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

Marc Baumann
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We talk with digital asset, AI and technology leaders about what's next in finance and commerce. Subscribe to our newsletter & join 35k+ others:https://join.fiftyone.xyz/ www.51insights.xyz

  1. 16h ago

    193: Your deposits are lazy

    Hey, it’s Marc, I keep coming back to one uncomfortable thought from this week: Friction may be one of banking’s most valuable assets. Banks make money because deposits sit still. Now 3,283 banks want to make those deposits programmable, while AI is getting good enough to manage money without us. The Dallas Fed ran the numbers: make deposits just 10% more rate-sensitive and banks could lose roughly $700 billion of capacity to hold long-term assets. That’s the paradox nobody talks about. We’re building the fastest financial system in history on top of a banking model that depends on money moving slowly. And this week, both sides accelerated. In today’s issue: * bitcoin clears $80K after its best week since March 2023, * Nvidia prints a $96B quarter, state bankers associations draft a blockchain for their 3,283 member banks, * and the Trump family’s planned crypto trust bank reveals a 49% silent partner in Abu Dhabi. Let’s get into it. PS: Did we hit the bottom yet…? That’s the question I discussed this with with Anthony Bassili, President of Coinbase Asset Management: 📚 Boardroom Reads * Tokenized deposits could affect bank liquidity, maturity transformation (Dallas Fed, Aug 2026). The $700B number every bank board will hear this quarter, with the assumptions behind it. * Stablecoins Meet the Mundell-Fleming Trilemma (New York Fed, Aug 2026). From earlier this month: crisis-country wallets were 1.8% likelier to receive dollar stablecoins the week a currency crisis began. * Keynote remarks at Jackson Hole (Fed Chair Warsh, Aug 2026). The full text of the no-forward-guidance doctrine, 100 days into his term. * On-Chain Taxable Activity (Chainalysis, Aug 2026). $457B of taxable onchain activity in 2025; CARF reporting captures 14% of it. * The Bessent Bounce Does Not Tell the Full Story (Bloomberg Opinion, Aug 2026). Why bonds gave back the buyback rally within 48 hours and bitcoin didn’t. Bitcoin Trades the Treasury, Not the Halving Fiscal policy is the chart. Bitcoin broke $80,000 this week for the first time since May after closing its strongest week since March 2023. What’s happening: Last week Washington supplied the story: Treasury buybacks, the SEC rulebook, the White House summit. This week the market supplied the money. * Spot bitcoin ETFs absorbed $1.92B in the week ended Aug 22, their best week since October. BlackRock’s IBIT took $1.33B of it. Combined bitcoin and ether ETF inflows hit $2.6B, triple the prior week. * Short sellers lost a record $2.7B in a single day over $4B across the rally. * The bond market gave back the Bessent buyback move within 48 hours: the 30-year yield round-tripped to near a 19-year high. Bitcoin and gold kept their gains. Gross federal debt crossed $40 trillion this month. * Washington kept feeding the tape. Treasury launched “Operation Economic Outcast” against Iran on Monday, designating nearly 60 targets across oil, missile and cyber networks and calling crypto the regime’s sanctions-evasion “tool of choice.” Our read: the debasement trade and the sanctions trade point the same way. Bigger buybacks show a government managing its own borrowing costs; wider sanctions show banking access used as a policy weapon. Both strengthen the case for a neutral, scarce asset that now has regulated wrappers. The marginal bitcoin buyer is trading US fiscal policy more than adoption headlines. Between the lines: Kevin Warsh used his first Jackson Hole speech as Fed chair this morning to warn that inflation is still too high and that he will not tell markets what comes next: “We should not indulge a regime in which market participants are looking primarily to the Fed for their next trade.” A rally built on liquidity hopes now reports to a chair who refuses to feed them. Quick plug, then back to the news. Every crypto firm’s pipeline looks great in a week like this. That’s the trap. I’ve watched three cycles, and the firms that only market in good weeks buy their leads at the top. We build the machine that runs in every tape: positioning, research, campaigns, distribution to 100K+ decision-makers. Avalanche got 700+ qualified leads. BCG got 500+. Want one? Start here. Nvidia Makes Compute the New Revenue Line The other rail. Nvidia reported $96.2B in revenue for its July quarter on Wednesday, up 106% in a year. Jensen Huang’s one-liner: “Now, compute is revenue.” The details: * Data center revenue hit $89.0B, up 117%, on the Blackwell Ultra ramp. That is 92% of the whole company. * Guidance: $108B next quarter, above the $104B analysts expected, and it assumes zero data center sales to China. Huang forecast roughly 70% revenue growth for fiscal 2028. * CFO Colette Kress said Nvidia expects the top five hyperscalers to lift capex from about $800B this year to $1.3T next year. * Amazon and Nvidia announced plans for AWS to deploy 2 million additional Nvidia GPUs and adopt its new Vera CPU. * Nvidia returned $26B to shareholders in the quarter and still holds a $99B buyback authorization. Why it matters: One set of companies is rebuilding the infrastructure of intelligence; another is rebuilding the infrastructure of money. Nvidia shows where the economics accrue in the first: the rail owner keeps 75 cents of gross profit per dollar. Between the lines: Gross margin is guided down a point on memory costs, and Nvidia is helping finance its own demand through partnerships with BlackRock, Apollo, KKR and others designed to mobilize over $500B in mostly third-party capital. Huang says “the risk is low.” Vendor-adjacent financing at this scale is exactly where past capex booms got into trouble. Looking ahead: The crypto industry is already migrating toward the AI build-out. NYDIG sold its trading desk this week to focus on 3GW of data-center power. Miners are becoming landlords of compute. 3,283 Banks Get Drafted Onchain If you can’t ban it, fork it. Thirty-nine state bankers associations announced the BankChain Alliance on Tuesday: an industry-owned blockchain for tokenized deposits, stablecoins and automated settlement, targeting 2027. What’s happening: The member associations represent 3,283 banks with $21.8 trillion in combined assets. Former CFPB director Kathy Kraninger is interim chair. * Banks nationwide will be invited to take ownership stakes. A technology partner is still being selected. * It is the third bank-led network in play: The Clearing House’s onchain money project (backed by JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citi, BNY and Wells Fargo) and the Cari network of 30+ regional banks are already building. * The same day, two Dallas Fed economists priced what the technology could cost: if tokenized deposits make depositors 10% more rate-sensitive, banks’ capacity to carry long-term loans and securities could shrink by roughly $700B in 10-year equivalents. If money simply leaves 10% sooner, ~$580B. Back-of-the-envelope, by the authors’ own admission. Why it matters: The associations just conceded that deposits are going onchain; the only open question is whose chain. The Dallas Fed’s math explains the anxiety. Be smart: Instant transfers and programmability are what make tokenized deposits competitive. They also dissolve the stickiness bank lending is built on. Smart contracts and AI agents can move deposits without the depositor lifting a finger. The tool that keeps banks in the game also shortens their funding. Between the lines: No individual bank has publicly committed. No governance, no funding, no tech stack. And three rival consortia are now rebuilding, onchain, the fragmentation problem Swift solved 50 years ago with messaging. Looking ahead: Watch whether any top-20 bank joins BankChain, or whether this stays a community-bank defense pact against the Clearing House giants. A Wyoming Bank Beat JPMorgan Out the Door 🚨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. For CEOs, board members, and heads of strategy at banks, FMIs, asset managers, and custodians. 📅 16 September, 10am EST 🚨 Space is limited. RSVP to secure your spot. The First Family’s Bank Has a Silent Partner Know your co-owner. CNBC reported Thursday that a group behind Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE’s national security adviser, owns 49% of the holding company for the Trump family’s proposed national crypto trust bank. The details: * StringZ Holding RSC holds 49% of WLTC Holdings; a Trump family entity holds 38%. WLTC is the parent of World Liberty Trust Company, which won preliminary conditional OCC approval on Aug 14 to issue and custody the ~$4B USD1 stablecoin under federal supervision. * The OCC’s published decision confirms StringZ as an investor with signed commitments not to influence the bank. It does not name Tahnoon or disclose the stake. * Tahnoon’s group already put $500M into World Liberty Financial in January 2025, four days before the inauguration, for a 49% stake. That deal directed $263M to Trump family entities, per the president’s own financial disclosure. * Tahnoon also chairs G42, the UAE’s AI champion, while Washington decides the UAE’s access to advanced US chips. Why it matters: This is one of the stories keeping the Clarity Act stuck. The bill’s ethics language, restricting officials from profiting from digital assets, exists because of this venture. The Sept 15 cloture vote needs 60, meaning at least seven Democrats if every Republican holds. Every disclosure like this raises their price. For institutions there’s a second layer: USD1 would be a federally supervised stablecoin whose ownership runs through a foreign national-security adviser. Compliance teams will read that cap table before treasurers touch the coin. Looking ahead: Sept 15 is the count that matters. Watch whether Democrats demand divestiture language as the toll. ⚡ Quick Hits * The SEC

