Bitcoin’s rebound has brought some momentum back to crypto after a difficult year, but I’m still watching where the capital is coming from and how durable that demand proves to be.

I spoke with Money last week about what has held the market back in 2026. The unwind of leverage after last year’s selloff left a lasting mark, while higher rates and the shift of capital and attention toward AI made the recovery slower than many expected. At the same time, traditional financial institutions have continued building. Banks, brokerages, and asset managers are expanding their digital asset products even though prices and trading activity have not yet reflected that progress. As I told Money, traditional finance takes time to build the infrastructure and distribution needed to bring these products to a broader market.

That gap between market prices and what is being built underneath them runs through this week’s newsletter. Schwab is expanding direct crypto trading, large Bitcoin holders are moving assets into BlackRock’s ETF structure, and Goldman Sachs is looking beyond trading volumes to new crypto businesses. In the deep dives, I look at what comes next as more assets and financial activity move onchain, from using tokenized stocks as collateral to protecting institutional order flow and positions on shared ledgers.

Vanessa Grellet, Managing Partner, Arche Capital

Upcoming Economic Indicators to watch out for this week

• U.S. ISM Manufacturing PMI - Tuesday 09/01

• U.S. AD Employment Change - Wednesday 09/02

• U.S. ISM Services PMI - Thursday 09/03

• U.S. Nonfarm Payrolls - Friday 09/04

Coming this October

My new book, Digital Assets and Crypto for Investors: Your Practical Guide to Building a Diversified Portfolio, is now available for preorder at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

This week’s deep dives

• 👇Tokenized stocks could open a new market for onchain credit

• 👇Privacy is becoming part of the institutional onchain stack

This week’s market briefing

📈 Mizuho sees stronger foundations behind crypto rebound

Mizuho says the latest crypto rally appears healthier than previous cycles, with spot markets and ETFs, not leverage, providing more of the momentum. With crypto open interest falling and spot Bitcoin ETFs drawing roughly $1.9 billion in weekly inflows, the bank sees a more durable funding structure that could benefit platforms such as Robinhood, eToro, and BitGo if trading activity continues to recover.

🏦 Charles Schwab expands crypto offering beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum

Charles Schwab plans to add Solana, Avalanche, and Chainlink to Schwab Crypto in the coming months, expanding a platform that already offers direct Bitcoin and Ethereum trading. The move signals Schwab’s gradual broadening of digital asset access within its traditional brokerage ecosystem, with further cryptocurrencies and digital assets expected to follow over time.

🐋 Bitcoin whales move $5 billion into BlackRock’s IBIT wrapper

Large Bitcoin holders have now converted more than $5 billion of existing BTC directly into BlackRock’s IBIT shares, up from roughly $3 billion last October, marking a notable migration from direct crypto ownership into traditional financial infrastructure. The structural enabler is IBIT’s in-kind creation mechanism: rather than selling Bitcoin and using the cash to purchase ETF shares, eligible holders can transfer BTC through an authorized participant in exchange for IBIT shares. BlackRock recently lowered the minimum conversion size from $25 million to $1 million, significantly expanding the pool of holders able to use the structure.

🏦 Goldman Sachs grows more optimistic about crypto-linked equities

Goldman Sachs is becoming more optimistic about the crypto sector despite trading volumes remaining well below their peak, maintaining Buy ratings on Coinbase and Robinhood and raising its Coinbase price target to $196. The bank points to improving regulation and the expansion of prediction markets, tokenized assets, and crypto infrastructure as longer-term growth drivers, suggesting its outlook increasingly rests on the businesses being built around digital assets rather than a recovery in crypto prices alone.

🔎 CFTC brings Nasdaq surveillance technology to crypto and prediction markets

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) is modernizing its market oversight with Nasdaq’s SMARTS surveillance technology, replacing legacy systems with automated alerts and cross-market monitoring designed to identify potential manipulation and abusive trading. While the technology spans the agency’s broader derivatives markets, the upgrade is increasingly relevant as crypto derivatives, 24/7 trading, and prediction markets expand the CFTC’s oversight responsibilities.

Deep dive: Tokenized stocks could open a new market for onchain credit

Tokenized equities are typically discussed as a new way to trade stocks on blockchain rails. A potentially more consequential development is what happens once those assets can also function as collateral.

In a recent note, Morpho co-founder Paul Frambot argued that tokenized stocks could extend onchain lending beyond its traditional base of crypto-backed loans and into forms of securities-backed credit already common in traditional finance. The opportunity is significant, but reproducing those markets onchain requires solving a harder problem than tokenization alone: managing portfolio-level collateral, liquidity, and regulatory restrictions without creating hundreds of disconnected lending markets.

From tokenized trading to tokenized collateral

There are two distinct markets to consider. Stock-backed lending allows investors to borrow against an equity portfolio without selling it, while stock lending involves temporarily lending securities to another party, typically for short selling, hedging, or settlement. Both are established businesses in traditional markets, but putting them onchain could make collateral programmable and allow borrowing, lending, and settlement to occur on shared infrastructure.

The challenge is that equities are considerably more complex collateral than the handful of major crypto assets that dominate DeFi lending today. A borrower may pledge a portfolio containing numerous securities, each with different volatility, liquidity, and regulatory characteristics. Eligibility can also depend on the investor and jurisdiction. That makes the conventional DeFi model of putting assets into large, shared lending pools difficult to extend to equities.

A different architecture is emerging for onchain credit

Morpho’s proposed solution illustrates how lending infrastructure may evolve as real-world assets move onchain. Its Midnight architecture treats individual portfolios as isolated collateral markets while allowing lenders to make offers across multiple markets, rather than requiring capital to sit inside a dedicated pool for each collateral combination. Compliance restrictions can also be applied at the market level, potentially allowing permissioned and permissionless lending to operate on common infrastructure.

For markets, the important development is broader than any single protocol. If tokenized equities become usable collateral rather than simply tradeable representations of stocks, tokenization begins to connect with the much larger credit markets surrounding securities. That could create new demand for tokenized assets themselves while bringing activities such as portfolio-backed borrowing and securities lending onto blockchain settlement rails.

Bottom line: Tokenized stocks could evolve from trading instruments into productive collateral. If equities can be borrowed against or lent onchain, tokenization could extend into the much larger securities-backed credit market, but scaling that opportunity will require infrastructure that can manage portfolio risk, regulatory requirements and liquidity.

