51 Insights – What's next in digital asset, AI and business.

Marc Baumann

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  1. 22 uur geleden

    185: they bought the 2026 low

    Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team, The Fed is hawkish, cheap money is gone, and ETH just printed its 2026 low. This is the part of the cycle where everything built on crypto is supposed to fold. Instead, look at the week: 140 companies, incl. Visa, Google, BlackRock, launched a shared stablecoin and knocked Circle down 16%. Robinhood, Securitize and Ondo put the stock market on-chain. And over in AI, Palantir and Nvidia started selling institutions control over their own models, while the frontier labs kept launching products against their own customers. One thread runs through all of it: when money gets expensive, capital stops betting on prices and starts buying infrastructure. The fight of 2026, in stablecoins, tokenized equities, an AI, is the same fight: who owns the rails, and who is merely renting them. Signals at a glance: * Europe just closed the door * 140 companies ganged up on Circle * Circle wired itself into a G-SIB * Robinhood put the stock market on-chain And 10+ more signals below. 🚨Save your spot for our next webinar, space is limited. I’m sitting down with the people dvising the banks and building the stablecoin rails those banks will plug into: * Chris Schmid, global lead for Corporate & Investment Banking, BCG. * Roy Choudhury lead for Capital Markets in North America, BCG * Martin Carrica , Head of Stablecoin Issuance at Anchorage Digital 35 minutes of moderated panel. 10 minutes of live Q&A. For CEOs, board members, and heads of strategy at banks, FMIs, asset managers, and custodians. 📅 23 July, 11am EST 🚨 Space is limited. RSVP to secure your spot. The 51 Signal The treasuries bought the 2026 low. While ETH and BTC printed yearly lows this week, the listed digital-asset treasury companies did the opposite of capitulate. Across five trading days, at least six were active accumulators or restructured to keep accumulating, deploying over $360M in disclosed purchases into the bottom. 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline. Win in digital assets. We position you as the authority among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers who act on what we publish. Top Boardroom Reads & Data * The Tokenized Asset Market Is $60 Billion. Most of It Isn’t Moving. Forbes, July 2, 2026. $32.9B of the $60B RWA market showed zero weekly transfer activity, the liquidity reality check behind every tokenization pitch deck. * 2026: The Year of Tokenized Equities, Sentora Research, June 2026. Tokenized equities hit $5.5B market cap, up 147% YTD, the sector data behind this week’s Robinhood/Securitize/Ondo launches. * Making Stablecoins Stable. IMF Working Paper, 2026. The IMF’s framework for what actually keeps a stablecoin at par, required reading as reserve-sharing models like OUSD change issuer economics. * Global Enterprise AI Report 2026/ Publicis Sapient, June 2026. 1,550 AI decision-makers surveyed: sovereign AI and vendor country-of-origin are now board-level criteria. 140 companies launched a stablecoin that pays them, not the issuer What happened: Open Standard announced Open USD (OUSD), a stablecoin backed by 140+ launch partners — Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, BlackRock, BNY, Standard Chartered, Google and Shopify among them. Businesses mint and redeem fee-free, reserve income is distributed to participants, and governance is shared across the consortium. Launch is slated for later this year on Plasma and Tempo. Circle closed down 16%. 51 View: The float was the business model, and Open USD just open-sourced it: reserve interest becomes a distribution incentive, the same move airline alliances made against flag carriers. We think the market repriced the wrong company. Circle already shares economics with Coinbase, while Tether keeps roughly all of its float, so a yield-sharing consortium attacks Tether hardest. The catch: consortiums ship slowly. Libra had 28 partners and died of governance; this one has 140. Circle’s counterpunch: a G-SIB, a custody bank, and a risk engine What happened: Two days after the OUSD reveal, Standard Chartered and Circle launched the first G-SIB-led integrated access to USDC minting and redemption. BNY expanded its institutional stablecoin servicing with Circle the same week, and BlackRock’s Aladdin added deeper support for Ethena’s stablecoin products, sending ENA up 8%. The fine print: Standard Chartered is also an Open USD launch partner. The banks are buying tickets to every train. 51 View: The integrations are the moat. Once a stablecoin lives inside Aladdin’s risk model and mints through a G-SIB’s own stack, allocation follows the plumbing. Our call: within 18 months a mandate-level allocator holds tokenized cash as a treasury line item simply because the systems already price and custody it. The interesting fight in stablecoins stopped being issuance and became who sits in the risk engine and on the bank rail. Robinhood turned DeFi into a savings product What happened: Robinhood launched Robinhood Earn on July 1: users buy USDG, Paxos’ 1:1 dollar stablecoin, and lend it out through self-custody wallets at an estimated 7% APY. Morpho’s credit network runs the lending underneath, Steakhouse Financial curates the vaults, and Robinhood Chain settles it. It’s one of the largest retail DeFi integrations to date, rolling out across Robinhood’s US base over the coming weeks. 51 View: The interesting part is what Robinhood didn’t build. There’s no lending desk and no balance-sheet risk. It plugged a DeFi protocol into a retail app and let the yield flow through, and the user never has to hear the word Morpho. The 7% will compress as money floods in; the architecture is the story. Watch whether Coinbase and Schwab respond, in that order. Be Smart: Robinhood just showed what “institutional-ready DeFi” actually looks like: the protocol is invisible and the brand carries the trust. If you run a customer-facing platform, the question has changed from “should we touch DeFi” to “which protocol do we plug in, and who curates the risk.” The stock market went on-chain What happened: Robinhood launched the public mainnet of Robinhood Chain, an Arbitrum-based L2 with tokenized stock trading live in 120+ countries. The next day, Securitize tokenized its own NYSE-listed stock (SECZ) on listing day, Ondo launched the first custodial tokenized securities in the US — starting with BlackRock’s IVV ETF and Micron, with Broadridge wiring in shareholder voting — and Nasdaq began distributing TotalView order-book data on-chain through Pyth. 51 View: The question of whether stocks go on-chain got answered this week. The open question is whose chain and whose wrapper, and that’s where the Ondo launch matters more than the Robinhood one. Robinhood’s tokens give non-US users access to US stocks. Ondo’s custodial structure keeps the shareholder vote attached to the token, and once a tokenized share still votes, it’s a real security changing venue rather than a derivative wrapped around one. That’s the structure a top-ten asset manager can actually copy, and we’d expect one to offer a natively tokenized share class through it within 12 months. Be Smart: When tokenized stocks come up, ask one question: “does the token carry the vote?” It instantly separates offshore wrappers from actual securities on-chain, and it’s the distinction the SEC will regulate around. News Flashes Infrastructure and Markets * Tradeweb executed a landmark on-chain US Treasuries transaction on the Canton Network, moving real-time tokenized UST settlement from pilot to production. * Anchorage Digital and Binance brought off-exchange settlement to institutional crypto trading, letting institutions trade on Binance while assets stay at a federally chartered custodian. Regulation and Policy * Taiwan passed a sweeping crypto law with licensing rules, reserve mandates and a bank-first stablecoin framework. * India’s USDT premium topped 8.5% after Enforcement Directorate raids squeezed local stablecoin supply. * Ukraine placed $8.3M of seized USDT under state management for the first time, with plans to convert some into war bonds. Banking and Payments * Crédit Agricole rolled out EURXT, a euro stablecoin from one of Europe’s largest banks, on MiCA’s first day in full force. * MetaMask launched a Money Account combining stablecoin yield and card spending in one wallet. * Telcoin launched what it calls the first regulated on-chain bank accounts in the US, minting eUSD 1:1 against ACH deposits. Funds, Deals and Others * Erebor Bank, the Thiel-backed crypto lender, is raising at an $8B+ valuation as deposits nearly quadrupled since March to $4.05B. * SBI Holdings agreed to acquire Bitbank for $288.6M, creating Japan’s largest regulated crypto operator. * Allium raised a $40M Series B (Amplify, Kleiner Perkins) as institutional demand for onchain analytics grows. The Machine Layer * Palantir’s Karp torched the frontier labs on live TV, and expanded with Nvidia * David Sacks reframed it: AI safety is model-layer choice * OpenAI proposed giving Washington a 5% stake, worth roughly $42.6B 51 View: Karp’s “crash-out” was really a product launch. Palantir will run Nvidia’s models inside the customer’s own stack, so the client keeps the weights, the data and the compute. Sacks made the same point from the buyer’s side: whichever model layer you pick can see everything you do with it. And OpenAI just offered the US government 5% of itself to buy political cover. Crypto settled this argument years ago with self-custody. Not your keys, not your coins. The enterprise version is arriving now: not your weights, not your alpha. Be Smart: The diligence question for any AI vendor is: “who holds the weights, and can you take your data and fine-tuning with you if you leave?” If the answer is no, you’re not a customer, you’re a data source. One Quick Favor Last week we asked what you actually do with 51 Insights, and the contrar