  2. 1d ago

    The Next Trillion Dollar Crypto Opportunity with Anthony B. (Coinbase Asset Management)

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “The next cycle is gonna be defined by on-chain asset management and what does it mean to be a fiduciary for your customers on chain.” My guest this week is Anthony Bassili, who runs Coinbase Asset Management. He spent a decade at BlackRock selling institutions the most traditional products in finance, the iShares pension business. Now he sells the same institutions Bitcoin and digital asset strategies. We recorded this deep in the bear market, with Bitcoin down roughly 50% from its November 2025 peak of $126,000. His big idea is simple. The last cycle settled whether a token is a security. The next one settles a harder question: what does it mean to manage other people’s money on-chain? Whoever answers that first gets to manage the money. About Anthony Bassili: Anthony Bassili runs Coinbase Asset Management, the institutional asset management arm of Coinbase. He spent ten years at BlackRock in the iShares pension business before joining Coinbase in 2021 with a simple pitch: pensions should hold Bitcoin. He led Coinbase’s institutional business before moving over to run the asset manager, where his team’s backgrounds span BlackRock, Millennium, AQR, and Bridgewater. He is the author of “Get Off Zero,” a paper urging every investor to hold at least a small Bitcoin allocation. He is active on X at @smartestbeta. “You’re not gonna catch the low. You just need to start allocating and do it consistently over time.” Why this matters: Bitcoin peaked at $126,000 in November 2025 and is down about 50%. The October 10 leverage wipeout took out $25+ billion and started this bear market. Meanwhile, the incumbents aren’t waiting for the recovery: JPMorgan announced vaults on Kinexys, Grayscale announced on-chain asset management, Bitwise is in, and Anthony expects Fidelity and everyone else to follow. The fight over who gets to be a fiduciary on-chain is starting now, in the bear market, exactly when nobody is watching. This is the map. This ad could belong to you. 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline and revenue. We position you among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers. 🎯 Jump to the best parts 00:00 The Next Big Crypto Opportunity01:00 Anthony B.'s Journey from BlackRock to Coinbase02:11 Is This a Good Time to Buy Bitcoin?07:16 The Fat Protocol Thesis Is Dead?08:36 Where Does Crypto Value Actually Accrue?12:00 How Bitcoin Yield Works18:07 Coinbase's Stablecoin Credit Strategy23:08 Managing Onchain Credit Risk26:21 The Future of Onchain Asset Management32:56 What Regulators Need to Fix35:08 When Bitcoin Became a Real Asset Class39:23 Lightning Round40:03 What Anthony B. Is Excited About for 202740:15 Stablecoin Credit vs Tokenized Treasuries40:19 Crypto's Most Underrated Narrative41:51 Where to Learn More Important Links * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonybassili/ * Coinbase Asset Management: https://www.coinbase.com/institutional/asset-management * X: https://x.com/smartestbeta Watch or listen now: YouTube • Apple Podcasts 🔒 The full breakdown is for subscribers Our biggest takeaways from this conversation 1. The next cycle is on-chain asset management The last four years were spent arguing whether a token is a security. The Clarity Act is codifying the answer. Anthony says the next fight is bigger: what does it mean to be a fiduciary on-chain? “The next cycle is gonna be defined by on-chain asset management and what does it mean to be a fiduciary for your customers on chain.” * The test case is DeFi vaults. Lenders park stablecoins permissionlessly, and the dollars get allocated against collateral through smart-contract rules written by engineers. Is that discretionary asset management, with fiduciary duties and custody rules? Or just technology, user beware? Nobody knows yet. * Hester Peirce’s recent comments on vaults opened the dialogue without settling it. Anthony’s read: that alone is progress. “We did not think that we’d get that kind of treatment back in the Gensler era.” * The incumbents aren’t waiting: JPMorgan announced vaults on Kinexys, Grayscale announced on-chain asset management, Bitwise is in. “Everyone recognizes in the asset management community from BlackRock down that we need vault infrastructure.” * Expect the old fight to reignite: “not your keys, not your coins” collides directly with “if you want risk management, I need discretion over some of your assets.” What to do with this: vaults are a settled technology and an unsettled legal category. Watch the fiduciary framework, not the tech. That’s where the next cycle’s winners get decided. Related reads:→ Banks went onchain 2. Coinbase’s stablecoin fund is 80% off-chain In April 2026, CBAM launched CUSHY, its stablecoin high-yield credit strategy. Investors subscribe with stablecoins, and the fund shares are tokenized by Superstate on Base, Solana, and Ethereum mainnet. The crypto-native wrapper hides a very traditional core, and that’s the point. “Everything in crypto is floating rate.” * On-chain and off-chain credit are two parallel worlds that haven’t intersected. On-chain: floating rate, transparent, crypto-backed (staking, lending pools, basis-trade products). Off-chain: fixed rate, longer duration, wrapped in funds that don’t work on-chain. * There isn’t enough high-quality credit on-chain to fill a fund that wants to be billions. So the portfolio is 80% traditional structured credit (CLOs, trade finance, asset-backed securities, receivables) and 20% tokenized, diversified across hundreds of names with 90 to 100 day liquidity. * The core tenet: only work with originators, like Apollo, that are on a tokenization pathway. When the two worlds connect, CBAM can hold the tokenized or the traditional version of the same asset and arb the spread between them. * And on-chain leverage cuts both ways. Looped positions in tokenized credit can unwind and force selling: “I may choose to just wait for the unwind to happen in the on-chain market and then go in and buy everything at a discount.” What to do with this: treat the 80/20 as a live gauge of tokenization’s real progress. When that ratio flips, the two credit worlds have actually merged. Until then, the alpha is in straddling both. Related reads:→ Same loans, better rails: the tokenized private credit opportunity 3. Tokens are cheap equity, and that’s why protocols don’t earn Two weeks before this episode we published our case that the fat protocol thesis is dead: ten years on, value hasn’t accrued to the base layers. Ethereum earned about $1,500 from Robinhood’s launch on $600 to 700 million of daily volume. I put the thesis to a man whose employer is the strongest counterargument, the biggest distribution platform in crypto. “It’s very cheap equity. It’s probably the lowest cost of capital financing you could utilize.” * His explanation of why protocols don’t earn is the sharpest I’ve heard: tokens aren’t a business model, they’re financing. Protocols pay customer acquisition costs with tokens created out of thin air, granting distribution platforms hundreds of millions in tokens for priority access to customers. * TVL grows, usage grows, customers grow. But “where does the revenue switch turn on?” The moment it does, a competitor with a fresh token undercuts you. * And the thesis eats itself: crypto was supposed to be a public good, nearly free. A protocol that captures enormous value stops being the thing it claimed to be. * The direction of travel: “it’s the distribution platforms who have the customer relationship” that accrue value. His honest caveat: jury’s still out. Some once crypto-native protocols are now integrating into fintechs and brokerages serving hundreds of millions of customers. What to do with this: when you underwrite a token, ask who pays the revenue and who owns the customer. If the answer to both is “someone else,” you’re holding the financing, not the business. Related reads:→ There Won’t Be Another Cycle: the fat protocol thesis is dead 4. How Bitcoin pays you without being sold

