51 Insights

US Banks are going on-chain

The Clearing House (TCH), the payments operator owned by 25 of the largest US banks, will run the network. It connects traditional rails (RTP, CHIPS) to blockchain infrastructure for 24/7 atomic settlement, with use cases spanning programmable treasury, real-time liquidity, cross-border payments, and agentic commerce. “A big move for the banks,” TCH CEO David Watson told the WSJ; the industry faces a “radically different” future in on-chain payments. The release names 17 participants, including BNY, HSBC, PNC, Truist, TD Bank, and U.S. Bank. One detail buried in the coverage: no blockchain partner has been selected yet. The build, in any meaningful sense, has not started. [RELEASE] [ANALYSIS]

Why it matters: McKinsey modeled it in May: when a corporation moves $1,000 into a third-party stablecoin, only $150 returns to the banking system as wholesale reserves. The other $850 buys T-bills off bank balance sheets. Tokenized deposits keep the full $1,000 on the bank’s balance sheet, preserving credit capacity. The Bank Policy Institute went further on May 8. Applying an industry-sponsored model to the projection that stablecoins reach ~$4T by 2030, BPI calculates deposits would first rise by $300B, then fall by $4T. Net result: $3.7T in destroyed deposits and a 19% decline in bank lending. A December Fed note by Jessie Jiaxu Wang points the same direction: credit supply likely shrinks, lending costs likely rise.

Citi tokenizes the pre-IPO market

What happened: Citigroup launched a blockchain-based platform that lets wealthy and institutional clients trade tokenized shares of private companies. The product, Digital Depositary Receipts, adapts the 100-year-old depositary receipt structure for private markets. Citi acts as both issuer and custodian, with the receipts recorded on blockchain infrastructure run by Swiss exchange operator SIX. [WSJ] [CoinDesk]

Why it matters: The structure is the story: a depositary receipt is a trust wrapper investors already understand, and putting it on-chain makes it transferable in ways paper private placements never were. A week after Goldman tokenized a real estate fund on GS DAP, a second bulge-bracket bank is turning tokenization into a distribution product, not a back-office experiment. Private markets access is becoming the first consumer-facing use case of institutional tokenization.

AI agents got payment rails this week

What happened: On the same day, the two largest card networks launched infrastructure for AI agents to transact. Mastercard unveiled Agent Pay for Machines (AP4M), an open protocol that lets AI agents authorize, coordinate, and settle transactions autonomously, including micropayments worth fractions of a cent. Agent credentials and spending permissions are stored on public blockchains: Polygon, Solana, and Base. 31 launch partners include Coinbase, Stripe, Adyen, and Cloudflare. Settlement runs in traditional currencies or stablecoins. Hours later, Visa announced Agent Scoring, an Agentic Registry, a Large Transaction Model, and a collaboration with OpenAI at Visa Payments Forum, plus expanded stablecoin settlement now running at a roughly $7 billion annualized rate with 160+ stablecoin-linked card programs live or in development. [Mastercard] [Visa]

Why it matters: Note where the trust layer lives. Mastercard is putting agent credentials on public blockchains, not in a private Mastercard database. That is a card network admitting that machine-to-machine commerce needs neutral, always-on infrastructure that no single company controls. The same week, Tether announced it will embed its wallet development kit directly into NEURA’s humanoid robots so machines can get paid for completed tasks. Three independent announcements, one direction: AI agents are becoming economic actors, and stablecoins are their native currency. Visa’s Jack Forestell said it plainly: “AI is transforming the front end of commerce. Stablecoins are reshaping the back end.”

Japan goes all in: megabank stablecoin plus a new rulebook

What happened: MUFG, SMBC, and Mizuho signed a memorandum of understanding to issue a joint yen stablecoin, targeting live corporate transactions in fiscal 2026 and issuance by March 2027. The structure: the three banks act as joint settlors under a trust agreement, building on a pilot Japan’s FSA approved in November 2025. One day later, Japan’s lower house passed a sweeping amendment to the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act that reclassifies crypto as financial instruments. The package: an insider trading ban that mirrors equities rules, a flat 20% tax replacing rates up to 55%, annual issuer disclosures, maximum prison terms for violations rising from 3 to 10 years, and a path toward crypto ETFs. [CoinDesk]

