Robert Leshner is one of the rare founders who built one of DeFi’s defining protocols, Compound, in 2017 and then walked away from it to do something harder. His pitch was simple: The crypto-native market is capped at $2T. The real prize is the $700T of stocks, bonds, real estate, and private credit still living in spreadsheets. Superstate is the rail he's building to move it.

That’s why he built Superstate. Three years later, that thesis has become a reality and is building the market structure. From BlackRock to Morgan Stanley, all the major U.S. banks and asset managers have entered the space, and the total value of RWAs has crossed $55.7B (excluding stablecoin and repurchase agreement).

“The ceiling for DeFi is too low if all we have are native tokens of other crypto projects. We need the $700T of stuff, of wealth, of assets, of ownership to make its way on-chain.”

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About Robert: Robert Leshner is a prominent entrepreneur and investor, serving currently as the CEO of Superstate, a SEC-registered asset tokenisation platform. In 2017, he also founded Compound, the DeFi lending protocol and grew it into one of the largest in crypto, with billions in deposits at peak.

Superstate is now the issuer-led tokenization layer behind two on-chain Treasury and basis funds with roughly $1B in combined AUM and Opening Bell, the platform tokenizing the SEC-registered shares of NASDAQ-listed public companies. On March 24, Invesco took over portfolio management of Superstate’s USTB fund, a $967M tokenized Treasury vehicle. Three weeks later, Invesco invested in Superstate’s $82.5M Series B. This is the first time a global asset manager has plugged into someone else’s tokenization stack instead of building its own.In April 2026,

By the data: The tokenised U.S. Treasuries market crossed $15B in the first quarter of 2026, with USTB now ranking among the 7 largest tokenised Treasury funds globally.

NYSE, NASDAQ, Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance have all publicly committed to listing tokenized securities. The SEC’s Project Crypto initiative is drafting the rules that will define how regulated securities behave on blockchains. And Forward Industries (NASDAQ: FWDI), the largest Solana digital asset treasury company at 6.8M SOL, has ~8% of its public shares now living as tokens on Solana via Superstate’s Opening Bell, actively used as collateral on Kamino.

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🎧 Jump to the best parts

00:00 Why Institutions Came for Tokenization
03:05 What SuperState Actually Does
07:57 How SuperState Differs From Other Players
12:50 Where We Are in the Tokenization Race
17:54 Inside the Invesco Partnership
22:12 What Tokenized Funds Unlock
29:14 Opening Bell Explained
32:16 How This Differs From ICOs
34:07 Tokenized Shares as DeFi Collateral
35:54 Regulation, Project Crypto and Clarity Act
40:01 Message to Corporate Leaders

Important Links

• X: https://x.com/rleshner

• Superstate: https://superstate.com/about

• Compound: https://compound.finance/

• Opening Bell platform: https://superstate.com/opening-bell

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Our biggest takeaways from this conversation:

1. Tokenization isn't a new asset class. It's a record-keeping change.

Most people hear “tokenized stock” and picture a synthetic. A digital wrapper around a real share, sitting on a chain somewhere, with a startup holding the actual paper. Robert is quick to correct that framing.

“The token on the blockchain is the same share of a company as the one that’s trading on the Nasdaq. And you can actually bridge shares back and forth between those two systems.”

What Superstate does is operate as the public company's SEC-registered transfer agent. The transfer agent is the entity that legally records who owns what. Move that record onto a blockchain, and the token is the share. Same rights, same dividends, same proxy votes. You can move it from your brokerage account into a wallet on Solana, and back, and nothing about the underlying ownership changes.

“The token on the blockchain is the same share of a company as the one that’s trading on the Nasdaq. And you can actually bridge shares back and forth between those two systems.”

Why this upgrade: In traditional financial markets, transferring shares between parties, settling trades, and using assets as collateral all involve layers of intermediaries, delays, and batch processes tied to business-day cycles.

Blockchain infrastructure eliminates much of this friction. As Robert explains, interest on tokenised T-bills through SuperState's USTB product accrues in real time, by the block, not by the business day.

“Something as simple as transferring shares between two parties is just clunky in traditional markets. But trying to get between two wallets, it’s trivial. It’s like one click.”

A watershed moment came with SuperState's recent partnership with Invesco, one of Wall Street's largest asset managers. It became the first major incumbent asset manager to run a product on SuperState's tokenisation platform. Invesco has also invested in SuperState.

“What we’re swapping is our own products for someone else’s products... This is us finally opening our platform to those asset managers.”

Related reads:

2. Superstate’s job is to lift it to $700T

The whole industry has spent the last cycle arguing about which crypto-native chain wins. According to Robert, the crypto-native race is capped at $2T (with respect to Compound Finance) and he sees $700T as the real prize, which includes stocks, bonds, real estate, and private credit currently sitting in spreadsheets, paper contracts, and DTC databases.

Right now, the total DeFi TVL is $83.27B and tokenised RWAs already sits at $55.7B (excluding stablecoin and repurchase agreement). And, the TAM is traditional finance.

“The upper bound of DeFi is $700 trillion. If that doesn’t happen, the upper bound of DeFi is roughly the same as it was in 2019.”

One of the important things I liked about Superstate is that they are trying to make sure his company is the regulated intermediary issuers use when they decide to bring their assets on-chain. The entire thesis sits or falls on whether off-chain securities meaningfully migrate.

Related podcast and reads:

3. Native shares versus wrappers is the architectural choice

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In the last 12 months, several Wall Street banks have entered the stablecoin reserve space and Morgan Stanley is the sixth one. Morgan Stanley Investment Management (MSIM) launched MSNXX, the Stablecoin Reserves Portfolio. Now it manages reserves for stablecoin issuers with a money market fund but BlackRock ($67.7B in USDXX), Goldman (ST…

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Nothing prepares you for a month where the Fed buys its own debt, the US military is running a Bitcoin node, and the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent calls crypto "very important payment rails” for the country.

The Senate Banking Committee was supposed to mark up crypto legislation this month, but the date was delayed until May.

“If we don’t get the Clarity Act passed by May, digital asset legislation will not pass for the foreseeable future.”

— United States Senator Bernie Moreno

On top of that, we saw one of the biggest blow-ups in DeFi. We’ve watched a lot of them, but this one’s different.

These are our highlights this week:

• Why Treasury’s record buyback matters to USDT

• Congress just rewrote Fed access rules

• The $196M hole Aave didn’t code

• Singapore just flanked PAXG with a bank

• DTCC front-runs Crypto to own tokenized Wall Street

• Japan’s banks ditch Euroclear for Canton JGB repo

And 15+ more signals. Let’s jump in 👇

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Top Boardroom Reads

• How the U.S. Weaponized the Dollar (And Stablecoins), with Eddie Fishman, New York Times Bestseller (51)

• 2026 Institutional Investor Survey on Digital Asset Investment Trends (Nomura)

• How tokenised assets transform liquidity management (Deutsche Bank)

• CLARITY Act Update: Final Push Ahead (Galaxy)

• Tokenized collateral goes global (ValueExchange)

• Adopting AI Agents in Banking (Creatio)

The Friday newsletter only scratches the surface. A lot more is going on that we’ll tell you in our PRO briefings.

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Top Signals This Week

Why Treasury’s record buyback matters to USDT

On April 16, 2026, the U.S. Treasury executed a record $15 billion debt buyback, matching the largest single-day operation in the program’s history. The operation targeted off-the-run nominal coupon securities maturing between May 2026 and April 2028, with settlement on April 17. The Treasury funded the repurchase through new bill issuance, keeping overall debt stock largely unchanged, but shifting the duration profile toward the short end of the curve. [NEWS]

Why it matters: Tether’s $141.6B in Treasury exposure as of Q4 2025 makes it the 18th-largest holder of U.S. government debt on the planet. The company printed more than $10 billion in net profit in 2025 almost entirely on T-bill yield. A buyback that absorbs off-the-run coupons and recycles them into bill issuance is, mechanically, a subsidy to Tether’s business model: it deepens the market for the exact instrument USDT requires as collateral and keeps front-end yields structurally attractive. Whether the Treasury intends this or not, the effect is symmetric with supporting the peg.

Be smart: Recent BIS research found stablecoin inflows reduce three-month T-bill yields by 2–2.5 bps within 10 days; outflows widen them by 6–8 bps. The buyback is now part of that same feedback loop, on the supply side.

🚀 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 100K+ decision-makers who act on what we publish.[let's talk →].

Congress just rewrote Fed access rules

On April 21, Reps. Kim and Liccardo introduced the PACE Act to establish a federal registration regime for non-bank payment firms, overseen by the OCC. Qualifying firms must hold a state bank or credit union charter, or 40 or more active state money transmitter licenses. Registered firms gain direct access to Fedwire, FedNow, and FedACH, rails historically walled off to chartered banks. [RELEASE] [PDF]

Why it matters: Getting a federal crypto license is nearly impossible for newcomers, and that’s by design. To qualify, a company needs money-transmission licenses in at least 40 states. Only a handful of giant, established companies have bothered to collect that many, think PayPal, Circle, Coinbase, and Western Union. They spent years and millions of dollars building up those licenses. Kraken already got approved through a different route (the Federal Reserve), so this rule doesn’t even affect them. Everyone else, any startup or smaller company trying to enter the market, is simply locked out. They haven’t had the time or money to get 40 state licenses yet.

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The $196M hole Aave didn’t code

Nobody hacked Aave last weekend. $196M walked out the door anyway. The attacker forged a message on a bridge next door, minted $292M of fake rsETH, and posted it to Aave as collateral. That’s the problem. [ANNOUNCEMENT]

Why it matters: DeFi lending is not a product. It’s an unpriced insurance contract on every asset listed. Aave’s defense is that its contracts worked. That is true. It is also beside the point. A depositor who supplies WETH to Aave is not just lending to Aave. They are lending into every cross-chain bridge that underpins every collateral asset Aave accepts. LayerZero broke. Kelp’s bridge released unbacked tokens. Aave’s oracle priced those tokens as real. The loss landed on WETH suppliers. The smart contract did its job. The insurance contract was never written, and not a single audit scope covered such incidents.