Deep dive: Privacy is becoming part of the institutional onchain stack

As I wrote on Substack last week, confidentiality is becoming a practical requirement as central banks and financial institutions move settlement activity onto shared ledgers. Institutional custody platform Utila and privacy infrastructure provider Bermuda recently demonstrated a confidential onchain repo transaction designed for central banks, combining institutional control of cryptographic keys with the ability to keep balances and transaction details out of public view.

Repo transactions and collateral movements can reveal positioning and intentions, allowing other market participants to trade around that information. Onchain settlement will need to protect order flow and positions while maintaining appropriate visibility for regulators and auditors.

Transparency works differently in institutional markets

Public blockchains were designed around transparency, but wholesale financial markets were not. A central bank conducting repo operations does not want its collateral movements or transaction sizes visible to the entire market in real time. Neither does a bank managing liquidity or an asset manager repositioning a portfolio.

What is emerging instead is selective visibility. Transactions can remain verifiable onchain without making every detail public. In the Utila and Bermuda model, institutions retain their own cryptographic keys through hardware security modules, while privacy technology shields transaction information on the ledger. Regulators and auditors can still receive the information they are entitled to see. The goal is not anonymity. It is preserving the information boundaries that already exist in regulated markets.

Moving onchain means recreating more than settlement

This question is becoming more relevant as central banks experiment with distributed-ledger infrastructure. Projects involving the Swiss National Bank, the Eurosystem, BIS, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore have already explored wholesale settlement and tokenized financial markets. The technical question of whether assets and payments can settle onchain is increasingly giving way to a harder one. Can the infrastructure meet the operational standards institutions already expect from existing financial markets?

Privacy is part of that equation. Repo, securities lending, collateral management, and large institutional transfers all contain commercially sensitive information. If those activities migrate to shared ledgers, institutions will need ways to protect positions and transaction flows without weakening regulatory oversight.

Bottom line: Institutional finance is unlikely to move onto infrastructure where every position and transaction can be observed by the market. The more viable model is one where settlement is shared and verifiable, while sensitive activity remains confidential and regulators retain the visibility they need.

That line, from Utila and Bermuda’s announcement this week, is the whole thesis in one sentence. As central banks and commercial banks quietly move settlement infrastructure onto shared ledgers, the industry has spent most of its energy solving for custody security and almost none for confidentiality. This week’s announcement is a signal that the second problem is finally getting the same attention as the first.

The announcement

Utila, an institutional custody platform, and Bermuda, a privacy infrastructure provider, announced a partnership enabling central banks to run on-chain settlement operations with confidentiality and security together, rather than trading one for the other. The showcase centerpiece was a live demonstration of a confidential repo operation — the kind of routine, high-frequency transaction that central banks execute constantly and would very much prefer the entire market not watch in real time.

The partnership stitches together two layers that have historically lived in separate parts of the stack:

Key control stays with the central bank. Cryptographic keys sit in hardware security modules that the central bank owns and physically controls — the same standard of custody regulators already apply to gold reserves and RTGS systems. Utila never holds the key material itself. This isn’t a cosmetic detail: regulators in Hong Kong (98%), Japan (95%) and Singapore (90%) already mandate HSM custody at those levels for digital asset operations. Institutions adopting shared ledgers were never going to accept anything less rigorous than what they already require of their existing infrastructure.

Privacy lives on the ledger. Bermuda layers confidentiality on top through shielded accounts and stealth addresses — balances and trade details stay hidden from public view, while compliance rules are enforced cryptographically and selective disclosure is preserved for auditors and regulators who need visibility. In other words: private from the market, transparent to the people who are actually supposed to be watching.

Bentzi Rabi, Utila’s CEO, framed it plainly: central banks expect the same rigor from digital asset infrastructure that they demand from their RTGS systems, and pairing that with Bermuda keeps operations on a shared ledger confidential without sacrificing that rigor. Jan Philipp Fritsche, Bermuda’s co-founder and a former ECB staffer, put it even more simply — privacy and compliance are the two most requested features from their institutional clients. Not one or the other. Both, together, as a baseline requirement.

Why the transparency problem is real, not theoretical

Public blockchains were built to be transparent by default, which is exactly backwards for institutional finance. If a central bank’s collateral movements, intervention timing, allotment sizes and strategy thresholds are visible on-chain in real time, that’s not radical transparency — it’s a standing invitation to front-run monetary policy. The cost isn’t abstract either: every basis point of information leakage shows up as worse execution and higher operational cost, the same way it would in any traditional market where order flow leaks early.

This is precisely why the current wave of central bank digital ledger pilots — the Eurosystem’s Pontes, the Monetary Authority of Singapore and Swiss National Bank’s various initiatives, Project Agorá, Project Helvetia, and the Global Layer One (GL1) effort — have all converged on the same requirement: programmable compliance that doesn’t require giving up confidentiality to get it. Bermuda’s contribution to the GL1 programmable compliance whitepaper (published this June) made the case formally: privacy and regulatory enforceability aren’t in tension, they just haven’t been engineered together properly until now.

The Swiss National Bank’s track record is instructive here. It ran the first central bank monetary policy operation on DLT back in June 2024, issuing CHF 64 million in digital bills on-chain, and has since extended its pilot through mid-2027. That’s not a proof-of-concept anymore — that’s an institution building toward production infrastructure, one careful step at a time. The Utila-Bermuda partnership reads like the next logical step in that build-out: taking what’s been proven technically feasible and hardening it into something a central bank’s risk committee would actually sign off on.

The bigger pattern: privacy is becoming table stakes, not a feature

Step back from central banks specifically, and the pattern generalizes. As commercial banks, asset managers and market infrastructure operators follow central banks onto shared ledgers, they’re going to run into the identical problem: public settlement rails expose exactly the information that institutional participants have spent decades protecting. Bermuda’s broader pitch — confidential balances via shielded accounts, unlinkable interactions via stealth addresses, cryptographically enforced compliance, and selective disclosure for regulators — isn’t a niche central-bank product. It’s the privacy layer that any institution moving real balance sheet on-chain is eventually going to need, whether the use case is a repo, a cross-border transfer, or a DeFi position they’d rather not broadcast to every other participant on the network.

The honest way to read this announcement: the “can institutions actually use public ledgers” question has quietly shifted from “can we secure the keys” (mostly solved, at least at the HSM layer) to “can we keep our activity confidential while staying fully auditable” (still being built, in real time, by partnerships exactly like this one).

Join the conversation

Utila and Bermuda are hosting a seminar — Confidential Custody: Privacy and Key Control — for operations, treasury, compliance and technology teams at central banks, commercial banks, and other financial institutions, along with market infrastructure operators and regulators working at the intersection of privacy and compliance on public blockchains.