Why it matters: The world’s third-largest banking system delivered both halves of the institutional playbook in 48 hours: the rails and the rules. The megabank stablecoin is explicitly defensive. Tokyo wants yen-denominated settlement infrastructure in place before USDT and USDC entrench any further in Asian corporate finance. The FIEA reclassification is the offensive half: cutting the top tax rate from 55% to 20% and opening the ETF door is how you bring domestic capital back onshore. Compare that with the US, where banks are still lobbying over GENIUS Act implementation details. Japan is now the cleanest test case of what coordinated bank issuance plus securities-grade rules looks like.

Wall Street writes a $355M check to its own blockchain

What happened: Digital Asset, the company behind the Canton Network, raised $355 million led by a16z crypto, which put in $100 million. Read the rest of the cap table: Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Apollo Funds, BNP Paribas, ABN Amro, Citadel Securities, CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, HSBC, S&P Global, SBI Group, Tradeweb, Optiver, William Blair, and more. Canton is a public, permissionless Layer 1 with configurable privacy built for regulated finance, running applications written in Digital Asset’s open-source Daml language. The capital goes toward expanding the Canton ecosystem and onboarding more institutions, assets, and regulated workflows. [PR Newswire]

Why it matters: This investor list is not a venture bet. It is a user list. Exchanges (CME, Tradeweb), banks (HSBC, BNP Paribas), market makers (Citadel Securities, Optiver), data (S&P Global), and sovereign wealth (ADIA) are funding the infrastructure they intend to settle on. We saw the same pattern in Issue 181: Visa is already piloting private stablecoin settlement on Canton. The privacy architecture is the differentiator. Institutions will not put real positions on a chain where competitors can read their flow. Purpose-built, privacy-enabled infrastructure keeps winning institutional volume over general-purpose chains, exactly the thesis of our Money Movement 2.0 report.

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A $300M crypto unicorn just sold for $10M

What happened: Blockworks bought Messari for a little over $10 million, the Wall Street Journal reported. Messari was valued at $300 million in 2022. That is a 97% wipeout. The crypto research firm raised $61 million in total funding, including a $35 million Series B led by Brevan Howard’s crypto arm with Point72 Ventures backing. It just sold for less than a third of that one round. The deal folds Messari’s brand, client list, and data pipelines into Blockworks, which raised at a $192 million valuation earlier this year with the stated plan of becoming crypto’s Bloomberg through acquisitions.

Why it matters: The WSJ blames the bear market. We don’t buy it. Crypto M&A has not collapsed: companies struck 144 deals worth $11.8 billion this year, up from 2025. The capital is still there. It stopped flowing to companies without a clear position. Crypto research has two revenue streams, funds paying for subscriptions and protocols paying to get covered, and both suffer in a downturn. Distressed data businesses sell for 1-2x revenue. Do that math backwards from $10 million. Blockworks did not buy a P&L. It bought a brand, a client list, and data pipelines for the price of a seed round. The 2022 investors did not misprice a company. They mispriced an entire business model.

PRO Stories this week:

NEWS FLASHES

Infrastructure and Markets

SpaceX lists twice on the same day. SpaceX raised $75 billion in the largest IPO in history, opening at a ~$2 trillion valuation, while tokenized SPCX shares issued by Backpack Securities went live on Solana. Redeemable for underlying shares, tradeable 24/7, self-custody compatible.
BlackRock’s yield bitcoin ETF is imminent. BlackRock filed a fourth, likely final amendment for the iShares Bitcoin Premium Income ETF (BITA). Covered calls on IBIT, 65bps fee, undercutting incumbent covered-call products at 95-99bps.

Regulation and Policy

CFTC proposes its first prediction markets rule. The agency seeks public comment on a framework for reviewing event contracts tied to war, terrorism, gaming, and unlawful activity. A formal 90-day review process replaces case-by-case improvisation.
UK funds get a 10% crypto allowance. The FCA proposed letting UK UCITS and some retail funds hold up to 10% in crypto ETNs. Comments due July 13.
Banks push back on GENIUS Act scope. The Bank Policy Institute, The Clearing House, and the Consumer Bankers Association argued in a joint comment letter that stablecoin AML rules should also cover secondary markets, where most illicit activity happens. Full GENIUS Act implementing rules take effect July 18.

