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

Marc Baumann

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  1. 1d ago

    187: Wall Street flipped the switch

    Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team, One number stopped me this week: $114 trillion. That’s what DTCC safeguards, and on Wednesday the backbone of US securities settlement ran its first live tokenized trades, in production, with real stocks, ETFs and Treasuries. More than 30 firms took part, and JPMorgan, BlackRock and Goldman were in the room. I wrote this week that the fat protocol thesis is dead. The 2016 idea was that blockchains would capture the value and the applications on top would stay thin. Ten years later the opposite happened: the protocols became commodities and the companies on top are capturing everything. This week’s signals at a glance: * DTCC went live on-chain * Stripe bid $53B for PayPal * Japan rewrote its rulebook * Circle got its bank And 10+ more signals below. The poll from last week: Top Boardroom Reads & Data * A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Age (Demis Hassabis, July 2026). A FINRA-style body testing frontier models 30 days before release, proposed by the lab with the most to lose. * Tokenization: An Asset Management Perspective (Investment Company Institute, July 2026). The voice of $40T+ in registered funds is preparing for tokenization, not fighting it. * Stablecoins and Fragility in Fixed Exchange Rate Regimes (IMF Working Paper, 2026). The IMF quantifies how dollar stablecoins give citizens a frictionless exit from pegged currencies. * Q2 Stablecoin FX Benchmark (Borderless, July 2026). Stablecoin FX priced a median 3.2bps BELOW interbank across 260 corridors in Q2, minus 5.9bps by June. * How Vaults Can Shape the Capital Markets of Tomorrow (S&P Global Ratings, 2026). Onchain vaults as asset management without the asset manager, and what it takes to rate them. DTCC went live on-chain What happened: DTCC processed its first live production trades using tokenized versions of DTC-held stocks, ETFs and Treasuries, with 30+ firms participating, including JPMorgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs and Vanguard. JPMorgan tokenized part of its Invesco QQQ holdings; workflows covered collateral pledging, securities lending, Treasury repo and settlement. The full service opens in October. 51 View: Every tokenized stock until now has been a workaround: offshore wrappers, synthetic exposure, someone else’s chain. These tokens are digital twins of DTC-held securities with the same protections, entitlements and ownership rights, issued by the utility that already clears the US market. That kills the fragmentation argument and turns DTCC from tokenization’s biggest obstacle into its biggest distributor. Price the October launch: if tokenized Treasuries move as collateral 24/7, the first casualty is not an exchange, it is the money market fund settlement cycle. Be Smart: One question for every tokenized equity product from here: does it settle at DTC or against it? Inside the perimeter inherits US market liquidity; outside it now competes with the utility itself. Stripe wants PayPal, all of it What happened: Stripe and Advent International made a $53B takeover offer for PayPal at $60.50 per share, a roughly 28% premium, backed by about $50B in committed financing. The bid follows an April approach; PayPal has not yet responded. Shares jumped 13%. 51 View: We wrote in April that Stripe wants to eat PayPal alive. The only thing new is the price. Look at what Stripe is actually buying: 430M+ consumer accounts, the button at millions of checkouts, and PYUSD to plug into Bridge’s issuance stack and Privy’s 75M wallets. Stripe spent three years building the money-creation layer. PayPal is the distribution it never had. It’s also defensive: in another buyer’s hands, that button is the one legacy asset that could be turned against Stripe. And the financing terms of a $53B bid carrying $50B of debt will tell you what banks really think stablecoin cash flows are worth. Be Smart: Watch the regulators, not the premium. One buyer concentrating Bridge and PYUSD (issued by Paxos) is new territory under the GENIUS Act, and how reviewers treat it will shape stablecoin M&A from here. 53 seats remaining 197 executives have already registered for our next webinar. Attendance is capped at 250, and registration will close once capacity is reached. I’ll be joined by the people advising banks on stablecoin strategy—and building the infrastructure those institutions will ultimately use. Designed for CEOs, board members, and senior leaders across banks, financial market infrastructures, asset managers, and custodians. 