    The Next Trillion Dollar Crypto Opportunity with Anthony B. (Coinbase Asset Management)

  3. Aug 21

    192: Washington ships

    Hey, it’s Marc. Big week for crypto, at least in the US. In today’s issue: * Trump hosts crypto’s CEOs as bitcoin rips 21%, * the SEC proposes its first crypto rulebook, * Citi moves bitcoin custody next to the bonds, * and Swift’s ledger carries its first live bank money. One theme runs through all of it: Washington stopped promising this week and started shipping. The market paid up front. Let’s get into it. 📚 Boardroom Reads * Regulation Crypto Assets, proposed rule (SEC). The primary text: $5M over four years for startups, $75M a year for reporting issuers. * GENIUS Act stablecoin rules (US Treasury). Knowingly taking part in unlawful stablecoin issuance: up to $1M per violation and five years in prison. * Q2 2026 Signals Report (Fidelity Digital Assets). Network activity now splits from price on Ethereum and Solana. * 2026 Stablecoin Momentum Report (Zero Hash). Active stablecoin users up 146% in a year; volumes up 690%, per its platform data. * 2026 Institutional Investor Survey (Coinbase and EY-Parthenon). 351 institutions polled; money is moving to regulated products and tighter governance. Quick plug, then back to the news. Weeks like this are won years earlier. I’ve been through three bear markets. Every time, firms cut marketing first. And every time, the ones who kept building owned the next run. We build that machine with you: positioning, research, campaigns, distribution to 100K+ decision-makers. Avalanche and Boston Consulting Group got thousands of them. Want one? Start here. Trump Turns the White House Into a Trading Floor Buy the room. Trump hosted crypto and exchange CEOs at the White House on Wednesday and told Congress to pass a “fair version” of the Clarity Act. Bitcoin ended the week near $77K, up about 20%. What’s happening: The rally started hours earlier, at the Treasury. On Wednesday morning the department said it will at least double its long-end bond buybacks, from a $2B cap to $4B or more per operation, one day after the 30-year yield hit 5.34%, its highest since 2007. * Bitcoin jumped from about $64K to $69,749 in under 12 hours, then past $72K on Thursday. Roughly $3B in crypto shorts were liquidated across the market, the biggest squeeze of 2026. * Spot bitcoin ETFs took in $517M on Wednesday, their largest day since early May, then $606M Thursday, per Farside. Ether ETFs added $220M Thursday, their strongest day since October. * Strategy rose 12%, Coinbase 9%. Ether jumped 10%. * In the room: Armstrong, Garlinghouse, Tenev, the Winklevoss twins, Nasdaq’s Friedman, ICE’s Sprecher. Also in the room: SEC Chair Atkins and CFTC Chair Selig. Why it matters: The marginal bitcoin buyer now reads the Treasury calendar, and Washington runs the liquidity desk. Between the lines: The bigger buybacks are temporary: they run September 9 through November 4, and Treasury has yet to publish the final schedule. One Point’s Peter Boockvar: “This is NOT a debt paydown.” Meanwhile the Clarity Act is still stuck on ethics language about officials profiting from digital assets. Punchline: A two-line Treasury notice moved bitcoin more than any halving narrative this year. The SEC Writes Crypto Its Own Rulebook Minimum effective dose. The SEC proposed “Regulation Crypto Assets” on Tuesday. It is the agency’s first rulebook written just for crypto, and it landed four days after the SEC cancelled the meeting where it was meant to vote. The details: * Two ways to raise money without registering: up to $5M over four years for startups, and up to $75M every 12 months for issuers that publish financials and keep reporting. * A safe harbor lets a token break free of its original investment contract. After that, the token itself is no longer a security. Chair Atkins called the package a “minimum effective dose” and credited Hester Peirce’s 2020 idea. * Qualifying offerings would be exempt from state registration rules; state antifraud powers stay. Comments run 60 days from the August 21 Federal Register notice. * Same week: Treasury proposed its GENIUS Act rules on who may issue and sell stablecoins in the US, with comments due October 19. And Comptroller Gould promised final OCC GENIUS rules by November. Why it matters: Last week we wrote that the agencies move on a faster clock than Congress. This week they lapped it. The SEC, Treasury, OCC, and CFTC all have live crypto rules in motion while the Clarity Act waits for its September 15 vote. If the $75M exemption survives, one big reason to launch a token offshore goes away. Useful shorthand for meetings: the SEC covers token sales. Treasury and the OCC cover stablecoins. Only the Clarity Act decides who polices trading. Looking ahead: September 15 is a cloture vote on the motion to proceed. Even with every Republican on board, it needs at least seven Democrats. Watch the ethics fight, then the count. Citi Puts Bitcoin Next to the Bonds One vault. Citi confirmed it will hold bitcoin for institutional clients later this year. The service sits inside Custody+, its new custody platform. What’s happening: The service starts with bitcoin and runs on Citi’s own digital-asset stack. It has been in the works for close to three years. No exact date yet, and no other assets named. * Custody+ serves clients in 100+ markets, 62 of them on Citi’s own network. Citi says it spends over $2B a year on the platform. * More banks are lining up. Morgan Stanley applied for a trust charter for crypto custody in February. NYSE is building a tokenized stock platform with Citi and BNY. * The unlock was regulatory. Once the SEC scrapped SAB 121, banks no longer had to carry client crypto on their own balance sheets. Why it matters: Custody was the moat for crypto-native firms. That moat is closing. When the bank that holds your bonds can hold your bitcoin too, the extra custodian relationship goes away. So does one of the last excuses for a zero allocation. Punchline: Coinbase Custody’s biggest competitor used to be self-custody. Now it’s the client’s existing bank. Two Banks Put Real Money on Swift’s Ledger Old pipes, new rails. Standard Chartered and HSBC executed the first live cross-border transaction on Swift’s blockchain ledger on Wednesday. The system went live only six weeks ago. What’s happening: The two banks swapped payment messages over Swift’s ledger. Each bank booked the result as tokenized deposits on its own system. The ledger matched and netted the obligations. The money then settled through the normal channels. * The ledger is EVM-compatible and built on Hyperledger Besu. Swift runs the shared workflow. Each bank keeps its own records. * 17 banks across six continents are in the pilot, including BNP Paribas, BNY, Citi, DBS, MUFG, UBS, and Wells Fargo. * HSBC’s Lewis Sun: bank-issued digital money can be “interoperable across banks... while maintaining the integrity and regulatory oversight of the existing financial ecosystem.” Why it matters: Swift doesn’t need to win the design debate on tokenized deposits. It needs every bank’s version to talk to the others. That’s the same trick it pulled on payment messages 50 years ago. And for bank plumbing, first live use six weeks after launch is fast. Between the lines: No amount, currency, or corridor was disclosed. Final settlement stayed on the old rails. The ledger carried the workflow; the money moved the old way. That is the point of the design, and its current ceiling. Looking ahead: The insurgent version arrived a day earlier. N3XT, the new Wyoming-chartered bank from Signature Bank’s founders, won approval on Tuesday to let its USD deposit tokens move beyond its own walls: to non-customers and foreign counterparties, 24/7. Swift orchestrates the old rails; N3XT skips them. If more bank pairs go live on Swift’s ledger by year-end, the incumbents’ version wins. If they don’t, watch Wyoming. Related: SWIFT builds blockchain with 30+ banks ⚡ Quick Hits * Tether completed its first full financial audit: KPMG issued an unqualified opinion and confirmed a $6.8B reserve surplus as of December 2025. * World Liberty Financial won preliminary conditional OCC approval for a national trust bank to issue USD1, the Trump family’s ~$4B stablecoin, under federal supervision. * Trump said the CFTC is working to bring Hyperliquid onshore “in a fully compliant fashion”; HYPE jumped 20%. * Bank Leumi tapped Galaxy to offer crypto trading, the first of Israel’s major banks to do so. * Securitize launched a tokenized high-yield bond fund subadvised by Neuberger Berman, the $230B fixed-income platform’s first tokenized mandate, across four chains. * Injective’s institutional affiliate registered with the SEC as a transfer agent for tokenized-securities recordkeeping. * The CFTC asked for comment on listing AI compute derivatives, with CME eyeing an October launch. * Coinbase added 50x crypto perps to its Base app, routed through Hyperliquid. * Kalshi filed with the CFTC to list copper perpetual futures, pushing its perps business beyond crypto into metals. * Deel partnered with Mesh to run stablecoin payouts for its global workforce clients. 💰 Money Moves * Metaplanet is investing 2,100 BTC plus cash, about $134.6M, to take ~96% of Nasdaq-listed Super League. The firm becomes “Superplanet,” its US bitcoin treasury arm. SLE closed up ~50%. * Ripple Prime raised $275M in its first senior notes, rated BBB by KBRA, to expand US clearing and prime brokerage. * FalconX and Ethena launched a $1B warehouse financing facility that will put USDe backing assets to work in overcollateralized institutional credit. * HIVE’s BUZZ HPC signed a five-year AI cloud deal worth about $350M with an unnamed investment-grade customer. It projects ~$70M a year in revenue once 2,016 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs come online in Q4. Bitcoin balance sheets keep turning into operating businesses. Treasuries buy listings, miners sell compute, stableco