Banking and Payments

Ripple and Bitso put the peso on-chain. Bitso’s regulated MXN stablecoin MXNB launches on the XRP Ledger alongside RLUSD, targeting the $60B US-Mexico corridor. Bitso Business already moves $82B+ in annualized volume.
DBS brings tokenized gold to retail. Singapore’s largest bank will offer tokens backed 1:1 by grams of vaulted physical gold via its digibank app in H2 2026. Issued, distributed, and custodied entirely in-house.

Funds, Deals and Others

Figure buys Kiavi for $717M. The blockchain lender acquires the AI-powered real estate lending platform, adding $7B+ in annual loan volume to its tokenized marketplace. A ~$200B origination opportunity moving on-chain.
Morpho raises $175M at a ~$2B valuation. Paradigm, a16z crypto, and Ribbit co-led the round to build an “open credit network.” $11B in deposits; Coinbase, Kraken, and Anchorage already run on it.
Tether leads a $1.4B robotics round. Tether Investments led NEURA Robotics’ Series C alongside Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Amazon. Tether’s wallet kit gets embedded in the robots so machines can hold and spend money.

That’s all for now, folks.

– Marc & Team

America is locking up its Bitcoin for 20 years

Marc Baumann — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 09:14:33 GMT

In 1933, FDR ordered Americans to surrender their gold to save the banking system. 93 years later, Washington wants to do the opposite: legally bind itself to hoard a decentralized digital commodity. On June 8, the full text of H.R. 8957, the American Reserve Modernization Act (ARMA), went public: a 20-year lock-up on the government’s 328,372 BTC, manda…

US Banks are going on-chain

Marc Baumann — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:34:43 GMT

Banks spent a year lobbying against stablecoin yield. Last week they stopped arguing and started building. JPMorgan, Citi, BofA, Wells Fargo, and 13 more banks just announced a shared tokenized deposit network through The Clearing House, targeting an H1 2027 launch. It’s Wall Street’s most coordinated answer to stablecoins yet: a response to the CLARITY Act’s yield fight and a deposit-flight scenario worth $3.7T in destroyed deposits. [NEWS] [RELEASE]

The Signal: Tokenized deposits won’t erase stablecoins. But they will push them out of enterprise B2B rails. JPMorgan already runs JPMD. HSBC, Citi, and BNY are building theirs. Expect three layers to co-exist: bank consortium tokens for wholesale settlement, regional networks like Cari for the mid-market, and USDC and USDT for permissionless global commerce, remittances, and DeFi.

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What happened

The whole perimeter is mobilizing. In March 2026, five regional banks (Huntington, First Horizon, M&T, KeyBank, Old National) holding $600B+ in combined deposits launched the Cari Network on ZKsync, with a pilot set for Q3 2026. Eugene Ludwig, the former Comptroller of the Currency, founded it. In 2025, North Dakota partnered with Fiserv for a state-level token. The banking sector is fully mobilizing to keep enterprise capital strictly within the FDIC-insured perimeter. [NEWS]

The timing is no coincidence: The CLARITY Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee on May 14 carrying the Tillis-Alsobrooks compromise: stablecoins cannot pay passive, deposit-style yield, but rewards tied to actual usage stay legal. Banks wanted that loophole closed entirely. ABA members sent more than 8,000 letters to Senate offices. Jamie Dimon told crypto firms that want to pay yield to apply for banking charters. The TCH network is what banks build when lobbying stops working.

Why it matters

The deposit math: McKinsey modeled it in May: when a corporation moves $1,000 into a third-party stablecoin, only $150 returns to the banking system as wholesale reserves. The other $850 buys T-bills off bank balance sheets. Tokenized deposits keep the full $1,000 on the bank’s balance sheet, preserving credit capacity. The Bank Policy Institute went further on May 8. Applying an industry-sponsored model to the projection that stablecoins reach ~$4T by 2030, BPI calculates deposits would first rise by $300B, then fall by $4T. Net result: $3.7T in destroyed deposits and a 19% decline in bank lending. A December Fed note by Jessie Jiaxu Wang points the same direction: credit supply likely shrinks, lending costs likely rise.