📅 23 July, 11am EST 🚨 Reserve your place before registration closes. Japan made crypto a financial product What happened: Japan’s parliament enacted the FIEA amendment on July 15, reclassifying crypto from a payment method into financial products under securities law. The new framework bans insider trading in digital assets, mandates issuer disclosures, raises maximum prison terms for illegal crypto businesses from 3 to 10 years, and paves the way for a planned flat 20% tax on crypto gains from 2028 (replacing rates up to 55%) plus spot bitcoin ETFs on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, targeted for 2027 or 2028. Two days earlier, MUFG-backed Progmat completed migrating ¥452B (about $2.7B) in security tokens, 64.6% of Japan’s issuance value, to a public Avalanche chain. 51 View: The tax cut gets the headlines. The reclassification is the event. Once crypto sits under the FIEA, the securities playbook applies: insider trading rules make it safe for institutions, disclosure makes it analyzable, and the ETF question becomes an implementation detail. Japan did in one law what the US is attempting across three bills and two agencies. Progmat moving to a public chain the same week is not a coincidence. Japan is now the cleanest place on earth to test a regulated on-chain capital market, and the 20% flat tax will pull volume home from Singapore and Dubai. Be Smart: The date that matters is 2028, when the flat tax lands. Until then, Japanese holders will sit on gains, so the volume wave is a 2028 story. Buy the buildout, wait for the flows. Circle got its bank What happened: Circle received final OCC approval on July 10 to open First National Digital Currency Bank, N.A., a federally chartered trust bank offering institutional digital asset custody, with USDC reserve management planned as a future capability. The second-largest stablecoin issuer is now under permanent federal supervision as GENIUS implementation approaches. 51 View: Conditional charters are press releases. Final charters are infrastructure. Circle now has what Tether cannot quickly get: a federal banking franchise behind a $60B+ stablecoin. Under GENIUS that compounds, because issuers get chosen on regulatory surface area, and “our issuer runs its own OCC-supervised national bank” is the strongest sentence in the industry. The open question is margin: a bank is expensive to run, and Circle is buying permanence with basis points just as distribution costs rise (Coinbase’s cut, and possibly a Stripe-owned PayPal pushing PYUSD). News Flashes Infrastructure and Markets * FalconX acquired bloXroute, folding low-latency blockchain connectivity into its $8B prime brokerage as tokenized assets move on-chain. * Securitize and Cantor Fitzgerald teamed up to let public companies run IPOs and follow-on offerings on-chain, with the token as the actual security rather than a wrapper. * Morgan Stanley’s E*TRADE launched spot crypto trading for retail clients via Zero Hash, starting with bitcoin, ether and solana. * SBI Group tapped Ondo Finance to tokenize Japanese stocks, settling in SBI’s regulated yen stablecoin JPYSC, one day after Japan’s new crypto law passed. Regulation and Policy * President Trump pressed the Senate to pass the Clarity Act before the August recess, framing inaction as handing digital assets and AI leadership to China. * The UK government unveiled a 54-firm tokenization taskforce including BlackRock, Goldman, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley, targeting up to £33B in annual economic output by 2035. * The ECB selected 36 payment service providers to join its digital euro pilot, moving the project from procurement into pilot preparation, with operational testing targeted for 2027. Banking and Payments * Citi and Siam Commercial Bank switched on 24/7 USD clearing via Citi Token Services, giving Thailand’s oldest bank near real-time cross-border payments outside banking hours. * Tether froze $131M in USDT after OFAC sanctioned four wallets tied to Iran’s central bank, bringing frozen Iran-linked funds to roughly $475M. * Visa introduced a stablecoin platform letting banks and fintechs mint, hold and move Open USD (OUSD), with wallet-as-a-service infrastructure, now in beta with selected clients. Funds, Deals and Others * Velocity raised a $38M Series A led by Dragonfly and FirstMark to bring stablecoin treasury infrastructure to enterprises, with Coinbase Ventures, Ripple and Capital One Ventures joining. * Tether invested $20M in Argentine neobank Ualá, an 11M-customer platform, its fourth Latin America bet in recent months. * Morgan Stanley filed amended S-1s for its spot ether and solana ETFs, naming Coinbase as custodian and setting a market-low 0.14% fee. * Citadel Securities invested $400M in Crypto.com at a $20B valuation, the exchange’s first institutional round, months after backing Kraken at the same valuation. * T. Rowe Price debuted the industry’s first actively managed multi-token spot exchange-traded product. The AI Layer * Thinking Machines Lab released its first model, Inkling: an open-weight mixture-of-experts system with 975B total parameters (about 41B active), trained on 45 trillion tokens of text, image, audio and video, and positioned by Mira Murati’s lab as a starting point for customers to fine-tune rather than a leaderboard champion. * Demis Hassabis called for a US-led, FINRA-style AI standards body, industry-funded and testing frontier models up to 30 da