PRO Analysis:

Singapore just flanked PAXG with a bank

On April 21, 2026, OCBC ($526B in total assets), its asset-management arm Lion Global Investors, and MAS-regulated digital-asset exchange DigiFT launched GOLDX, a security token that provides on-chain exposure to the LionGlobal Singapore Physical Gold Fund ($525.9M in AUM). Tokens are issued natively on Ethereum and Solana. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: The tokenized commodities are a $6.1B market, 97% controlled by Paxos Gold (PAXG) and Tether Gold (XAUT). Both are crypto-native issuers with vault partnerships but no institutional deposit relationships, no MAS license, no fund-structured wrapper. OCBC’s entry is the first time a G-SIB has issued a physically-backed tokenized gold product on public chains, and it is wrapped as a regulated collective investment scheme, not a bare commodity token. Asset managers who were blocked from holding PAXG on regulatory or mandate grounds now have a bank-issued alternative that clears the compliance hurdle in one move. The $6B tokenized-gold segment just acquired an institutional tier.

Be smart: MAS runs a wholesale CBDC pilot on the Singapore dollar. And now OCBC has issued the first physically-backed bank-grade tokenized gold fund. Four moves, including commodities, gold, credit, and CBDC, all within one regulator’s jurisdiction.

• DigiFT obtained CMS + RMO licenses in December 2023.

• Standard Chartered-backed Libeara launched the MG 999 synthetic gold fund.

• Tokenized commodities and credit, under Project Guardian with 40+ financial institutions.

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DTCC front-runs Crypto to own tokenized Wall Street

On April 13, DTCC published its public-facing roadmap. The pilot launches in H2 2026.

Be smart: DTCC has been quietly assembling the pieces for two years. It started with a December 2025 SEC no-action letter granting DTC a three-year exemption from Reg SCI, Section 19(b) rule-filing requirements, and key clearing standards under Rules 17Ad-22 and 17Ad-25. That cleared the regulatory path. [RELEASE]

In March 2026, the House Financial Services Committee held its hearing on tokenized securities, and DTCC Deputy General Counsel Christian Sabella filed written testimony the same day.

Why it matters: The testimony’s most important word was not “tokenization,”it was “interoperability.” Sabella made a specific argument: tokenization efforts built in “isolated or proprietary environments risk fragmenting liquidity and increasing cost.” DTCC is warning against a world where every bank, exchange, and fintech builds its own tokenization silo. The alternative DTCC is proposing is itself an open, protocol-agnostic infrastructure layer where tokenized securities inherit the legal protections, netting benefits, and settlement guarantees that exist today and hence acts as the connective tissue between every tokenization effort on Wall Street.

PRO Analysis:

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Japan’s banks ditch Euroclear for Canton JGB repo

On 20 April 2026, Japan Exchange Group announced that JSCC, Mizuho Financial Group, Nomura Holdings, and Digital Asset Holdings had begun a proof-of-concept to use JGBs as digital collateral on the Canton Network. The trial runs through late September 2026 and is one of three initiatives the Japanese Financial Services Agency (JFSA) formally selected in February 2026 for its Payment Innovation Project, the FSA’s successor to the FinTech PoC Hub. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: Unlike the US (Fed, BNY, JPM) or Europe (Euroclear, Clearstream), Japan has no domestic tri-party repo venue. JGB holders who want to finance their bonds must either use bilateral gensaki with manual margin workflows or ship their JGBs to Euroclear’s Collateral Highway and finance offshore. The Canton pilot is the first serious attempt to build that plumbing natively, and it skips the 15-year build by using an L1 that is already live with DTCC and Euroclear. If JSCC goes from PoC to production, Japanese banks suddenly recapture collateral velocity that currently leaks to London.

Other Signals

Infrastructure and Markets

• Coinbase introduced the app store for agents, Agentic.Market. Link

• Kalshi is launching crypto perpetual futures on April 27. The CFTC-regulated prediction market, most recently valued at $22B, brings non-expiring crypto contracts to US retail for the first time. Link

• Polymarket announced plans to launch perpetual futures with up to 10x leverage on BTC, gold, Nvidia, and other assets. Link

• Core Scientific priced $3.3B in senior secured notes due 2031 at a 7.75% coupon. Proceeds fund data centre expansion across Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, and Oklahoma as the miner pivots deeper into AI hosting. Link

• $350M in crypto shorts liquidated in 24 hours as Bitcoin rallied from $74K to $78K. A classic short squeeze, triggered as US-Iran tensions cooled and traders moved back into risk assets. Link

DeFi and Blockchain

• North Korea’s Lazarus Group deployed “Mach-O Man,” a new macOS malware campaign targeting crypto and fintech executives. Link

• Tether froze $344M in USDT across two Tron addresses in coordination with OFAC and US law enforcement. Link

• Tether minted $1B USDT on Ethereum. Link

Regulation and Policy

• Japan’s Cabinet approved reclassifying 105 cryptoassets, including BTC and ETH, as financial instruments under the FIEA. Same legal status as stocks and bonds, insider trading rules now apply, and a 20% flat capital gains tax is on the table. Link

• The Swiss Federal Council published its final Capital Adequacy Ordinance (CAO) on April 22, 2026. The ordinance specifies the regulatory capital treatment for select, undisclosed assets for banks headquartered in Switzerland. Link

• Belarus legalized crypto banks handling 26 cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Toncoin. Licenses cover 11 services: deposits, loans, staking, transfers, token issuance, and exchange. Link

• US Admiral Samuel Paparo confirmed INDOPACOM is running a live Bitcoin node for operational security tests. First time a US military combatant command has publicly acknowledged direct participation in the Bitcoin network. Link

• A White House official publicly condemned the banking sector’s lobbying against a compromise on yield-bearing stablecoins within the proposed CLARITY Act. Link

Banking and Payments

• Coinbase listed tGBP, the first UK-regulated pound-pegged stablecoin, on its global platform. Issued by BCP Technologies under the FCA’s sandbox framework, giving British users on-chain GBP without FX conversion costs. Link

• Singapore Gulf Bank (SGB), a licensed digital bank in Bahrain, has launched a stablecoin minting and redemption service for corporate and high-net-worth clients. Link

Funds, Deals and others

• Payward (Kraken) has agreed to acquire the U.S.-based digital asset derivatives platform Bitnomial. The transaction is valued at up to $550M in a combination of cash and stock. Link

• Michael Saylor’s Strategy has bought another $2.54B in Bitcoin. Link

Our CEO Notes this week

If you're building infrastructure, allocating capital, or pricing the shift to always-on markets, this is the briefing your competitors already read on Monday.

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

We’ve watched a lot of DeFi blowups. This one’s different. Nobody hacked Aave last weekend. $196M walked out the door anyway. The attacker forged a message on a bridge next door, minted $292M of fake rsETH, and posted it to Aave as collateral. Aave’s code worked exactly as written. That’s the problem. [ANNOUNCEMENT]

Let’s unpack.

The Sig…

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In 2025, Eddie Fishman, a former State Department and Treasury official who helped design the sanctions against Russia after the 2014 annexation of Crimea, wrote the playbook on economic warfare, Chokepoints. It not only became a New York Times Bestseller, but a blueprint of what would follow.

Watch on Youtube

So I sat down with Eddie to ask the obvious question. If the dollar and the chip supply chain are the new weapons, what happens when adversaries finally build their own? His answer reframed how I think about stablecoins, China, and the next ten years of geopolitics.

His core insight: the most powerful weapons in modern geopolitics aren't military. They're financial and technological. And they include stablecoins.

“The choke points that the US uses, that China uses, that Europe uses may change over time, but economic warfare will continue. All of our businesses may soon be completely dependent on LLMs from OpenAI and Anthropic, and guess what, all three are US companies.”

• China (2026): The U.S. controls advanced AI chips and chipmaking tools sales.

• Venezuela (2026): The U.S. military utilised Claude, an AI model developed by Anthropic, to capture then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

• Russia (2022): The U.S. and G7 froze roughly $300B of Russia’s foreign currency reserves held in Western jurisdictions after the Ukraine invasion. Whereas, U.S. and EU sanctions forced companies like Boeing and GE to stop providing spare parts, maintenance, and technical support to Russian airlines.

Interestingly, America doesn’t need to fire a single missile to bring a country to its knees. It just needs to cut off access to the dollar.

• FX: ~90% of all global foreign exchange transactions involve the U.S. dollar.

• Clearing: Almost all dollar transactions, even those between two non-U.S. banks, must eventually clear through a U.S.-based correspondent bank. These settlements typically pass through two U.S. payment rails: Fedwire & CHIPS.

  • Because of sanctions, Iran started using Bitcoin as a toll booth for 20% of the world’s oil. [Full story]

• Stablecoins: ~99% of the global stablecoin market is denominated in U.S. dollars.

What made this conversation more worthwhile is that Eddie doesn’t just describe the system. He diagnoses where it’s breaking, and he’s specific about why.

On sanction overuse, he mentioned:

“Every single US president in the 21st century, from Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden, has imposed sanctions at twice the rate of their predecessor. There has to be a structural driver.”

About Edward: Edward Fishman is a former U.S. diplomat and a leading authority on economic statecraft and international sanctions.

• Current roles: Senior Fellow and Director of the Geoeconomics Center at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), and an educator at Columbia University.

• Government service (2011–2017): Held strategic roles at the State Department, Pentagon, and Treasury. He was a central architect of U.S. sanctions regarding Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the Iran nuclear negotiations.

• Thought leadership: New York Times-bestselling author of Chokepoints and a frequent geopolitical analyst for Foreign Affairs, The NY Times, and WSJ.

Watch on Youtube

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🎧 Jump to the best parts

• 00:00 What Are “Choke Points”?

• 01:29 The Hidden Power of the Dollar

• 05:09 What Happens When Sanctions Hit

• 07:49 Why Countries Are Moving Away from the Dollar

• 10:50 The End of Globalization?

• 13:56 Are Sanctions Losing Power?

• 16:09 AI, Chips, and the Next Economic Weapon

• 19:18 China’s Real Strategy

• 21:33 China’s Choke Points vs America’s

• 25:01 The AI Race: Who Wins?

• 28:18 Iran, Sanctions, and Escalation

• 32:53 Europe’s Position in Economic Warfare

• 36:20 More Sanctions or More Wars?

• 39:09 Bitcoin, Stablecoins & the Dollar

• 42:06 What to Watch Next

Important Links

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edward-fishman

• X: https://x.com/edwardfishman

• CFR: https://www.cfr.org/experts/edward-fishman

• Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fishman

• Chokepoints: Buy on Amazon

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My biggest takeaways from this conversation:

1. The dollar is a passport. But alternatives are emerging as well.

According to Eddie, a choke point requires three things: dominant market share (80–90%+), no real substitute, and the ability to inflict asymmetric pain without hurting yourself. By that bar, the U.S. dollar is the most powerful economic weapon in history. It also has the legal authority to lock any company, bank, or government on Earth.

