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

Marc Baumann

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  1. 15h ago

    184: Ethereum is tumbling

    Hey, it’s Marc For years, the story was CeFi vs DeFi. Kraken just blew that up. The exchange is in talks to take a 15% stake in Aave at a $385 million valuation. Price: roughly 35,000 ETH (about $71 million) for 250,000 AAVE and a seat on the cap table. Same week, it expanded onchain OTC lending with Maple, pulled tokenized assets into custody with Centrifuge, and moved its Ink chain onto Optimism in a multi-year deal. Weeks before its IPO, Kraken is not telling public-market investors that DeFi is the enemy. It is telling them DeFi is the asset class. Our highlights this week: * Kraken is buying DeFi * MiCA’s cliff locked out Binance * Invesco joined the reserve race * The Ethereum Foundation cut 40% * UBS put compliance on-chain And 10+ more signals below. Top Boardroom Reads * Safeguarding Trust in Money: The Next-Generation Monetary System (BIS, June 23, 2026) * Tokenization 2030: Wall Street On-Chain (Citi Institute GPS, June 2026) * From Recovery to Resurgence in Global Fintech (BCG, June 2026) * Principles for How State Regimes Can Comply with the GENIUS Act (a16z crypto, June 2026) * Europe’s Crypto Reset: MiCA Creates a Single Market as Hundreds of Firms Face Exit (Euronews, June 24, 2026) 🚀 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. Kraken is buying DeFi instead of fighting it What happened: Kraken’s parent Payward is in talks to take a 15% common equity stake in Aave Group at a $385 million valuation, investing roughly 35,000 ETH (about $71 million) in exchange for 250,000 AAVE tokens and the equity, with plans to syndicate part of the deal. It’s described as the first in a series of transactions building out Payward Asset Management ahead of Kraken’s IPO. The same week, Kraken expanded onchain OTC lending through a warehouse facility with Maple, partnered with Centrifuge to bring tokenized assets into qualified custody, and moved its Kraken-incubated Ink chain onto Optimism’s managed enterprise stack in a multi-year deal. [CoinDesk] [Centrifuge] Why it matters: For a decade the pitch was that centralized exchanges and DeFi were rivals. Kraken just priced the opposite: it would rather own 15% of the largest onchain lender than rebuild one, and route flow through protocols it has a stake in. The Aave deal is small, but the logic is not. A US exchange weeks from an IPO is telling public-market investors that DeFi is part of its balance sheet, not its competition. Our read: expect Coinbase and others to follow, and expect the best protocols to start picking which exchange they marry. Invesco joins the stablecoin reserve race What happened: Invesco, which manages close to $2 trillion, filed with the SEC for the Invesco Stablecoin Reserves Onchain Fund, a tokenized Rule 2a-7 government money market fund built to hold the cash and short-dated Treasuries that back stablecoins. The fund runs on a public blockchain, uses tokenization firm Superstate as sub-transfer agent for an onchain shareholder registry, and is expected to go effective around the end of August. It joins GENIUS Act-aligned reserve products already launched or filed this year by BlackRock, State Street, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, BNY, and ProShares. [CoinDesk] Why it matters: Two weeks ago this was a State Street and Fidelity story. Now it’s an industry. The GENIUS Act made the float a regulated, T-bill-backed business, and every large manager wants the carry on a pool Citi sees reaching $1.9 to $4 trillion by 2030. The only real fight left is how fast the fee compresses once six giants chase the same dollars. Ethereum is tumbling What happened: Vitalik Buterin said the Ethereum Foundation will cut its budget roughly 40% this year and move to an endowment-style model, lowering annual spending from about 15% of treasury assets toward 5% by 2030. The reset includes a 20% staff cut (about 54 roles), the wind-down of its Privacy and Scaling Explorations unit, smaller Devcon events, and a reorganization into five clusters. It follows nine senior departures since January, including co-executive director Hsiao-Wei Wang. In parallel, former Foundation contributors launched Ethlabs, funded by Bitmine, Sharplink, and Joe Lubin, to court institutional builders. [Bloomberg] [PR Newswire] Why it matters: This is another big blow for Ethereum, which is under pressure to pursue a more aggressive and commercial roadmap. But the risk is governance. When the people funding the protocol are the people holding billions in the token, “neutral infrastructure” gets harder to claim, and that has been Ethereum’s main selling point. That is the question allocators should be asking, not the ETH price. Tokenization’s plumbing week: UBS, Chainlink, and a UK bond fund go on-chain What happened: The infrastructure layer had a busy week. UBS and Nethermind completed compliance proofs of concept on Ethereum, testing how regulated transfer rules can be enforced directly onchain. Chainlink and a consortium of multinational banks launched Project Pangea to build a T+0 settlement framework for international FX. And Baillie Gifford, with BNY, launched BAGEY, the UK’s first natively tokenized bond fund, issued directly on Ethereum and Solana so the token itself is the legal record of ownership. [UBS] [CoinDesk] Why it matters: Putting an asset on a chain is the easy part, and the market is past it. We think the harder, more valuable work is what happened this week: compliance, settlement, and recordkeeping moving on-chain so institutions can actually transact, not just demo. UBS testing onchain compliance rules and a bank consortium building T+0 FX settlement is the boring middle-office layer that decides whether tokenization scales. Europe’s MiCA cliff arrives, and Binance is on the wrong side of it What happened: MiCA’s transitional period ends July 1, the hard deadline by which any crypto firm must hold a license in at least one EU member state or wind down across the bloc. In a June 23 statement, ESMA told unauthorized providers to stop onboarding EU clients, halt marketing, and limit service to letting customers close positions. By the regulator’s own count, roughly 83% of crypto-asset service providers active in the EU are still unlicensed. Binance withdrew its Greek application on June 24 after Reuters reported the regulator was set to reject it, and now says it will seek authorization elsewhere in the EU. The contrast is sharp: Ripple secured a preliminary license, and Bull Bitcoin (France) and Bitcoin Suisse (Liechtenstein) cleared MiCA the same week. [ESMA] [CoinDesk] Why it matters: Binance running out of EU doors with days to spare is the clearest signal yet that “global and unlicensed” is over as a strategy on this continent. News Flash Infrastructure and Markets * Cboe revives S&P 500 binary options. Cboe is bringing back S&P 500 binary options, chasing the event-contract market Polymarket and Kalshi made mainstream. * Telcoin launches the first regulated on-chain US bank accounts. Telcoin went live with what it calls the first regulated on-chain bank accounts in the United States. Regulation and Policy * Trump won’t sign his own CBDC ban. Days after the Senate passed a housing bill carrying a four-year Fed CBDC ban 85-5, Trump refused to sign it, holding the prohibition hostage until Congress passes an unrelated voter-ID bill. * ESMA orders unlicensed firms out of the EU. Europe’s markets watchdog directed unauthorized crypto providers to stop onboarding and marketing as the MiCA transition ends July 1. Banking and Payments * Circle and Nomura target Japan corporate FX. Circle and Nomura signed an MoU to build instant USDC-based corporate FX settlement for Japanese firms, targeting a 2027 launch. * Blockchain.com expands into Brazil. Blockchain.com launched institutional payments infrastructure in Brazil, one of the fastest-growing stablecoin markets. Funds, Deals and Others * SBI buys Bitbank to become Japan’s largest exchange. SBI Holdings agreed to acquire Bitbank for $288.6 million, creating Japan’s largest regulated crypto operator with about $6.8 billion in custody. * H100 clears a Bitcoin treasury deal. H100 shareholders approved a financing that would make it Europe’s No. 2 listed Bitcoin treasury. One Quick Favor We want to make this the sharpest briefing in digital assets, and the best way to get there is to know what you actually do with it. 51 Intelligence Stack: Related Reading That’s all for now, folks. – Marc & Team This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.51insights.xyz