Regulation drew the moat, banks are now paving it. The GENIUS Act (signed July 2025) bars stablecoin issuers from paying interest, taking deposits, or making loans, and excludes them from deposit insurance. Tokenized deposits sit on the opposite side of every one of those lines: they live inside the banking system as a digital representation of bank deposits, pay interest legally, carry FDIC insurance up to $250,000, and fund loans. A corporate treasurer choosing between two on-chain dollars faces a simple test: one yields and is insured, the other is neither. That test decides the enterprise layer.

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

Marc Baumann — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 06:31:02 GMT

Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️

“Blockchain doesn’t solve all problems. It solves some problems really, really well.”

JP Morgan has quietly moved $3T in cumulative notional value through its private blockchain, settles roughly $5B every day, and just became the largest global systemically important bank (G-SIB) to launch a tokenized money market fund on public Ethereum, MONY.

We sat with Dennis Cristallo, the person responsible for digital asset wealth management at JPMorgan to unpack the recent rebrand to Kinexys, why they are moving beyond private networks to public chains like Ethereum and Base, and the "Fundflow" pilot that just proved tokenization can move capital 38 times faster than the legacy system. This was more of a playbook than a podcast.

In this conversation, we break down why the $400T tokenization opportunity lives or dies not in the boardroom or the legislature, but in the UX of a wallet app.

About Dennis: Dennis Cristallo is the Head of Wealth Management Engagement for Kinexis Digital Assets at J.P. Morgan. He designs and scales blockchain tokenization solutions for the private bank and its global clients. Prior to joining the Kinexis team three and a half years ago, Dennis spent a decade building portfolios of hedge funds, private credit, and co-investments. He co-authored the seminal Bain & Company paper on the $400T tokenization opportunity and is a key driver behind JPM’s "Fundflow" and "MONY" (tokenized money market fund) initiatives.

Dennis joined the Kinexis team, then called Onyx, about three and a half years ago, coming from a decade of building hedge fund and private credit portfolios.

“We came up with the Onyx name. It sounded cool, it sounded mysterious. People didn’t really know what was going on.”

The rebrand to Kinexys: It was a signal that JPMorgan is moving from internal blockchain lab to commercial business unit.

Why this matters: Tokenized real-world assets on public blockchains crossed $32B in May 2026, roughly tripling year-over-year. The GENIUS Act became law in July 2025, formally distinguishing payment stablecoins from tokenized bank deposits and creating the first US regulatory lane for both. Since then, JP Morgan has deployed JPMD on Base, announced expansion to Canton, launched the MONY fund on Ethereum, and completed the first transaction on Kinexys Fund Flow with Citco. The conversation is now shifting from infrastructure to adoption and distribution.

🎧 Jump to the best parts

00:00 Introduction
01:00 Why JP Morgan Started Building On Chain
03:39 The $400 Trillion Tokenization Opportunity
06:17 From Onyx To Kinexys
07:45 Blockchain vs Crypto Inside JP Morgan
09:35 Public vs Private Blockchains
12:53 Kinexys Fundflow Explained
17:31 Why Tokenization Matters
18:42 JP Morgan's MONY Fund
22:10 Deposit Tokens vs Stablecoins
24:15 The Stablecoin Endgame
25:33 Tokenized Private Markets
28:47 What Is Actually Holding Tokenization Back
28:59 Multi Chain Strategy
31:09 Wealth Management In Five Years
32:55 Lessons From Building Blockchain At JP Morgan
33:50 Lightning Round

Important Links

Watch or listen now:
YouTube • Apple Podcasts

Our biggest takeaways from this conversation:

1. Public chains are distribution networks, private chains are for operations

There is a constant debate about permissioned vs. permissionless blockchains. Dennis frames this not as a philosophical war, but as a product segmentation strategy.

“We look at them as distribution mechanisms. You have on Ethereum 60% of all stablecoins issued. You have a ton of users... we want to ultimately deploy tokens and assets where people are there to buy them.”