“You usually need 80-90% market share at least. The dollar, 90% of foreign exchange transactions. Rare earth minerals, China controls about 90% of global refining capacity. AI chips, Nvidia has over 90% global market share.”

February 2022 showed what happens when Washington decides to actually use it. Russians lined up at ATMs. The Moscow stock exchange closed for nearly a month. Major Western banks predicted the Russian economy would shrink up to 15%. It shrank ~2%, because Russia clamped down on capital and kept selling oil to whoever would buy it. The chokepoint worked. It just didn’t work as well as people expected.

• Russia: After the initial 2014 sanctions over Crimea, it built SPFS (connects over 557 financial institutions across 20 countries) to serve as an alternative to SWIFT, alongside NSPK and the Mir (476M+ cards) payment card network.

• China: It built CIPS ($24.47T annual volume) to clear transactions in yuan. The e-CNY is China’s central bank digital currency, and Project m-Bridge is a collaborative platform to move digital money directly between global central banks.

The dominance will not change overnight, but the world is progressing, and power is shifting, with new blockchain-based plumbing, and nations like the UAE, Hong Kong, and Singapore are trying to attract builders.

“If you were to fall asleep today and wake up next year, you’d probably say not much has changed. If you went to sleep today and woke up ten years from now, the world would look totally different.”

Related reads:

2. Stablecoin is not an escape; it is the next layer of US dominance

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I always assumed crypto would tokenize Wall Street. Turns out Wall Street is doing it itself. DTCC settles every U.S. equity and Treasury trade, holds $100T in custody, and once cleared $5.55T in a single day. In H2 2026, that plumbing goes on-chain with the SEC's blessing. Let's get into it. [ARTICLE]

The Signal: DTCC is attempting to build a structure for tokenization on legal infrastructure that already works. This is an American infrastructure upgrade from the inside.

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What happened

DTCC has been quietly assembling the pieces for two years. In April, it told the market what it built.

It started with a December 2025 SEC no-action letter granting DTC a three-year exemption from Reg SCI, Section 19(b) rule-filing requirements, and key clearing standards under Rules 17Ad-22 and 17Ad-25. That cleared the regulatory path. [RELEASE]

In March 2026, the House Financial Services Committee held its hearing on tokenized securities, and DTCC Deputy General Counsel Christian Sabella filed written testimony the same day.

By April 13, DTCC had published its public-facing roadmap. The pilot launches in H2 2026.

What he said, translated:

• DTCC supports tokenization. → DTCC is going to run tokenization.

• Innovation must build on existing legal frameworks. → No new asset class, no Wyoming-style rewrite, securities law still applies.

• Multilateral netting must remain a key benefit. → Atomic bilateral settlement isn’t compatible with how Wall Street actually works. Drop it.

• Tokenization will lead to a hybrid evolution where different assets use different models. → Equities and Treasuries stay in DTC’s pool. Private debt and the long tail can go on-chain natively.

• Interoperability is the make-or-break issue. → Don’t build your own chain. Build on ours, or connect to ours.

• Tokenized securities must carry the same rights as today’s assets. → The wrapper can be programmable. The substance can’t change.

• The service will be voluntary and protocol-agnostic. → DTCC won’t pick Ethereum or Canton or Polygon. It’ll be the connective tissue between all of them.

• Innovation should strengthen, not erode, investor protections. → Pre-approved wallets, reversible entries, KYC at the ledger level.

• Lasting market evolution comes from coordinated industry action, not technology alone. → Solo crypto-native protocols don’t get to set the rules.

• Done right, tokenization helps DTCC carry its mission forward. → DTCC plays offense in this transition, not defense.

Table 1: Important Elements

The three takeaways that matter

1. DTCC is positioning itself as the standards body. “Interoperability” sounds neutral. Read it again. It’s DTCC saying every tokenization effort either plugs into its plumbing or eats fragmentation costs. That’s a warning, dressed as an industry value.

2. Netting is the red line. Sabella named multilateral netting twice as a benefit that must remain. This is the tell. Any tokenization model that breaks netting, including atomic bilateral settlement and on-chain repo without a CCP, is incompatible with this regime. Half the crypto-native architecture in the market just got put on notice.

Hybrid evolution is permission, not prediction. The line about different assets using different models is DTCC drawing a map. Equities, Treasuries, and ETFs run through DTC’s tokenized rails. Private equity, real estate, and structured credit can issue on-chain natively. The crypto-native firms got the long tail. DTCC kept the core.

Table 2: The timeline

Why it matters

1. Sabella’s real message: we will tokenize Wall Street, but on our terms. The testimony’s most important word was not “tokenization,”it was “interoperability.” Sabella made a specific argument: tokenization efforts built in “isolated or proprietary environments risk fragmenting liquidity and increasing cost.” DTCC is warning against a world where every bank, exchange, and fintech builds its own tokenization silo. The alternative DTCC is proposing is itself, an open, protocol-agnostic infrastructure layer where tokenized securities inherit the legal protections, netting benefits, and settlement guarantees that exist today and hence acting as the connective tissue between every tokenization effort on Wall Street.

2. A huge implication for vendors: DTCC has refused to pick a chain. It is telling Ethereum, Canton, Polygon, Avalanche, and every enterprise DLT the same thing, that outcome is everything. Whereas, it puts walled gardens on notice. Proprietary consortium chains, single-issuer DLTs, and integrated tokenization stacks face a clear message that interoperability is the public good and fragmentation is the barrier to scale.

Table 3: Competitive positioning

Our take

For years the crypto pitch was that decentralized rails would replace DTCC. What’s happening instead is that DTCC is becoming the rails.

The mistake was thinking tokenization would bypass the incumbent. It doesn’t. It makes the incumbent more valuable. Multilateral netting compresses trillions in daily flow into a few billion in actual settlement. Atomic bilateral settlement breaks that math. Banks can’t afford to break that math. So whoever offers tokenization with netting intact wins. That’s DTCC.

Read the fine print on the pilot. Wallets must be pre-approved. DTC can reverse erroneous entries. The chain is programmable but the central ledger stays put. This isn’t the crypto-native vision wrapped in regulation. It’s the regulated system wrapped in crypto-native tech.

This makes DTCC an architect of tokenisation in the U.S. capital markets.

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Investor alpha

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I’ve watched banks lobby Washington for 100 years to keep their Fed access exclusive. This week, Deutsche Börse skipped the lobby and bought a seat.

Deutsche Börse paid $200M for a 1.5% stake in Kraken, hours before Kraken confirmed it filed for a US IPO. The real story wasn’t the valuation discount. It’s what Kraken’s Kansas City Fed account gives Deutsche Börse: a pipe into Fedwire that makes correspondent banks optional.

Meanwhile, Lummis says CLARITY dies if it doesn't pass now:

“This is our last chance to pass the Clarity Act until at least 2030. We can’t afford to surrender America’s financial future.”

— Senator Cynthia Lummis on X

Here’s what we’re covering:

• Deutsche Börse front-runs Kraken IPO with $200M stake

• Goldman Sachs files first-ever Bitcoin ETF

• Charles Schwab launches spot crypto trading for 39 million accounts

• UBS leads Swiss Banks into live CHF Stablecoin pilot

• Visa is building to replace Visa

• HSBC takes Stablecoin stack public on Canton blockchain

• Ripple lands Kyobo to tokenize Korean Sovereign Bond

• ECB undercuts US Stablecoin model with tokenization terms

And 15+ more signals. Let’s jump in 👇

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Top Boardroom Reads

• The Role of Digital Money in Capital Markets (GFMA)

• SoK: Blockchain Agent-to-Agent Payments (Research Paper)

• Detangling Tokenization of RWAs (Franklin Templeton)

• Stablecoin Issuance Market: Four Business Models Reshaping the Market (Tiger Research)

• Institutional Infrastructure for Global Settlement and Tokenized Assets (Allium)

• 2026 Insurance Value Creators Report (BCG)

• Tokenization of Financial Assets (IOSCO)

The Friday newsletter only scratches the surface. A lot more is going on that we’ll tell you in our PRO briefings.

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Top Signals This Week

Deutsche Börse front-runs Kraken IPO with $200M stake

On April 14, 2026, Deutsche Börse announced it acquired a 1.5% fully diluted stake in Kraken (Payward Inc.), for $200M in a secondary share transaction. The deal implies a $13.3B valuation, down from the $20B Kraken printed in its November 2025 $800M raise. It closes before June. [RELEASE]

Hours later, Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi confirmed at Semafor’s World Economy Summit that Kraken has confidentially filed for a US IPO. [NEWS]

Why it matters: Through Kraken, Deutsche Börse bought a pipe directly into the U.S. central bank. Kraken’s “limited purpose” account can’t earn interest, can’t touch the discount window or FedNow, but it can settle on Fedwire. That’s the only access institutional wholesale fiat flows actually need. Correspondent banks exist solely to provide this. Kraken just made them optional, and banks are lobbying against it. The Bank Policy Institute called the Kansas City Fed’s decision a “front-run” of the Fed Board’s public comment process. Also, Deutsche Börse stepped in between Kraken’s November raise and IPO filing and captured a 1.5% secondary position.

🚀 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 100K+ decision-makers who act on what we publish.[let's talk →].

Goldman Sachs files first-ever Bitcoin ETF

On April 14, Goldman Sachs filed with the SEC for the Goldman Sachs Bitcoin Premium Income ETF, a covered-call strategy that buys shares of existing spot Bitcoin ETFs (BlackRock’s IBIT, Fidelity’s FBTC) and systematically sells call options against them to generate income. The earliest possible launch is late June, assuming no SEC objections. Management fee has not been disclosed. BlackRock’s competing product, the iShares Bitcoin Premium Income ETF (BITA), is further along and expected to launch within weeks. [NEWS]

Why it matters: Goldman filing its first Bitcoin ETF product is the signal, not the product itself. The covered-call wrapper turns Bitcoin volatility into yield, which makes BTC palatable to the exact investors who would never buy spot: retirees, endowments, conservative allocators, and the wealth management channels Goldman dominates. Fortune called it “boomer candy” and the label fits. The 40-100% overlay range gives Goldman unusual flexibility to toggle between aggressive and defensive positioning depending on vol regime. This is Wall Street domesticating Bitcoin into a familiar income product. The competitive race is now Goldman vs. BlackRock on who captures yield-hungry capital first.