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

    2d ago

    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. Jun 19

    183: Wall Street wants the float

    Hey, it’s Marc, For two years everyone’s asked the same stablecoin question: whose logo goes on the coin? Circle or Tether? Banks or fintechs? Wrong question. This week State Street and Fidelity answered the one that actually prints money: who manages the reserves behind the coin. State Street launched a money market fund built solely to hold stablecoin reserves. Fidelity opened one two days later. BlackRock, Goldman, and BNY are already there. Here’s the tell: the GENIUS Act forces issuers to back tokens with T-bills and government money funds, and Citi says supply hits $1.9–4 trillion by 2030. The issuer’s name goes on the token. The asset manager keeps the carry on all of it. Wall Street didn’t bet on a stablecoin. It bet on the float underneath every one of them. (Meanwhile, CME is suing the regulator that just opened the perps market — more below.) Our highlights this week: * State Street and Fidelity opened the reserve land grab * CME is suing its own regulator * Europe’s MiCA deadline could cut off millions * Moody’s put credit ratings on Solana * Franklin Templeton filed a dividends-into-Bitcoin ETF * Morgan Stanley undercut every crypto ETF on fees * Coinbase joined the tokenized stock race * A Gulf dynasty is moving a $6T trade market on-chain And 12+ more signals below. Loading... Top Boardroom Reads * Stablecoins 2030: Web3 to Wall Street (Citi Institute) * Euro Stablecoins and Their Potential Effect on Sovereign Bond Markets (ECB Macroprudential Bulletin) * Digital Assets: A strategic playbook for banks (BCG) * Towards an Efficient and Integrated Digital Capital Market in Europe (ECB) * Tokenized Finance (IMF) * Effects of Stablecoin Yield Prohibition on Bank Lending (White House CEA) * Stablecoin Payments: The Truth Behind the Numbers (BCG) 🚀 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. Wall Street found its stablecoin trade: managing the reserves State Street Investment Management launched the State Street Stablecoin Reserves Money Market Fund, a GENIUS Act-aligned Rule 2a-7 government money market fund designed specifically to back stablecoin issuance. State Street Bank and Trust and Anchorage Digital are the initial investors. Two days earlier, Fidelity opened the Fidelity Reserves Digital Fund, which holds only US Treasuries maturing in 93 days or less, overnight repo, and government money market shares, at a 0.18% net expense ratio. Both products sit alongside GENIUS-aligned launches this year from BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and BNY. [State Street] [CoinDesk] Why it matters: We think this is the cleanest institutional trade in the entire space. The GENIUS Act forces issuers to back tokens with short-dated Treasuries and government money funds, so the asset manager holding those reserves gets paid on the float no matter whose logo is on the coin. State Street runs over $5 trillion; it doesn’t need to win the consumer war to win this one. Our read: the issuer is becoming the commodity, and the reserve manager is the toll booth on a market Citi sees hitting $1.9–4 trillion by 2030. The only real question left is how fast the fee compresses once five of the world’s largest managers fight over the same mandate. CME is suing the regulator that just opened the perps market What happened: CME Group, the world’s largest futures exchange operator, said it will sue the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over the agency’s approval of crypto perpetual futures. Outgoing CEO Terrence Duffy announced the suit on CNBC, arguing that perps, which carry no expiration date and can run up to 50-to-1 leverage, are swaps rather than futures under the Dodd-Frank Act, and therefore face a different clearing and trading-venue regime. [CNBC] [Bitcoin Magazine] Why it matters: We don’t read this as a safety fight. It’s a turf fight. CME isn’t claiming perps are dangerous; it’s claiming they’re swaps, a jurisdictional weapon to keep a $20 billion franchise routed through its own pipes. We think the lawsuit is the most bullish signal of the week. (The same day, a Michigan judge ruled prediction wagers aren’t swaps, so the swap-versus-future line is about to be drawn across the whole market.) Europe’s MiCA cliff arrives July 1, and Binance and Tether are exposed Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation hits its hard licensing deadline on July 1, and the industry is not ready. By one count, only 194 of more than 3,000 crypto firms operating in the EU have secured a license, and roughly 60% of European users still sit on unlicensed platforms. Binance’s passporting strategy ran through Greece, where regulators are reportedly preparing to reject its application, pushing the exchange to explore a France route instead. Tether, which has said it will not seek EU approval, has