If the goal is to tap into crypto-native pools of capital, you deploy on Ethereum or Base (like JPM did with their “MONY” tokenized money market fund). But if a client wants to bring an asset on-chain strictly to eliminate back-office friction, without forcing their end-investors to manage crypto wallets, pay gas fees, or undergo redundant AML screening, the private permissioned network is the vastly superior choice.

Kinexys Digital Assets processes roughly $5B daily, primarily through an intraday repo application that allows wholesale lending with the borrowing leg and cash leg settling on the same infrastructure.

“If they borrow for an hour, they only pay an hour’s worth of interest, and there’s no overnight capital charge because it’s an intraday loan.”

The JPM team is explicit that private and public chains serve different purposes. It also established the pattern Dennis returns to throughout the conversation: tokenization earns its keep by solving a specific operational pain point precisely, not by being generically “on blockchain.”

Related reads:

2. Blockchain is just a better database for broken plumbing

J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management and Citco completed the first live transaction using Kinexys Fund Flow in October 2025. [RELEASE]

The problem it solves is structural: in private equity and private credit, fund managers, fund administrators, and wealth management distributors run on incompatible systems with no common data standard. Capital calls are slow, manually intensive, and routinely underfunded.

“There’s no DTCC in the middle, there’s no standards around how data is shared, how capital calls are processed.”

Fund Flow addresses this in two stages:

A discrepancy-surfacing data layer that doesn't require blockchain at all, just better-connected data management across the three parties.
Tokenized settlement: when a capital call hits, cash moves from the investor's brokerage account, becomes tokenized, and settles against a fund token in near-real time.

“Honestly, you don’t need a blockchain for that. It’s helpful, but you don’t need a blockchain for that. You just need better data management.”

Result: Money moved from client accounts to the fund manager 38 times faster than the existing process, and labor associated with file processing, mapping and reconciliation dropped by approximately 93%. These numbers were verified by Citco, one of the largest fund administrators in the world.

3. MONY was launched on Ethereum for one reason

Why DTCC picked Stellar over Ethereum

Marc Baumann — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 06:43:58 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc,

For four decades, I’ve watched DTCC keep one record: who owns every U.S. share, bond, and Treasury. A $100 trillion ledger. None of it ever touched a public blockchain.

On May 27, that changed. DTCC chose Stellar to move DTC-custodied securities onto an open ledger by 1H 2027. In December 2025, DTCC tokenized U.S. Everyone assumed this moment would belong to Ethereum. Why DTCC went the other way is the real story. [RELEASE]

Let’s unpack.

The Signal: DTCC uses a split ecosystem strategy. While choosing Stellar as its public settlement blockchain, DTCC operates its own internal, permissioned network called DTCC AppChain, which is built using Ethereum-compatible EVM architecture (Hyperledger Besu). This allows them to use private Ethereum tech inside their walls while deploying Stellar for external public market settlement at a lower cost and built-in compliance.

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What happened

On May 27, 2026, DTCC announced that it will integrate DTC’s tokenization service with the Stellar network, with the initial scope covering Russell 1000 equities, major index ETFs, and U.S. Treasuries. The integration supports the full asset lifecycle, including corporate actions and reporting, rather than a wrapper or representation. Tokenized assets retain the same investor protections, entitlements, and safeguards as traditionally held securities.

The Stellar deal builds on the regulatory foundation laid in December 2025, when the SEC Division of Trading and Markets issued DTC a No-Action Letter authorizing a three-year tokenization pilot. The relief covers Reg SCI, Section 19(b) of the Exchange Act, and Rules 17Ad-22(e) and 17Ad-25, the rules that govern how a clearing agency operates. DTCC plans limited production trades in July 2026, broader service launch in October, and the DTC-tokenized assets on Stellar go-live in 1H 2027.

DTCC + Stellar deal terms, May 27, 2026

Zooming in: Stellar wasn’t picked at random. The network already has $1.82B in tokenised RWAs and hosts Franklin Templeton’s BENJI, the first U.S.-registered tokenized money market fund, which crossed $1.98B in AUM in April 2026.

Stepping back: On May 8, 2026, the DTCC publicly advanced DTC’s native tokenization service, and announced its commercial launch in October. More than 50 firms are already in the working group that helped DTCC build this platform, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Citi, Anchorage Digital, Circle, Ondo Finance, and Payward. [Read CEO notes]

What the SEC actually waived: The No-Action Letter exempts DTC from three core obligations every other systemically important utility must meet.