  2. 4d ago

    Most AI investors are backing the wrong layer, with Stephen Messer (Internet & AI Pioneer)

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “Nobody really wants to talk about the hedge that all the buildup of data centers is.” Stephen Messer thinks the trillion-dollar data center buildout makes sense even if the frontier labs never earn it back, because a stockpile of general-purpose GPUs is a strategic asset the day China moves on Taiwan. He puts it plainly: even at a 3% probability, those chips are “worth gold.” Nobody in the market is pricing the buildout that way. Stephen is worth listening to on calls like this. Last time he sat in that chair, he told us large language models would end up like web browsers: free, everywhere, and worthless as a moat. That’s roughly what happened. He invented affiliate marketing, sold LinkShare for $425 million, and has spent 18 years building Collective[i], an AI company that predicts economic outcomes instead of next words. He wrote up the pricing side of his argument as “Peak Token” on his blog, and jokes he’s been in witness protection from frontier-lab investors ever since. This one is a playbook, not a podcast: why token pricing power is collapsing, what the forward-deployed engineer push is really about, and the one question a CEO should ask before spending an AI budget. About Stephen Messer: Stephen is co-founder and vice chairman of Collective[i], one of the earliest AI companies (founded 2008), which trains models on pooled, proprietary transaction data to predict economic outcomes: which deals close, which buyers are real, what demand does next. Before that he co-founded LinkShare, effectively inventing affiliate marketing, and sold it to Rakuten for $425 million. He publishes two posts a week at reloadnyc.com. “If your gap and the premium you’re asking people to pay for a language model disappears in two weeks, but it took you a year to make, that is not the sign of a moat that is going to be defensible.” Why this matters: The enterprise revolt against token pricing went public last week. Palantir’s Alex Karp told CNBC that CEOs are “livid,” paying for “tokens that create no value” while handing their proprietary data to the labs charging them. Uber reportedly burned its annual AI coding budget in four months. Meanwhile AI agents are getting credit cards and Stripe is building payment rails for them, which means token costs are about to become a line item in every P&L, not just engineering budgets. Stephen’s framework explains what’s underneath: the models are commodities, the data is the moat, and the market has put 90% of its money on the commodity. 🎯 Jump to the best parts 00:00 Why Everyone Is Investing In The Wrong AI00:44 Introduction01:47 Why LLMs Are Becoming Commodities03:16 Why Bigger Models Won't Win05:48 Compute vs Software07:42 The Real AI Moat09:04 OpenAI's Business Challenge12:09 Economic Foundation Models Explained15:50 Building Collective[i]17:24 Why Proprietary Data Wins21:16 Predicting Business Outcomes With AI24:44 The Biggest Enterprise AI Mistake26:24 Why Most AI Wrappers Will Die28:13 Is AI In A Bubble?30:00 The Taiwan Chip Risk32:25 AI, Geopolitics & National Security34:38 Should Frontier Models Be Restricted?36:10 Where CEOs Should Actually Invest In AI37:46 The Most Mispriced AI Opportunity38:40 Advice For AI Founders40:58 Lightning Round42:07 Where To Learn More Important Links * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenmesser/ * Collective[i]: https://www.collectivei.com * Stephen’s blog: https://www.reloadnyc.com * Last episode with Stephen: Beyond LLMs: How AI is set to reshape global business Watch or listen now: YouTube • Apple Podcasts See our last episode with Stephen: Our biggest takeaways from this conversation 1. Peak Token is here. Stephen’s core thesis: a language model’s training data is public, so the model is a commodity, and open-source distillation now closes any frontier lead in weeks. The question that kills the business model isn’t whether frontier models are better. It’s how much you can charge for the difference. “If your gap and the premium you’re asking people to pay for a language model disappears in two weeks, but it took you a year to make, that is not the sign of a moat that is going to be defensible.” “How much can you charge for that little incremental improvement? ... My question is, can that cover the cost of everything else?” * The pattern: a frontier release looks untouchable for two or three weeks, then open-source models from China and Japan distill their way to an indistinguishable gap at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek was the preview, a year ago. * New laptop-class hardware can run high-parameter models locally. Stephen’s estimate: 90% of workloads run local, and you pay frontier prices only for the rare job your machine can’t handle. That ratio breaks the labs’ economics. * The labs’ escape route is narrow premium niches, security and biology, where one result is worth real money. Hence the talent fights over those teams. What to do with this: Price every AI vendor as if their underlying model becomes free in 18 months. If the pitch still works, it’s a real business. Related reads:→ Beyond LLMs, with Stephen Messer (his first appearance) 🚀 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. Let’s talk. 2. Forward-deployed engineers are a lock-in play. The labs’ answer to commoditization is sending engineers into enterprises to build agents, positioned as a replacement for Accenture and McKinsey. Stephen’s read: those engineers have no incentive to build the one thing a token-cost-literate buyer would demand first, an abstraction layer:

