Neo · · 32 min
Inside Dakota's Agentic Build Challenge: Building a Neobank in Under 9 Hours
With 
Ryan Bozarth
Key takeaways
Ryan Bozarth says more agents than people now visit Dakota's documentation pages, about 50% of docs visitors.
Dakota says work that used to take 14 to 18 months and millions of dollars in compliance spend now takes hours through its APIs.
The Agentic Build Challenge asks developers to ship a working neobank in under nine hours, and Bozarth says some submissions are beating that by a wide margin.
Watch the episode
Summary
Ryan Bozarth says agents reading Dakota's documentation, and a nine-hour neobank build, show how splitting compliance infrastructure from the application layer makes it cheaper to launch niche financial products.
Dakota found that AI agents had overtaken people as visitors to its developer documentation, co-founder and CEO Ryan Bozarth said. "Like 50% of the visitors to the docs page was agents," he said. The stablecoin infrastructure company, which says it supports hundreds of businesses, now runs a challenge built around how fast developers can ship a neobank on its APIs.
From neobank to infrastructure
Ryan Bozarth said Dakota started out building a neobank for businesses and ended up spending all of its time on a stablecoin infrastructure platform. While building, the company used its own product and built its own operational account on top of its APIs. He described the core offering as three pieces: money movement orchestration, wallet APIs and issuance.
Bozarth said compliance and payment operations are the hard parts for new builders. Behind the "golden path" of fast settlement, he said, there is inventory being drawn down, liquidity providers, float management and reconciliation.
“One of things we talk about internally, a little bit jokingly, is like you can't like buy a code licenses.”
Ryan BozarthA nine-hour neobank
The Agentic Build Challenge came about after a Dakota engineer built Nomad Pay, a neobank, over a weekend in nine hours. A more recent build beat that by an hour, Bozarth said. Entries must let users log in, make a deposit, hold a balance and make a payout. The sandbox runs on Ethereum Sepolia with USDC, and a Nomad Pay payroll demo fired off 17 payouts back to back.
Zach Fowler, who called himself "far from an engineer," built Sandlot, a bank for ballplayers, in his own sandbox and showed customers onboarding on testnet.
Smaller audiences, lower costs
Ryan Bozarth said separating compliance infrastructure from application development opens up financial products for audiences too small to justify the old cost structure. Drawing on his early career at Sony in rights management, he pointed to neobanks for musicians, who he said can be paid quarters later than they otherwise would be because of reconciliation. Stabledash said it has used Dakota since it started, for treasury management and payouts.
Ryan Bozarth expects more specialized financial products because building costs have dropped with this separation of concerns. He said that split, which he did not see coming in the early days, has turned out to be the next step.
Dakota, Sony, and Coinbase come up most.
- People
- Ryan Bozarth
- Zach Fowler
- Drew Rogers
- Companies
- Dakota
- Sony
- Coinbase
- Dfns