already seen USDT pulled or restricted for EU customers across Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, OKX, Bitstamp, and Crypto.com. Circle’s USDC, which is MiCA-compliant, is now the only major dollar stablecoin widely available on licensed EU venues. [CryptoSlate] [Decrypt] Why it matters: We think MiCA was sold as a licensing framework but is really industrial policy. Euro stablecoins sit at ~€450 million against nearly $300 billion in dollar tokens and that gap is exactly what Brussels wants to close before a digital euro lands. Forcing USDT off licensed venues and slow-walking Binance shifts liquidity toward euro and compliant-dollar tokens better than any subsidy could. Our take: The offshore structure that defined crypto’s first decade does not passport into the EU, and the firms that treated compliance as optional are about to discover how much of their European user base was borrowed. Moody’s puts credit ratings on Solana Moody’s Ratings expanded its Token Integration Engine to Solana, letting issuers embed Moody’s credit assessments directly into tokenized bonds and other fixed-income securities. The rollout, in partnership with tokenization specialist Alphaledger, follows the engine’s first deployment earlier this year on the institutional Canton Network and a 2025 municipal-bond pilot on Solana. “Investors need independent credit analysis wherever they transact, and increasingly, that’s onchain,” said Rajeev Bamra, Moody’s head of digital economy strategy. BCG and Ripple estimate the tokenized-asset market could reach $18.9 trillion by 2033. [Moody’s] [CoinDesk] Why it matters: Tokenization spent two years proving you can put a bond on a chain. We think the harder, more valuable problem is putting the rest of the bond’s world there: the ratings, pricing, and compliance data desks actually trade on. A tokenized bond with no embedded rating is a curiosity; one carrying a live Moody’s assessment any app can read is something a credit desk can underwrite. And watch where Moody’s went: first Canton (permissioned), now Solana (public). It’s hedging because it expects real volume on both. The ETF arms race moves from access to engineering What happened: Three of the biggest names in asset management filed or launched crypto products inside a single week. Franklin Templeton filed for two “Bitcoin DRIP” ETFs that hold US stocks and reinvest the dividends into Bitcoin, a structure the market hasn’t seen before. Morgan Stanley filed amended registrations for spot Ethereum and Solana ETFs at a 0.14% sponsor fee, the lowest in both markets, undercutting Grayscale’s 0.15% Mini Ether product and Franklin Templeton’s 0.19% Solana fund, with 95% of staking rewards flowing back to shareholders. And BlackRock launched a Bitcoin income fund that pairs BTC exposure with a cash-flow overlay. [Decrypt] [CoinGape] [CoinDesk] Why it matters: The first ETF wave sold access: own Bitcoin without a wallet. We think that race is over, and a 0.14% fee proves it: ETH and SOL exposure is now a commodity priced like an index fund, so the margin has to come from engineering. Franklin Templeton’s dividends-into-Bitcoin wrapper and BlackRock’s income overlay are both ways to manufacture yield on top of volatile assets. It’s what you build when the underlying no longer differentiates you. Our read: the same firms now managing stablecoin reserves are compressing ETF fees to zero because they’ve decided digital assets are a distribution business, and they win those on scale and cost. News Flashes Infrastructure and Markets * Coinbase joins the tokenized stock race. Coinbase will offer onchain shares with dividend payments, plus an AI advisor, stock options, and pre-IPO markets, pushing deeper into full-stack finance. * A Gulf dynasty moves a $6T trade market on-chain. The heir to a 135-year-old Gulf trading house is building blockchain rails for global commodity trade finance. Regulation and Policy * Congress moves to ban a CBDC until 2030. A bipartisan housing bill now includes a prohibition on a US central bank digital currency through 2030, hard-coding the private-stablecoin-first model. Banking and Payments * Alchemy ships an AI-agent payment card on Visa’s rails. Alchemy introduced AgentCard, a payments and identity platform for AI agents built on Visa Intelligent Commerce, extending last week’s agent-payments push from the card networks. Funds, Deals and Others * Trace Finance raises $32M for stablecoin settlement. The startup closed a round to expand cross-border stablecoin settlement infrastructure. * Ripple backs Flutterwave’s Series E. Ripple invested in African payments giant Flutterwave to accelerate stablecoin settlement across the continent. One quick favor We want to make this the best briefing in digital assets. Loading... Or just hit reply and tell us the one thing you’d change. We read every response. 51 Intelligence Stack: Related Reading * Issue 181: Goldman tokenizes real estate, Th