The agenda covers key control and HSM implementation requirements, the operational infrastructure around key management, on-chain confidentiality mechanisms (shielded balances, stealth addresses), live demonstrations of repo operations and cross-border transfers, and a panel discussion with open Q&A.

Register here: luma.com/fy9ra0wu

Announcement: https://utila.io/blog/utila-bermuda-confidential-custody-central-banks

This week Solana is running its first real on-chain governance vote. Three items are on the ballot. Two of them change the money.

They have not passed yet. Voting is open into Thursday, August 27. A “yes” is a green light for developers to implement the change — not an instant switch.

If you hold SOL, stake SOL, or just keep seeing “5% yield” on an exchange screen, this is the vote that matters.

What’s actually being decided

Think of SOL like a company that still prints a few new shares every year to pay the people who keep the network online.

Proposal 1 (SGP-0002 / SIMD-550) speeds up how quickly that printing slows down. Solana already planned to reduce inflation every year until it settles at 1.5%. Today that taper is 15% a year. This vote would make it 30%. Same destination, faster trip: the 1.5% floor arrives around 2029 instead of 2032. Over six years, about 18.9 million fewer SOL get created. The dollar value of that depends on the price; treat the token count as the real number.

Proposal 2 (SGP-0003 / SIMD-553) changes how transactions are priced. Today Solana mostly charges a flat fee for a signature, then gives a lot of compute away. The new design charges a small fee to get into a block, plus a second fee based on how much work the transaction asks the network to do. That second fee is burned — destroyed, not paid to anyone. At today’s activity, burns could rise from roughly 650 SOL a day to 7,500–9,000. That is a forecast, not a promise. If apps get more efficient and request less compute, the burn comes in lower.

To pass, each proposal needs roughly one-third of staked SOL to vote and then two-thirds of the yes/no votes in favor. Abstains help make quorum. They do not count as yes.

What happens to staking yield

If you stake SOL today, you earn around 5.3%. Most of that is not “profit” in the normal sense. It is mainly new coins issued to offset the new coins everyone else is also getting. After inflation, the real yield is closer to 2%.

The first proposal does not slash that coupon overnight. Helius, which wrote it, modeled the inflation piece of yield (assuming about 68% of SOL stays staked) like this:

- In a year: about 4.3%

- In two years: about 3.0%

- In three years: about 2.3%

That path is why people say yield “gets cut in half.” It is a two-to-three-year glide, and it only hits the inflation part of the coupon. Trading tips and MEV can still add something on top. They would need to grow a lot to fully replace what inflation stops paying.

If you use a staked ETF, an exchange staking product, or a liquid staking token, the headline APY you are marketed will likely fall along that same path.

Why some people think this is bullish

Less dilution. High inflation means a slow leak. Every year there are more coins. Stakers often sell a slice of rewards to pay tax. Slowing issuance plugs some of that leak.

More scarcity if usage holds up. The second proposal ties burning to actual network work. If Solana stays busy, more SOL disappears. One research shop has suggested that, if both pass, SOL’s supply growth could eventually sit below gold’s. That is a model, not a guarantee.

Idle capital might go to work.About 68% of SOL is staked, versus roughly 35% of ETH. A fat staking coupon encourages people to lock coins and wait. A thinner coupon may push some of that SOL into trading, lending, and apps instead. That is the hope, not a law of nature.

Markets have liked this kind of story before. After Ethereum started burning fees in 2021, and after Cosmos cut inflation in 2023, prices rose in the following months. Both windows also had good broader markets. History is a hint, not a strategy.

Why other people hate it

Your coupon gets worse. There is no spin that turns 5% into 3% and calls it a raise. Funds and products that live on staking income will earn less per coin unless the price goes up.

Small validators feel it first. The people who run the computers that secure Solana get paid mostly from that inflation. The authors estimate only a handful become unprofitable in year one, rising to a few dozen by year three — out of roughly 740 operators. That is a model. If costs rise or SOL’s price falls, more get squeezed. The last time Solana tried a bigger inflation cut, in March 2025, small validators helped kill it. That vote got 61% yes and needed 67%.

Some transactions get more expensive. Simple votes and oracle updates get cheaper. Messy, compute-heavy trades — the kind memecoin bots love — can get much pricier unless developers clean up how much compute they request. That is intentional. It is also a tax on the “Solana is cheap” habit.

Institutions wanted a quieter first vote. Solana Company, a Nasdaq-listed SOL treasury firm, said it would vote against both money proposals, arguing the first governance cycle was the wrong moment to rewrite issuance and fees.

How to read this if you are not in the weeds

You do not need the proposal numbers. You need three ideas:

1. Staking yield is mostly new coins, not a dividend from a profitable company.

2. These votes trade a fatter coupon for a tighter supply. Holders who care about the price of one SOL may like that. People who budget around 5% a year may not.

3. None of it works if the network goes quiet. Burns only bite if people keep using the chain. Solana is a leader in on-chain stock trading and punches above its weight in stablecoin *activity* relative to how many stablecoins actually live there. Usage is the real product. Tokenomics is just the plumbing.

What I’d watch after Thursday

- Did both proposals clear one-third turnout and two-thirds yes? Either can pass without the other.

- Does the share of SOL being staked drop — and does that SOL show up in apps, or on exchanges?

- Do daily burns actually move toward thousands of SOL, or do developers slim down their transactions and shrink the burn?

- Do small validators keep operating, or does stake pile into fewer big operators?

Solana is asking stakers to accept a smaller paycheck so the coin itself prints more slowly and burns a bit more. That is a grown-up trade. It is not free.

If you are a long-term holder, the interesting question is not “will my APY look worse on a dashboard?” It will. The question is whether Solana keeps being a place people actually transact. A tighter supply on a busy chain is a feature. A tighter supply on a quiet chain is just a worse savings account.

The vote is still open. Don’t write the ending until Thursday.

Not financial advice.

Bitcoin just had its biggest weekly move in more than three years, rallying after the U.S. Treasury announced plans to double buybacks of longer-dated government bonds. The move brought liquidity back to the center of the Bitcoin story and helped push the asset above $79,000 thereby validating the debasement trade. The move was amplified by record ETF inflows and a major short squeeze. Ether pushed above $2,400. Standard Chartered projected Bitcoin could reach $100,000 by year-end. But price was only one part of what caught my attention this week.