  4. Aug 20

    The $2T market still running on spreadsheets

    Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “Now my balance sheet as an originator drops from a week’s worth of production to one loan’s worth of production.” Mike Manning, Head of Institutional Finance, Ava Labs That is the most useful way I have heard someone explain the promise of onchain private credit. Private credit has grown to roughly $2 trillion. Yet many facilities still run on spreadsheets, monthly reports, emailed PDFs, and weekly funding cycles. An originator may make a loan today and wait days for the money that funds it. I sat down with Juan Montero, co-founder and CEO of Fence, Anant Matai, Investments & Product at Grove, and Mike Manning, Head of Institutional Finance at Ava Labs. We talked about what changes when the loan and the money move on the same rails, why most tokenization still stops at the wrapper, and what code should never be trusted to decide. This is a playbook for building working private-credit rails, not a podcast about putting old assets inside new tokens. This ad could belong to you. 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline and revenue. We position you among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers. Why this matters now The first wave of tokenization changed the ownership wrapper. A fund share or bond became a token, but the underlying loans, servicing, covenants, and cash movements often stayed in the old system. The second wave is trying to change the operating model. A loan is created digitally. Its legal documents point to an authoritative record. Eligibility and covenant rules can be checked continuously. Repayment can arrive in digital cash and map back to that exact loan. That distinction separates a faster transfer rail from a faster credit business. Our 51 Insights report estimates that working rails can compress funding from 5 to 15 days to 1 to 3 days, distributions from T+5 to T+30 to near real time, and refinancing from 4 to 8 weeks to 1 to 2 weeks. The loan does not become safer because it is onchain. The capital around it can move with less waiting and less clerical work. About the guests * Juan Montero is co-founder and CEO of Fence. The company builds operating infrastructure for asset-backed finance, from loan onboarding and borrowing-base calculations to covenants, cash flows, and reporting. Fence says it administers about $1.5 billion across live facilities. * Anant Matai works across investments and product at Grove, an institutional credit protocol backed by Sky. Grove allocates onchain capital to tokenized credit and provides financing against eligible digital assets. “The lenders are here ... what we’re really looking for is that end to end originators to originate assets that are on chain and borrow against them on chain.” * Mike Manning is Head of Institutional Finance at Ava Labs, which develops the Avalanche network. He previously led blockchain and digital-currency work at Amazon and held roles at Provenance and Symbiont. “This is a settlement and operational technology. It’s not a judgment technology.” The discussion was part of Same Loans, Better Rails: The Institutional Rebuild of Private Credit, presented by 51 Insights and Avalanche. Chapters 00:00 The $2 Trillion Private Credit Problem00:56 Meet the Panel02:38 Why Private Credit Still Runs on Spreadsheets06:38 Blockchain Without the Hype09:44 Bringing Institutional Credit Onchain12:41 Tokenization vs Onchain Lifecycle Management15:04 The Money Rail Meets the Asset Rail17:28 How Banks Save 80% in Operational Costs19:06 Can Blockchain Prevent Double Pledging?21:59 Is Regulation Holding Blockchain Back?25:01 Why Banks Will Adopt This26:50 Which Blockchain Should Institutions Use?29:00 What Really Needs to Go Onchain?31:56 The Future of Onchain Credit34:13 Final Thoughts Important links * Event page and guest details * 51 Insights report: The tokenized private credit opportunity * Fence case study: BBVA and Payflow * Grove Allocator * Grove’s $250 million Avalanche deployment target * Avalanche for institutions 1. The wrapper is not the product Thesis: A tokenized claim is useful. A digitally native loan lifecycle changes the economics. Mike drew a clean line between putting an ownership wrapper onchain and moving issuance, servicing, covenants, repayment, and settlement onto the same system. “Asset-backed finance and securitization is composable finance without a composable stack.” A wrapper gives investors a new way to hold an asset. It does not automatically change how the loan is originated, checked, funded, serviced, or enforced. * The underlying loan needs a durable digital identity. * The credit agreement needs machine-readable eligibility, covenant, and waterfall rules. * Cash movements need to reconcile to the same loan record. * The legal documents need to say which record controls ownership. What to do with this: When someone pitches a tokenized credit product, ask where the underlying loan, covenants, servicing events, and repayments live. If the answer is still email, PDF, and spreadsheet, the token changed the wrapper, not the operating model. Related read: The tokenized private credit opportunity 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline. Win in digital assets. We produce institutional-grade research that helps digital asset companies own a category, then distribute it to 100,000+ decision-makers. Let’s talk. 2. Capital velocity is the business case Thesis: The most valuable output is not a token. It is less time between creating an eligible loan and receiving the capital that funds it. In a weekly borrowing-base process, an originator may carry days of new loans on its own balance sheet. If each loan enters the facility as soon as it passes the agreed rules, that inventory can fall sharply. “Now my balance sheet as an originator drops from a week’s worth of production to one loan’s worth of production.” “It turns a capital intensive model into a capital light model.” Juan used a Fence facility with BBVA as the proof point. Fence’s published case study says the system handles 100,000 transactions a month, reduced interest expense by about 30%, and increased the advance rate by more than 10%. Fence separately reports up to 80% lower operating overhead and up to 40% lower cost of capital across clients. These are company-reported outcomes and should be read that way. What to do with this: Measure idle funding days, reconciliation hours, advance rates, and the cost of carrying unfunded loans. Those numbers tell you whether new rails changed the business. Related read: Inside JPMorgan’s $3T tokenization machine 3. One ledger does not stop every double pledge Thesis: A ledger can prevent two claims against one digital asset only when that asset is the authoritative legal record from origination. The panel discussed the alleged double and triple pledging in the collapses of First Brands and Tricolor. A shared record can make duplicate claims visible, but only inside the system that everyone recognizes. “You can prevent double pledging of an asset once that it is on chain, but then the question is, well, how do I know the asset that’s on chain is the original one?” A digital twin can still be pledged on one chain, another chain, and a traditional facility. A signature can prove who submitted a record. It cannot prove that the offchain asset exists or that no competing claim sits elsewhere. * Origination must create the first authoritative asset record. * Legal documents must define control and priority. * All relevant lenders need access to the same ownership state. * Servicing data and cash need to reconcile to the asset continuously. What to do with this: Ask which record has legal priority, whether the same receivable can still exist offchain, and what happens when a servicer or borrower disputes the data. Related read: DTCC’s $20T October debut 4. Lenders are ready. Originators are the bottleneck Thesis: Capital is already willing to move onchain. The missing piece is a deeper supply of loans that are created, funded, and serviced onchain from the start. “The lenders are here ... what we’re really looking for is that end to end originators to originate assets that are on chain and borrow against them on chain.” Grove shows the allocator side of the market. As of August 2026, its site shows $2.80 billion in TVL and 16 active allocations. Its first Sky mandate put more than $1 billion into Janus Henderson’s JAAA strategy. On Avalanche, Grove announced a $250 million deployment target, which is different from saying the full amount has already been deployed. The harder step is moving beneath the fund token. Originators need loan data, documents, controls, servicing events, and payment rails that lenders can rely on without rebuilding the deal by hand. What to do with this: Build the allocator roadmap around originators who can create a legally native loan record and keep it current. Separate capital allocated to tokenized wrappers from capital funding digitally native loans. Related read: Same loans, better rails 5. Code should run operations, not judge credit Thesis: Smart contracts can execute the agreed rules. They should not decide whether a borrower deserves capital. “Code should do ninety nine percent, we should flag that one percent.” “This is a settlement and operational technology. It’s not a judgment technology.” There is plenty to automate: eligibility checks, concentration limits, payment status, waterfalls, borrowing bases, and defined covenants. Future-receivables facilities are especially clean examples. A missed payment can remove a receivable from the borrowing base, while a digital-cash repayment maps to that loan and releases capital for the next one. Underwriting, audited accounts, change-of-control analysis, bespoke waivers, and enforcement remain human work. The system also needs a controlled way to handle exceptions. A rigid smart contract that cannot process a sensible waiver creates a new operating problem. W