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Charles Schwab launches spot crypto trading for 39 million accounts

On April 16, Charles Schwab announced Schwab Crypto, a direct spot trading product for Bitcoin and Ethereum rolling out “in the coming weeks.” The product runs through Paxos, which handles both sub-custody and trade execution. Schwab is pricing trades at 75 basis points per transaction, undercutting Fidelity Crypto (100 bps) while sitting above Robinhood’s tightest spreads. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: Schwab manages $12 trillion in client assets across 39 million accounts. That makes it the largest traditional brokerage to offer direct spot crypto trading. When $12T in AUM gets a “buy Bitcoin” button in the same interface where clients hold their index funds, the distribution math changes. Schwab isn’t competing with Coinbase. It’s competing with the reason most traditional investors never bought crypto in the first place: friction.

UBS leads Swiss Banks into live CHF Stablecoin pilot

On April 8, UBS, PostFinance, Sygnum, Raiffeisen, Zürcher Kantonalbank, and BCV launched a joint CHF stablecoin sandbox. The CHF (Swiss Franc Stablecoin) sandbox is a controlled live environment. The six banks with technical infrastructure from Swiss Stablecoin AG, will test real payment flows with real counterparties under transaction caps and a restricted participant pool. The sandbox runs through 2026 and remains open to additional banks and corporations. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank, with $5.7T in invested assets, brings credibility to this sandbox. It has spent three years building tokenization infrastructure through UBS Tokenize, UBS Digital Cash (adopted by Ant International) and its Money Market Investment Fund (uMINT). Additionally, it joined a major Bank for International Settlements (BIS) initiative, Project Agora and is currently an active partner of MAS Singapore’s Project Guardian. Even in the blockchain space, it has achieved multiple milestones. A CHF stablecoin plugs directly into that stack. It gives UBS clients a settlement token for tokenized assets, FX, and intraday liquidity, without routing through a US-issued stablecoin.

Also: On April 9, ClearBank Europe secured CASP status from the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets, becoming the first Dutch credit institution to complete MiCAR notification. [RELEASE]

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Visa is building to replace Visa

On April 14, 2026, Visa, Stripe, and Standard Chartered–backed Zodia Custody went live as the first external validators on Tempo, a payments-first Layer 1 co-founded by Stripe and venture firm Paradigm. Tempo raised $500M at a $5B valuation in late 2025, ran a public testnet starting December 9, 2025, and went to mainnet in March 2026. Reportedly, Visa configured and managed the validator entirely in-house after six months of joint engineering work with Tempo’s team. [NEWS]

Why it matters: The usual story with incumbents is they watch disruption coming and freeze, because the new thing looks too small and too unprofitable to matter. Tempo fits that description perfectly. Near-zero liquidity on day one. A testnet that opened in December. Valued at $5B against a stablecoin market that’s already $318.6B. Visa signed up anyway. The math is simple. If Tempo works, Visa is inside the validator set with governance influence and a direct view of flow. If Tempo fails, Visa spent a few engineers and a press release. Against a $700B revenue franchise, that’s the cheapest insurance policy anyone has ever written.

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HSBC takes Stablecoin stack public on Canton blockchain

HSBC tested its Tokenised Deposit Service (TDS) on the Canton Network, a public Layer 1 blockchain designed to connect institutional permissioned ledgers with privacy guarantees. The pilot simulated three core functions: issuance of tokenised deposits, peer-to-peer transfer between wallets, and atomic settlement against other digital assets. This was the first time HSBC deployed its TDS on a public blockchain environment. [NEWS]

On 10 April 2026, the HKMA granted HSBC a license FRS02 under Hong Kong’s Stablecoins Ordinance, alongside Anchorpoint Financial (a Standard Chartered / Animoca Brands / HKT joint venture). Only 2 out of 36 applicants cleared the bar.

Scale: TDS now processes five currencies (HKD, USD, SGD, EUR, GBP) and is expanding to the US and UAE in H1 2026.

Why it matters: Before April 10, HSBC’s tokenized deposits were corporate-only instruments: programmable bank money for treasury management, cross-border settlement, and interbank transfers. Powerful, but narrow. The FRS02 stablecoin license blows the aperture wide open. HSBC will embed an HKD stablecoin directly into PayMe, reaching 7M retail users. Every token will be fully backed by liquid assets held in segregated accounts.

What’s next: HSBC plans to launch an HKD-denominated stablecoin in H2 2026, integrated directly into PayMe (7M+ users) and the HSBC HK mobile banking app.

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Ripple lands Kyobo to tokenize Korean Sovereign Bond

On April 15, 2026, Ripple signed a strategic partnership with Kyobo Life Insurance, one of South Korea’s largest insurers, to enable tokenized Korean government bond settlement. It is Ripple’s first collaboration with a major insurance institution in Korea. Transactions will run through Ripple Custody, the firm’s institutional digital asset platform. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: Insurers are the patient capital of Asia’s bond markets. When a top-three Korean life insurer agrees to settle sovereign debt on Ripple’s custody stack, it is a procurement decision. Kyobo manages long-duration assets measured in tens of trillions of won, and Korean Treasury bonds are the anchor of that book. This is also one of Ripple’s biggest steps into the institutional blockchain space.

ECB undercuts US Stablecoin model with tokenization terms

The ECB doesn't endorse technology often. This week it endorsed tokenization, with one condition: central bank money sits at the bottom of every settlement stack. Privately issued stablecoins don't qualify. Tokenized bank deposits don't qualify. The euro has to be euro all the way down. The Bulletin covered tokenized bonds, tokenized money market funds, and euro-denominated stablecoins under MiCA, noting early evidence that tokenized bonds already show lower borrowing costs and tighter bid-ask spreads than their traditional counterparts. [Bulletin]

Why it matters: Europe just told the US model it's not welcome. In the US, tokenized deposits and private stablecoins are carrying the tokenization load. The ECB is saying: not here. The preferred rail is a wholesale digital euro or a DLT platform sitting on top of Eurosystem plumbing. Anything else is a second-class settlement asset in the world's second-largest capital market. Read together with MiCA, the message to USD stablecoin issuers is clearer than any regulation they’ve seen yet. You can operate in Europe. You just can’t win there.

ECB Macroprudential Bulletin 33, April 2026

• Euro stablecoins and their potential effect on sovereign bond markets

• Tokenised money market funds: new technology, familiar risks?

• Towards an efficient and integrated digital capital market in Europe: the role of tokenisation and the Eurosystem’s policy response

• Tokenised bonds: assessing efficiency and liquidity in a nascent market

Other Signals

Infrastructure and Markets

• Chainlink puts €2T of Swiss and Spanish equities data on-chain. SIX, the operator of the Swiss and Spanish exchanges, partnered with Chainlink to pipe its equities data directly onto blockchain networks. Link

• Ether.fi launches crypto card on OP Mainnet, driving record $680M single-day TVL increase. Link

• Tether invests in $134M round for Stablecoin Development Corp, a public stablecoin-infra vehicle. Link

• Galaxy launches GalaxyOne for Business, integrated treasury platform for US entities. Link

DeFi and Blockchain

• BNB Chain burns 1.57M BNB (~$1.02B) in the 35th quarterly auto-burn. Link

• Legal & General Asset Management tokenizes £50B liquidity funds on Calastone’s network. Link

• Ondo Finance files with the SEC for the tokenised S&P 500 tracking fund on Ethereum. Link

• Keyrock issues tokenized corporate bond on Ethereum via Sygnum and Obligate. Link

• Tron announces plan to upgrade network with post-quantum cryptography. Link

Regulation and Policy

• SEC Division of Trading and Markets issued staff guidance providing a five-year no-action relief for certain self-custody crypto apps and DeFi interfaces from registering as broker-dealers. Link

• UK FCA opens consultation on comprehensive crypto asset regime for 2027 rollout. Link

• JPMorgan reports US CLARITY Act nearing final agreement. Link

• White House study finds weak case for stablecoin yield ban. Link

Banking and Payments

• Societe Generale-FORGE to integrate MiCA-compliant Euro stablecoin EURCV into MetaMask. Link

• AllUnity launches MiCAR-compliant EURAU euro stablecoin on Stellar. Link

• Rakuten integrates XRP into its payment network for 44M users in Japan. Link

• Quantoz launches licensed Polish Złoty and British Pound stablecoins under MiCA. Link

• PayPal integrates Brazil’s Pix instant payment system for small business checkout. Link

• X product lead hints at crypto integration for upcoming “X Money” payments service. Link

Exchange, ETP and Market Structure

• Bitwise launches spot Avalanche ETP (BAVA) with in-house staking for AVAX rewards. The ETP provides spot exposure to Avalanche (AVAX) and stakes the underlying assets through its in-house division to generate yield. Link

• Goldman Sachs files with SEC for Bitcoin Premium Income ETF. Competes directly with BlackRock on yield-generating crypto products. Link

• 21Shares files amended S-1 for spot Hyperliquid ETF (THYP) on Nasdaq. Link

• OKX launches regulated perpetual futures “X-Perps” in the EEA.

  Leverages its Malta MiFID license to capture EU derivatives share pre-MiCA. Link

Our CEO Notes this week

If you're building infrastructure, allocating capital, or pricing the shift to always-on markets, this is the briefing your competitors already read on Monday.

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

On April 8, UBS, PostFinance, Sygnum, Raiffeisen, Zürcher Kantonalbank, and BCV launched a joint CHF stablecoin sandbox with Swiss Stablecoin AG. On April 9, ClearBank Europe became the first Dutch credit institution to secure MiCA approval as a crypto asset service provider, going live with EURC and USDC through Circle Mint and Taurus-P…

Read more

Deutsche Börse, the third-largest stock exchange in Europe, just acquired a backdoor into the U.S. Federal Reserve.

On April 14, the operator of Frankfurt exchange, Deutsche Börse AG, dropped $200M for a 1.5% stake in Kraken, exactly six weeks after Kraken quietly became the first crypto firm in history to receive a Federal Reserve mast…

Read more

We counted eleven OCC trust bank charter filings in 83 days. The latest one came from Citadel, Fidelity, and Schwab, together, through EDX Markets. They're not building a bank. They're building the custody and settlement layer for every tokenized asset that's about to hit institutional markets.