Franklin Templeton cleared a path for tokenized assets to enter traditional funds. Ripple raised $275 million to expand its institutional prime brokerage business. FalconX and Ethena launched a $1 billion credit facility. And U.S. regulators continued moving forward on clearer rules for digital assets.

These may look like separate developments, but they point in the same direction. Digital assets are becoming more closely integrated into how institutions manage liquidity, credit, collateral, and investment products. Bitcoin’s rally may be grabbing the headlines, but the infrastructure around the market is changing too.

Vanessa Grellet, Managing Partner, Arche Capital

Upcoming Economic Indicators to watch out for this week

• U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent press conference - Monday 08/24

• U.S. July PCE Inflation data - Wednesday 08/26

• U.S. Q2 2026 GDP data - Wednesday 08/26

• Nvidia Earnings - Wednesday 08/26

• Fed Chair speaks at Jackson Hole - Friday 08/28

Coming this October

My new book, Digital Assets and Crypto for InvestorsYour Practical Guide to Building a Diversified Portfolio, is now available for preorder at Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

This week’s deep dive

• 👇Franklin Templeton just widened the path to mainstream tokenization

This week’s market briefing

💵 Standard Chartered says Treasury buybacks strengthen Bitcoin’s $100,000 case

Bitcoin’s rebound toward $80,000 is putting the liquidity narrative back in focus after the U.S. Treasury announced it will at least double the maximum size of buybacks in longer-dated government bonds. The move raises planned buybacks of 10- to 30-year nominal coupons from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation, helping ease pressure on long-term yields after the recent bond selloff. Standard Chartered’s Geoff Kendrick argues that the intervention improves the liquidity backdrop for Bitcoin, which has historically benefited from easier financial conditions and government liquidity support. Kendrick now sees the latest Treasury action as reinforcing the case for Bitcoin to reach $100,000 by year-end.

🏛️ Canton targets state benefits with 2027 blockchain pilot

Digital Asset and former House Speaker Paul Ryan’s American Idea Foundation are preparing to pilot a blockchain-based benefits system across three U.S. states, extending Canton Network’s reach beyond institutional markets and into government infrastructure. The RISE program, expected to launch in early 2027 pending federal approval, would consolidate multiple state-administered benefits into monthly or twice-monthly payments, automatically adjust support as household income changes, and give agencies a shared system for monitoring payments and compliance while restricting access to sensitive data. The initiative adds another government-linked use case for Canton following recent projects involving Japanese government bonds and tokenized U.S. Treasuries, as the network looks to establish itself as infrastructure for regulated financial and public-sector transactions.

💼 Ripple raises $275 million to scale institutional prime brokerage

Ripple has raised $275 million through a private placement of senior unsecured notes as it expands deeper into traditional financial services. Issued through Ripple Prime, the company’s non-bank prime brokerage, the offering drew participation from institutional investors, with proceeds earmarked for prime brokerage, financing, and multi-asset clearing. The raise builds on Ripple’s $1.25 billion acquisition of Hidden Road last year and a $200 million credit facility secured in May to expand lending capacity, as the company positions Ripple Prime as a broader institutional platform spanning traditional and digital asset markets.

⚖️ CFTC signals crypto rulemaking push if CLARITY stalls

CFTC Chair Michael Selig said the agency will move ahead with crypto rulemaking if Congress fails to pass the CLARITY Act. He has directed staff to explore rules allowing registered and non-registered firms to offer leveraged/margined crypto trading, plus developer protections, while giving the Senate time to act in September. The comments follow President Trump’s White House push for a “fair version” of the CLARITY Act. Separately, the SEC proposed Regulation Crypto Assets, its first major crypto rule. It creates a tailored offering regime with a $5M “startup” exemption (4 years) and a $75M “fundraising” exemption (12 months), plus an investment-contract safe harbor. A 60-day comment period is open. U.S. regulators are signaling they will set clearer rules through agency action if legislation stays stalled.

🤝 FalconX and Ethena launch $1 billion institutional credit facility

FalconX and Ethena have launched a $1 billion secured lending facility that will use assets backing USDe into overcollateralized loans to institutional borrowers, expanding the synthetic dollar’s sources of returns beyond its traditional crypto basis strategies. Structured through a special purpose vehicle, the facility will see FalconX originate and service loans and manage collateral held with qualified custodians, with financing available for institutional trading strategies, corporate treasury management, and payments. The arrangement broadens Ethena’s yield model by introducing institutional credit exposure alongside the derivatives-based strategies underpinning USDe, which currently has roughly $4 billion in circulation.

Deep dive: Franklin Templeton just widened the path to mainstream tokenization

Wall Street’s tokenization push is starting to move beyond issuing digital versions of traditional assets. Franklin Templeton has received SEC clearance to use its tokenized U.S. government money-market fund, BENJI, within its existing ETFs and mutual funds for cash management and collateral purposes. Until now, much of the market has focused on creating tokenized products that investors or institutions choose to hold directly. Franklin is now bringing the technology into the mechanics of traditional fund management. If that model spreads, investors may increasingly gain the efficiencies of tokenization without buying a tokenized product, using a crypto wallet, or changing how they access financial markets.

Tokenized assets are becoming part of portfolio management

Franklin’s immediate focus is cash and collateral. Funds need liquidity to meet redemptions and support portfolio activity, but holding too much cash can weigh on returns. Franklin believes BENJI could give portfolio managers more flexibility over those cash balances while allowing a greater share of fund assets to continue earning yield. Individual fund boards will still need to approve its use, but the SEC clearance gives Franklin a route to incorporate a digitally native asset into conventional investment products.

Franklin manages more than 130 ETFs globally with roughly $82 billion in assets, while its mutual funds hold roughly $790 billion. Its tokenized money-market funds currently manage $2.6 billion. The gap between those numbers illustrates the opportunity: tokenized assets could reach a far larger pool of capital by becoming useful within existing portfolios, rather than depending primarily on investors actively seeking blockchain-based investments.

Wall Street adoption may look more familiar than expected

Franklin is not alone in looking for ways to bring tokenization deeper into traditional finance. The tokenization market has already grown to roughly $38 billion, according to RWA.xyz data, as firms including BlackRock and BNY expand their efforts. As that market grows, the focus is shifting from putting assets onchain to finding practical uses for them within existing financial products and infrastructure.

Cash and collateral provide an obvious entry point because they sit at the center of everyday fund operations. If tokenized instruments can improve liquidity management, settlement, and collateral use, asset managers have an economic reason to adopt the technology regardless of whether their clients care about blockchain.