    8 min.
  2. He spent 15,000 hours trying to kill Bitcoin

    24 jun

    He spent 15,000 hours trying to kill Bitcoin

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “Take it from somebody who spent 15,000 hours trying to kill Bitcoin.” Global debt now sits at roughly $350 trillion, propping up some $900 trillion of assets. By Jeff Booth’s math, it can never be repaid. Six years after The Price of Tomorrow predicted that technology-driven deflation would collide head-on with a credit system that must expand forever, Jeff says we’re simply further down the same path, with AI pouring fuel on it. We sat with Jeff Booth, founding partner of Ego Death Capital (which just closed a $100M fund to invest in the Bitcoin ecosystem) and board member at Core Scientific, to unpack why he thinks the entire market is mispricing Bitcoin as “digital gold” when it’s actually a protocol like the internet in 1969. If he’s right, almost every allocator is holding the wrong layer of the stack. In this conversation, we break down why the most contrarian Bitcoin thesis isn’t about price at all. It’s about what you’re measuring price in. 🚨Join us next week: Private credit is a $2 trillion asset class financing a 21st-century economy on 20th-century rails. Spreadsheets. PDFs. Email. Quarterly reporting. On June 29, 12:30pm EST we are hosting three of the operators actually rebuilding those rails. Presented by 51 Insights and Avalanche. Space is limited. RSVP to secure your spot and get the report👇 About Jeff: Jeff Booth is the founding partner of Ego Death Capital, a $100M venture fund investing exclusively in companies building on the Bitcoin protocol (portfolio includes Fedi, Breez, and Ark Labs, a co-investment with Tether). He sits on the board of Core Scientific and previously co-founded and ran BuildDirect for nearly two decades, scaling a 100+ engineer organization. His 2020 book The Price of Tomorrow became the canonical text on why technology is deflationary and why credit-based money is structurally at war with the free market. “We came to two systems colliding into each other — one the free market, and one a version of people’s reality that has to centralize everything to survive.” 🎯 Jump to the best parts 00:00 Introduction00:51 The Price Of Tomorrow Thesis04:24 Why Debt Creates Centralization08:10 Can The US Become Japan09:37 Bitcoin As A Parallel System14:50 What Must Happen For Bitcoin To Win20:50 Arc Labs And Bitcoin Payments25:13 Stablecoins vs Bitcoin27:50 Is Quantum Computing A Threat31:48 Michael Saylor And Strategy34:52 AI, Energy & Deflation39:09 Bitcoin Mining Economics45:33 Where The Biggest Bitcoin Opportunities Are46:17 Projects To Watch47:55 Why People Still Fear Bitcoin49:48 What Excites Jeff Most51:23 Lightning Round53:37 Where To Learn More Important Links * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffrbooth/ * Ego Death Capital: https://egodeath.capital/ * The Price of Tomorrow: https://www.jeffreybooth.com/ Watch or listen now: YouTube • Apple Podcasts Our biggest takeaways from this conversation 1. The $350 trillion error in every portfolio model Jeff’s core claim is mathematical, not ideological. The natural state of a free market is deflation: entrepreneurs compete to deliver more value, so prices fall. Credit-based money cannot tolerate that. It must expand exponentially or collapse. “You’re talking about federal debt only. You’re not talking about the total global debt of $350 trillion... and that $350 trillion is supporting, say, $900 trillion of assets. But the $350 trillion cannot be repaid.” The consequence for allocators: every discounted cash flow model on earth uses the long bond as the risk-free rate. Jeff says that’s the error. “They think all of the assets on top of that debt are safe because they assume the risk-free rate of that debt is a long bond rate... There’s an error in their calculation, because they believe that credit is solvent.” What to do with this: stress-test your models with a different question — not “what is this asset worth in dollars?” but “what is this asset worth against the monetary printing rate?” Jeff’s point on Japan applies globally: Japanification “works” only by the state buying its own markets. Related reads: 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline. Win in digital assets. We position you as the authority among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers who act on what we publish. 2. Bitcoin is 1969 internet, and almost everyone is buying the wrong layer This is the thesis Ego Death Capital’s entire $100M fund is built on. Jeff rejects “digital gold” as a category error. Gold always centralized, got captured by the state, and was repriced. A protocol doesn’t. “Imagine going back to 1969 and you could own a piece of the internet itself, and all of the value that came on top of it... instead of owning just the company on top of it.” His test for any model: it should be predictive.