    The $2T market still running on spreadsheets

  5. Aug 14

    191: Goldman didn't buy bitcoin

    Hey, it’s Marc. In today’s issue: * Goldman pays up to $2.25B for an income-ETF shop, * Fidelity turns staking into a dividend, * Washington’s agencies lap Congress, * and stablecoins ride the digital pound’s test rails. One theme runs through all of it: nobody bought exposure this week. Everybody bought income. Let’s get into it. PS: This week, we’re testing a new format. Simpler, lighter, sharper. Tell us how you like it at the bottom of the newsletter. Goldman Buys the Yield, Not the Coin Coupon clippers. Goldman Sachs agreed to acquire NEOS Investments for up to $2.25B in cash and equity, its second ETF deal this year. What’s happening: NEOS, founded in 2022, runs $30B across 19 options-based income ETFs. The one everyone’s watching is BTCI, its bitcoin high-income fund: $1B+ in assets, under 4% of the deal, and an advertised annualized distribution rate around 27%. * Bitcoin trades near $64K, about half its October high. * Ether is down about 37% since January. The 10-year pays 4.65%. * Derivative-income ETFs are already a $180B category, growing 70%+ a year since 2021, per Morningstar data cited by Goldman. When the price stops paying, investors want the asset to. Why it matters: Goldman filed its own bitcoin premium income ETF in April. It never launched. Four months later, it agreed to pay up to $2.25B for the firm that got there first. In ETFs, track record and assets compound. Buying two years of head start beats building. BlackRock’s rival bitcoin income fund launched in June and holds $59M. BTCI holds $1B+. It’s rare to watch BlackRock lose a category, and Goldman is paying to keep it that way. Between the lines: BTCI’s payout comes from selling options against bitcoin’s price, and part of each distribution can be your own capital coming back. The advertised rate is ~27%; the one-year total return was about minus 42%. When someone quotes a crypto income ETF’s yield, ask for total return. Punchline: Wall Street figured out how to charge active fees on a passive asset. Beta compressed to a few basis points; a 27% distribution supports a 0.99% expense ratio. The product being sold is changing from the price to the paycheck. 🚨 Quick plug, then back to the news. The Goldman story is really a distribution story. We run the smaller version of that trade for clients every week: 100K+ digital-asset readers, 75% of them decision-makers, the same research that goes into this brief pointed at your category. It produced thousands of qualified leads for clients like BCG, MoonPay or Avalanche. If your pipeline needs a head start you’d rather not build from zero, here’s how we run it. Fidelity makes ether pay a dividend Staking claims. Fidelity filed to let its $898M ether ETF stake up to 100% of holdings and pay rewards out as quarterly cash distributions. The details: * The fund keeps 85% of gross staking rewards; 15% goes to the sponsor, custodians, and node operators Blockdaemon, Figment, and Galaxy. * Staking starts only once the SEC declares the filing effective. * Grayscale has staked its ether ETP since October; 21Shares pays distributions; BlackRock’s ETHA still doesn’t stake. * Meanwhile: a record 34% of all ETH is now staked, while ether fell a third from January. And Galaxy’s $125M on-chain yield fund went live with $100M of SharpLink’s ETH treasury, committed in May. Why it matters: The ETF wrapper keeps absorbing reasons to hold crypto directly. First custody, then options, now the staking coupon, paid in cash like a dividend. Between the lines: The headline fee stays 0.25%, but 15% of staking rewards is a second toll that never shows up in the expense ratio. At today’s rates, that’s roughly another 0.4% a year if the fund stakes everything. Looking ahead: Expect every US ether ETF to file the same feature within months. “The fund pays you” is a better pitch than “the fund tracks ether,” especially with ether down 37% this year. Compare staking ETFs on the reward split, not the expense ratio. The split is where the real fee hides. Washington’s Agencies Stopped Waiting Two clocks. Three moves in five days put the regulators ahead of Congress. What’s happening: * Majority Leader Thune filed cloture on the Clarity Act, setting a 60-vote test on September 15 to open floor debate. * The SEC scheduled a vote for this morning on proposing “Regulation Crypto Assets,” its first crypto-specific rulemaking. Then it cancelled the meeting hours before the gavel. No reason posted, no new date. * The OCC reported 40 new bank charter applications in 18 months, 13 from digital-asset firms, Kraken and Revolut among them. Comptroller Gould: firms dealing in digital assets “should have a path to becoming a national bank.” Why it matters: Galaxy just cut the Clarity Act’s 2026 odds from 50% to 30%. So the agencies are building their own regime instead: a proposed offering rule at the SEC, a charter pipeline at the OCC. For a company, a charter in 2026 beats a statute in 2028. Between the lines: This morning’s pulled meeting is the tell. Agency timelines can vanish overnight, and what an agency gives, the next administration can take back. Rules reverse; statutes stick. The rational play is the one the industry is making: take the charter now, keep pushing the bill. Looking ahead: September 15 needs seven Democrats. Watch that count. Related: 187: Wall Street flipped the switch Stablecoins ride the digital pound Plumbing, not an app. Polygon Labs published details of its test inside the Bank of England’s Digital Pound Lab, run with NOBO Finance and Dun & Bradstreet. What’s happening: In the experiment, an exporter gets paid on stablecoin rails while the UK importer settles in simulated digital pounds on the Bank’s test system. One payment, both forms of money. No real funds moved; Phase 2 wrapped in July, and findings feed the Bank and Treasury’s digital pound decision later this year. Why it matters: Central banks spent years framing CBDCs and stablecoins as rivals. The Bank of England’s lab just let a participant team run them in the same payment. That’s a quiet shift. Between the lines: The Bank’s June draft rules point the same way: a temporary £40B issuance guardrail per systemic sterling stablecoin, and up to 70% of reserves in short-term gilts. Punchline: The UK design is coming into focus. The central bank settles the core; regulated stablecoins do the reach. A digital pound as plumbing, not an app. ⚡ Quick Hits * Nasdaq agreed to acquire LeveL Markets, the third-largest US ATS, anchoring a new always-on markets unit. * MUFG will test real-time settlement of Japanese government bond repos on Canton, a ~$1.7T market. * Wintermute registered as a US broker-dealer and plans ~$1B of AI and trading-infrastructure spend, per Bloomberg. * Securitize reported Q2 volume of $5.3B, up 147%, in its first earnings report as a public company. * The US Treasury sanctioned Iran-linked exchanges Shelbit and Aban Tether for moving IRGC funds. * The Bank of Russia cleared bitcoin, ether, and USDT for exchange trading, with a proposed retail cap near $3,600/year per broker. * Bybit secured a US court injunction freezing assets from its $1.5B hack after suing North Korea and Lazarus directly. * Anchorpoint, the Standard Chartered-led venture, began rolling out HKDAP, Hong Kong’s first regulated local-dollar stablecoin. * Coinbase made Abu Dhabi its global tokenization hub after winning an ADGM permission covering tokenized securities. 