Let’s unpack.

The Signal: Every major player…

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A sanctioned country just made Bitcoin a toll booth for 20% of the world’s oil.

Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz. About a fifth of global oil moves through it every day. After the 40-day war with the US and Israel ended in ceasefire on April 8, Iran started charging $1 per barrel in Bitcoin. Pay or you don’t pass. [NEWS]

Why Bitcoin? Iran can’t use dollars. Can’t use SWIFT. Can’t touch any payment rail the US controls. Bitcoin is the one network no country can freeze.

The math: roughly $20M a day in tolls. That’s 280 BTC daily, about 60% of all new Bitcoin mined. Bitcoin jumped from ~$68K to ~$72K on the news. But the price move is the least interesting part. A nation-state just made Bitcoin a prerequisite for accessing critical infrastructure. That’s new.

It was that kind of week.

Here’s what we’re covering:

• The US just cracked open $7.7T in retirement savings to Bitcoin [Link]

• Visa connected all agentic payment protocols to one rail [Link]

• Morgan Stanley launched a spot BTC ETF that undercuts BlackRock by 44% [Link]

• Three federal agencies published stablecoin rules in 48 hours [Link]

• CME Group goes 24/7 for all crypto derivatives starting May 29 [Link]

And 20+ more signals. Let’s jump in 👇

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Exclusive for 51 Readers:

👉 Register for Consensus Miami May 5-7, 2026, and get in the room where the people moving that money actually meet. Use this for up to $200 off:

🎟️ 20% Discount Code: MARC
🔗 Auto-applied discount link: https://go.coindesk.com/3NLCAAd

Top Boardroom Reads

• The scalability trade-off is dead, with Bryan Pellegrino, CEO of LayerZero (51)

• US Equities Tokenization: An Overview (Jane Street)

• Effects of Stablecoin Yield Prohibition on Bank Lending (White House)

• Prediction Markets: Addressing the Five Biggest Questions (Bitwise)

• One Hundred Years in the U.S. Stock Markets (Research paper)

• Digital Assets & Tokenized Finance Impact Report 2026 (FII Institute)

The Friday newsletter only scratches the surface. A lot more is going on that we’ll tell you in our PRO briefings.

Upgrade to PRO

Top Signals This Week

🚀 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 100K+ decision-makers who act on what we publish.[let's talk →].

Visa connects all agentic payment protocols

On April 8, Visa announced Intelligent Commerce Connect, a single integration layer that lets merchants and AI agent builders accept payments from any of the competing agentic payment protocols. AWS, Aldar, Highnote, Mesh, and Payabli are already piloting it. [RELEASE]

Here’s the problem Visa is solving: AI agents are starting to buy things. They book flights, purchase software, reorder supplies. But every payment system speaks a different language. Right now, four major protocols are fighting to become the standard for how AI agents pay for things: Visa’s own TAP, Stripe’s MPP, OpenAI’s ACP, and Google’s UCP. Instead of trying to win that war, Visa said: we’ll support all of them.

Why it matters: Visa just did to agentic commerce what it did to e-commerce twenty years ago. It didn’t build the stores. It built the checkout counter that every store had to use. Visa’s bet is that it doesn’t need to win the protocol layer. It just needs to be the settlement layer underneath all of them. Most people will read this as an AI story. We think it’s a stablecoin adoption story wearing AI clothes.

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Morgan Stanley launches spot BTC ETF

On April 8, Morgan Stanley launched its own spot Bitcoin ETF, ticker MSBT, and it did $34 million in first-day trading volume. Bloomberg’s Eric Balchunas called it a top 1% ETF launch and projects $5B in assets within a year. [RELEASE]

Zooming in: The fee is 0.14%. That’s the lowest in the market. BlackRock’s IBIT charges 0.25%. Grayscale’s mini trust charges 0.15%.

Why it matters: Morgan Stanley was already in the Bitcoin ETF business since August 2024, but as a distributor. Now they’re a manufacturer. The fee revenue stays in-house. They control the pricing, the positioning, the narrative. They have 16,000 financial advisors managing $9.3T in client assets. It won’t matter whose ETF is better. Morgan Stanley has an edge in selling.

Be smart: In January 2026, they filed S-1s for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana ETFs. In February, they applied for an OCC National Trust Bank Charter, Morgan Stanley Digital Trust, to handle crypto custody, trading, swaps, and staking in-house. Later this year, they’re launching retail crypto trading on E*TRADE for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. Put it all together: a full-stack crypto wealth management platform inside a traditional bank. ETF products, proprietary custody, direct trading, staking yields, all under one roof. The Bitcoin ETF is the front door.

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U.S. just gave Stablecoins a banking rulebook

Last week we covered the Treasury’s 87-page GENIUS Act rule. This week, two more agencies piled on. Three federal agencies published stablecoin rules in 48 hours. That’s never happened in digital assets.

On Wednesday, FinCEN and OFAC proposed a rule spelling out exactly how stablecoin issuers must build anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance programs under the GENIUS Act. The rule formally classifies stablecoin issuers as “financial institutions” under the Bank Secrecy Act, the same bucket as banks and money transmitters. Treasury Secretary Bessent framed it as balancing protection with innovation. [NEWS]

What’s in it: Issuers must build and maintain full AML programs, file suspicious activity reports, and run sanctions compliance operations that meet OFAC standards. There’s even a provision barring anyone with a criminal background from heading a stablecoin issuer’s compliance program.

And Bessent publicly called on the Senate Banking Committee to mark up the CLARITY Act. Senate returns April 13. Markup is targeted for late April.

Why it matters: This is net bullish for the stablecoin ecosystem, even though it adds compliance costs. These rules remove the biggest barrier to institutional adoption: regulation. Banks, asset managers, and payment processors wouldn’t touch stablecoins at scale without clarity on the rules. Now they have it. The issuers who were already running serious compliance operations (Circle, Paxos) just got their moat widened. This also signals the passage of the Clarity Act very soon.

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CME Group goes 24/7

On April 8, CME Group announced that starting May 29, all crypto futures and options will trade around the clock, seven days a week. [NEWS]

This is the world’s largest derivatives exchange. $1.4 quadrillion in notional value traded each year. Until now, crypto futures on CME followed traditional market hours with weekend gaps. That created an arbitrage window where offshore venues like Binance and Bybit captured weekend flow.

Why it matters: CME just removed the last timing advantage offshore venues had. Institutional traders can now hedge positions, manage risk, and adjust exposure without waiting for Monday morning. This compresses the gap between crypto-native infrastructure and traditional market plumbing. Expect volume to shift from offshore perps into regulated CME contracts, especially from hedge funds and macro desks that need clearing guarantees their compliance teams can sign off on.

Bitcoin in your 401(k)

The Department of Labor published a proposed rule that would let 401(k) plans include Bitcoin as an investment option. [Filing]

Quick distinction, because most headlines got this wrong. Trump’s executive order last August didn’t open 401(k)s to crypto. It told the DOL to start a rulemaking process.

Why it matters: 401(k) plans hold $7.7 trillion and cover roughly 90 million Americans. Unlike spot ETF flows, which are discretionary, 401(k) contributions are automatic, recurring, and dollar-cost-averaged through payroll. Average holding period is decades. If even 1% flows into Bitcoin, that's $77 billion. More than all spot Bitcoin ETF inflows in their first year combined. Comment period closes June 1. Final rule expected Q4 2026. First plans could offer Bitcoin ETFs by early 2027.

Other Signals

Infrastructure and Markets

• Broadridge’s DLT repo platform processed $8 trillion in March 2026. That’s 392% growth year over year. Repo is the plumbing of capital markets, $4T+ traded daily. Broadridge just proved DLT works at that scale. [RELEASE]

• Circle launched cirBTC. A wrapped Bitcoin product designed to challenge WBTC. Circle is betting its institutional reputation that the market wants a trust-minimized, audited alternative. [NEWS]

• Securitize hired Brett Redfearn as President. He ran the SEC’s Division of Trading and Markets. [NEWS]

• Pyth Network data marketplace launches with Fidelity and Euronext. On-chain price feeds backed by TradFi institutions. [NEWS]

• Tether testing investor appetite at $500B valuation. If they raise at that number, Tether would be one of the 20 most valuable private companies on earth. [NEWS]

Regulation and Policy

• SEC safe harbor proposal sent to the White House for interagency review. $75M cap, 4-year exemption for token projects. If finalized, this gives crypto startups a legal path to launch without immediate securities registration. [Filing]

• CFTC sued multiple states over prediction market jurisdiction. This ties directly to the Hougan quote at the top. Prediction markets are becoming a real asset class, and the turf war between federal and state regulators just went public. [NEWS]

• Hester Peirce publicly apologized for the SEC’s past regulatory approach. A sitting SEC Commissioner said the agency got it wrong. That doesn’t happen often. [NEWS]

• Todd Blanche named interim Attorney General. The DOJ’s approach to crypto enforcement is shifting. [NEWS]

• EU considering centralizing all crypto supervision under ESMA. One regulator for all 27 member states. If adopted, this would be the most significant structural change to MiCA since it was enacted. [NEWS]

Banking and Payments

• Schwab confirmed spot Bitcoin and Ether trading launching H1 2026. 35 million brokerage clients about to get direct access. [NEWS]

• Standard Chartered exploring full takeover of Zodia Custody. A top-20 global bank potentially going all-in on digital asset custody. [NEWS]

• Paysafe and MoonPay partnered for crypto payments. Paysafe processes $167B annually. [NEWS]

• Swiss banks launched a CHF stablecoin sandbox. Seven banks including UBS. A consortium approach to national stablecoin issuance. [NEWS]

• Circle’s CPN Managed Payments went live. [RELEASE]

• Coinbase’s OCC trust charter received conditional approval. The largest US crypto exchange is becoming a nationally chartered trust bank. [NEWS]

Digital Assets and DeFi

• Ethereum Foundation completed its 70,000 ETH staking target. $93M staked. The Foundation is eating its own cooking. [NEWS]

• Ant Group / Anvita building AI agents on crypto payment rails. [NEWS]

• IMF warned that tokenization could amplify financial stability risks. Worth reading for the counterargument. [Report]

• Bitcoin quantum-resistant wallet prototype announced. [NEWS]

• Solana launched STRIDE framework after the $285M Drift hack. [NEWS]

• US Treasury launched cybersecurity threat-sharing for crypto firms. [NEWS]

• Morgan Stanley plans a private credit fund. [Link]

Our CEO Notes this week

If you're building infrastructure, allocating capital, or pricing the shift to always-on markets, this is the briefing your competitors already read on Monday.