    Most AI investors are backing the wrong layer, with Stephen Messer (Internet & AI Pioneer)

  3. Jul 10

    186: banks went on-chain

    Hey, it’s Marc One number stopped me this week: tokenized equities just hit an all-time high of $3.86B in monthly volume, up 145% in a month, while SOL, the chain settling 95% of it, trades at December 2023 prices. What strikes me most: Usage is exploding, and the value is flowing to the plumbing rather than the tokens. For ten years this industry priced tokens as the prize and licenses as overhead. This week showed that the tides are turning: * Kraken paid $600 million largely for licenses to assemble a bank * Sony committed $40 million for a US bank charter. * SWIFT’s shared blockchain ledger ready with 17 global banks piloting 24/7 settlement * And the quiet confirmation sits in a Broadridge release almost nobody read: its distributed ledger repo platform processed $7.5 trillion in June, arguably the largest production blockchain application in finance. It has no token at all. And more signals: * Vanguard blinked on crypto * Saylor sold the low * Coinbase and Gemini switched on stock trading. And 8+ more signals below. the poll from last week: most of 51 readers think that OpenUSD will win the stablecoin war. 51 Signal: Tokenized equities hit $3.86B in monthly volume Top Boardroom Reads & Data * Tokenization Can Change the World’s Financial Architecture (IMF, Tobias Adrian, July 2026). The IMF’s most senior markets official argues tokenization shifts risk from bank balance sheets to the infrastructure operators running the ledgers, which is exactly where regulation isn’t looking yet. * Statement on the 2026 Regulatory Agenda (SEC Chair Paul Atkins, July 2026). The SEC put three crypto rules on its 2026 agenda, covering crypto capital raising, custody and tokenized-securities trading, all targeting proposed rulemakings as early as this month. * The Great Wealth Transfer Is Already Reshaping How Americans Spend (Visa Business and Economic Insights, July 2026). Visa sizes the boomer-to-millennial wealth transfer at $36T over 20 years but finds only ~$8T becomes consumer spending; the rest lands in assets, the pool tokenized products are chasing. * Announcing Our Fourth Fund (Paradigm, July 2026). The largest crypto VC raised $1.2B and explicitly widened its mandate to AI and robotics, the clearest data point yet that crypto-native capital sees its next returns beyond crypto. * Distributed Ledger Repo Processes $7.5 Trillion in June (Broadridge, July 2026). Tokenized repo did $357B a day in June, up 68% year over year, making DLR arguably the largest production blockchain application in finance and nobody talks about it. 🚨Save your spot for our next webinar, space is limited. I’m sitting down with the people dvising the banks and building the stablecoin rails those banks will plug into. For CEOs, board members, and heads of strategy at banks, FMIs, asset managers, and custodians. 📅 23 July, 11am EST 🚨 Space is limited. RSVP to secure your spot. SWIFT just built the banks’ blockchain What happened: SWIFT announced its shared blockchain ledger is ready for use, built in nine months, with 17 banks across six continents set to pilot tokenized cross-border payments: ANZ, BNP Paribas, BNY, Citi, DBS, HSBC, MUFG, Standard Chartered, UBS and Wells Fargo among them. The goal is 24/7 settlement on trusted shared infrastructure. The same week, UBS completed its first live cross-border stablecoin B2B payments with partner Merge, settling from Switzerland in under two minutes. 