    54 min.
  3. Inside JP Morgan's $3T tokenization machine, with Dennis Cristallo, Head of Wealth Management at Kinexys, JPMorgan

    8 jun

    Inside JP Morgan's $3T tokenization machine, with Dennis Cristallo, Head of Wealth Management at Kinexys, JPMorgan

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “Blockchain doesn’t solve all problems. It solves some problems really, really well.” JP Morgan has quietly moved $3T in cumulative notional value through its private blockchain, settles roughly $5B every day, and just became the largest global systemically important bank (G-SIB) to launch a tokenized money market fund on public Ethereum, MONY. We sat with Dennis Cristallo, the person responsible for digital asset wealth management at JPMorgan to unpack the recent rebrand to Kinexys, why they are moving beyond private networks to public chains like Ethereum and Base, and the "Fundflow" pilot that just proved tokenization can move capital 38 times faster than the legacy system. This was more of a playbook than a podcast. In this conversation, we break down why the $400T tokenization opportunity lives or dies not in the boardroom or the legislature, but in the UX of a wallet app. About Dennis: Dennis Cristallo is the Head of Wealth Management Engagement for Kinexis Digital Assets at J.P. Morgan. He designs and scales blockchain tokenization solutions for the private bank and its global clients. Prior to joining the Kinexis team three and a half years ago, Dennis spent a decade building portfolios of hedge funds, private credit, and co-investments. He co-authored the seminal Bain & Company paper on the $400T tokenization opportunity and is a key driver behind JPM’s "Fundflow" and "MONY" (tokenized money market fund) initiatives. Dennis joined the Kinexis team, then called Onyx, about three and a half years ago, coming from a decade of building hedge fund and private credit portfolios. “We came up with the Onyx name. It sounded cool, it sounded mysterious. People didn’t really know what was going on.” The rebrand to Kinexys: It was a signal that JPMorgan is moving from internal blockchain lab to commercial business unit. Why this matters: Tokenized real-world assets on public blockchains crossed $32B in May 2026, roughly tripling year-over-year. The GENIUS Act became law in July 2025, formally distinguishing payment stablecoins from tokenized bank deposits and creating the first US regulatory lane for both. Since then, JP Morgan has deployed JPMD on Base, announced expansion to Canton, launched the MONY fund on Ethereum, and completed the first transaction on Kinexys Fund Flow with Citco. The conversation is now shifting from infrastructure to adoption and distribution. 🎧 Jump to the best parts 00:00 Introduction01:00 Why JP Morgan Started Building On Chain03:39 The $400 Trillion Tokenization Opportunity06:17 From Onyx To Kinexys07:45 Blockchain vs Crypto Inside JP Morgan09:35 Public vs Private Blockchains12:53 Kinexys Fundflow Explained17:31 Why Tokenization Matters18:42 JP Morgan's MONY Fund22:10 Deposit Tokens vs Stablecoins24:15 The Stablecoin Endgame25:33 Tokenized Private Markets28:47 What Is Actually Holding Tokenization Back28:59 Multi Chain Strategy31:09 Wealth Management In Five Years32:55 Lessons From Building Blockchain At JP Morgan33:50 Lightning Round Important Links * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dcristallo/ * Kinexys: https://www.jpmorgan.com/kinexys/index * MONY: https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/adv/about-us/media/press-releases/jp-morgan-asset-management-launches-its-first-tokenized-money-market-fund/ * Morgan Money: https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/liq/resources/morgan-money/ Watch or listen now:YouTube • Apple Podcasts Our biggest takeaways from this conversation: 1. Public chains are distribution networks, private chains are for operations There is a constant debate about permissioned vs. permissionless blockchains. Dennis frames this not as a philosophical war, but as a product segmentation strategy. “We look at them as distribution mechanisms. You have on Ethereum 60% of all stablecoins issued. You have a ton of users... we want to ultimately deploy tokens and assets where people are there to buy them.” If the goal is to tap into crypto-native pools of capital, you deploy on Ethereum or Base (like JPM did with their “MONY” tokenized money market fund). But if a client wants to bring an asset on-chain strictly to eliminate back-office friction, without forcing their end-investors to manage crypto wallets, pay gas fees, or undergo redundant AML screening, the private permissioned network is the vastly superior choice. Kinexys Digital Assets processes roughly $5B daily, primarily through an intraday repo application that allows wholesale lending with the borrowing leg and cash leg settling on the same infrastructure. “If they borrow for an hour, they only pay an hour’s worth of interest, and there’s no overnight capital charge because it’s an intraday loan.” The JPM team is explicit that private and public chains serve different purposes. It also established the pattern Dennis returns to throughout the conversation: tokenization earns its keep by solving a specific operational pain point precisely, not by being generically “on blockchain.” Related reads: 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline. Win in digital assets. We produce institutional-grade research that positions you as the authority in your category, then distribute it to 100,000+ decision-makers who act on what we publish. Let’s talk. 2. Blockchain is just a better database for broken plumbing J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management and Citco completed the first live transaction using Kinexys Fund Flow in October 2025. [RELEASE] The problem it solves is structural: in private equity and private credit, fund managers, fund administrators, and wealth management distributors run on incompatible systems with no common data standard. Capital calls are slow, manually intensive, and routinely underfunded. “There’s no DTCC in the middle, there’s no standards around how data is shared, how capital calls are processed.” Fund Flow addresses this in two stages: * A discrepancy-surfacing data layer that doesn't require blockchain at all, just better-connected data management across the three parties. * Tokenized settlement: when a capital call hits, cash moves from the investor's brokerage account, becomes tokenized, and settles against a fund token in near-real time. “Honestly, you don’t need a blockchain for that. It’s helpful, but you don’t need a blockchain for that. You just need better data management.” Result: Money moved from client accounts to the fund manager 38 times faster than the existing process, and labor associated with file processing, mapping and reconciliation dropped by approximately 93%. These numbers were verified by Citco, one of the largest fund administrators in the world. 3. MONY was launched on Ethereum for one reason