Bottom line: The bigger opportunity for tokenization may be getting asset managers to use tokenized assets inside the products investors already own. Franklin now has regulatory clearance to test that model at scale, creating a potential blueprint for how blockchain becomes part of mainstream asset management without being visible to the end investor.

Dear all,

For most of financial history, the identity of the customer was taken for granted: it was a person or an institution acting through people.

Our infrastructure reflects that assumption. Markets have opening hours. Payments move through systems designed around business days. Accounts require human authorization. Even much of today’s digital finance is essentially old financial architecture with a faster interface.

AI agents challenge that model in a way I think the market is only beginning to appreciate.

Software that can independently purchase data, rent computing power, or pay another piece of software doesn’t care that it’s Sunday, that a bank is closed, or that settlement takes two days. It needs money that can move at the same speed—and with the same programmability—as the software itself.

That makes several developments this week look different when viewed together. Wells Fargo is preparing tokenized deposits that can move outside conventional payment windows. BlackRock is making money market fund shares transferable between approved wallets around the clock. BNY is bringing staking inside its institutional custody framework. Western Union is connecting stablecoins to payment infrastructure already used around the world.

None of these initiatives were built primarily for AI agents. But collectively, they are pushing finance toward an architecture that looks considerably more compatible with them.

That’s what makes the convergence of AI and digital assets so interesting to me. We’ve spent years asking how blockchain might change the way people transact. We may soon have to ask a much stranger question: What does a financial system look like when some of its most active customers aren’t human?

Vanessa Grellet, Managing Partner, Arche Capital

Upcoming Economic Indicators to watch out for this week

• CoreWeave Quarterly Earnings - Tuesday 08/11

• Super Micro Computer Quarterly Earnings - Tuesday 08/11

• U.S. July CPI Report - Wednesday 08/12

• Figure Technology Solutions Quarterly Earnings - Wednesday 08/12

• U.S. July PPI Report - Thursday 08/13

• Bullish Quarterly Earnings - Thursday 08/13

• Gemini Quarterly Earnings - Thursday 08/13

This week’s deep dives

• 👇 Agentic AI may be blockchain’s next chapter—but investors still need to know which blockchain

• 👇 Bittensor’s market-driven model is facing a governance test

• Nexr week will be dedicated to the Ethereum EIP 8363 discussions

This week’s market briefing

⚖️ Clarity Act Vote Pushed back to September

The U.S. Senate has delayed a floor vote on the Clarity Act, the bipartisan crypto market-structure bill formally known as the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, until after its August recess. Senate Majority Leader John Thune confirmed that Democrats blocked a procedural vote before lawmakers left Washington, citing unresolved differences over ethics rules, illicit-finance provisions, and related issues. Thune stated the legislation will be “queued up first thing” when the Senate returns in mid-September, and he subsequently filed a cloture motion that positions an initial procedural vote for around September 15. The delay compresses the remaining legislative window ahead of the November midterms, leaving only a few weeks for negotiators to secure the 60 votes needed to advance the bill.

🔗 BlackRock expands tokenized money market funds in Europe on Ethereum

BlackRock is bringing tokenization to select European money market funds, launching digital share classes through JPMorgan’s Kinexys platform. The new structure covers funds denominated in U.S. dollars, euros, and British pounds and sits within BlackRock’s $311 billion Institutional Cash Series business. Eligible investors can hold fund shares as digital tokens and transfer them between approved wallets around the clock. The move could broaden how money market funds are used across digital financial markets, particularly as corporate treasurers explore tokenized cash and financial institutions look for assets that can move more easily and serve as collateral.

🏦 BNY brings institutional staking into its custody platform

BNY is expanding its digital asset custody offering through a partnership with Galaxy that will allow eligible institutional clients to stake supported proof-of-stake assets without moving them outside BNY’s custody framework. Galaxy will provide the staking infrastructure and serve as a design partner for BNY’s broader digital asset platform, with the companies also looking to integrate custody, staking, reporting, and tax services into a more unified offering. The move reflects a broader shift among traditional financial institutions from simply safeguarding digital assets toward providing the infrastructure needed to participate in onchain markets within established institutional controls.

⚖️ CME challenge puts crypto market structure back in focus

The SEC has paused Nasdaq PHLX’s planned launch of cash-settled Bitcoin index options following a challenge from CME Group. The dispute centers on whether direct Bitcoin derivatives should fall under SEC securities rules or CFTC oversight of commodity derivatives. CME argues that the decision could have broader consequences, potentially opening the door for securities exchanges to list similar products tied to commodities such as gold and oil. The challenge highlights the jurisdictional questions that remain as traditional exchanges expand into digital assets, underscoring the importance of efforts such as the CLARITY Act to establish clearer boundaries between the SEC and CFTC.

💵 Wells Fargo to bring tokenized deposits to corporate payments

Wells Fargo is preparing to bring blockchain infrastructure into its corporate payments business, with a tokenized deposit service expected to debut this fall, according to The Wall Street Journal. The initial rollout will focus on dollar- and sterling-denominated cross-border transactions, giving commercial clients the ability to move and settle bank money outside conventional payment windows and incorporate programmable features into treasury workflows. More important than the product itself is what it signals: large banks are increasingly treating tokenization as an upgrade to core financial infrastructure rather than a standalone digital asset experiment. With additional currencies and jurisdictions expected to follow, Wells Fargo is effectively positioning tokenized commercial bank money as another potential rail for institutional payments.

🌎 Western Union puts stablecoins on familiar payment rails

Western Union is pushing stablecoins closer to everyday financial use with Stablecard, a new wallet and Visa card developed with payments infrastructure provider Rain. The product connects Western Union’s remittance network with USDPT, a dollar-backed stablecoin issued by Anchorage Digital Bank on Solana, allowing customers to receive transfers into a digital dollar balance and spend those funds through the existing Visa network. Stablecard is launching across 37 markets, with more than 60 targeted by year-end. For Western Union, the strategic opportunity extends beyond faster cross-border transfers: in markets where local currencies are volatile, the company can offer recipients a way to retain funds in dollar-denominated form without sacrificing everyday usability.

Deep dive: Agentic AI may be blockchain’s next chapter—but investors still need to know which blockchain

Franklin Templeton recently argued that agentic AI—the next generation of autonomous software capable of transacting on behalf of users—could become blockchain’s “killer use case.” The paper makes a compelling observation: if AI agents increasingly buy data, pay for APIs, rent compute, and settle transactions without human intervention, today’s payment infrastructure may prove inadequate. Public blockchains, stablecoins, and programmable payments could provide a more efficient financial rail for machine-to-machine commerce.