💰 Money Moves * Erebor, the crypto-friendly bank backed by Palmer Luckey, is in talks to raise $1.5B at a $9.5B valuation, six months after launch, per the FT. * NVIDIA partnered with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman, and KKR on platforms targeting $500B+ of third-party capital for AI compute. MoUs for now, not committed capital. The pitch: treat the GPU like a building that pays rent. * Morgan Stanley launched an initiative to facilitate ~$1.5T of US innovation-infrastructure financing over ten years. * Riot Platforms signed a 20-year, $9.1B lease for 191MW of AI capacity with a frontier AI lab, which Bloomberg reports is Anthropic. Same instinct across chips and crypto this week: everything becomes an income product. 51 View: The last time tech vendors financed their own customers at scale, it was Lucent and Nortel in the dot-com years. It ended badly. 📚 Boardroom Reads * Stablecoins in Emerging Markets (IMF). South Africa’s dollar-stablecoin trading grew from under ZAR 4B to ZAR 80B in three years. * FCA departs from the traditional stablecoin model (OMFIF). UK issuer capital set at 1% of issuance, half of MiCA’s 2%. * Solana Q2 2026 (Galaxy Research). RWA holdings crossed $3B; public equities now the largest category. * Violent Crypto Wrench Attacks: H1 2026 (Chainalysis). $30M stolen in physical attacks in H1, pacing past 2025’s record. * The AI investment race (BIS). Models AI over-investment at 1.5x the efficient level, against $700B of 2026 capex. 📅 On the Calendar * Date TBD: SEC’s cancelled Regulation Crypto Assets vote; watch for a new Sunshine Act notice * Aug 26: Nvidia earnings (guidance near $91B) * Aug 27-29: Jackson Hole, themed on financial innovation and payments * Sep 11: August CPI * Sep 15: Senate’s 60-vote test on the Clarity Act * Sep 15-16: FOMC decides between a hike and a hold * Sep 16: Circle’s Arc mainnet launches, with Wall Street as validators This post has bonus content for paid subscribers. Upgrade to get full access. That’s all for now, folks. – Marc & Team Ps: 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: * ​Christian Schmid, Managing Director & Senior Partner at BCG, global lead for Corporate & Investment Banking. * ​Alexander Paddington, Managing Director & Partner at BCG, Global Leader

  6. Aug 12

    why a KKR partner left for DeFi (with Xiao-Xiao, President of Jupiter)

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “We did over $1.2 trillion of onchain trading volume across spot and perps.” One app on Solana processed $1.2 trillion in trading volume. Not an exchange with servers and order books. An app that runs entirely on a blockchain. Its president spent years at KKR, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, before he switched sides. His name is Xiao-Xiao J. Zhu, President of Jupiter, the biggest DeFi platform on Solana. At KKR he led the firm’s digital assets and blockchain strategy. Now he runs a company with 20+ onchain products, $3 billion in TVL, and a plan to put US stocks, a stablecoin, a neobank, and AI agents on the same rails. His core argument is simple: the value in crypto has moved from blockchains to applications. He calls it the fat app thesis. And he thinks onchain finance is still 10x to 100x smaller than its real market. This isn’t a recap. It’s the playbook: the six best ideas from the conversation, the exact quotes, and what to do with each one. About Xiao-Xiao J. Zhu: Xiao-Xiao J. Zhu is President of Jupiter, Solana’s largest onchain finance platform. Before Jupiter, he was Digital Operating Partner at KKR, where he led technology value creation across the portfolio and ran the firm’s global digital assets and blockchain strategy, backing crypto funds and companies including Anchorage Digital. He has seen both sides: how value gets built in traditional private equity, and how it gets built onchain. “The biggest companies in crypto are basically centralized exchanges or market makers who are extremely intransparent and are running on centralized databases.” Why this matters: Jupiter is what the next generation of financial institutions might look like. It started as a DEX aggregator three or four years ago. Today it is the number one trading venue and the number one TVL protocol on Solana, it launched a stablecoin backed by BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, and in May it put regulated US equities onchain with Jump Trading and Securitize. Robinhood, Coinbase and OKX already route through its APIs. We recorded this live at Proof of Talk in Paris. Here it is in six ideas. 🎯 Jump to the best parts [00:00] Cold open: $1.2 trillion and the road map[00:30] Live from Proof of Talk in Paris[01:05] From KKR to the biggest DeFi app on Solana[02:26] The inflection point: blockchains finally got fast[03:12] The fat app thesis[03:43] What Jupiter is: 20+ products, $1.2T in volume[04:44] Jupiter Lend, JLP, and their own stablecoin[05:52] Why “onchain finance,” not DeFi[07:56] The 100x gap: millions of users vs. Binance’s 300M[09:00] The two unlocks: RWAs and agentic finance[10:31] Agents don’t do KYC[11:39] The Jupiter agent kit is live[12:37] How institutions plug in today[14:29] Bitwise and up to $1B into Jupiter Lend[15:11] Jupiter Global: the onchain neobank[15:40] Tokenized US equities with Jump and Securitize[17:07] What tokenized stocks actually unlock[17:52] The road map: super app, neobank, JupNet[18:38] Wrap Important Links * Jupiter: https://jup.ag * Securitize / Jump / Jupiter tokenized equities announcement: PR Newswire * Jupiter Lend x Bitwise (Ethena market): PR Newswire * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xiao-xiao-j-zhu-12078730 Watch or listen now: YouTube • Apple Podcasts 🔒 The full breakdown is for subscribers Our biggest takeaways from this conversation 1. The value moved from blockchains to apps. For years the money in crypto was made at the protocol layer. You bought the chain, not the things built on it. Zhu says that flipped, and it flipped because blockchains finally got fast enough to build real products on. “Value was initially in crypto created at the protocol level, at the blockchain level, to now really an era of the fat app thesis.” The irony he points out: everyone came to crypto for decentralization, but the biggest crypto companies are centralized exchanges and market makers running on ordinary databases. Not because they were lazy. Five to seven years ago, chains simply couldn’t handle the volume. * The inflection came in the last two to three years, when Solana and newer L1s and L2s solved most of the scalability problems. * The result is a new generation of apps like Jupiter and Hyperliquid: permissionless, self-custodial, and built fully onchain, at global scale. * The question he thinks matters now: what applications, brands and user experiences can you build at scale on top of blockchains? Not which chain wins. What to do with this: if your digital asset exposure is all protocol-level, you own the last cycle’s thesis. Look at where usage and fees actually accrue now: the application layer. Related reads:→ 184: Kraken is buying DeFi This ad could belong to you. 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline and revenue. We position you among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers. 2. Jupiter is Robinhood, rebuilt fully onchain.