Why it matters

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

Marc Baumann — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 21:39:12 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc

For years, the stablecoin debate has been about who issues the token. This week made that debate obsolete. The companies that actually move money for a living stopped arguing about issuance and started building settlement infrastructure together. Three payment networks forming one platform. Four of the biggest U.S. banks building shared tokenized deposit rails. And 1.5 million contractors waking up to a stablecoin wallet they didn’t ask for, built on infrastructure they’ll never see.

We called this in our Money Movement 2.0 report and in “Stablecoin issuance is overrated.” The real race was never about who mints the coin. It’s about who owns the pipes. This week, we found out.

Here’s what moved:

Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard are forming a stablecoin platform
Deel launches stablecoin accounts for 1.5M workers via Stripe
JPMorgan, Citi, and big banks plan tokenized deposit network for 2027
Goldman Sachs tokenizes real estate on GS DAP
DTCC picks Stellar for tokenizing Russell 1000 equities and Treasuries
Coinbase and Better fund first bitcoin-backed mortgage, Fannie Mae-approved
CME goes 24/7 with crypto futures

Let's Talk

The payment giants are forming a stablecoin supergroup

Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard are close to launching a shared stablecoin platform. Coinbase is exploring whether to participate. Each company has been building stablecoin infrastructure independently for years. Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion in late 2024. Mastercard acquired BVNK earlier this year and just expanded on-chain settlement to USDC, PYUSD, and RLUSD, enabling intraday, weekend, and holiday settlement. Visa expanded its stablecoin settlement network to nine blockchains in April. Now they are converging on shared rails. [CoinDesk]

Why it matters: When three competitors stop competing on infrastructure and start pooling it, they are responding to a threat bigger than each other: fragmentation. Dozens of stablecoins on dozens of chains with no shared settlement standard. If this platform launches, it becomes the SWIFT replacement everyone has theorized about for years, except it will be owned by the companies that already process most of the world’s card transactions. We flagged this dynamic in our Money Movement 2.0 report: purpose-built payment infrastructure is displacing general-purpose blockchains for institutional settlement. This is the clearest proof yet.

Deel gives 1.5 million workers a stablecoin account

Deel, the global payroll platform used by 40,000 businesses and 1.5 million workers across 150+ countries, launched a stablecoin wallet built on Stripe’s full infrastructure stack. Bridge handles issuance via Open Issuance. Privy provides embedded wallets. Tempo handles settlement. The product is called DLUSD. Contractors receive dollar-denominated balances, can earn rewards on idle funds via Morpho, and spend anywhere via the Deel Card. Live today in Argentina, with LATAM, APAC, MENA, and Africa to follow. [Stripe] [Privy]

Why it matters: This is the first time Stripe’s full crypto stack (Bridge + Privy + Tempo) has been deployed at real scale. The use case is not speculative. In Argentina, 85% of contractors wanted to be paid in US dollars rather than Argentine pesos in 2025, according to Deel. In Turkey, a local salary can lose 20-40% of its value in a single year. The blockchain is invisible to the contractor. What they see is dollars landing in their account.

The banks are building “The Bridge”

JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and other major U.S. banks plan to launch a tokenized deposit network as early as H1 2027, operated by The Clearing House, a private-sector payments company owned by the consortium. Some banks call it “The Bridge.” Others call it “The Chain.” Clearing House CEO David Watson told the Wall Street Journal it marks a “big move for the banks,” adding that the industry faces a “radically different” future built around on-chain payments. Early users: large global companies seeking to streamline payments and treasury operations. [WSJ] [The Block]

Why it matters: This is the consortium phase. Individual bank efforts have matured: JPMorgan’s Kinexys has settled over $3 trillion in cumulative transactions. BNY launched its own tokenized deposit service in January. The Clearing House already processes $2 trillion per day in traditional payments. If tokenized deposits plug into that volume, it creates a bank-native alternative to stablecoins for corporate treasury. As we described in Issue 180: the payment networks are building stablecoin rails, the banks are building tokenized deposit rails. Both racing toward instant, 24/7 settlement. The question is not which wins. It is whether they interoperate.