51 View: For a decade the question was whether banks would come to public chains or build their own. SWIFT just answered it: they’ll do both, but the coordination layer will be theirs. This is the empire striking back. Stablecoins proved the demand for 24/7 dollar settlement, trillions of dollars of it a month, and SWIFT is now repackaging that exact product inside the correspondent banking trust model. We think the pilot-to-production gap is the whole game. SWIFT ships slowly and governance-first, while Kraken, Circle and the stablecoin rails ship weekly. If the 17 banks are settling real client volume by mid-2027, banks keep cross-border money. If not, this becomes the ledger equivalent of their 2017 DLT pilots. Be Smart: When someone says “SWIFT is doing blockchain now,” the sharp question is: settlement in what asset? A shared ledger still needs tokenized central bank money or deposits to settle. Whoever supplies that settlement asset, not the messaging layer, captures the economics. Vanguard blinked What happened: Vanguard, the $12T asset manager that famously refused to list crypto ETFs, opened a search for its first head of digital assets. The role reportedly covers a multi-year roadmap spanning tokenization, stablecoins and custody. CEO Salim Ramji, who ran iShares at BlackRock when it launched the largest bitcoin ETF, has been in the seat since 2024. To be precise: this is a hiring search, no product has been announced. 51 View: The last major allocator holdout is now recruiting for the thing it swore off, and we think the tell is the job description. It reportedly leads with tokenization and stablecoins, with trading nowhere in sight. Vanguard isn’t warming to bitcoin, it’s conceding that funds themselves are being re-platformed, and a $12T manager cannot sit out the format change even if it sits out the asset class. Our read: Vanguard’s first shipped product is a tokenized money market or index share class, and its crypto ETF stance survives another year as cover while the real migration happens underneath it. Saylor sold the low What happened: Strategy sold 3,588 BTC for $216M across the week ending July 5, its largest bitcoin sale ever, in two tranches of 1,363 and 2,225 coins. Proceeds fund the dividends on its five preferred stock series. The company still holds 843,775 BTC plus $2.55B in cash, but this is the second consecutive week of selling and a sharp acceleration. 51 View: Last week’s issue showed the treasury cohort buying the 2026 low. The biggest of them all is doing the opposite, and both can be true because Strategy is no longer really a treasury company. It’s a leveraged fund with fixed obligations: the preferreds pay out whether bitcoin cooperates or not, and with the stock trading near the value of its coins, selling BTC beats issuing equity. We think this is the first structural seller the bitcoin market has ever had at the top of its own cap table. Watch the ratio of coins sold to dividends owed; if it rises while BTC stays flat, the flywheel is running in reverse. Kraken is assembling a bank piece by piece What happened: Kraken’s parent Payward closed its $600M acquisition of Reap on July 1, adding global card issuance and stablecoin settlement infrastructure. Six days later, Reuters-reported filings showed Kraken pursuing a full EU banking license through Lithuania. Kraken is already the first digital-asset company on the Fed’s payment rails, live since March. 