    why a KKR partner left for DeFi (with Xiao-Xiao, President of Jupiter)

  7. Aug 5

    "waiting isn't a strategy", with Christian Schmid, Global Banking Lead, BCG

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “Waiting and seeing is not a strategy.” A senior partner and global banking lead at BCG just put a number on the thing every bank CEO is nervous about: up to 15% of bank revenue and 30% of profits at risk by 2035. But the opportunity is bigger than the threat. His name is Christian Schmid, Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG, where he leads the global banking business. He is the lead author of BCG’s biggest ever digital assets report, The Future of Digital Assets. He calls the whole shift the iPhone of money, and he thinks the real fight is not stablecoins versus deposits. It is who owns the screen the customer taps. About Christian Schmid: Christian Schmid is a Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG, based in Zurich, where he leads the firm’s global commercial banking, capital markets and investment banking business and chairs the board of BCG Expand. He trained as an engineer at ETH, came up through IBM, and has spent 27 years advising the CEOs of the world’s biggest banks. He is the lead author of The Future of Digital Assets. “That’s probably the most interesting topic I have seen in my whole consulting career, which is twenty seven years almost by now.” Why this matters: This is the year banks stopped watching from the sidelines. The GENIUS Act gave stablecoins a US rulebook, the market is now north of $300B, and the biggest US banks, JPMorgan, Citi and Bank of America, are building a shared tokenized-deposit network aimed at around 2027. BCG puts the tokenization prize near $88 trillion. So when the person who advises these CEOs tells you what he actually thinks, in plain language, it is worth 40 minutes. Here it is in six ideas. 🎯 Jump to the best parts 00:50 Introduction01:59 Why BCG Published Its Biggest Digital Assets Report04:13 How Banking Conversations Have Changed05:46 Is Tokenization Bigger Than Digital Banking?08:13 Why Banks Could Lose 30% of Their Profits13:08 Are Digital Assets Replacing Banks?16:15 The Three Types of Digital Assets20:08 Where Banks Should Invest23:20 The Biggest Real World Use Cases26:00 What Banks Are Actually Doing27:30 AI vs Digital Assets30:18 Why Waiting Is Not a Strategy32:03 Four Futures for Digital Assets35:14 Stablecoins vs Tokenized Deposits37:41 The Future of Programmable Money38:36 Lightning Round39:50 Where To Learn More Important Links * BCG profile: https://www.bcg.com/about/people/experts/christian-schmid * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/schmidchristianzuerich 🔒 The full breakdown is for PRO subscribers Our biggest takeaways from this conversation 1. The threat is real, the opportunity is bigger Most consultant reports are built to scare you into buying a project. Schmid’s does the opposite. He gives you the scary number, then tells you not to over-index on it. “Whether this number is completely correct or not is actually a bit irrelevant, I would say. But there is a threat.” The threat comes in two parts. Banks lose fee income and net interest margin as deposits and transactions drift toward stablecoins. Then they pay again to run two sets of rails at once. “They also need to maintain the dual rails, which increases the cost base for those banks. And so it’s almost a bit a double whammy.” * The model: up to 15% of revenue and 30% of profit at risk by 2035, versus a world where digital assets barely develop. * The catch he keeps repeating: it is a simulation, not a forecast. The point is the size of the stake, not the decimal. * The upside is the part banks miss. In BCG’s numbers the biggest wins are in asset management and trading. Tokenization makes it easier to wrap more assets, and trading could need less capital and liquidity, which lifts return on equity. BCG pegs the trading upside at up to a 4% RoE bump or $1B+ for an average G-SIB. What to do with this: don’t argue about whether it’s 30% or 12%. Run the model on your own book. The industry number hides a huge spread from one bank to the next. Related reads:→ BCG’s new digital asset playbook: The $88 Trillion Question This ad could belong to you. 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline and revenue. We position you among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers. 2. Stop calling it crypto The word “crypto” hides the most important distinction in the whole report. Schmid splits digital assets into three: tokenized securities, digital money, and cryptocurrency. They are not the same animal, and they don’t have the same future. “Cryptocurrency per se is a very different thing because it’s not backed with any value, and that’s very different from digital money or digital real world assets.” * Tokenized securities and digital money look a lot like what we already have, just in a new wrapper. In 20 years, he says, no one will care whether a security was tokenized or not. * Cryptocurrency itself he barely grows in the model, roughly 2%. His line: “in today’s world that’s where the money is made,” but it “will not be so significant going forward.” * The bigger point is to stop thinking in use cases and start seeing the technology as one general-purpose thing. That’s the “iPhone of money.” “The iPhone of money, which combines all the technologies in one thing through the programmability, through DLT.” What to do with this: when someone says “our crypto strategy,” ask which of the three they mean. If they can’t answer, they don’t have a strategy, they have a headline. Related reads:→ 186: banks went on-chain 3. The real fight is who owns the screen, not the instrument

    "waiting isn't a strategy", with Christian Schmid, Global Banking Lead, BCG

  8. Jul 31

    189: "AI is the only focus"