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

I watched the DTCC’s CTO go on stage and say one sentence that reframed everything I thought about blockchain scalability. He said it was real.

The “it” was a live demo. 2 million transactions per second (that’s roughly 100,000 times Ethereum’s throughput). Running on a network of Raspberry Pis. Built by Bryan Pellegrino and the LayerZero labs team, the guy who went from professional poker player to selling AI models to the Oakland A’s to running LayerZero, the protocol that moves 85% of all cross-chain messages.

Watch on Youtube

On February 10, Bryan unveiled Zero, a new layer-one blockchain. Citadel Securities, DTCC, and the parent company of the NYSE all backed the announcement.

The pitch: a system fast enough for the New York Stock Exchange to run on-chain. Not in theory. In production.

“We believe we can actually bring the entire global economy onchain with this technology.”

We dug into the technical architecture, the $10B stablecoin distribution bet nobody expected to work, and why Bryan thinks AI agents will need payment rails that make Visa look like a fax machine.

About Bryan: Bryan Pellegrino is the co-founder and CEO of LayerZero Labs. Before crypto, he was one of the top heads-up poker players on the planet (screen name: Primordial AA) and built AI models for MLB teams, including Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s. LayerZero now secures close to $100B in value and has processed hundreds of billions in cross-chain transfers. His investors include Sequoia, a16z, and Citadel Securities.

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🎧 Jump to the best parts

• 00:00 From Poker to Crypto: A Journey of Obsession

• 06:08 Risk Management Lessons from Poker

• 11:48 The Birth of Layer Zero Labs

• 18:09 Building a Layer One Blockchain: The Zero Architecture

• 24:00 Privacy in Blockchain: The Three Zones of Zero

• 29:56 Advisory Board Insights and Future Plans

• 32:08 The Rapid Rise of USDT Zero

• 35:49 Choosing the Right Interoperability Standard

• 39:25 The Strategic Acquisition of Stargate

• 41:39 The Future of Machine-to-Machine Payments

• 46:36 Adapting Traditional Institutions to New Realities

• 49:02 The Evolution of the Crypto Mission

• 53:09 The Case for In-Person Collaboration

• 55:04 Lightning Round: Quick Insights
  

Important Links

• LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/bryanpellegrino

• X: https://x.com/PrimordialAA

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bryanpellegrino/

• LayerZero: https://layerzero.network/

• Zero: https://layerzero.network/zero

• Sequoia spotlight: https://sequoiacap.com/founder/bryan-pellegrino/

Watch or listen now:
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My biggest takeaways from this conversation:

1. The scalability trade-off is dead for blockchains

For years, blockchain infrastructure has operated under a simple constraint: you can optimize for speed, or you can optimize for decentralization, but not both.

• Solana chose throughput, processing thousands of transactions per second (TPS), but relying on a relatively small set of high-cost validator nodes.

• Ethereum took the opposite approach, prioritizing decentralization with a vast network of nodes, at the cost of limited throughput, around 15 TPS.

Every architectural decision over the past decade has been a trade-off within these constraints. Pellegrino argues that this trade-off is no longer fundamental.

Zero’s architecture, built natively around zero-knowledge proofs, removes the requirement for every node to re-execute every computation. Instead, computation is verified, not replicated.

“There’s been almost five billion dollars of bridge hacks. We said, could we build a better bridge? And that led us to realise that was the generalisable problem.”

The result: a system that reportedly achieves 2M TPS while maintaining decentralization comparable to Ethereum.

This wasn’t presented as a theory. In a live demonstration to the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the system ran on a distributed network of Raspberry Pis. DTCC CTO publicly confirmed the demonstration and described it as real.

“You could not have the New York Stock Exchange on chain in any system that exists prior. And now they’re saying, wow, that is possible.”

What makes this notable is a stack of interdependent innovations:

• QMDB (verifiable database): Processes up to 3 million state updates per second, roughly 100× faster than existing verifiable databases and significantly faster than traditional systems like RocksDB.

• FAFO (execution scheduler): Enables over one million EVM transactions per second by optimizing transaction ordering and parallelism.

• SVID (data compression layer): Uses ZK-based compression so nodes only download partial data (a shard plus a transaction commitment), addressing bandwidth constraints that limit high-throughput systems.

Pellegrino describes this as a compounding system, each layer unlocking the next.

Related reads:

2. Stablecoins are the “distribution” wedge for institutions

Tether had about $186B in circulation. Nearly all of it, around $180B, was concentrated on just two networks: Ethereum and Tron.

The prevailing assumption was simple: once you’re live on the major chains, distribution is effectively maxed out. That assumption is now being challenged.

USDT-0, built on LayerZero, expanded Tether’s presence to 20+ additional networks. In less than a year, it enabled roughly $70–75 billion in cross-chain transfers.

More importantly, it drove $10 billion in incremental AUM.

At typical reserve yields (~4%), that translates to $400–450M in annual revenue from ecosystems most teams had written off.

“There is immense value, even in the longer tail of distribution, much more than people give it credit for.”

The usage pattern matters:

• A high volume of small retail transfers

• A smaller number of very large institutional flows

• Including a single $800M transfer

“The most memorable number was a single transfer of $800M. And then the AUM growth alone was about $400 million directly to Tether’s bottom line.”

This mix signals something important: once access improves, professional capital follows. Market makers, in particular, are using this expanded reach to capture arbitrage across chains that were previously too slow or too costly to access. As a result, the total economic activity, not just user count, has expanded.

Related podcast and reads:

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3. Immutability is the security model institutions actually need

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SoFi Technologies didn’t just launch another crypto product. It quietly did something no U.S. national bank has done before: it put a fully reserved stablecoin on a public blockchain and embedded it directly into a regulated banking stack. [RELEASE]

That changes the frame.

With SoFi Big Business Banking, companies don’t need to “move into…

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I don't think Washington has ever shipped this much crypto policy in a single week. Each one would normally be the headline.

• The US Labor Department proposed allowing Bitcoin in 401(k) plans, opening digital assets to $7.7 trillion in American retirement savings.

• US Congress advanced a payment stablecoin framework, pushing dollar-backed digital currencies closer to formal regulatory recognition.

• The Treasury published its first rule under the GENIUS Act. Under $10B, you stay with your state. Over it, you move to the OCC.

Other highlights we’re watching this week:

• U.S. Treasury publishes first GENIUS Act regulation

• Arizona opens $7.43B of pension money to crypto

• Franklin Templeton settles an acquisition in its own token

• Citadel-backed EDX Markets applies for US trust bank charter

• Moody’s rates first Bitcoin-backed $100M bond

and much more. Let’s jump in 👇

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Top Boardroom Reads

• Stablecoins: What Strategic Choices for Europe (Banque de France)

• Making the Case for Tokenized Collateral (Nasdaq & The ValueExchange)

• Beyond Dollarization: The Rise of Local Currency Stablecoins (Visa & Dune Analytics)

• Tokenized Intraday Repo: Balance Sheet Optimization (Finadium & Broadridge)

• Global Economic Outlook 2026‑27: The Fog of War (Allianz Research)

• Stablecoin Payments at Scale (Artemis)

The Friday newsletter only scratches the surface. A lot more is going on that we’ll tell you in our PRO briefings.

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Top Signals This Week

The $500B stablecoin rulebook

The U.S. Department of the Treasury on April 1 published its first regulation under the GENIUS Act, an 87-page proposed rule defining when state stablecoin regimes qualify as equivalent to the federal framework. Issuers under $10 billion can stay under state supervision if their state passes; above that line, they move to the OCC, which published its own 376-page rulemaking in February. The GENIUS Act takes effect by January 2027 at the latest. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: Three regulatory layers are now closing that gap at once: the GENIUS Act banned issuer-to-holder payments, the OCC added a rebuttable presumption targeting affiliate pass-throughs, and last week’s Senate CLARITY Act deal extends the ban to anything “economically equivalent to interest”. Every platform that built its stablecoin business around yield takes a hit: Circle fell 20% on the and Coinbase dropped 11% on the news. The banks got exactly what they lobbied for: the passive yield ban is now written into three concurrent rulemakings. Stablecoin issuance is heading toward $500 billion this year. How the Treasury draws the line between qualifying state regimes and federal oversight in the next 60 days shapes who gets to issue into that market.

🚀 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 →].

Arizona plugs pensions into the bitcoin reserve

Arizona’s SB1042 cleared the House Rules Committee, authorizing public retirement systems to allocate up to 10% of their portfolios into virtual currency, including through exchange-traded products or, notably, the federal Strategic Bitcoin Reserve for storage. The Arizona State Retirement System manages ~$50B and the Public Safety Personnel Retirement System holds ~$24.3B, putting the combined maximum crypto exposure at $7.43B from a single state. The bill passed the Senate on partisan lines and now sits on the House consent calendar. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: SB1042 is significant not because of the 10% ceiling but because it treats digital assets as an investable asset class for public pension systems. That is a category shift. New Hampshire’s HB 302 created a Bitcoin-only mandate; Texas’s SB 21 validated a full custody chain by routing $5M through BlackRock’s IBIT; SB1042 goes further by referencing the federal Strategic Bitcoin Reserve for storage, a state bill plugging directly into federal custody infrastructure. Every 2026 crypto regulation debate is about permission. Three states are already past it, building the operational plumbing for government-held digital assets before the BITCOIN Act reaches a vote.

Read our full CEO Notes👇

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Franklin paid in its own token

Franklin Templeton acquired 250 Digital, a CoinFund spinoff with all of CoinFund’s liquid crypto strategies, to create a new unit called Franklin Crypto. The interesting part is the payment: Franklin used it’s BENJI tokens, the on-chain shares of its own U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX), yielding 3.58%, as deal currency. The deal closes Q2 2026, one week after Franklin partnered with Ondo Finance to tokenize five ETFs for 24/7 crypto wallet trading. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: This the first time a top-20 global asset manager has used a tokenized fund share to pay for a corporate acquisition.

