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

Marc Baumann

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  1. 22h ago

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

    3d ago

    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
  3. 8 of 9 recessions called, now he's calling bitcoin, with Cam Harvey, Economist

    May 22

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

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

    1h 20m
  4. How stablecoins saved the dollar, with Brent Johnson, Santiago Capital

    May 15

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

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

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

    May 12

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

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

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

    Apr 28

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

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

    41 min
  7. How the U.S. Weaponized the Dollar (And Stablecoins), with Eddie Fishman, New York Times Bestseller

    Apr 22

    How the U.S. Weaponized the Dollar (And Stablecoins), with Eddie Fishman, New York Times Bestseller

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ In 2025, Eddie Fishman, a former State Department and Treasury official who helped design the sanctions against Russia after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, wrote the playbook on economic warfare, Chokepoints. It not only became a New York Times Bestseller, but a blueprint of what would follow. So I sat down with Eddie to ask the obvious question. If the dollar and the chip supply chain are the new weapons, what happens when adversaries finally build their own? His answer reframed how I think about stablecoins, China, and the next ten years of geopolitics. His core insight: the most powerful weapons in modern geopolitics aren't military. They're financial and technological. And they include stablecoins. “The choke points that the US uses, that China uses, that Europe uses may change over time, but economic warfare will continue. All of our businesses may soon be completely dependent on LLMs from OpenAI and Anthropic, and guess what, all three are US companies.” * China (2026): The U.S. controls advanced AI chips and chipmaking tools sales. * Venezuela (2026): The U.S. military utilised Claude, an AI model developed by Anthropic, to capture then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. * Russia (2022): The U.S. and G7 froze roughly $300B of Russia’s foreign currency reserves held in Western jurisdictions after the Ukraine invasion. Whereas, U.S. and EU sanctions forced companies like Boeing and GE to stop providing spare parts, maintenance, and technical support to Russian airlines. Interestingly, America doesn’t need to fire a single missile to bring a country to its knees. It just needs to cut off access to the dollar. * FX: ~90% of all global foreign exchange transactions involve the U.S. dollar. * Clearing: Almost all dollar transactions, even those between two non-U.S. banks, must eventually clear through a U.S.-based correspondent bank. These settlements typically pass through two U.S. payment rails: Fedwire & CHIPS. * Because of sanctions, Iran started using Bitcoin as a toll booth for 20% of the world’s oil. [Full story] * Stablecoins: ~99% of the global stablecoin market is denominated in U.S. dollars. What made this conversation more worthwhile is that Eddie doesn’t just describe the system. He diagnoses where it’s breaking, and he’s specific about why. On sanction overuse, he mentioned: “Every single US president in the 21st century, from Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden, has imposed sanctions at twice the rate of their predecessor. There has to be a structural