51 View: Put the pieces in order: Fed payment rails in March, card issuance and settlement in July, an EU bank charter in progress, and a reported IPO ahead. That’s a bank org chart being assembled in public, and I think the sequencing is deliberate: infrastructure first, charter second, listing last, so the prospectus reads “regulated global bank with an exchange attached” rather than “crypto exchange seeking respectability.” The margin logic is simple: Exchange fees compress every year, while deposits, cards and settlement float don’t. We expect at least one more top-five exchange to file for a banking charter within twelve months, and the interesting question is whether regulators price that approval like a fintech or like a bank. News Flashes Infrastructure and Markets * Brazil’s B3 introduced options on bitcoin, ether and solana futures, extending Latin America’s most complete regulated crypto derivatives suite. * Gemini launched commission-free US stock trading, its next step from crypto exchange to broker-dealer super app. Regulation and Policy * Sony Bank won conditional OCC approval for Connectia Trust, a US stablecoin trust bank with $40M capital targeting a 2027 launch under the GENIUS Act. * Coinbase secured UK authorization to offer equities and derivatives alongside crypto, its biggest UK expansion since entering the market. Banking and Payments * PayPal’s PYUSD went native on Polygon via Paxos, joining a network settling $2.5B in stablecoin volume daily. * Hyundai Card completed its first live stablecoin remittance between Hyundai Motor’s US and Mexico units using USDT on Avalanche, cutting a 3-4 hour transfer to seven minutes. Funds, Deals and Others * Gauntlet raised a $125M Series C from sole investor SBI Holdings to expand institutional DeFi risk management into yen and peso stablecoins. * Tether invested $20M in Brazil’s Mercado Bitcoin, a 4.5M-user platform with more than 10 financial licenses across Brazil and Europe. The Machine Layer * Paradigm raised a $1.2B fourth fund expanding beyond crypto into AI and robotics, backing Zipline, True Anomaly and Nous Research alongside Hyperliquid and Tempo. * Meta is preparing to sell excess GPU capacity as a cloud provider, monetizing part of its $125B+ 2026 capex the way Amazon once monetized spare servers. * Anthropic’s reported ~$47B revenue run-rate has passed OpenAI’s $25-33B, reshuffling the AI leaderboard mid-cycle. 51 View: The one that matters is Anthropic passing OpenAI. A year ago this ranking looked settled. Now the challenger runs at a reported ~$47B annualized against OpenAI’s $25-33B, and the flip happened without OpenAI shipping anything visibly worse. That is the tell: enterprise AI spend moves to whichever model wins the current eval cycle, so leadership rotates with every model generation. We think run-rate has become a lagging indicator at the model layer. The durable assets are contracts and distribution, and that race is still wide open. Watchlist / On the Calendar What to prepare for:

  4. Jul 8

    The government seized his $110B bank, with Scott Shay (Ex Signature Bank Chairman)

    This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “If you gave people the choice between full reserve banking and fractional banking, they’d take full reserve banking in a minute.” The person building it is Scott Shay, who has founded four banks the traditional way, including Signature Bank, and created Signet, the first 24/7 payment system inside a US bank. We sat down live at Proof of Talk in Paris. His argument is simple: for years the industry has tried to make crypto behave more like a bank. The better trade is making a bank behave more like crypto. Think about it: Almost every bank in the world works the same way. You deposit money, the bank lends most of it out, and your balance is a promise to pay, settled in batches, often a day later. N3XT does neither. Every deposited dollar sits in short-term Treasuries. Nothing gets lent. The core banking system is a blockchain, so when a client moves a dollar, they move the actual dollar, any hour, any day, in seconds. It’s the first full-reserve “narrow bank” in the US, and it raised $72 million from Paradigm, HACK VC, and Winklevoss Capital to prove the model works. This one is a playbook, not a podcast: how a bank without lending makes money, why the number of stablecoins will be small, and how on-chain payments would have caught a $2.3 billion fraud. About Scott Shay: Scott is founder and chairman of N3XT, a full-reserve, blockchain-native bank that launched in December 2025 under a Wyoming SPDI charter. Before that he co-founded Signature Bank in 2001 and chaired it for 22 years as it grew past $110 billion in assets, created Signet, co-founded Ranieri & Co. with Lew Ranieri, and helped found Bank United of Texas and Merrick Bank. He is also the author of In Good Faith: Questioning Religion and Atheism. “Taking a system like Bitcoin and putting it into a bank was a lot like stapling paper to cardboard.” Why this matters: The race to put dollars on-chain has two established camps. Stablecoins are a ~$311 billion market, and the GENIUS Act (July 2025) bars issuers from paying interest or lending. Banks are answering with tokenized deposits: JP Morgan’s JPMD is live on Base, and 17 banks including Citi, BofA, and Wells Fargo are building a shared tokenized-deposit network through The Clearing House for H1 2027. Scott’s model is a third option: not a token that represents a dollar, and not a claim on a fractional balance sheet, but a bank where the on-chain balance is the dollar itself. 🎯 Jump to the best parts 00:00 Why Signature Bank Was Shut Down00:24 Introduction01:13 Building Signature Bank02:58 Signet Explained05:00 What Really Happened During The Banking Crisis08:37 Why Scott Built NEXT09:16 Full Reserve Banking Explained11:20 Can This Banking Model Work?14:33 Why Traditional Banks Resist Change17:07 Why Choose NEXT Over JP Morgan?20:02 Building A Blockchain Native Bank21:35 Tokenized Dollars Explained23:01 DeFi Meets Banking24:27 Stablecoins vs Tokenized Deposits25:47 What's Next For NEXT?27:09 Lightning Round29:05 Why Scott Never Feared Blockchain29:41 Where To Learn More 🚀 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. Important Links * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-shay/ * N3XT: https://n3xt.io * Scott’s books: https://www.scottshay.com Watch or listen now: YouTube • Apple Podcasts 🔒 The full breakdown is for PRO subscribers Our biggest takeaways from this conversation 1. A deposit is a promise to pay. N3XT’s product is removing the promise. The clearest way to understand N3XT is one distinction. When you hold a bank deposit, you hold an IOU that gets settled in overnight batches. When you hold a dollar at N3XT, the dollar is there, in short-term Treasuries, all of it, all the time. Scott’s point is that this isn’t a technical detail. It’s the actual product. “Fractional banking started as a three-card Monte sleight of hand.” “All banks at the bottom are debits and credits and batch processing. ... If you gave people the choice between full reserve banking and fractional banking, they’d take full reserve banking in a minute.” * The design comes from the Bitcoin white paper: transfer the whole asset, not a claim on it. Signet, which Scott built at Signature, moved a promise to pay. N3XT moves the dollar. * No lending means no FDIC, no lender of last resort, and no maturity mismatch, because there is nothing to mismatch. Short-term governments only: no interest rate risk, no credit risk. * Where the revenue comes from: Treasury float and payment fees, B2B only. Clients who want yield lend explicitly, on the platform, knowing exactly what they’re funding, instead of the bank doing it silently with their balance. What to do with this: For any “digital dollar” product, ask one question: am I holding the asset or a promise to pay? Your counterparty risk follows from the answer. Related reads:→ How banks are beating stablecoins

    The government seized his $110B bank, with Scott Shay (Ex Signature Bank Chairman)

  5. Jul 3

    185: they bought the 2026 low

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

  6. Jun 24

    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.

    He spent 15,000 hours trying to kill Bitcoin

  7. 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

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

  8. 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)

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