    36 min.
  4. Stablecoin issuance is overrated, with Tony McLaughlin, Founder & CEO at Ubyx

    27 mei

    Stablecoin issuance is overrated, with Tony McLaughlin, Founder & CEO at Ubyx

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “I’m not a fan of stablecoins being co-opted by the cards world. I’m not a fan of cards on the front end of stablecoins because then the stablecoin is just another account feeding the legacy beast. This is not the intended future.” Tony McLaughlin spent two decades at Citigroup as managing director of emerging payments, where he authored the Regulated Liability Network whitepaper, the conceptual scaffolding the Fed prototyped in its RLN proof of concept and the BIS extended into Project Agora. He then founded Ubyx, where he raised $10M to build the the clearing system for tokenized money. In this conversation, we unpack why the “Tether/Circle duopoly” is a temporary trend, why every bank on earth is about to become a wallet provider, and why the “general-purpose” technology of blockchains will inevitably subsume special-purpose rails like ACH and SWIFT. “I disagree with anyone who believes there’s going to be an oligopoly in stablecoin issuance.” About Tony: Tony McLaughlin spent 20+ years at Citigroup, most recently as Managing Director of Emerging Payments. Earlier in his career he worked on continuous linked settlement at ABN AMRO and travelers' checks at Barclays in 1993, three decades of building payment infrastructure across every form factor that has ever existed. In March 2025 he left Citi to found Ubyx, the first global clearing system for stablecoins and tokenized deposits, with backing from Galaxy, Founders Fund, Coinbase Ventures, VanEck, Paxos, LayerZero, Monerium and as of January 2026, Barclays, in what was the British bank's first-ever direct stablecoin infrastructure investment. He also convened the Tokenized Cash Management Advisory Group, a 20-corporate body that published its core principles for digital money in April. Why is it important: The total stablecoin float crossed $323B in May 2026. Barclays just took its first stablecoin equity position in Ubyx. JPMorgan moved JPMD onto Canton in January and is now processing $5B in daily transactions through Kinexys. Citi’s tokenized deposit volumes went from millions to billions in a year. Genius Act issuers are queuing up in the US. Europeans banks are racing with Qivalis. And the Bank of England's proposed £20,000 retail holding cap on systemic stablecoins. Proof of Talk is known as the Davos of Web3, bringing together the core 2500 decision-makers in Web3, happening on the 2nd and 3rd of June at the Louvre Palace in Paris. ​Major speakers include Jenny Johnson (CEO, Franklin Templeton), Tom Lee (Chairman, Fundstrat), Stani Kulechov (Founder & CEO, Aave), Tom Zschach (CIO, Swift), Adam Back, Elliot Hentov (State Street, Chief Macro Policy Strategist) and more. 🎧 Jump to the best parts * 00:00 Tony McLaughlin Introduction * 01:29 Why Tony Left Citi * 03:38 Why Stablecoin Monopolies Will Fail * 07:16 Why Tony Built Ubyx * 09:20 Why Stablecoins Could Collapse Payment Rails * 13:19 Why Banks Need Stablecoin Deposits * 17:27 The Real Stablecoin Business Model * 22:14 Consortium Stablecoins and CBDCs * 25:32 Building Ubyx * 29:14 AI Agents and Stablecoin Payments * 31:38 What Could Kill the Stablecoin Thesis * 34:00 TThe BlackBerry Comparison * 38:00 Corporate Adoption of Tokenized Money * 42:58 Lightning Round Proof of Talk is known as the Davos of Web3, bringing together the core 2500 decision-makers in Web3, happening on the 2nd and 3rd of June at the Louvre Palace in Paris. 51 Insights will be the official research partner. 👉 A few days to go: Grab your ticket now! Important Links * LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tony-mclaughlin-7b627a3 * X: https://x.com/stablemaximus * Whitepaper: https://www.ubyx.xyz/whitepaper * Website: https://ubyx.xyz/ Watch or listen now:YouTube • Apple Podcasts Our biggest takeaways from this conversation: 1. The stablecoin duopoly is not the endgame More than 82% of the stablecoin market sits with two issuers: Tether ($189B) and Circle ($76B). And, almost everyone is looking at them as the dominate players even in the future. Tony’s argument and it’s the most important reframe of the conversation, is that this is exactly what every adolescent payment network looks like before it pluralises. There was a point in time when there were only a few credit card issuers, all dollar-denominated, all US-based. Today, there are roughly 16,000 card issuers globally and the market shows no fragmentation. The acceptance layer absorbs all of them invisibly. “Hundreds, and then thousands, of issuers. Hundreds of thousands, and then millions, of accepting points. I’ll be judged by that prediction over time.” Tony's analogy to AOL and CompuServe is sharp: walled-garden pioneers always look unassailable until the open network arrives and the moat turns out to have been the entire business. “America Online was the pre-internet portal to the information superhighway as we used to call it. There was something called CompuServe … All I'm saying is that what you observe at a point of time at the early stages of a market, if you extrapolate forward, you're probably making a mistake. And I think what's a far more likely outcome is that we will have eventually, and in the not too distant future, hundreds and then thousands … then millions of accepting points for tokenized money. Why do we agree with him: Currently, Stablecoin accounts for 0.02% of global payments volumes. We are just at the start. Related reads: 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline. Win in digital assets. We produce institutional-grade research that positions you as the authority in your category, then distribute it to 100,000+ decision-makers who act on what we publish. Let’s talk. 2. General-purpose technology always subsumes special-purpose technology Tony uses the “iPhone vs. Walkman” analogy to explain the future of payment rails. ACH, SWIFT, and Card Networks are special-purpose devices, they only do one thing (carry low-value messages, high-value messages, or authorizations). “In the same way that we don’t have physical alarm clocks and calculators and Walkmans anymore, I think the business case to build a special-purpose payments rail... will become difficult to justify.” Blockchains are general-purpose. They can represent a dollar, a stock, a piece of real estate, or a contract on the same infrastructure. Tony’s bet is that the cost-efficiency of general-purpose rails will eventually make special-purpose rails (like the current banking stack) obsolete. Related reads: 3. Banks are running the wrong playbook (Issue vs. Accept)