driver.” About Edward: Edward Fishman is a former U.S. diplomat and a leading authority on economic statecraft and international sanctions. * Current roles: Senior Fellow and Director of the Geoeconomics Center at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and an educator at Columbia University. * Government service (2011–2017): Held strategic roles at the State Department, Pentagon, and Treasury. He was a central architect of U.S. sanctions regarding Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the Iran nuclear negotiations. * Thought leadership: New York Times-bestselling author of Chokepoints and a frequent geopolitical analyst for Foreign Affairs, The NY Times, and WSJ. 🚨We’re opening sponsorships for our next podcast series. Top guests. Serious listeners. Claim your spot → 🎧 Jump to the best parts * 00:00 What Are “Choke Points”? * 01:29 The Hidden Power of the Dollar * 05:09 What Happens When Sanctions Hit * 07:49 Why Countries Are Moving Away from the Dollar * 10:50 The End of Globalization? * 13:56 Are Sanctions Losing Power? * 16:09 AI, Chips, and the Next Economic Weapon * 19:18 China’s Real Strategy * 21:33 China’s Choke Points vs America’s * 25:01 The AI Race: Who Wins? * 28:18 Iran, Sanctions, and Escalation * 32:53 Europe’s Position in Economic Warfare * 36:20 More Sanctions or More Wars? * 39:09 Bitcoin, Stablecoins & the Dollar * 42:06 What to Watch Next Important Links * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edward-fishman * X: https://x.com/edwardfishman * CFR: https://www.cfr.org/experts/edward-fishman * Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fishman * Chokepoints: Buy on Amazon Watch or listen now:YouTube • Apple Podcasts 🙌 A note from 51: Start a research-driven growth campaign with us and reach 100k+ decision makers across digital assets and finance. My biggest takeaways from this conversation: 1. The dollar is a passport. But alternatives are emerging as well. According to Eddie, a choke point requires three things: dominant market share (80–90%+), no real substitute, and the ability to inflict asymmetric pain without hurting yourself. By that bar, the U.S. dollar is the most powerful economic weapon in history. It also has the legal authority to lock any company, bank, or government on Earth. “You usually need 80-90% market share at least. The dollar, 90% of foreign exchange transactions. Rare earth minerals, China controls about 90% of global refining capacity. AI chips, Nvidia has over 90% global market share.” February 2022 showed what happens when Washington decides to actually use it. Russians lined up at ATMs. The Moscow stock exchange closed for nearly a month. Major Western banks predicted the Russian economy would shrink up to 15%. It shrank ~2%, because Russia clamped down on capital and kept selling oil to whoever would buy it. The chokepoint worked. It just didn’t work as well as people expected. * Russia: After the initial 2014 sanctions over Crimea, it built SPFS (connects over 557 financial institutions across 20 countries) to serve as an alternative to SWIFT, alongside NSPK and the Mir (476M+ cards) payment card network. * China: It built CIPS ($24.47T annual volume) to clear transactions in yuan. The e-CNY is China’s central bank digital currency, and Project m-Bridge is a collaborative platform to move digital money directly between global central banks. The dominance will not change overnight, but the world is progressing, and power is shifting, with new blockchain-based plumbing, and nations like the UAE, Hong Kong, and Singapore are trying to attract builders. “If you were to fall asleep today and wake up next year, you’d probably say not much has changed. If you went to sleep today and woke up ten years from now, the world would look totally different.” Related reads: 2. Stablecoin is not an escape; it is the next layer of US dominance

