commerce. Larger, better-funded competitors could emerge and capture the market.

These are real risks. But every Ribbit investment carried similar uncertainty at entry. Coinbase in 2013 could have been regulated out of existence. Robinhood in 2014 could have been a feature that Schwab copied. Nubank in 2016 could have been crushed by regulatory incumbents. The pattern is: enormous uncertainty at the point of entry, followed by structural inevitability once the infrastructure takes hold.

Reading the Room

The community around TIBBIR has been doing its own detective work for months. Gribbit.club, a community-built site, maintains a timeline of evidence connecting TIBBIR to Ribbit Capital. Altcoinist published a detailed research thread covering the "Digital Backpack" thesis. Researchers have traced wallet connections, timeline correlations, and public statements.

What is notable is not just the research but the quality of the people doing it. This is not a typical meme coin community chasing pump signals. The TIBBIR community is largely composed of people who understand venture capital, financial infrastructure, and institutional strategy. They are not here because a frog is funny. They are here because the pattern is unmistakable to anyone who has studied how Ribbit operates.

When the man who spotted Coinbase at $100 Bitcoin, Robinhood before zero-fee trading, and Nubank before Latin American neobanking makes a new move, the right response is probably not to ignore it.

It is probably to pay very close attention.

For a technical breakdown of TIBBIR's tokenomics, the Virtuals Protocol ecosystem, and the AI agent economy, read our companion piece: TIBBIR: One Token, Zero Humans, and the Future of Autonomous AI Commerce.

Interested in how AI agents are changing the way we work? Check out Your AI Team Across Every Channel for a practical look at multi-agent workflows.