    44 min.
  5. 8 of 9 recessions called, now he's calling bitcoin, with Cam Harvey, Economist

    22 mei

    8 of 9 recessions called, now he's calling bitcoin, with Cam Harvey, Economist

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “Any asset that has annualized volatility four times greater than the stock market is not a safe haven asset. So we’re done right there.” I just spent an hour with Cam Harvey. Economist and Duke finance professor. He advises Man Group with $325B in AUM. His 1986 yield curve model has called every US recession since. Five for five. We sat down to unpack why his recession model gave a “false signal” in 2023, why AI agents are the secret growth engine for stablecoins, and why we are currently living through the most disruptive decade in human history. In this conversation, he prices Bitcoin’s digital-gold thesis, the agent-to-agent economy, the yield curve’s eight-of-nine recession record, and the four simultaneous technology disruptions he says CFOs are dangerously underestimating. Back in 1986, as a University of Chicago PhD student, he introduced a model that used the shape of the yield curve to predict recessions. It was heavily scrutinized at the time. Today, it boasts an 8-for-9 track record. [Read Thesis] “Bitcoin is not a substitute for gold. It might be a complement, but it is not a substitute.” That is a provocative stance from a man who literally wrote the book on DeFi and the Future of Finance. But Cam’s perspective isn't anti-crypto; it's hyper-rational. “Just gambling on crypto, that’s not solving any problem. What I’m interested in is doing stuff that increases both economic growth and economic well-being. And something like a stablecoin is fully equipped to do that.” Cam believes that DeFi will disrupt the traditional financial system by removing costly middlemen, increasing financial inclusion, and driving mass tokenization. And, this will happen as DeFi will eliminate centralized institutions like commercial banks, stock exchanges, and brokerages. About Campwell: Cam Harvey is Professor of Finance at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a past President of the American Finance Association. He is also Partner and Senior Advisor at Research Affiliates ($150B+ AUM) and an investment strategy advisor at Man Group, the world’s largest publicly listed hedge fund. He co-founded the Duke-Fed CFO Survey in 1997, still the most cited corporate sentiment study in the US, and authored “DeFi and the Future of Finance.” His Coursera specialization on decentralized finance has trained more than 102,000 students. His September 2025 paper “Gold and Bitcoin” is driving the institutional conversation about Bitcoin’s real risk profile in 2026. 🚨We’re opening sponsorships for our next podcast series. Top guests. Serious listeners. Claim your spot → 🎧 Jump to the best parts * 00:00 Cam Harvey Introduction * 02:09 The Aave Exploit Explained * 07:53 Why DeFi Still Matters * 12:30 What Happened With Aave and Kelp * 15:34 The Origin of the Yield Curve Model * 22:35 Why the 2022 Recession Never Happened * 30:20 Why Cam Entered Crypto and DeFi * 43:19 Why DeFi Solves Real Problems * 51:55 Bitcoin vs Gold * 57:18 Can Bitcoin Be Attacked * 01:00:56 The Duke Fed CFO Survey * 01:03:25 Stablecoins vs Banks * 01:07:13 Why CEOs Underestimate AI * 01:09:42 The Four Technological Disruptions * 01:15:18 AI and the Future of Education Important Links * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/camharvey * X: https://x.com/camharvey * Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business: https://www.fuqua.duke.edu/faculty/campbell-harvey * Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=cajqjGAAAAAJ&hl=en * Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell_Harvey * Gold and Bitcoin: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5530719 * Tokenised Gold: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5995434 Watch or listen now:YouTube • Apple Podcasts 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline. Win in digital assets. We produce institutional-grade research that positions you as the authority in your category, then distribute it to 100,000+ decision-makers who act on what we publish. Let’s talk. Our biggest takeaways from this conversation: 1. The yield curve model worked because everything else was wrong When Harvey presented his recession-prediction model in 1986, the criticism was simple: not enough data. Four recessions, four correct calls. Now it's five for five. The mechanism is elegant, the spread between a 10-year Treasury and a 3-month T-bill encodes forward-looking expectations about growth in a way that stock prices, with their volatility and absent maturities, never could. “A model is a simplification of reality. It looks at one thing, the difference between the yield on the 10-year and the yield on the Treasury bill. That’s it, one variable.” The 2022 inversion looked like a sixth hit coming. It wasn’t. Harvey went on record in real time calling it a false signal, and laid out five reasons: the model’s own publicity had changed CEO and CFO behavior, companies undertook prophylactic layoffs and slashed investment even without an actual downturn, and COVID-era stimulus artificially propped up consumption. The recession was partly managed away because enough people believed the model. “You might even think that that inversion in 2022 sufficiently changed behavior so that we dodged a potential recession.” This is a great example to assess how outcome changes when the signal is widely known. Market is very dynamic and the signal that work eventually change the behavior they were measuring. 2. The Kelp DAO exploit will trigger regulatory extinct The Aave incident that preceded this conversation, in which attackers drained $292 million from a smaller protocol, KelpDAO, used the stolen tokens as collateral on Aave to borrow ETH, and left Aave holding bad debt, got significant press. Harvey’s response was careful to avoid both dismissiveness and alarm. “The protocol operated exactly as it should have operated. Don’t interpret this as ‘we’ve seen this before, it’s no big deal.’ It is a big deal. It does point to improvement that’s necessary.” The regulatory problem is genuinely hard. am has a paper forthcoming in Research Policy on how to regulate decentralized protocols, and his point of view should worry anyone who thinks “ban it” is a viable response. His partial solution is indirect: regulated entities like Coinbase, if they choose to interact with a decentralized protocol, have legal liability exposure that gives them an incentive to pressure protocols toward better security. He also makes a point that frequently gets dropped in these conversations: 80% of the value of all U.S. paper currency is held in $100 bills. Almost no one uses them for legitimate transactions. Related reads: 3. Bitcoin is not digital gold, and calling it that is the wrong sale Harvey has published research on both Bitcoin and gold, and his conclusion is direct: they are not substitutes. The “digital gold” framing, he argues, is a marketing pitch that doesn’t survive contact with the data. “Any asset that has got annualized volatility that is four times greater than the stock market is not a safe haven asset. So we’re done right there.” The case against Bitcoin-as-gold runs on three tracks. * Volatility: drawdowns approaching 70% are not consistent with a store-of-value thesis. * Tangibility: gold has industrial, technological, and artistic applications that put a floor under its price. Bitcoin does not. * The 51% attack vector. Harvey sketches a credible scenario in which a well-capitalized actor takes a large short position in Bitcoin derivatives, then spends what he estimates is a feasible sum to acquire 51% of network hash power, driving the price toward zero as they profit on the short. For gold, no equivalent attack exists. On quantum computing, the other threat frequently cited, he is notably less alarmed. The technology to build quantum-proof wallets already exists. “The quantum attack I’m not as worried about, other than if these old public keys are harvested, there’s going to be a big sale of Bitcoin that could drive the price down somewhat.” Bitcoin may still be valuable. Harvey does not dismiss it. But it is a complement to gold, not a replacement, and conflating the two misleads both asset classes. Related podcast and reads: 4. Stablecoins are the dollar rails for the agent-to-agent economy