    7 min

  4. Jun 12

    182: AI agents just got a credit card

    Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team, SpaceX just pulled off the biggest IPO in history. $75 billion raised. A $2 trillion valuation at the open. Shares priced at $135, trading as high as $168.75. Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire before lunch. Here’s the part most people missed: SPCX went live on Solana the same day. Tokenized shares, issued by Backpack Securities, redeemable for the real thing, trading 24/7. The biggest IPO ever was also the first to debut on Nasdaq and a blockchain simultaneously. And while SpaceX owned the front page, Mastercard and Visa quietly gave AI agents their own payment rails. Within hours of each other. Agent credentials now live on Solana, Polygon, and Base. Settlement runs in stablecoins. Wall Street got its biggest listing ever. Machines got their first credit cards. Same week. Here’s what moved: * SpaceX listed twice on the same day * Citi tokenized the pre-IPO market * Mastercard launched Agent Pay for machines * Visa gave AI agents a credit score * Japan’s megabanks picked one stablecoin * Wall Street wrote a $355M check to its own blockchain * A $300M crypto unicorn sold for $10M And 9+ more signals below. TOP BOARDROOM READS * Digital Assets: A strategic playbook for banks (BCG) * Wholesale banking reckons with the rise of digital assets (Oliver Wyman) * Handbook: Crypto assets (KPMG) * Banks Evaluate Opportunity and Threat of Digital Assets (Morgan Stanley) * Inside JP Morgan’s $3T tokenization machine, with Dennis Cristallo, Head of Wealth Management at Kinexys, JPMorgan (51) * Tokenization 2030 (Citi GPS) * Beyond Stablecoins: The Emerging Architecture of On-Chain Money (McKinsey) * Towards an Efficient and Integrated Digital Capital Market in Europe (ECB) * Tokenized Finance (IMF) * Effects of Stablecoin Yield Prohibition on Bank Lending (White House CEA) * Stablecoin Payments: The Truth Behind the Numbers (BCG) US Banks are going on-chain The Clearing House (TCH), the payments operator owned by 25 of the largest US banks, will run the network. It connects traditional rails (RTP, CHIPS) to blockchain infrastructure for 24/7 atomic settlement, with use cases spanning programmable treasury, real-time liquidity, cross-border payments, and agentic commerce. “A big move for the banks,” TCH CEO David Watson told the WSJ; the industry faces a “radically different” future in on-chain payments. The release names 17 participants, including BNY, HSBC, PNC, Truist, TD Bank, and U.S. Bank. One detail buried in the coverage: no blockchain partner has been selected yet. The build, in any meaningful sense, has not started. [RELEASE] [ANALYSIS] Why it matters: McKinsey modeled it in May: when a corporation moves $1,000 into a third-party stablecoin, only $150 returns to the banking system as wholesale reserves. The other $850 buys T-bills off bank balance sheets. Tokenized deposits keep the full $1,000 on the bank’s balance sheet, preserving credit capacity. The Bank Policy Institute went further on May 8. Applying an industry-sponsored model to the projection that stablecoins reach ~$4T by 2030, BPI calculates deposits would first rise by $300B, then fall by $4T. Net result: $3.7T in destroyed deposits and a 19% decline in bank lending. A December Fed note by Jessie Jiaxu Wang points the same direction: credit supply likely shrinks, lending costs likely rise. Citi tokenizes the pre-IPO market What happened: Citigroup launched a blockchain-based platform that lets wealthy and institutional clients trade tokenized shares of private companies. The product, Digital Depositary Receipts, adapts the 100-year-old depositary receipt structure for private markets. Citi acts as both issuer and custodian, with the receipts recorded on blockchain infrastructure run by Swiss exchange operator SIX. [WSJ] [CoinDesk] Why it matters: The structure is the story: a depositary receipt is a trust wrapper investors already understand, and putting it on-chain makes it transferable in ways paper private placements never were. A week after Goldman tokenized a real estate fund on GS DAP, a second bulge-bracket bank is turning tokenization into a distribution product, not a back-office experiment. Private markets access is becoming the first consumer-facing use case of institutional tokenization. AI agents got payment rails this week What happened: On the same day, the two largest card networks launched infrastructure for AI agents to transact. Mastercard unveiled Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M), an open protocol that lets AI agents authorize, coordinate, and settle transactions autonomously, including micropayments worth fractions of a cent. Agent credentials and spending permissions are stored on public blockchains: Polygon, Solana, and Base. 31 launch partners include Coinbase, Stripe, Adyen, and Cloudflare. Settlement runs in traditional currencies or