    44 min
  8. the scalability trade-off is dead, with Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero

    Apr 8

    the scalability trade-off is dead, with Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ I watched the DTCC’s CTO go on stage and say one sentence that reframed everything I thought about blockchain scalability. He said it was real. The “it” was a live demo. 2 million transactions per second (that’s roughly 100,000 times Ethereum’s throughput). Running on a network of Raspberry Pis. Built by Bryan Pellegrino and the LayerZero labs team, the guy who went from professional poker player to selling AI models to the Oakland A’s to running LayerZero, the protocol that moves 85% of all cross-chain messages. On February 10, Bryan unveiled Zero, a new layer-one blockchain. Citadel Securities, DTCC, and the parent company of the NYSE all backed the announcement. The pitch: a system fast enough for the New York Stock Exchange to run on-chain. Not in theory. In production. “We believe we can actually bring the entire global economy onchain with this technology.” We dug into the technical architecture, the $10B stablecoin distribution bet nobody expected to work, and why Bryan thinks AI agents will need payment rails that make Visa look like a fax machine. About Bryan: Bryan Pellegrino is the co-founder and CEO of LayerZero Labs. Before crypto, he was one of the top heads-up poker players on the planet (screen name: Primordial AA) and built AI models for MLB teams, including Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s. LayerZero now secures close to $100B in value and has processed hundreds of billions in cross-chain transfers. His investors include Sequoia, a16z, and Citadel Securities. 🚨We’re opening sponsorships for our next podcast series. Top guests. Serious listeners. Claim your spot → 🎧 Jump to the best parts * 00:00 From Poker to Crypto: A Journey of Obsession * 06:08 Risk Management Lessons from Poker * 11:48 The Birth of Layer Zero Labs * 18:09 Building a Layer One Blockchain: The Zero Architecture * 24:00 Privacy in Blockchain: The Three Zones of Zero * 29:56 Advisory Board Insights and Future Plans * 32:08 The Rapid Rise of USDT Zero * 35:49 Choosing the Right Interoperability Standard * 39:25 The Strategic Acquisition of Stargate * 41:39 The Future of Machine-to-Machine Payments * 46:36 Adapting Traditional Institutions to New Realities * 49:02 The Evolution of the Crypto Mission * 53:09 The Case for In-Person Collaboration * 55:04 Lightning Round: Quick Insights Important Links * LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/bryanpellegrino * X: https://x.com/PrimordialAA * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bryanpellegrino/ * LayerZero: https://layerzero.network/ * Zero: https://layerzero.network/zero * Sequoia spotlight: https://sequoiacap.com/founder/bryan-pellegrino/ Watch or listen now:YouTube • Apple Podcasts 🙌 A note from 51: Start a research-driven growth campaign with us and reach 100k+ decision makers across digital assets and finance. My biggest takeaways from this conversation: 1. The scalability trade-off is dead for blockchains For years, blockchain infrastructure has operated under a simple constraint: you can optimize for speed, or you can optimize for decentralization, but not both. * Solana chose throughput, processing thousands of transactions per second (TPS), but relying on a relatively small set of high-cost validator nodes. * Ethereum took the opposite approach, prioritizing decentralization with a vast network of nodes, at the cost of limited throughput, around 15 TPS. Every architectural decision over the past decade has been a trade-off within these constraints. Pellegrino argues that this trade-off is no longer fundamental. Zero’s architecture, built natively around zero-knowledge proofs, removes the requirement for every node to re-execute every computation. Instead, computation is verified, not replicated. “There’s been almost five billion dollars of bridge hacks. We said, could we build a better bridge? And that led us to realise that was the generalisable problem.” The result: a system that reportedly achieves 2M TPS while maintaining decentralization comparable to Ethereum. This wasn’t presented as a theory. In a live demonstration to the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the system ran on a distributed network of Raspberry Pis. DTCC CTO publicly confirmed the demonstration and described it as real. “You could not have the New York Stock Exchange on chain in any system that exists prior. And now they’re saying, wow, that is possible.” What makes this notable is a stack of interdependent innovations: * QMDB (verifiable database): Processes up to 3 million state updates per second, roughly 100× faster than existing verifiable databases and significantly faster than traditional systems like RocksDB. * FAFO (execution scheduler): Enables over one million EVM transactions per second by optimizing transaction ordering and parallelism. * SVID (data compression layer): Uses ZK-based compression so nodes only download partial data (a shard plus a transaction commitment), addressing bandwidth constraints that limit high-throughput systems. Pellegrino describes this as a compounding system, each layer unlocking the next. Related reads: 2. Stablecoins are the “distribution” wedge for institutions Tether had about $186B in circulation. Nearly all of it, around $180B, was concentrated on just two networks: Ethereum and Tron. The prevailing assumption was simple: once you’re live on the major chains, distribution is effectively maxed out. That assumption is now being challenged. USDT-0, built on LayerZero, expanded Tether’s presence to 20+ additional networks. In less than a year, it enabled roughly $70–75 billion in cross-chain transfers. More importantly, it drove $10 billion in incremental AUM. At typical reserve yields (~4%), that translates to $400–450M in annual revenue from ecosystems most teams had written off. “There is immense value, even in the longer tail of distribution, much more than people give it credit for.” The usage pattern matters: * A high volume of small retail transfers * A smaller number of very large institutional flows * Including a single $800M transfer “The most memorable number was a single transfer of $800M. And then the AUM growth alone was about $400 million directly to Tether’s bottom line.” This mix signals something important: once access improves, professional capital follows. Market makers, in particular, are using this expanded reach to capture arbitrage across chains that were previously too slow or too costly to access. As a result, the total economic activity, not just user count, has expanded. Related podcast and reads: 3. Immutability is the security model institutions actually need

    58 min
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