Let’s unpack that: There are two ways to get blockchain infrastructure. You buy it, or you build it. Stripe paid $1.1 billion for Bridge. Mastercard paid $1.8 billion for BVNK. Franklin built its own. Benji runs on 10 public blockchains; it feeds into Canton Network’s collateral markets where HSBC, BNP Paribas, and Citadel Securities operate; it powers off-exchange collateral at Binance and enables stablecoin-to-MMF trading with Ripple and DBS. And now it works as deal currency. Crypto M&A hit $37 billion in 2025, but look at what every other major deal has in common: an incumbent paying billions for someone else’s plumbing. Franklin is the only one using its own. Issuance, settlement, collateral, distribution, corporate treasury, all on rails it built. Everyone else is still assembling.

Read our full CEO Notes👇

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Citadel wants a bank charter

EDX Markets applies for a national trust bank charter to provide institutional-only digital asset custody, settlement, and asset management under federal banking supervision. The exchange, backed by Citadel Securities, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Charles Schwab filed with the OCC on March 25 to charter EDX Trust, National Association as a de novo national trust bank in Chicago, requesting full fiduciary powers to serve institutional clients exclusively through electronic APIs. The proposed entity would provide fiduciary custody of digital assets and stablecoins, riskless principal trading, and end-of-day net settlement, all separated from EDX’s existing order-matching platform; no branches, no retail services, no proprietary trading, no deposit-taking. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: Think about who’s behind EDX. Citadel Securities processes over a third of all US retail equity trades. Fidelity runs one of the largest custody operations on Earth. Charles Schwab clears for millions of brokerage accounts. These aren’t crypto tourists. These are the firms that built equity market structure. And they’re telling the OCC: we want to bring that same architecture to digital assets. Separate the custody from the trading. Put a federal trust bank in the middle. Run it the way stocks already work. The OCC is listening. The OCC has conditionally approved five digital asset firms since December, received at least 18 charter applications in 2025, and finalized an April 1 rule expanding what trust banks are allowed to do; Coinbase, which filed its own application in October, was not among those approved. Meanwhile, the Bank Policy Institute, which represents 40 of the biggest US lenders (JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, the usual names), is considering a lawsuit to block the entire charter wave. Citadel and Fidelity want the charter. JPMorgan’s lobby group wants to kill it. The custody war isn’t between crypto and banks anymore. It’s between banks.

Moody’s just priced bitcoin as collateral

Moody’s rates a $100 million bond backed entirely by Bitcoin, the first time a major credit agency has scored a bond where the only thing standing behind it is BTC. The bond is issued through New Hampshire’s state finance authority, but repayment comes solely from Bitcoin collateral, not taxpayer money. CleanSpark, a publicly traded Bitcoin miner, puts up $160 million in BTC (1.6x the bond’s value) held by BitGo; if Bitcoin’s price drops far enough, the whole thing gets liquidated automatically to pay investors back. Moody’s gave it a Ba2, two notches below investment grade, but rated it using the same framework it applies to traditional loan obligations. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: A major credit agency just published a working methodology for rating Bitcoin as bond collateral. Ba2 is speculative grade; the methodology is the real product. S&P got there first with Ledn’s BBB- Bitcoin-backed ABS in February, but that deal hit a 27% BTC drawdown and lost a quarter of its collateral to forced liquidation almost immediately. New Hampshire built toward this in steps: HB 302 authorized Bitcoin in the state treasury in May 2025, the BFA approved the bond in November, Moody’s rated it in March. Ba2 locks out pension funds, insurance general accounts, and most muni buyers, but Fitch has no comparable framework, and every conduit issuer in the country now has a template sitting on Moody’s website.

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Other Signals

• The US Labor Dept proposes Bitcoin in 401(k) plans. Link

• Square enables Bitcoin payments for millions of merchants. Link

• Senate Banking Committee to mark up the CLARITY Act in April. Link

• S&P Dow Jones indices announce first tokenized index for onchain markets. Link

• SoFi announces 24/7 banking hub that blends traditional cash with crypto. Link

• Fed Vice Chair Barr calls for strong stablecoin oversight. Link

• US Congress advances payment stablecoin framework. Link

• StraitsX 40x stablecoin volume growth in SE Asia. Link

• CoinShares begins trading on Nasdaq via SPAC. Link

• HKMA Project Ensemble for wholesale CBDC. Link

Our CEO Notes this week

If you're building infrastructure, allocating capital, or pricing the shift to always-on markets, this is the briefing your competitors already read on Monday.

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

WE keep a running list of how institutions actually use blockchain. Not what they announce. What they do. Yesterday, Franklin Templeton added something new to that list.[RELEASE]

They bought a crypto team. Normal. They launched a new division. Fine. But here’s the part that matters: they paid for part of the deal with BENJI tokens. Their …

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I've been tracking every state Bitcoin reserve bill for the past year. They all do the same thing: buy Bitcoin, hold Bitcoin, repeat. Arizona apparently found that boring.

Two bills just cleared committee that would let the state treasurer lend seized crypto for yield. Also, $7.43B of public pension money is now eligible for crypto. Cels…

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Europe’s largest asset manager decided to skip paying the operational tax and brought its fund distribution infrastructure on blockchain. Amundi (€2.4T AUM) moved $100M onto public blockchains (Ethereum and Stellar). And, it is the firm’s second blockchain-based product in five months. [RELEASE]

Let’s unpack. [RELEASE]

👉PRO: Download the P…

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Tuning in from DAS New York this week (which was much more institutional than last year). A few things that caught my eye:

• A bipartisan Senate deal on stablecoin yields finally broke months of gridlock on the Clarity Act (banks won).

• Both NYSE and Nasdaq announced tokenization partners this week, but they have very different ideas about what comes next.

Our other highlights this week:

• Franklin Templeton puts five ETFs on the blockchain

• Coinbase and Better bringing crypto collateral to mortgage market

• MoonPay launches open wallet standard for AI agents

and much more. Let’s jump in 👇

🎙️ This week we spoke with Mike Belshe — the man who co-wrote HTTP/2 and just IPO’d a crypto bank. 👇

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Top Boardroom Reads

• Making the Case for Tokenized Collateral (Nasdaq & The ValueExchange)

• Stablecoins and the Future of Payments: Evidence from Financial Markets (IMF)

• A Cross‑Border Guide to the New Era of Stablecoin Regulation (Gibson Dunn)

• Tokenized Deposits: The Future of Money (RWA.io)

• The UAE Blockchain Ecosystem 2026 (Blockchain Centre Abu Dhabi & Binance)

• Stablecoin Payments: The Truth Behind the Numbers (BCG)

The Friday newsletter only scratches the surface. A lot more is going on that we’ll tell you in our PRO briefings.

Upgrade to PRO

Top Signals This Week

Franklin Templeton puts five ETFs on the blockchain

Franklin Templeton partners with Ondo Finance to tokenize five ETFs spanning U.S. equities, high-yield bonds, and gold. Ondo will purchase shares of the underlying ETFs and issue tokens that give holders rights to the return stream, not direct ownership of fund shares. The products trade 24/7 through crypto wallets, no brokerage account required, launching first across Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and Latin America. U.S. availability depends on further regulatory clarity around on-chain distribution of registered funds. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: A top-ten global asset manager just outsourced tokenized distribution to a crypto-native platform. That's a first.

The structure tells you what they’re really doing. Ondo holds ETF shares in custody and issues a wrapper token. Counterparty risk sits with Ondo, not Franklin Templeton. In countries where directly tokenizing foreign fund shares is a regulatory headache, this is how you get around it. That is likely the point: in markets where direct tokenization of foreign fund shares faces heavy regulatory barriers, this wrapper is an interim access mechanism, especially as regulatory clarity continues to evolve in the U.S.

Be smart: The total on-chain tokenized stock market just crossed $1 billion; Ondo Global Markets alone holds over $700 million of that, commanding 60% market share.

Punchline: This deal is about reaching wallet-native investors across emerging markets who were never brokerage clients, and the local brokers, correspondent banks, and fund distributors who charged for that access are the ones getting disintermediated.

🚀 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 →].

Senate reaches stablecoin yield deal, unblocks crypto bill

Senators Tillis (R) and Alsobrooks (D) cut a deal on stablecoin yield after months of nothing happening. Here's what they agreed to: no passive yield on stablecoin balances. Nothing "economically equivalent to interest." But rewards tied to actual activity, transactions, loyalty, platform use, those stay legal. The SEC, CFTC, and Treasury get twelve months to figure out where to draw the line.

Also, the White House completed its review of a Labor Department rule that could formally permit digital assets inside the $10 trillion 401(k) market, a signal that the administration’s crypto-friendly posture is moving on multiple fronts simultaneously. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: The American Bankers Association argued that unregulated stablecoin yield could siphon $6.6 trillion in deposits, and the framework signals how much weight the banking lobby still carries across a $316 billion stablecoin market. Circle fell 20% in a single session, wiping $5.6 billion in market cap; Coinbase dropped 11%, with stablecoin revenue representing roughly 20% of its quarterly income. The passive yield ban would be the price crypto platforms pay for the rest of the bill to move forward. The Senate Banking Committee markup is targeted for late April, but Senator Bernie Moreno has warned: if the Clarity Act does not reach the Senate floor by May, crypto legislation risks going dark until after the midterm cycle.

Read our past coverage on Clarity Act and stablecoin bills👇

🚨 Want more intelligence and understand what this means for your institution? Subscribe to PRO below:

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Nasdaq and NYSE bring crypto in-house, on different terms

Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange both moved to bring crypto infrastructure inside their core platforms this week. They picked different partners because they have different theories about what’s happening. Nasdaq integrated Talos‘s digital asset tools into Calypso, its risk and collateral system used by banks, hedge funds, and asset managers globally, targeting an estimated $35 billion in excess collateral stuck in non-interest-bearing accounts because crypto and traditional systems don’t talk to each other. NYSE named Securitize as the transfer agent for its planned Digital Trading Platform, a 24/7 venue for tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs with same-day settlement and stablecoin funding, targeting a late 2026 launch pending SEC and FINRA approval. [Nasdaq Release] [NYSE Release]

Why this matters: Nasdaq is retrofitting with Talos. Take what exists, add crypto to it. NYSE is building from scratch. NYSE is building something new from scratch with Securitize, a venue where actual shares, not derivatives or price trackers, get issued on-chain with full legal rights, settlement finality, and shareholder protections attached, as outlined in its Digital Trading Platform announcement. Both are betting that digital and traditional assets end up inside the same system. They just disagree about whether you upgrade the old one or start over. That disagreement is going to define market structure for the next ten years.tal and traditional assets converge inside the same system.