stablecoins. Hours later, Visa announced Agent Scoring, an Agentic Registry, a Large Transaction Model, and a collaboration with OpenAI at Visa Payments Forum, plus expanded stablecoin settlement now running at a roughly $7 billion annualized rate with 160+ stablecoin-linked card programs live or in development. [Mastercard] [Visa] Why it matters: Note where the trust layer lives. Mastercard is putting agent credentials on public blockchains, not in a private Mastercard database. That is a card network admitting that machine-to-machine commerce needs neutral, always-on infrastructure that no single company controls. The same week, Tether announced it will embed its wallet development kit directly into NEURA’s humanoid robots so machines can get paid for completed tasks. Three independent announcements, one direction: AI agents are becoming economic actors, and stablecoins are their native currency. Visa’s Jack Forestell said it plainly: “AI is transforming the front end of commerce. Stablecoins are reshaping the back end.” Japan goes all in: megabank stablecoin plus a new rulebook What happened: MUFG, SMBC, and Mizuho signed a memorandum of understanding to issue a joint yen stablecoin, targeting live corporate transactions in fiscal 2026 and issuance by March 2027. The structure: the three banks act as joint settlors under a trust agreement, building on a pilot Japan’s FSA approved in November 2025. One day later, Japan’s lower house passed a sweeping amendment to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act that reclassifies crypto as financial instruments. The package: an insider trading ban that mirrors equities rules, a flat 20% tax replacing rates up to 55%, annual issuer disclosures, maximum prison terms for violations rising from 3 to 10 years, and a path toward crypto ETFs. [CoinDesk] Why it matters: The world’s third-largest banking system delivered both halves of the institutional playbook in 48 hours: the rails and the rules. The megabank stablecoin is explicitly defensive. Tokyo wants yen-denominated settlement infrastructure in place before USDT and USDC entrench any further in Asian corporate finance. The FIEA reclassification is the offensive half: cutting the top tax rate from 55% to 20% and opening the ETF door is how you bring domestic capital back onshore. Compare that with the US, where banks are still lobbying over GENIUS Act implementation details. Japan is now the cleanest test case of what coordinated bank issuance plus securities-grade rules looks like. Wall Street writes a $355M check to its own blockchain What happened: Digital Asset, the company behind the Canton Network, raised $355 million led by a16z crypto, which put in $100 million. Read the rest of the cap table: Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Apollo Funds, BNP Paribas, ABN Amro, Citadel Securities, CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, HSBC, S&P Global, SBI Group, Tradeweb, Optiver, William Blair, and more. Canton is a public, permissionless Layer 1 with configurable privacy built for regulated finance, running applications written in Digital Asset’s open-source Daml language. The capital goes toward expanding the Canton ecosystem and onboarding more institutions, assets, and regulated workflows. [PR Newswire] Why it matters: This investor list is not a venture bet. It is a user list. Exchanges (CME, Tradeweb), banks (HSBC, BNP Paribas), market makers (Citadel Securities, Optiver), data (S&P Global), and sovereign wealth (ADIA) are funding the infrastructure they intend to settle on. We saw the same pattern in Issue 181: Visa is already piloting private stablecoin settlement on Canton. The privacy architecture is the differentiator. Institutions will not put real positions on a chain where competitors can read their flow. Purpose-built, privacy-enabled infrastructure keeps winning institutional volume over general-purpose chains, exactly the thesis of our Money Movement 2.0 report. 🚀 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. A $300M crypto unicorn just sold for $10M What happened: Blockworks bought Messari for a little over $10 million, the Wall Street Journal reported. Messari was valued at $300 million in 2022. That is a 97% wipeout. The crypto research firm raised $61 million in total funding, including a $35 million Series B led by Brevan Howard’s crypto arm with Point72 Ventures backing. It just sold for less than a third of that one round. The deal folds Messari’s brand, client list, and data pipelines into Blockworks, which raised at a $192 million valuation earlier this year with the stated plan of becoming crypto’s Bloomberg through acquisitions. Why it matters: The WSJ blames the bear market. We don’t buy it. Crypto M&A has not collapsed: companies struck 144 deals worth $11.8 billion this year, up from 2025. The capital is still there. It stopped flowing to companies without a clear position. Crypto research has two revenue streams