The thesis is directionally persuasive. But it also highlights a broader challenge emerging across institutional digital asset research. It is no longer enough to argue that blockchain will benefit from AI. The more important investment question is where that value will accrue, and that requires a much more granular analysis than treating blockchain as a single, homogeneous asset class.

As institutional investors begin evaluating digital assets through the lens of AI infrastructure, understanding the difference between technological possibility and investable reality becomes increasingly important.

The question is whether AI agents will use blockchains

Franklin Templeton correctly identifies a genuine structural shift. Agentic AI introduces an entirely new category of economic participant: software capable of making decisions, holding assets, and executing transactions autonomously. Traditional payment rails, built around banks, card networks, and human users, were never designed for billions of automated, low-value transactions occurring between machines.

Blockchain networks, stablecoins, and programmable payment protocols solve many of these problems. The report also highlights x402, the emerging open protocol designed to enable native payments over HTTP, alongside initiatives from Visa and Stripe that seek to modernize digital commerce.

The technology is increasingly converging toward a future where autonomous software can transact directly with other software.

But identifying a technological trend is only the beginning of an investment thesis.

Institutional investors do not allocate capital to “blockchain” as a category. They allocate capital to specific networks, protocols, companies, and assets. That distinction becomes particularly important in the context of agentic AI, where developer activity and ecosystem adoption remain highly concentrated rather than evenly distributed.

Today, much of the experimentation around AI agents, stablecoin payments, and x402-enabled applications is occurring within specific ecosystems—not uniformly across every blockchain. The report acknowledges x402 as an important development but stops short of examining the infrastructure surrounding it, including the networks attracting developers and applications building around autonomous commerce.

That omission matters because infrastructure rarely wins on technical specifications alone. It wins because developers build on it, users adopt it, and network effects emerge over time.

It is not even clear that AI agents need blockchain at all.

Why should AI agents use blockchain?

The paper makes a strong case that blockchain will become the default infrastructure for agentic AI. Yet many of its central assumptions remain speculative and sit at odds with how AI systems are actually being built and deployed today.

The largest leap is the assumption that agents will primarily transact on-chain. In practice, the large majority of production AI agents continue to operate through REST APIs, the Model Context Protocol, OAuth, enterprise identity systems, cloud billing arrangements, Stripe, and the marketplaces of AWS, GCP, and Azure. Agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot have no inherent need for a blockchain, in present-day production systems, to call an API, consume compute, retrieve data, authenticate themselves, or pay for SaaS services. While experimental protocols such as x402 have begun enabling native stablecoin payments over HTTP and have processed tens to hundreds of millions of mostly sub-dollar transactions, absolute volumes remain modest relative to overall AI spending, and independent analyses have noted that a meaningful share of early activity includes self-dealing or low-value experimentation. The paper posits a broad migration onto crypto rails without explaining why the incumbents that already dominate these workflows would abandon systems that function at enterprise scale.

A related confusion runs through the analysis: the tendency to treat autonomous agents as if they were necessarily crypto-native agents. An AI agent requires identity, permissions, payment capability, and audit logs. None of these requirements inherently demands blockchain. Traditional infrastructure already delivers them through OAuth, API keys, enterprise IAM, AWS IAM, Microsoft Entra, Google Identity, and Stripe APIs. Blockchain is one possible implementation, not a prerequisite.

The paper also largely overlooks where enterprise AI spending is actually concentrated. Most large enterprises building agents today rely on Microsoft Copilot (now exceeding 30 million paid seats), Azure AI and Foundry, Google Vertex, Amazon Bedrock, Salesforce Agentforce, ServiceNow, or SAP Joule. These systems run almost entirely on conventional cloud infrastructure. Relatively few production enterprise deployments settle core transactions on public blockchains.

The claim that machine-to-machine payments require crypto because credit-card rails are too expensive is similarly overstated for the bulk of activity. Alternatives already exist in the form of prepaid enterprise billing, API credits, monthly net settlement, cloud billing, internal ledgers, and bank payment APIs. Stablecoin rails can be more efficient for true micropayments below typical card fee floors, and Visa and others have acknowledged a hybrid future in which cards handle larger proxy transactions while stablecoins suit machine-native micro-commerce. The further inference that such activity will therefore drive broad appreciation in altcoins is not demonstrated.

Identity and auditability receive similar treatment. The paper presents decentralized identity as a necessary solution, yet agent identity today is handled at scale through enterprise PKI, certificates, OAuth, JWTs, hardware security modules, and cloud identity providers. Likewise, while blockchain’s immutable ledgers sound attractive in theory, large enterprises frequently cannot place sensitive information on public chains because of privacy rules, GDPR, confidentiality obligations, and regulatory constraints. Most AI audit logs continue to reside inside Datadog, Splunk, Snowflake, and enterprise SIEMs.

Finally, the payment model itself appears unrealistic when applied universally. The paper envisions every inference, API call, and compute request settling individually on-chain. In practice, systems batch requests because batching is dramatically cheaper. The internet itself rarely settles every interaction as a discrete transaction. Technical possibility is not the same as economic inevitability. The infrastructure that ultimately wins is usually the cheapest, the easiest to adopt, and the best integrated with existing workflows—not necessarily the most decentralized.

This is not to say blockchain has no role. The paper is strongest when it points to genuine niches: decentralized GPU marketplaces such as Akash, Aethir, and Render; verifiable execution; decentralized data marketplaces; tokenized incentive networks; permissionless financial agents; autonomous on-chain trading systems; and DeFi-native AI. These are real and growing use cases. For the majority of AI agents, however, traditional rails are likely to remain dominant. Those applications derive far more value from cloud infrastructure, enterprise identity, existing payment systems, and compliance tooling than from public blockchains.

Infrastructure alone does not determine where value accrues

Perhaps the paper’s biggest weakness is that it blurs the distinction between blockchain adoption and investment returns.

History offers countless examples of transformative infrastructure that created enormous economic activity without generating equal returns for every participant. The internet reshaped commerce, but value accrued unevenly across browsers, telecom providers, cloud infrastructure, software platforms, and marketplaces. AI itself has produced similar dynamics, with semiconductors, hyperscalers, and application companies capturing different portions of the value chain.

Blockchain is unlikely to be different.

If AI agents become meaningful economic participants, investors will eventually need to answer far more specific questions than whether blockchain benefits.

Which networks capture transaction fees?

Which ecosystems attract developers?