Read our past CEO notes on Nasdaq and NYSE, to understand where we are headed👇

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Fannie Mae will accept crypto-backed mortgages for the first time

Coinbase and Better just launched a product that lets homebuyers pledge BTC or USDC as collateral on a Fannie Mae-conforming mortgage without selling their crypto, triggering a capital gains event, or facing margin calls. Rates run 0.5 to 1.5 percentage points above a standard 30-year; if Bitcoin drops, mortgage terms do not change and no additional collateral is required. The only liquidation trigger is a 60-day payment delinquency, identical to a conventional mortgage. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: Pledge assets, borrow against them, never trigger a taxable event. Private bankers have done this forever. What's new is who gets access. Fannie Mae conforming standards backstop 25% of all U.S. single-family mortgage debt. This just opened to anyone with qualifying crypto. It didn't happen by accident. The SEC ruled stablecoins aren't securities in April 2025. FHFA told Fannie and Freddie to accept crypto reserves in June. JPMorgan opened BTC and ETH as loan collateral in October. CFTC approved crypto for cleared derivatives margin in December. Each step made the next one possible.

Punchline: When Fannie changes its underwriting standards, the entire industry follows. This isn’t some Miami fintech experimenting with crypto mortgages for the ultra-wealthy. This is the U.S. government’s mortgage infrastructure saying: crypto is real collateral.

MoonPay launches open wallet standard for AI agents

Three payment protocols for AI agents shipped in the past month month. Coinbase’s x402. Google’s Agent Payments Protocol. Stripe/Tempo’s Machine Payments Protocol.

All three assume agents have a wallet. None of them define how that wallet should work.

MoonPay built the missing piece and open-sourced it. The Open Wallet Standard lets AI agents hold value, sign transactions, and pay across eight blockchain families without exposing a private key. PayPal, OKX, Ripple, Circle, and the Ethereum, Solana, and TON foundations all contributed. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: Why this matters: Right now every team building AI agents solves the same wallet problem from scratch. Everyone rolls their own key management, their own signing logic, their own security model. None of it talks to anything else.

Punchline: MoonPay doesn’t charge for the standard. They don’t need to. If Open Wallet becomes the default, every agent that funds a wallet or bridges chains hits MoonPay’s on-ramp. They gave away the pipes to own the meter.

Read our past Coverage on AI agent payments👇

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News Flash

• Basel Committee publishes first data on global banks’ crypto exposures. Link

• FSB flags crypto risks, outlines 2026 regulatory priorities. Link

• Tether hires a Big Four firm for the first full USDT reserves audit. Link

• BlackRock CEO Fink backs tokenization, cites ~$150B digital asset exposure. Link

• Invesco takes over Superstate’s $900M tokenized Treasury fund. Link

• Coinbase brings exchange data on-chain via Chainlink DataLink. Link

• Backed sunsets bTokens, shifts focus to xStocks tokenized equities. Link

• Ethereum rethinks the scaling roadmap amid AI and quantum pressures. Link

• Bitmine launches MAVAN, a US-based Ethereum validator network. Link

Our CEO Notes this week

If you're building infrastructure, allocating capital, or pricing the shift to always-on markets, this is the briefing your competitors already read on Monday.

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

The man who co-wrote HTTP/2, the protocol loading this page right now, just IPO’d a crypto bank. Priced at $18 in January, trading at ~$10 today. And he doesn’t care.

Watch on Youtube

Mike Belshe started BitGo in 2013 and spent 13 years doing the boring work nobody wanted to do: multi-sig wallets, cold storage, SOC audits, trust company licenses in seven jurisdictions. While every other crypto firm was chasing volume or yield or hype, BitGo was filing paperwork.

Now the firm custodies over $100 billion in digital assets, holds an OCC federal bank charter, runs the reserve infrastructure behind the Trump-linked USD1 stablecoin ($4.8B market cap), and just launched regulated crypto services across 30 European countries under MiCAR. First crypto IPO of 2026. First federally chartered digital asset bank owned by a public company.

The thing that stuck with me from this conversation: Mike’s argument that the entire debate about FDIC insurance is backwards. That an uninsured reserve bank is structurally safer than an insured depository. That the banking lobby is fighting interest-bearing stablecoins not to protect consumers, but to protect a spread. And that the Clarity Act, if it passes with market structure intact, is the last excuse institutions have for sitting on the sidelines.

About Mike: Co-creator of HTTP/2 at Google. One of the first ten engineers on Chrome. Founded BitGo in 2013. Pioneered two-of-three multi-sig, still the gold standard for Bitcoin custody. Navigated seven regulatory jurisdictions across the US, Europe, the Middle East, and Singapore. Took BitGo public on the NYSE (BTGO) in January 2026.

Watch on Youtube

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🎧 Jump to the best parts

00:00 The Evolution of Crypto: From Fringe to Mainstream
06:30 Building a Secure Future: The Birth of Bitco
12:48 Navigating Regulatory Waters: The Impact of Bank Charters
18:14 Crypto as a Service: Expanding Horizons in Europe
21:52 Going Public: The Strategic Move for Bicco
23:41 Navigating Public Company Challenges
26:02 The Intersection of Politics and Digital Assets
28:24 Revolutionizing Banking with Stablecoins
32:30 The Future of Interest-Bearing Stablecoins
41:20 Envisioning the Future of Digital Assets

Important Links

• BitGo: https://www.bitgo.com/mike-belshe/

• Medium: https://medium.com/@mikebelshe

• Belshe: https://www.belshe.com/author/mike/

• goUSD: https://design.bitgo.com/gousd

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My biggest takeaways from this conversation:

1. The "uninsured bank" is the safe one

This is the part of the conversation I keep coming back to. Mike’s argument is hard to argue with: FDIC insurance exists because depositories take risks with your money. They lend it out. They run fractional reserves. They need a backstop because the money might not be there when you ask for it.

BitGo doesn’t do that. 100% reserves, segregated, audited, bankruptcy remote. The money is there because they never lent it to anyone.

“Ironically, an uninsured bank is actually safer than an insured bank because the insured bank is taking risks that need insurance. We hold the reserves. We don’t need the insurance because the money is actually there.”

Most institutional due diligence checklists still ask “is this FDIC insured?” as a proxy for safety. The better question: what’s the actual reserve model? If a custodian holds 100% of client assets, fully segregated, and a depository lends yours out and carries insurance to cover the downside, which counterparty do you actually trust more?

“Ironically, an uninsured bank is actually safer than an insured bank because the insured bank is taking risks that need insurance. We hold the reserves. We don’t need the insurance because the money is actually there.”

There’s a version of this story where BitGo is just another crypto custodian that survived long enough to get relevant. That version is wrong.

Mike built the security layer first, deliberately, before it was commercially urgent, because he understood that everything else depends on it. Two-of-three multi-sig, cold storage, SOC audits, seven regulated trust companies across four continents. That’s a 13-year foundation.

For institutions evaluating counterparty risk, this matters more than it probably shows up in procurement checklists. Most crypto firms that failed, failed at the foundation. They had the product without the infrastructure.

Related reads:

2. Stablecoins are repricing a $4 trillion spread

Here’s the math Mike laid out. The risk-free rate is roughly 4%. Banks take your deposits, invest at that rate, and return 0.1% to you. The rest is margin. It’s been this way for decades.

Stablecoin issuers like Circle and Tether currently keep the full spread for themselves too. Mike thinks that model is temporary. Interest-bearing stablecoins are coming, and the banking lobby is fighting them not because they’re dangerous, but because they’re competitive.

“The risk-free rate is 4%. The bank gives you 0.1% while taking risks with your money. Stablecoins can pass that 4% back to you with lower risk and 24/7 liquidity. The idea that we are passing laws to prevent that is effectively against the American people.”

The fragmentation you’re seeing right now, every institution launching its own stablecoin to capture the spread, goes away the moment interest-bearing coins become legal. One or two well-run issuers charging a small management fee, like an ETF, and passing the rest through. The issuer proliferation problem solves itself.

Related podcast and reads:

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3. Market structure is the “last straw” for institutional trust

Mike’s critique of crypto market structure is precise and worth sitting with. In traditional finance, your bank and your broker are separate. There are conflict-of-interest protections. Regulatory separation between custody, trading, and lending.

In crypto, until recently, one vendor did everything. Held your deposits, ran the exchange, matched your trades, held your collateral, settled your transactions. When it worked, nobody asked questions. When it didn’t, you got FTX.

“You should be able to have both security and liquidity and you should be able to have choice of where you store it, who is your bank and who is your broker. And yet what’s happening in crypto without market structure, you don’t get any of those things.”

BitGo has been building the separated version: regulated custody in one entity, trading and financial services through independently regulated affiliates. The Clarity Act, if it passes with market structure provisions intact, codifies this in law. That’s probably the catalyst for the next wave of institutional flow, not because it’s new information, but because it removes the last compliance objection for institutions that have been waiting for permission to move.

Related reads:

4. Going public was a transparency play, not a liquidity event

BitGo priced at $18 in January, hit $24 intraday, and now trades around $10. Easy to read as a flop. Mike framed it differently.

Private companies, however well audited, carry an information gap that public companies don’t. The 300-plus pages of SEC filings create a transparency standard that procurement teams at the largest financial institutions rely on. Multiple investors on the roadshow told Mike they’d been using a competitor not because it was better, but because it was public. That was the entire decision factor.

“Many of our private competitors are, maybe most, losing a lot of money. And it’s difficult to suss that out as a public company. Can I use this company which is a private company when I can’t really see exactly how well they’re operating?”

That says more about where institutional crypto adoption actually is than any conference keynote. It’s not a conviction problem. It’s a procurement problem.

Related Reads:

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Related reads:

Bottom line

Mike Belshe is a systems builder who recognised the patterns for the need for institutional digital asset infrastructure.

What's striking about this conversation is how much of it is about things that aren't visible: reserve models, regulatory separation, custody architecture, the difference between insured and uninsured banks. These are not the narratives that generate headlines. But they are the questions that determine which firms institutional capital actually flows to. The Clarity Act, interest-bearing stablecoins, 24/7 equity markets, all of these are incoming changes that require exactly the kind of infrastructure BitGo has been building.

Take care,
Marc

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