    I spoke with a bank executive this week about where the attention is going. “AI is the only focus.” That captures the mood. Crypto is in a bear market. The excitement has moved elsewhere. But here’s one number that stopped me this week: 80 seconds. That’s how long it took some of the world’s biggest banks to settle a cross-border payment in the BIS Project Agorá test. But what settled wasn’t a stablecoin. It was tokenized central bank reserves and bank deposits. Here’s what matters, though: Banks aren’t chasing speed; they’re defending the deposit. When money settles in a stablecoin, it leaves the balance sheet, and deposits are what fund the lending business. A tokenized deposit is the same dollar, still on the bank’s books, now programmable. This week’s signals at a glance: * The world’s biggest banks settled cross-border payments in 80 seconds * BNY is moving $8.6 trillion of fund records on-chain * Ten European banks launched a blockchain they own * MoonPay put a crypto wallet inside ChatGPT and Claude And 15+ more signals below. One quick thing: last week, we launched the 51 Institutional Digital Asset Adoption Index. It ranks 103 financial institutions across eight capabilities using linked public evidence. If you want to see which banks are actually live—and which are still piloting—check it out at index.fiftyone.xyz. The 51 Signal (PRO) The settlement asset is bank money. Banks looked at stablecoins, saw the demand was real, and decided they would rather issue the settlement asset than rent it. A tokenized deposit keeps the money on the bank’s balance sheet, inside the regulatory perimeter, earning the float. A stablecoin hands all three to Circle or Tether. Stablecoins are not losing. They still dominate the application and consumer edge, where Visa, MoonPay and SoFi all shipped this week. But in the wholesale settlement stack, the fight is no longer whether to tokenize. It’s who owns the rails and whose liability settles on them. This week both answers pointed the same way: bank-issued money, on bank-governed infrastructure. 📍 Where the Clarity and Genius Agenda Stands Here is the state of play in Washington: * GENIUS Act (stablecoins): law, but behind schedule. Signed in 2025, it takes effect January 18, 2027. Regulators have issued proposed rules but missed their rulemaking deadlines, and none are final yet. Stablecoin supply still grew to about $308 billion. * Clarity Act (market structure): stuck on the one question crypto keeps dodging. The headline fight is ethics language on officials’ crypto ventures, where Tillis and Gallego found common ground. The real one is jurisdictional: whether a token is a security (SEC) or a commodity (CFTC) decides who supervises it, what it must disclose, and whether paying yield is even legal. Big banks are split, Goldman backs it while the Bank Policy Institute flags gaps on yield and developer liability, and Warren calls it “a giveaway” that should be “dead on arrival.” With the August 10 recess days away and no floor vote scheduled, Majority Leader Thune says it “almost certainly doesn’t have enough time.” This ad could belong to you. 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline and revenue. We position you among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers. Top Boardroom Reads & Data * Will Robinhood Chain Succeed Where Coinbase’s Base Stumbled? (Galaxy Research, July 30, 2026). * No Headstands Required: Applying Securities Laws to Vaults and Onchain Lending (Galaxy Research, July 29, 2026). When a DeFi vault becomes a security, and why the design details now decide. BNY put $8.6 trillion of fund records on-chain What happened: BNY, the world’s largest custodian, is building rails to move its transfer-agency business onto a single on-chain ledger. Transfer agency is the record of who owns which fund shares, and BNY’s book covers about $8.6 trillion across 7.6 million accounts. It will run the old and new systems in parallel at first. First clients include Baillie Gifford, for what BNY calls the first fully native UK-regulated tokenized fund, plus BlackRock and BNY’s own Dreyfus unit. “We think of BNY as modernizing a function that sits behind every single fund transaction by bringing the books and records onchain.”— Carolyn Weinberg, Chief Product and Innovation Officer at BNY, to CoinDesk 51 View: If ownership updates in real time, a fund share can settle in seconds instead of days, trade around the clock, and post as collateral the moment it changes hands. The custodian is rebuilding the foundation the whole industry stands on, and it keeps the client relationship while doing it. Ten European banks built their own blockchain What happened: Ten European institutions launched RL1, or Regulated Layer One, on July 28. It is a member-owned permissioned blockchain, structured as a European Cooperative Society in Luxembourg, where each founder holds an equal vote. The founders are ABN AMRO, DekaBank, DZ BANK, Natixis CIB, LBBW, Crédit Mutuel Alliance Fédérale, Cecabank, SC Ventures, Chartered Investment and Seturion. RL1 runs on infrastructure built by Frankfurt fintech SWIAT, which settled more than €700 million in production over three years before ownership passed to the cooperative. It targets tokenized bonds, collateral, settlement and central bank digital currency links, and is in talks with NatWest. “RL1 will serve as the connecting infrastructure for Europe’s digital financial market, enabling participating institutions to move from isolated tokenization initiatives to an integrated, liquid, and scalable capital market ecosystem.”— Henning Vollbehr, Managing Director of RL1 (formerly of SWIAT), in the launch release 51 View: The last decade of bank blockchains failed the same way: one bank builds a network, invites the others, and the others refuse to route their business through a competitor’s rails. RL1 solves the politics before the technology. No single member owns it, so no rival has to route through a competitor’s infrastructure. That is why the cooperative structure matters more than the chain. It is also a very European answer to a very American problem: rather than let a US stablecoin or a US consortium set the standard, the continent’s banks pooled their own. Go deeper with our PRO read: Tokenized deposits move to the center of settlement What happened: Two moves in one week put tokenized bank deposits, not stablecoins, at the center of institutional settlement. OpenAssets and Partior completed a proof-of-concept for 24/7 atomic delivery-versus-payment, using tokenized commercial bank money on Partior as the settlement asset that removes counterparty risk. Partior is backed by DBS, J.P. Morgan, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank and others. Separately, America’s largest banks are building a shared deposit-token network, with JPMorgan, Citi and Bank of America among them, targeting roughly 2027. “With Partior, we’ve shown how institutions can settle digital assets, stablecoins, and tokenized deposits together on existing infrastructure.”— Gabor Gurbacs, CEO of OpenAssets, in the announcement 51 View: A stablecoin and a tokenized deposit look identical on a screen. They are not the same thing. A stablecoin is a claim on a private issuer’s reserves. A tokenized deposit is the bank’s own money, backed by the bank, inside the banking system, covered by the rules that already govern it. This is why the banks stopped fighting stablecoins and started copying the format. They get the 24/7 rails without moving the money off their balance sheet or outside the regulatory perimeter. Morgan Stanley undercut the market on staked crypto What happened: Morgan Stanley Investment Management launched two exchange-traded products on July 28: the Morgan Stanley Ethereum Trust (MSSE) and the Morgan Stanley Solana Trust (MSOL), both on NYSE Arca. Each charges a 0.14% sponsor fee, among the lowest in the market. Both stake a portion of their holdings and pass the staking rewards through to shareholders. The products follow the firm’s bitcoin trust and join a $14 billion ETP suite; MSIM manages about $2 trillion in assets under management or supervision. “The addition of MSSE and MSOL reflects the natural evolution of our product suite, which seeks to provide simplified access to digital assets.”— Ally Wallace, Global Head of ETFs at MSIM, in the announcement 51 View: Pricing tells you where a product sits on the maturity curve. When bitcoin ETFs launched, issuers charged what they could get away with. A 0.14% fee on a staked, multi-asset product means the price war has reached crypto. The staking twist matters as well. By passing staking rewards through to shareholders, Morgan Stanley turns a passive wrapper into a yield product and dares rivals to match it, because institutions want exposure that generates yield, not just price, and the industry is racing to package it cheaply. Read our PRO deep dive on MS: News Flashes Infrastructure and Markets * Provable Markets raised a Series B led by Charles Schwab, with DTCC joining as an investor; its Aurora securities-lending ATS has processed over $30 trillion in monthly order volume. Banking and Payments * Samsung SDS said it is in talks with Dunamu, operator of Korea’s largest exchange Upbit, to build stablecoin issuance and settlement infrastructure, disclosed on its Q2 earnings call. * Visa reported fiscal Q3 net revenue of $11.6 billion, up 14%, and said its stablecoin settlement pilot now runs across nine blockchains, with cumulative stablecoin settlement volume it pegs at a roughly $7 billion annualized pace. * SoFi reported about $134 million in crypto transaction revenue but only around $1.2 million net after transaction costs, and is enabling its new SoFiUSD stablecoin as a settlement option for commercial payments. Funds, Deals and Others * Ondo Finance is weighing an acquisition worth $250M to $500M,

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