Which protocols become the default payment layer?

Which companies monetize agent infrastructure?

Which digital assets actually appreciate as usage grows?

These are ultimately the questions that determine investment outcomes.

Franklin Templeton’s paper begins this conversation but leaves those questions largely unexplored. Rather than examining competitive dynamics between blockchain ecosystems or identifying where agentic activity is already emerging, the report treats blockchain infrastructure as a largely interchangeable settlement layer.

That may be appropriate for explaining the technology. It is less useful for constructing an investment portfolio.

Bottom line: Franklin Templeton deserves credit for reframing agentic AI as a potential driver of blockchain adoption rather than simply another AI application. The report advances an important institutional conversation by recognizing that autonomous software may require a new financial infrastructure built around programmable payments and digital assets. But the next phase of institutional research must move beyond asking whether AI agents will use blockchains. The more relevant question for investors is which networks, protocols, and companies are already emerging as the financial infrastructure for autonomous commerce.

Deep dive: Bittensor’s market-driven model is facing a governance test

Bittensor has emerged as one of the most closely watched attempts to build a decentralized market for artificial intelligence. Rather than relying on a single company to develop and control AI models, Bittensor uses its TAO token to incentivize independent teams to provide models, compute, data and other AI services through specialized networks known as subnets. The broader thesis is that open competition can direct capital and rewards toward useful AI infrastructure without a centralized platform deciding which projects win.

That thesis is now facing an important test.

Recent Bittensor upgrades have made market prices increasingly important to how capital moves through the network. In July, the v431 upgrade tied subnet emissions more directly to the moving-average price of each subnet’s alpha token. The subsequent v440 upgrade went further, concentrating a larger share of emissions among the highest-ranked subnets. The goal is to reward projects attracting genuine demand and reduce capital flowing to weaker or inactive networks.

However, the same market logic also determines which projects can remain on Bittensor at all. With the network currently capped at 128 subnets, the arrival of a new project can trigger the removal of the lowest-priced eligible subnet. That has sparked a growing debate among builders and investors over whether Bittensor’s competitive model is becoming too dependent on short-term market signals, particularly as its economic rules continue to evolve.

Bittensor is turning price into a survival mechanism

The case for Bittensor’s approach is that network capacity is scarce, and projects should not receive permanent access simply because they arrived early. Once a subnet’s four-month immunity period expires, a sufficiently weak alpha-token price can eventually put it at risk of deregistration.

That creates a form of automated creative destruction. Subnets that attract capital and demand survive, while weaker projects make room for new competitors. Combined with recent changes to emissions, Bittensor is effectively using markets to decide where both network rewards and scarce capacity should flow.

The complication is that price and fundamental value are not always the same thing, particularly in newer and relatively illiquid markets. A team can still be developing useful technology while its token trades near the bottom of the rankings. At the same time, speculative demand can support projects whose underlying products remain unproven.

For investors, this creates an unusually powerful feedback loop. Price influences emissions, emissions influence project economics, and price can ultimately influence whether the project remains on the network at all.

The bigger institutional question is rule stability

The backlash is therefore about more than whether underperforming subnets should be removed. It is also about whether builders and investors can confidently underwrite projects when the economic framework itself is changing quickly.

That concern has become more visible following criticism from Bittensor-focused investor Mark Creaser, who has argued that repeated changes to emissions and subnet economics make long-term capital allocation increasingly difficult. It also echoes the governance concerns raised when Covenant AI left the ecosystem earlier this year, criticizing the degree of centralized influence over Bittensor’s direction.

There is a legitimate counterargument. Decentralized AI remains experimental, and Bittensor may need to change incentives quickly when they produce unintended behavior. Protecting existing projects from competition could preserve inefficient subsidies and weaken the market mechanism that makes Bittensor distinctive in the first place.

For institutional investors, however, there is an important distinction between economic risk and governance risk. While investors can price the possibility that a subnet fails to attract users or capital, it’s harder to price the possibility that the rules governing its economics will change materially after capital has already been committed.

Bottom line: Bittensor’s willingness to let markets determine which AI projects receive capital, emissions, and ultimately network capacity is central to its value proposition. But market discipline alone does not make a market investable. As Bittensor pushes further toward automated competition, its challenge will be balancing that experimentation with enough rule stability for serious builders and long-term capital to participate with confidence.

Coming this October

My new book, Digital Assets and Crypto for Investors, is now available for preorder. Drawing on more than 20 years of experience across traditional and digital finance, it provides a practical framework for evaluating digital assets, managing risk, and building a diversified portfolio. Preorder your copy on Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

Dear all,

One of the questions I ask most often about digital assets is simple: where is value actually accruing?

For years, investors focused on tokens, prices, and trading activity. Increasingly, however, the more interesting opportunities are emerging one layer below the assets themselves — the infrastructure that enables markets to function.

This week’s developments all point in that direction. Coinbase is steadily becoming a diversified financial marketplace rather than simply a crypto exchange. BNY Mellon is building the operational rails for tokenized funds. And Franklin Templeton is asking whether blockchain networks, not just AI companies, could become part of the infrastructure powering the next generation of artificial intelligence.

The investment debate is gradually shifting from what digital assets are worth to what role they play in the financial system.

Upcoming Economic Indicators to watch out for this week

• Advanced Micro Devices Quarterly Earnings - Tuesday 08/04

• SpaceX Quarterly Earnings - Tuesday 08/04

• U.S. ADP Employment Report - Wednesday 08/05

• U.S. Nonfarm Payrolls Report - Friday 08/07

This week’s deep dives

• 👇 Coinbase’s earnings reveal something bigger than crypto trading

This week’s market briefing

📈 Morgan Stanley expands crypto offerings with ETFs and staking

Morgan Stanley has launched low-cost exchange-traded products (ETPs) providing exposure to staked Ethereum and Solana, charging a 0.14% fee and making them available across its network of 16,000 financial advisers. Coming just weeks after the firm’s expansion of spot crypto trading through E*TRADE, the move signals that staking is increasingly being incorporated into mainstream wealth management rather than treated as a niche crypto strategy.

🪙 Demand for tokenized stocks accelerates

Despite broader weakness across digital assets, tokenized equities continue to gain traction. According to RWA.xyz, the number of onchain tokenized equity holders has reached a record 759,000, up 92% over the past 30 days and 522% year-to-date. Much of that growth is being driven by demand for trading outside traditional market hours, with Jupiter, the largest onchain equities platform, reporting 360% year-to-date growth in off-market monthly trading volume. Chip and memory stocks remain the most actively traded tokenized assets, reinforcing the view that tokenization is increasingly expanding when investors can access public markets, rather than simply changing how they own them.