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

    Jun 8

    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

  6. Jun 5

    181: JPMorgan, Citi, big banks go all-in on tokenzied deposits

    Hey, it’s Marc For years, the stablecoin debate has been about who issues the token. This week made that debate obsolete. The companies that actually move money for a living stopped arguing about issuance and started building settlement infrastructure together. Three payment networks forming one platform. Four of the biggest U.S. banks building shared tokenized deposit rails. And 1.5 million contractors waking up to a stablecoin wallet they didn’t ask for, built on infrastructure they’ll never see. We called this in our Money Movement 2.0 report and in “Stablecoin issuance is overrated.” The real race was never about who mints the coin. It’s about who owns the pipes. This week, we found out. Here’s what moved: * Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard are forming a stablecoin platform * Deel launches stablecoin accounts for 1.5M workers via Stripe * JPMorgan, Citi, and big banks plan tokenized deposit network for 2027 * Goldman Sachs tokenizes real estate on GS DAP * DTCC picks Stellar for tokenizing Russell 1000 equities and Treasuries * Coinbase and Better fund first bitcoin-backed mortgage, Fannie Mae-approved * CME goes 24/7 with crypto futures 🚀 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. Top Boardroom Reads * Deposit Tokens: A Foundation for Stable Digital Money (JPMorgan) * Stablecoins: Modernizing Financial Infrastructure (Morgan Stanley) * Tokenized Finance (IMF) * The Stable Door Opens: How Tokenized Cash Enables Next-Gen Payments (McKinsey) * 2026 Institutional Digital Assets Survey (EY & Coinbase) * Stablecoins: Framing the Debate (BIS) The payment giants are forming a stablecoin supergroup Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard are close to launching a shared stablecoin platform. Coinbase is exploring whether to participate. Each company has been building stablecoin infrastructure independently for years. Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion in late 2024. Mastercard acquired BVNK earlier this year and just expanded on-chain settlement to USDC, PYUSD, and RLUSD, enabling intraday, weekend, and holiday settlement. Visa expanded its stablecoin settlement network to nine blockchains in April. Now they are converging on shared rails. [CoinDesk] Why it matters: When three competitors stop competing on infrastructure and start pooling it, they are responding to a threat bigger than each other: fragmentation. Dozens of stablecoins on dozens of chains with no shared settlement standard. If this platform launches, it becomes the SWIFT replacement everyone has theorized about for years, except it will be owned by the companies that already process most of the world’s card transactions. We flagged this dynamic in our Money Movement 2.0 report: purpose-built payment infrastructure is displacing general-purpose blockchains for institutional settlement. This is the clearest proof yet. Deel gives 1.5 million workers a stablecoin account Deel, the global payroll platform used by 40,000 businesses and 1.5 million workers across 150+ countries, launched a stablecoin wallet built on Stripe’s full infrastructure stack. Bridge handles issuance via Open Issuance. Privy provides embedded wallets. Tempo handles settlement. The product is called DLUSD. Contractors receive dollar-denominated balances, can earn rewards on idle funds via Morpho, and spend anywhere via the Deel Card. Live today in Argentina, with LATAM, APAC, MENA, and Africa to follow. [Stripe] [Privy] Why it matters: This is the first time Stripe’s full crypto stack (Bridge + Privy + Tempo) has been deployed at real scale. The use case is not speculative. In Argentina, 85% of contractors wanted to be paid in US dollars rather than Argentine pesos in 2025, according to Deel. In Turkey, a local salary can lose 20-40% of its value in a single year. The blockchain is invisible to the contractor. What they see is dollars landing in their account. The banks are building “The Bridge” JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and other major U.S. banks plan to launch a tokenized deposit network as early as H1 2027, operated by The Clearing House, a private-sector payments company owned by the consortium. Some banks call it “The Bridge.” Others call it “The Chain.” Clearing House CEO David Watson told the Wall Street Journal it marks a “big move for the banks,” adding that the industry faces a “radically different” future built around on-chain payments. Early users: large global companies seeking to streamline payments and treasury operations. [WSJ] [The Block] Why it matters: This is the consortium phase. Individual bank efforts have matured: JPMorgan’s Kinexys has settled over $3 trillion in cumulative transactions. BNY launched its own tokenized deposit service in January. The Clearing House already processes $2 trillion per day in traditional payments. If tokenized deposits plug into that volume, it creates a bank-native alternative to stablecoins for corporate treasury. As we described in Issue 180: the payment networks are building stablecoin rails, the banks are building tokenized deposit rails. Both racing toward instant, 24/7 settlement. The question is not which wins. It is whether they interoperate. Goldman Sachs tokenizes real estate Goldman Sachs, Apex Group, and Archax launched a blockchain-native real estate fund this week. Fund shares are tokenized using GS DAP, Goldman’s own blockchain platform. LRC Group manages the underlying real estate assets. Archax serves as custodian and first distribution partner. Ownera facilitates connectivity between participants and distribution channels. The fund is structured under Luxembourg regulation. “Issuing blockchain-native fund units on GS DAP enables investment in real estate assets with precision while unlocking more seamless transferability in the future,” said Mathew McDermott, global head of digital assets at Goldman Sachs. [CoinDesk] Why it matters: Real estate has been the white whale of tokenization: illiquidity, complex title structures, regulatory fragmentation. Goldman is solving the issuance and custody layer on infrastructure it controls (GS DAP), then using regulated distribution partners to build toward future transferability. The same week, Hamilton Lane launched HLSCOPE on Tron via Securitize, and Franklin Templeton brought BENJI to MoonPay. The tokenized fund distribution race is accelerating. Issuers are not waiting for one chain to win. They are going everywhere liquidity exists. DTCC picks Stellar What happened: On May 27, DTCC announced it will integrate DTC’s tokenization service with the Stellar blockchain, covering Russell 1000 equities, major index ETFs, and U.S. Treasuries. This is the first public blockchain deployment of assets from DTC’s $114 trillion custody base. The initiative rests on an SEC No-Action Letter (December 2025) granting DTC a three-year pilot exemption. Limited production trades start July 2026, broader service launch in October 2026, with Stellar go-live targeted for H1 2027. DTCC is building a multi-chain stack: ComposerX for issuance and compliance, a Collateral AppChain on Hyperledger Besu with Chainlink, Canton Network for permissioned institutional rails, and now Stellar for public settlement. [PR Newswire] Why it matters: Stellar hosts Franklin Templeton’s BENJI fund ($1.98B AUM), an SEC-registered tokenized money market fund operating since 2021, plus native USDC issuance ($256M outstanding). That five-year compliance audit trail made Stellar the only public chain with proven regulated fund infrastructure at scale. Despite “public” deployment, DTCC maintains centralized control: root wallet authority to freeze, force-transfer, or burn tokens, whitelisted addresses, and off-chain legal record via Cede & Co. under UCC Article 8. This is not DeFi. This is the existing custody infrastructure extending onto a public chain while keeping every legal protection intact. News Flashes Infrastructure and Markets * CME goes 24/7. CME Group launched round-the-clock crypto futures and options trading on CME Globex. Over the opening weekend, 7,200+ contracts traded, ~$50 million in notional volume. Bitcoin volatility contracts launched alongside. * Galaxy launches OTC prediction markets. Galaxy now offers institutional OTC prediction market trading. * Kaiko acquires Amberdata. Kaiko acquired Amberdata in a blockchain data consolidation push. Data infrastructure is consolidating fast. Banking and Payments * Visa and Brale explore private settlement. Visa announced a PoC with Brale for stablecoin settlement using SBC on the Canton Network. Privacy-enabled institutional payment flows. * MoneyGram stablecoin on Stellar. MoneyGram launched MGUSD on Stellar. The remittance giant joins the digital dollar payments rush. Funds, Deals and Others * Ether.fi deploys $100M into Plume. Ether.fi allocated $100 million to a Plume RWA vault. Real-world asset yield inside DeFi lending. * Franklin Templeton brings BENJI to MoonPay. The BENJI tokenized fund is now accessible via MoonPay. Tokenized fund distribution is becoming a competitive layer. That’s all for now, folks. – Marc & Team Loading... This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.51insights.xyz