    1 u 20 m
  6. How stablecoins saved the dollar, with Brent Johnson, Santiago Capital

    15 mei

    How stablecoins saved the dollar, with Brent Johnson, Santiago Capital

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ Brent Johnson has spent roughly 25 years in financial markets, and he has one of the cleanest frameworks afor thinking about the dollar. Back in 2018, when the "de-dollarization" narrative was just starting to simmer, he stepped onto the global stage with a theory that sounded almost arrogant at the time. He called it the Dollar Milkshake Theory. But one phrase that made me more curious was: “Stablecoins are a stealth weapon of empire. They are quietly re-dollarizing the world from the bottom up. They do something no military base or trade agreement ever could.” That is a strong phrase, but in this conversation, it was not used for effect. It was used as a description of what is already happening. The logic is straightforward. If people around the world want to hold dollars, but they want them in a form that is faster, cheaper, and easier to move than the legacy banking system allows, stablecoins become the obvious answer. And because dollar stablecoins have to be backed by dollar assets, that creates new demand for U.S. Treasury securities. Dollar Milkshake Theory, a framework he first laid out in 2018 that argued, against almost universal consensus at the time, that the U.S. dollar would strengthen precisely as the rest of the world printed more money. It was controversial then. It looks prescient now. The DXY is hovering around 99.66 even as gold has already crossed $5,000, which is, strangely, exactly what Brent said would happen. So I sat down with him to ask the next question. Now that the milkshake thesis has largely played out, what is the new chapter? And where do stablecoins, tariffs, a $39 trillion national debt, and a potential sovereign crisis all fit together? His answer was one of the most coherent explanations I have heard of, where the dollar actually goes from here, and why the U.S. government’s decision to let private companies issue dollar-backed stablecoins may be the smartest geopolitical move of the decade. About Brent: Brent Johnson is the founder and CEO of Santiago Capital, a San Francisco-based registered investment advisor founded in 2011. He holds an MBA in International Business from the Thunderbird School of Global Management and began his career as an auditor at Philip Morris before moving through Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette in New York City. He has spent roughly 25 years in global macro markets and is the creator of the Dollar Milkshake Theory, first articulated publicly in 2018. Alongside his RIA practice, he runs a standalone institutional research subscription at research.santiagocapital.com. In June 2025, he joined Monetary Metals' advisory board, advising on the distribution of gold-backed fixed-income products, including gold leases and bonds. He hosts a weekly show called Milkshakes, Markets and Madness on YouTube. 🚨We’re opening sponsorships for our next podcast series. Top guests. Serious listeners. Claim your spot → 🎧 Jump to the best parts * 02:37 Understanding the Dollar Milkshake Theory * 05:38 The Relationship Between Inflation and Dollar Strength * 08:27 The Role of Gold in the Dollar Milkshake Theory * 11:00 Stablecoins as a Stealth Weapon of Empire * 16:16 The Global Demand for Stablecoins * 21:51 Bitcoin’s Role in the Financial Landscape * 27:10 Potential Sovereign Debt Crisis * 32:29 Looking Ahead: Economic Outlook and Global Events Important Links * Website: https://santiagocapital.com/about/ * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brent-johnson-40a8461/ * YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChvlmVy6Q0a9uC1jRFRpp8Q * Dollar Milkshake Theory Watch or listen now:YouTube • Apple Podcasts 🙌 A note from 51: Start a research-driven growth campaign with us and reach 100k+ decision makers across digital assets and finance. Our biggest takeaways from this conversation: 1. The milkshake was never about the dollar being great, it was about everything else being worse When Brent first presented the Dollar Milkshake Theory in 2018, most people in macro were calling for dollar decline. The argument against him was simple: the U.S. had too much debt, was printing too much money, and the world was moving toward alternatives. He was not arguing against any of that. He was arguing that none of it mattered if everyone else was in worse shape. The name itself comes from the film There Will Be Blood, in which an oil executive tells a rival landowner that he does not need to buy the land to get the oil beneath it. He just puts his straw in from his side of the fence. “The United States has the straw. And when the rest of the world prints money, the United States sucks up all that capital into their own markets.” That is largely what happened over the following six years. The U.S. attracted more foreign capital than any other country in the world. The Fed raised rates from zero to five percent in under a year, something many observers said was impossible without breaking the economy. It did not break it, at least not in the way people expected. And through all of it, the dollar stayed stronger than almost anyone predicted. The most common misreading of the theory, Brent says, is that people thought he was predicting dollar strength at the expense of everything else. He was not. “I never said the dollar was going to go higher and everything else was going to collapse. I said the dollar would go higher, but gold would go higher, that U.S. equities would go higher, that U.S. dollar assets would go higher.” His original price targets were a DXY of 150 and gold at $5,000. Gold hit $5,000. The dollar never reached 150, it peaked around 114 in 2022 and currently sits near 99.66. By his own accounting, the gold call was a 400% return from where he made it; the dollar call was a 50-60% move. He never claimed the dollar would outperform gold. Most of his critics did not notice that distinction. The deeper point is the difference between relative strength and absolute purchasing power. The dollar can be losing value against real goods while simultaneously rising against every other currency. Both things are true at once. “You can have a rising dollar on a relative basis, but still have it lose purchasing power versus real things. And this is something that people need to understand, when I talk about a strong dollar, I don’t mean your purchasing power. What I mean is versus foreign currencies.” This matters enormously if you live outside the United States. When the dollar strengthens, every country that has to import goods or services dollar-denominated debt feels the squeeze, often violently. The U.S. middle class might feel richer on paper, while people in Turkey, Argentina, or Nigeria find that their savings have quietly been cut in half. Related podcast and reads: 2. Gold ultimately wins, but you still need dollars to operate right now Brent is not against gold. He thinks gold is the ultimate beneficiary of the global monetary system’s dysfunction. “The dollar doesn’t ultimately win. Gold ultimately wins. So for anybody who needs to hear me say that again, gold is the ultimate winner of the milkshake. But in the short term, you still need dollars to operate on the global stage.” The proof of this showed up in real time during the recent escalation in the Middle East. As the Strait of Hormuz disruptions sent oil prices sharply higher, gold and silver pulled back. So did Bitcoin. The reason was: countries that needed to buy now-expensive energy had to sell whatever they held to get dollars first. The mechanism was visible, live, in the market. “Those who needed to transact on the global stage had to sell their gold to get dollars to buy the oil that was now priced 50% higher than it was a month ago. And I think that’s a demonstration that to operate on the global stage, you still need dollars.” Gold going to $10,000 is still possible in Brent’s view. But a voluntary return to the gold standard is not. Governments will not willingly put financial handcuffs on themselves, because a gold standard limits how much they can spend, and politicians do not win elections by saying no. “If governments did go back to a gold standard, they would have to massively devalue their currencies against gold when they did it. A lot of people would lose all of their savings. And once they had that constraint, their gold holdings would put a restriction on how much money they could spend. But politicians get elected by saying yes.” If a gold standard ever comes back, Brent believes it will be forced on governments from the outside, not chosen. A reset after a crisis, not a planned reform. Related podcast and reads: 3. Stablecoins are not an escape from the dollar system; they are the dollar system, upgraded