🏦 BNY Mellon builds tokenization infrastructure

BNY Mellon has launched a Digital Transfer Agency that records fund ownership and transactions on blockchain while remaining compatible with existing fund administration systems. The platform supports both tokenized and traditional funds across multiple blockchains, enabling faster settlements and the issuance or redemption of fund shares using fiat currency or stablecoins. Early adopters include BNY Investments, Baillie Gifford, and BlackRock, underscoring that the next phase of tokenization is shifting from pilot projects toward the institutional infrastructure needed to manage tokenized funds at scale.

🏛️ The clock is ticking on CLARITY

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act remains held back by negotiations over ethics rules for government officials with ties to the digital asset industry. According to CoinDesk, Senators Thom Tillis and Ruben Gallego are working on revised language in hopes of reaching a bipartisan compromise before the Senate’s August recess. While industry participants see the ethics provisions as the final major hurdle, prediction markets currently assign only around a 30% probability that the legislation will pass this year. Should the Clarity act not pass before the August recess, this will not stop innovation or the crypto market, the CFTC and SEC will create a sound regulatory framework for market participants. See SEC comments

💰 Bitcoin ETFs post first monthly inflow since April

U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs returned to net inflows in July, attracting $172.4 million after nearly $7 billion in combined outflows over May and June, according to SoSoValue data. The recovery, however, was tempered by a $265.4 million outflow on the final trading day of the month, leaving Bitcoin ETFs with $5.3 billion in net outflows year-to-date. In contrast, spot Ether ETFs extended their inflow streak to four consecutive weeks, adding $365.2 million in July, suggesting institutional demand is broadening beyond Bitcoin even as overall digital asset allocations remain measured.

Deep Dive: Coinbase’s earnings reveal something bigger than crypto trading

Coinbase’s second-quarter earnings disappointed Wall Street. Revenue declined, profitability missed expectations, and the stock sold off after the release.

However, beneath the earnings miss, Coinbase is steadily transforming its business away from dependence on volatile spot crypto trading and toward a broader financial marketplace spanning derivatives, prediction markets, stablecoins, institutional services, custody, and blockchain infrastructure.

The evolution reflects a broader shift taking place across digital assets. As institutional participation grows, the industry’s largest companies are increasingly competing on the breadth of financial products they offer, not simply on crypto trading volumes.

The “everything exchange” is beginning to take shape

Coinbase generated approximately $1.2 billion in net revenue during the second quarter, broadly in line with expectations but down 19% year over year. The company reported a GAAP net loss of $359 million, while transaction revenue and subscription and services revenue both came in below consensus.

Yet operationally, Coinbase continued gaining market share. The company captured a record 10.3% of global crypto trading volume, up from 9.1% in the previous quarter despite softer trading activity across the broader industry. It marked the third consecutive quarter of market share gains.

More importantly, the composition of that business continues to change. Prediction markets more than doubled revenue during the quarter, surpassing $100 million on an annualized basis. Newly launched binary contracts significantly increased both daily traders and trading activity, highlighting growing demand for event-driven financial products alongside traditional crypto markets.

Coinbase also disclosed that 88% of net revenue now comes from businesses other than spot Bitcoin trading — a striking figure for a company that, only a few years ago, was viewed primarily as a retail crypto exchange.

Institutions are reshaping the crypto exchange model

Coinbase’s diversification reflects a broader shift in digital asset markets. As institutional participation grows, exchanges are competing on much more than trading volumes. Large investors increasingly require derivatives, custody, financing, staking, stablecoin infrastructure, and tokenization capabilities alongside spot markets. Coinbase is building across each of those areas, making the company less dependent on crypto trading cycles and more aligned with the infrastructure institutions need to participate in digital assets.

Coinbase is far from alone. Across the industry, leading exchanges are expanding well beyond spot trading. CME has built one of the world’s largest regulated crypto derivatives franchises, Kraken has expanded into equities and payments, Robinhood is integrating tokenized assets into its broader brokerage platform, and Binance continues to invest heavily in payments, stablecoins, and institutional services.

Bottom line: Coinbase’s earnings may have disappointed, but its business model continues to evolve. With 88% of revenue now coming from sources other than spot Bitcoin trading, the company is steadily positioning itself as diversified digital market infrastructure rather than simply a crypto exchange. For institutional investors, that’s the more important metric to watch, because the long-term opportunity increasingly depends on the expansion of digital capital markets, not just the next crypto bull cycle.

Coming this October

My new book, Digital Assets and Crypto for Investors, is now available for preorder. Drawing on more than 20 years of experience across traditional and digital finance, it provides a practical framework for evaluating digital assets, managing risk, and building a diversified portfolio. Preorder your copy on Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

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For years, the debate centered on whether digital assets would become part of the financial system. This week’s developments suggest a different question is now taking shape: who will control the infrastructure that powers it?

Governments are exploring stablecoins to solve payment challenges. Banks are expanding their digital asset teams. DTCC h…

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A hiring decision at Vanguard. An allocation recommendation from Wells Fargo. A consultation paper from European regulators. None of these moves markets overnight, but each says something about how traditional finance is adapting to digital assets and where institutional capital is likely to flow over time.

As part of my weekly newsletter series, I’ll br…

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I’m excited to share that my new book, Digital Assets and Crypto for Investors: Your Practical Guide to Building a Diversified Portfolio, will be published in October by Wiley with a foreword by J. Christopher Giancarlo. It’s available now for preorder HERE or on my website.

This book is the culmination of more than…

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Will Bitcoin go up or down?

Professional investors often care about a different question entirely:

How much will Bitcoin move?

This week, CME Group launched Bitcoin Volatility Index Futures, a new derivatives product that allows investors to trade Bitcoin volatility directly rather than Bitcoin’s…

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It is not a fine. It is not a ban. It is a capital multiplier:

1,250%.

Today, Senator Cynthia Lummis led a coalition of Senate Republicans — in…

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…

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We are at that moment in AI.

The parallel to the late 1990s is not a metaphor. It is a structur…

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The non-custodial wallet supports USDT, USAT (Tether’s regulated U.S. stablecoin), XAUT (t…

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Last week, a data point quietly crossed a threshold that Ethereum researchers have been watching with growing anxiety for over a year.

Ethereum’s staking ratio — the percentage of total ETH supply locked in validators — passed 1/3 for the first time. Including entry queues, the figure sits at approximately…

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