    9 min

  7. May 29

    180: first bank to offer a stablecoin on a public blockchain

    Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team I’ve watched plenty of turf wars in this market. Never one like this. Minnesota just made running a prediction market a felony. Punishable by five years in prison. The same week, CFTC filed its proposed rule to govern prediction markets with the White House on Tuesday, and the same afternoon Donald Trump posted that the agency’s “exclusive authority over Prediction Markets” must be defended. Now, the Office of Management and Budget is reviewing the proposal. All of this is happening a week after Minnesota became the first state to ban prediction markets outright (SF4760, effective August 1), with the CFTC suing within 24 hours to block enforcement. Meanwhile former CFTC and SEC Chair Gary Gensler told CNBC the agency may not even have authority under Dodd-Frank to regulate prediction markets, predicting the issue will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court. [Read more on prediction markets] Here’s what else moved this week: * DTCC picked Stellar for tokenising securities * SoFi launches its first stablecoin * Coinbase added six new currencies to its institutional product * Bitwise just undercut 21Shares by 165 bps * Mastercard just cleared NYDFS * VanEck’s $61M treasury token got a DeFi lending venue And 15+ more signals. Let’s jump in 👇🌆 🚨 SAVE YOUR SPOT: We’re running two live panels next week with BCG on what banks and asset managers should actually be doing about digital assets. * Webinar 1: June 5, 10am EST, with Nadine Chakar (DTCC), Christian Schmid + Roy Choudhury (BCG). Inside the DTCC’s $100T tokenization buildout that goes live in October. * Webinar 2: June 8, 12:30pm CET, with Kim Hochfeld (State Street), Christian Schmid + Roy Choudhury (BCG). What live tokenization actually looks like, from the team that just shipped SWEEP, a tokenized private liquidity fund. 30 min each, 10 min live Q&A. Top Boardroom Reads * Project Agorá: A shared programmable platform for wholesale cross-border payments (BIS) * Stablecoin issuance is overrated, with Tony McLaughlin, Founder at Ubyx (51) * Banking in tokenised economy (IBM) * Beyond stablecoins: The emerging architecture of on-chain money (McKinsey) * Accelerating AI Investment in Emerging Markets (IFC) * Global Banking Annual Review 2026 (McKinsey) Top Signals This Week DTCC picked Stellar for tokenising securities On May 27, 2026, DTCC announced that it will integrate DTC’s tokenization service with the Stellar network, with the initial scope covering Russell 1000 equities, major index ETFs, and U.S. Treasuries. The integration supports the full asset lifecycle, including corporate actions and reporting, rather than a wrapper or representation. Tokenized assets retain the same investor protections, entitlements, and safeguards as traditionally held securities. [RELEASE] Why it matters: The chain selection is a signal. Stellar offers compliance-first protocol, native token primitives, and predictably lower operating costs. And, it is the only public blockchain that has run an SEC-registered tokenized money market fund (BENJI) continuously for five years. WisdomTree and Amundi are also running their funds on Stellar. It is not avoiding Ethereum or EVM compatibility as the DTCC AppChain is built on Hyperledger Besu. Hyperledger Besu is handling settlement infrastructure. The DTCC’s AppChain is not issuing assets, it is moving them, matching them, and settling them between institutions. While, for tokenizing which includes asset creation, Stellar’s native token primitives do this cleanly, without smart contract risk and without unpredictable costs. Surprising for us that DTCC didn’t select Canton for this, given their partnership. 🚨 The Friday newsletter only scratches the surface. A lot more is going on that we’ll tell you in our PRO briefings. SoFi becomes the first bank to offer a stablecoin on a public blockchain On May 27, 2026, SoFi Technologies (NASDAQ: SOFI) made SoFiUSD available to retail members directly inside the SoFi app on Ethereum and Solana. The token is 1:1 redeemable for U.S. dollars from SoFi Bank, backed by liquid reserves on the bank’s balance sheet, and audited by an independent U.S.-licensed CPA. SoFi originally issued SoFiUSD in December 2025 to enterprise partners. Today’s announcement is the consumer rollout. [RELEASE] Why it matters: Under the GENIUS Act, permitted payment stablecoin issuers cannot pay holders any form of interest or yield. Tokenized deposits sit outside that prohibition and qualify for FDIC insurance. Only a chartered bank can issue them and SoFi has the charter. In this process, SoFiUSD reserves remain at SoFi Bank. Also, SoFi has 14.7M banked customers and now it has become the first bank to offer a stablecoin on a public blockchain. The acquisition cost on each is zero. Coinbase added six new currencies to its institutional product Coinbase announced on 26 May that Standard Chartered will provide multi-currency banking rails for Coinbase Prime and Coinbase Exchange