Ming-Li Liu

Founder, Paygent Labs

Ming-Li Liu

Agentic commerce, on-chain rewards and payment orchestration

25+ years building the hard parts of payments, from EMV smart cards and NFC to DeFi rails, proximity payments and agentic commerce.

Visit Paygent Labs Connect on LinkedIn

ming@paygentlabs.com github.com/mll11

The rings behind my name are a SHA-256 hash chain: the inner ring hashes “Ming-Li Liu”, and each ring after it hashes the one inside it.

Paygent Labs

Founder, since August 2026

Infrastructure that lets AI shopping agents find products, recommend the highest-earning card, and help shoppers earn rewards wherever they shop.

  • Paygent: The AI commerce agent: finds what to buy and recommends the card to pay with.
  • StellarBack: On-chain rewards infrastructure on Stellar.
  • Paydapter: PSP-agnostic payment orchestration across Stripe, Square and PayPal.

Founder-funded and open to early conversations.

Read the investor overview Visit paygentlabs.com

Career

Full history on LinkedIn

I am a payments founder and engineer with 25+ years spent on the parts of the payment stack most people never see: the standards, the silicon, the cryptography, and the settlement rails underneath the apps.

  • Paygent Labs
    Founder, 2026–present

    Agentic commerce, on-chain rewards and payment orchestration infrastructure.

  • MysDeFi LLC
    Founder, 2020–present

    Payments and crypto R&D studio: decentralized-finance and payment prototypes, including crypto micropayment rails and BLE/UWB proximity payments.

  • Poynt by GoDaddy
    R&D, 2019–2021

    PayFac risk and onboarding infrastructure.

  • OV Loop
    R&D, 2018–2019

    R&D payment solutions using messaging and voice.

  • SimplyTapp
    Director of Software Engineering, 2014–2018

    Led the engineering behind host card emulation (HCE): cloud-based NFC payments.

  • Zenius Solutions
    Co-founder & CTO, 2008–2014

    Integration services and white-label payment solutions.

  • ViVOtech
    Sr. Software Engineer, 2004–2008

    Contactless / NFC payment and acceptance products.

  • Visa International
    Software Engineer, 2000–2004

    Reference implementations of EMV, turning specifications into working prototypes.

What ties it all together: I like the ambiguous, technically risky problems, the ones where nobody is sure yet whether the idea will actually work, and I like being the person who finds out.

Expertise

  • Payments & FinTech

    Standards-level fluency across card, mobile, and crypto rails, from acquiring and risk logic to DeFi settlement.

    • EMV
    • GlobalPlatform
    • ISO 7816
    • Contactless / NFC / ISO 14443
    • ISO 8583
    • Mobile / P2P Payments
    • Stellar / DeFi / Payments

  • Full-Stack Engineering

    Backend to native mobile in one set of hands, built to move a prototype fast without cross-team handoffs.

    • Python / FastAPI / FastMCP
    • React / Node.js / TypeScript
    • Java / Spring Boot
    • iOS (Swift)
    • Android
    • Flutter

  • Cloud & Data Infrastructure

    Production-grade deployment and data pipelines for prototypes that need to hold up under real usage.

    • GCP / Firebase
    • AWS
    • Docker
    • LiteLLM
    • MySQL / MongoDB
    • CI/CD

  • Hardware & Security

    Deep embedded and cryptographic expertise, where most fintech PoCs actually run into trouble.

    • Cryptography / HSM
    • Tokenization
    • Smart Cards / JavaCard
    • Embedded Firmware

Need a payments proof of concept?

Alongside Paygent Labs, I take on a small number of proof-of-concept engagements through MysDeFi LLC, my payments and crypto R&D studio. Discovery through demo, typically in 2–6 weeks.

Visit MysDeFi