    36 min.
  7. Why “DeFi is dead” and what replaces it with Sidney Powell, CEO of Maple Finance

    12 mei

    Why “DeFi is dead” and what replaces it with Sidney Powell, CEO of Maple Finance

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ In January 2026, Sidney Powell went on record with CoinDesk and said a high-profile on-chain credit default was coming. Three months later, Aave, one of the largest crypto lending platforms in the world, found itself sitting on up to $230M it might never get back, following the Kelp cascade. [Read CEO Notes] Sid didn’t predict Aave specifically. But he understood why something like it was inevitable. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Maple Finance, one of the biggest DeFi protocols. Maple has done more than $21B in loans under its newer model, with zero credit losses on overcollateralized lending since 2023. When I sat down with him, I wanted to understand two things: what actually went wrong at Aave, and why Maple had managed to avoid anything like it. The answers turned out to be the same: DeFi is dead. “My view was in saying DeFi is dead, that DeFi is this kind of niche product category with an insular community. That concept is dead... Over time, it won’t be referred to as DeFi. It’ll just be referred to as finance.” How Maple survived 2022: 2022 was when the idea of crypto lending almost died. The big names, Celsius, BlockFi, and Genesis, all collapsed. They’d been making loans backed by promises and assumptions rather than real collateral in real custody. When prices fell, the collateral wasn’t there. Most people looking at that wreckage concluded that crypto lending was done. Maple concluded the opposite. “Everybody was saying crypto lending was done. But we took the contrarian view that this is literally the oldest profession in finance, lending, and what are the odds it’s not going to be around in the next couple of years?” They rebuilt around collateralized loans, kept the legal structures that most of DeFi ignores, and waited. The competitors never came back. Maple did. By April 2026, it manages over $4B in assets. Monthly transfer volume is running at $9.6B. Active loans are at $2.4B, up 48% over 2025. About Sidney: Sidney Powell grew up in Australia, worked in securitization at a major bank, then became Treasurer at a commercial fintech lender. He’s been involved in more than a billion dollars in corporate bond issuance. He co-founded Maple in 2019 with Joe Flanagan. Under his leadership, the platform has facilitated more than $20B in total loan originations as of early 2026, with assets under management (AUM) reaching approximately $5B. Powell has positioned Maple as a key player in the "on-chain credit" sector, focusing on bringing high-grade institutional structures like automated margin calls and tri-party custody to the digital asset space. 🚨We’re opening sponsorships for our next podcast series. Top guests. Serious listeners. Claim your spot → 🎧 Jump to the best parts * 00:00 Why DeFi Matters * 02:37 DeFi Is Dead or Evolving * 04:21 What Happened with Kelp and Aave * 08:44 Can DeFi Handle Risk * 11:05 How Institutions Should View This Crisis * 14:36 Maple vs Aave Models * 19:12 Permission less vs Permissioned Finance * 22:13 Institutional Lending Explained * 27:19 Future of DeFi Architecture * 30:13 Regulation and the US Market * 32:16 Global Institutional Adoption * 34:44 What Comes Next for Maple * 36:22 Key Trends to Watch Important Links * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sidneypowell/ * Maple: https://maple.finance/about * X: https://x.com/syrupsid * Syrup: https://maple.finance/syrup * CfC St. Moriz: https://cfc-stmoritz.com/profiles/sidney-powell Watch or listen now:YouTube • Apple Podcasts 🙌 Work with us: Start a research-driven growth campaign and reach 100k+ decision makers across digital assets and finance. Our biggest takeaways from this conversation: 1. The problem with crypto lending was never the crypto part It was the lending part. Specifically, the parts that make lending work, who takes the first loss, what happens when collateral falls, and who you can go after if things go wrong, got skipped in the rush to make everything open and automatic. Ignoring these questions is why Celsius collapsed, why BlockFi collapsed, and why Aave is now working through hundreds of millions in potential bad debt. "More things can happen than will happen." Sidney explained the gap of Aave: Aave is built to handle falling collateral. When the value of what you’ve deposited drops, automated systems kick in and start selling it before the loan goes underwater. The whole thing depends on having enough time to do that. The Kelp DAO hack removed that time completely. “The asset was worth $100 one minute, and then roughly $80 the next. So it bypassed the level at which it could have been liquidated without a loss.” And because Aave doesn’t have contracts with its borrowers, anyone can deposit anything, no paperwork, there was nobody to go after once the damage was done. What made it worse: because Aave is designed to run itself with no human override, other users could see what was happening and made rational decisions that made things worse. They pulled their own collateral. They borrowed more while they still could. The platform wasn’t hacked. It just worked exactly as designed, in a situation nobody had fully planned for. “If I give you $100 of collateral and borrow $80 from you, if you default, I have a problem. I can either try and withdraw my surplus collateral from you, or I can try and borrow more from you. Ordinarily, if you’re having bad debt issues, you wouldn’t do that for me, but because Aave is an immutable protocol, users could do that.” Related podcast and reads: 2. The banks need Maple more than Maple needs them