institutional clients. The integration adds new direct rails in Australian dollars, Singapore dollars, Canadian dollars and Swiss francs. Euros and pounds settle through G-SIB-backed infrastructure, Standard Chartered itself is a global systemically important bank designated by the Financial Stability Board. [RELEASE] Why it matters: Coinbase’s Q1 2026 earnings showed institutional revenue of $136M, down 27% sequentially, with institutional trading volumes off 48% QoQ. The volume is drifting to competitors. Binance, Hidden Road, Kraken Prime and FalconX have spent two years building multi-jurisdictional prime brokerage with native multi-currency funding. A Tokyo hedge fund running BTC basis no longer has to convert JPY to USD to fund a Coinbase Prime account if it can use Hidden Road or Binance institutional in local currency. The Standard Chartered rails close that operational gap, retaining the users and capturing SEA markets. Bitwise just undercut 21Shares by 165 bps Bitwise Europe GmbH listed the Bitwise Canton ETP (BWCC) on Xetra today (ISIN: DE000A4ARTH9). The product tracks the Kaiko CANTO Reference Rate LDNLF index and holds CC tokens 1:1 in cold storage. Annual management fee is 0.85%. The ETP is BaFin-approved and domiciled in Germany, putting it inside the same regulatory wrapper as Bitwise’s BTCE, BTC1, and DA20 lineup. Why it matters: Unlike traditional crypto networks, participants can keep transaction data private on Canton while still interacting with counterparties across the network. That combination of privacy and interoperability has become Canton’s key differentiator. Unlike Ethereum (fully transparent, front-running risk) or JPMorgan’s Kinexys (private but closed, no rival bank will trust JPMorgan’s rails), Canton uses configurable sub-transaction privacy. DTCC tokenized U.S. Treasuries on Canton, running a pilot with 26 participants across 21 nodes. Tradeweb and BNY Mellon scaled Canton to $10B/day in repo. HSBC completed a pilot simulating the issuance, transfer, and atomic settlement of its Tokenised Deposit Service (TDS) on Canton. HKEX’s Synapse platform facilitates post-trade workflows for cross-border Northbound Stock Connect trades on Digital Asset’s DAML smart contract language. These aren’t experiments. They’re attempts to rebuild the plumbing of capital markets. 🚨 Want more intelligence and understand what this means for your institution? Subscribe to PRO below: Mastercard just cleared NYDFS NYDFS approved Mastercard Transaction Services (U.S.) LLC for a virtual currency business license under New York’s BitLicense framework on 27 May 2026. The license authorizes the unit to conduct virtual currency business activity in New York, including custody, transmission, exchange, and issuance. [RELEASE] Why it matters: The BitLicense is the keystone, because in U.S. payments, regulatory legibility is the moat. The federal GENIUS Act implementation rules are due by 18 July 2026, less than two months from this license. NYDFS approval is the most likely template federal regulators will recognize as fit-for-purpose. Mastercard acquired BVNK, partnered with SoFi to integrate SoFiUSD (SoFi’s dollar-backed stablecoin) as a settlement currency across Mastercard’s global payments network and its MTN is connected to JPMorgan’s Kinexys. Hence, they are pushing multiple startegies to connect different ledgers in the blockchain space. Related reads: VanEck’s $61M treasury token got a DeFi lending venue Securitize, the SEC-registered tokenization platform issuing VBILL ($61M total value), launched the fund live on a KPK-curated Euler vault on Thursday, May 28. Users can post VBILL as collateral, borrow other crypto assets, and run DeFi strategies while continuing to earn the underlying Treasury yield. The integration runs on Securitize’s DS Protocol, a compliance-aware framework that enforces transfer restrictions and investor eligibility checks onchain. Pricing data is supplied through RedStone oracles. VBILL launched in May 2025 across Avalanche, BNB Chain, Ethereum, and Solana with Wormhole bridging cross-chain liquidity. It charges a 0.20% management fee. Why it matters: Securitize is not building a fund, it is building a distribution layer. VBILL is the demo unit that proves regulated tokenized treasuries can multi-home across Aave and Euler without a vendor-lock decision. Apollo (ACRED), Hamilton Lane (SCOPE), KKR, and BNY all run on the same rails. Related reads: Other Signals Infrastructure and Markets * Paxos Securities Settlement Company (PSSC) received formal clearing agency registration from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Link * Samsung Securities, Samsung Card, and Samsung SDS are acquiring a combined 4% stake in Dunamu from Kakao for $407.7M. Link * Aave Labs’ UK subsidiaries, Push Labs Ltd. and Push Virtual Assets Ltd., secured FCA registration as cryptoasset exchange pr

    9 min
  8. Stablecoin issuance is overrated, with Tony McLaughlin, Founder & CEO at Ubyx

    May 27

    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
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