    37 min.
  8. The $700T blueprint, with Robert Leshner, Co-Founder and CEO of Superstate

    28 apr

    The $700T blueprint, with Robert Leshner, Co-Founder and CEO of Superstate

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ Robert Leshner is one of the rare founders who built one of DeFi’s defining protocols, Compound, in 2017 and then walked away from it to do something harder. His pitch was simple: The crypto-native market is capped at $2T. The real prize is the $700T of stocks, bonds, real estate, and private credit still living in spreadsheets. Superstate is the rail he's building to move it. That’s why he built Superstate. Three years later, that thesis has become a reality and is building the market structure. From BlackRock to Morgan Stanley, all the major U.S. banks and asset managers have entered the space, and the total value of RWAs has crossed $55.7B (excluding stablecoin and repurchase agreement). “The ceiling for DeFi is too low if all we have are native tokens of other crypto projects. We need the $700T of stuff, of wealth, of assets, of ownership to make its way on-chain.” About Robert: Robert Leshner is a prominent entrepreneur and investor, serving currently as the CEO of Superstate, a SEC-registered asset tokenisation platform. In 2017, he also founded Compound, the DeFi lending protocol and grew it into one of the largest in crypto, with billions in deposits at peak. Superstate is now the issuer-led tokenization layer behind two on-chain Treasury and basis funds with roughly $1B in combined AUM and Opening Bell, the platform tokenizing the SEC-registered shares of NASDAQ-listed public companies. On March 24, Invesco took over portfolio management of Superstate’s USTB fund, a $967M tokenized Treasury vehicle. Three weeks later, Invesco invested in Superstate’s $82.5M Series B. This is the first time a global asset manager has plugged into someone else’s tokenization stack instead of building its own.In April 2026, By the data: The tokenised U.S. Treasuries market crossed $15B in the first quarter of 2026, with USTB now ranking among the 7 largest tokenised Treasury funds globally. NYSE, NASDAQ, Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance have all publicly committed to listing tokenized securities. The SEC’s Project Crypto initiative is drafting the rules that will define how regulated securities behave on blockchains. And Forward Industries (NASDAQ: FWDI), the largest Solana digital asset treasury company at 6.8M SOL, has ~8% of its public shares now living as tokens on Solana via Superstate’s Opening Bell, actively used as collateral on Kamino. 🚨We’re opening sponsorships for our next podcast series. Top guests. Serious listeners. Claim your spot → 🎧 Jump to the best parts 00:00 Why Institutions Came for Tokenization03:05 What SuperState Actually Does07:57 How SuperState Differs From Other Players12:50 Where We Are in the Tokenization Race17:54 Inside the Invesco Partnership22:12 What Tokenized Funds Unlock29:14 Opening Bell Explained32:16 How This Differs From ICOs34:07 Tokenized Shares as DeFi Collateral35:54 Regulation, Project Crypto and Clarity Act40:01 Message to Corporate Leaders Important Links * X: https://x.com/rleshner * Superstate: https://superstate.com/about * Compound: https://compound.finance/ * Opening Bell platform: https://superstate.com/opening-bell Watch or listen now:YouTube • Apple Podcasts 🙌 A note from 51: Start a research-driven growth campaign with us and reach 100k+ decision makers across digital assets and finance. Our biggest takeaways from this conversation: 1. Tokenization isn't a new asset class. It's a record-keeping change. Most people hear “tokenized stock” and picture a synthetic. A digital wrapper around a real share, sitting on a chain somewhere, with a startup holding the actual paper. Robert is quick to correct that framing. “The token on the blockchain is the same share of a company as the one that’s trading on the Nasdaq. And you can actually bridge shares back and forth between those two systems.” What Superstate does is operate as the public company's SEC-registered transfer agent. The transfer agent is the entity that legally records who owns what. Move that record onto a blockchain, and the token is the share. Same rights, same dividends, same proxy votes. You can move it from your brokerage account into a wallet on Solana, and back, and nothing about the underlying ownership changes. “The token on the blockchain is the same share of a company as the one that’s trading on the Nasdaq. And you can actually bridge shares back and forth between those two systems.” Why this upgrade: In traditional financial markets, transferring shares between parties, settling trades, and using assets as collateral all involve layers of intermediaries, delays, and batch processes tied to business-day cycles. Blockchain infrastructure eliminates much of this friction. As Robert explains, interest on tokenised T-bills through SuperState's USTB product accrues in real time, by the block, not by the business day. “Something as simple as transferring shares between two parties is just clunky in traditional markets. But trying to get between two wallets, it’s trivial. It’s like one click.” A watershed moment came with SuperState's recent partnership with Invesco, one of Wall Street's largest asset managers. It became the first major incumbent asset manager to run a product on SuperState's tokenisation platform. Invesco has also invested in SuperState. “What we’re swapping is our own products for someone else’s products... This is us finally opening our platform to those asset managers.” Related reads: 2. Superstate’s job is to lift it to $700T The whole industry has spent the last cycle arguing about which crypto-native chain wins. According to Robert, the crypto-native race is capped at $2T (with respect to Compound Finance) and he sees $700T as the real prize, which includes stocks, bonds, real estate, and private credit currently sitting in spreadsheets, paper contracts, and DTC databases. Right now, the total DeFi TVL is $83.27B and tokenised RWAs already sits at $55.7B (excluding stablecoin and repurchase agreement). And, the TAM is traditional finance. “The upper bound of DeFi is $700 trillion. If that doesn’t happen, the upper bound of DeFi is roughly the same as it was in 2019.” One of the important things I liked about Superstate is that they are trying to make sure his company is the regulated intermediary issuers use when they decide to bring their assets on-chain. The entire thesis sits or falls on whether off-chain securities meaningfully migrate. Related podcast and reads: 3. Native shares versus wrappers is the architectural choice

    41 min.
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