Goldman Sachs tokenizes real estate

Goldman Sachs, Apex Group, and Archax launched a blockchain-native real estate fund this week. Fund shares are tokenized using GS DAP, Goldman’s own blockchain platform. LRC Group manages the underlying real estate assets. Archax serves as custodian and first distribution partner. Ownera facilitates connectivity between participants and distribution channels. The fund is structured under Luxembourg regulation. “Issuing blockchain-native fund units on GS DAP enables investment in real estate assets with precision while unlocking more seamless transferability in the future,” said Mathew McDermott, global head of digital assets at Goldman Sachs. [CoinDesk]

Why it matters: Real estate has been the white whale of tokenization: illiquidity, complex title structures, regulatory fragmentation. Goldman is solving the issuance and custody layer on infrastructure it controls (GS DAP), then using regulated distribution partners to build toward future transferability. The same week, Hamilton Lane launched HLSCOPE on Tron via Securitize, and Franklin Templeton brought BENJI to MoonPay. The tokenized fund distribution race is accelerating. Issuers are not waiting for one chain to win. They are going everywhere liquidity exists.

DTCC picks Stellar

What happened: On May 27, DTCC announced it will integrate DTC’s tokenization service with the Stellar blockchain, covering Russell 1000 equities, major index ETFs, and U.S. Treasuries. This is the first public blockchain deployment of assets from DTC’s $114 trillion custody base. The initiative rests on an SEC No-Action Letter (December 2025) granting DTC a three-year pilot exemption. Limited production trades start July 2026, broader service launch in October 2026, with Stellar go-live targeted for H1 2027. DTCC is building a multi-chain stack: ComposerX for issuance and compliance, a Collateral AppChain on Hyperledger Besu with Chainlink, Canton Network for permissioned institutional rails, and now Stellar for public settlement. [PR Newswire]

Why it matters: Stellar hosts Franklin Templeton’s BENJI fund ($1.98B AUM), an SEC-registered tokenized money market fund operating since 2021, plus native USDC issuance ($256M outstanding). That five-year compliance audit trail made Stellar the only public chain with proven regulated fund infrastructure at scale. Despite “public” deployment, DTCC maintains centralized control: root wallet authority to freeze, force-transfer, or burn tokens, whitelisted addresses, and off-chain legal record via Cede & Co. under UCC Article 8. This is not DeFi. This is the existing custody infrastructure extending onto a public chain while keeping every legal protection intact.

News Flashes

Infrastructure and Markets

CME goes 24/7. CME Group launched round-the-clock crypto futures and options trading on CME Globex. Over the opening weekend, 7,200+ contracts traded, ~$50 million in notional volume. Bitcoin volatility contracts launched alongside.
Galaxy launches OTC prediction markets. Galaxy now offers institutional OTC prediction market trading.
Kaiko acquires Amberdata. Kaiko acquired Amberdata in a blockchain data consolidation push. Data infrastructure is consolidating fast.

Banking and Payments

Visa and Brale explore private settlement. Visa announced a PoC with Brale for stablecoin settlement using SBC on the Canton Network. Privacy-enabled institutional payment flows.
MoneyGram stablecoin on Stellar. MoneyGram launched MGUSD on Stellar. The remittance giant joins the digital dollar payments rush.

Funds, Deals and Others

Ether.fi deploys $100M into Plume. Ether.fi allocated $100 million to a Plume RWA vault. Real-world asset yield inside DeFi lending.
Franklin Templeton brings BENJI to MoonPay. The BENJI tokenized fund is now accessible via MoonPay. Tokenized fund distribution is becoming a competitive layer.

That’s all for now, folks.

– Marc & Team

Money Movement 2.0: 2026 Edition [Report]

Marc Baumann — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:04:23 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc. A year ago we wrote that money was moving, and that this time it was real. Stablecoin supply was $250 billion with monthly settlement of $2.3 trillion.

The frame was: this is real, and it is accelerating.

We underestimated the speed.

Supply just crossed $323 billion. In March 2026, stablecoins settled $7.5 trillion in a single month, surpassing the U.S. ACH network for the first time in history. Tether and Circle, between them, now hold more U.S. Treasury bills than Germany. The GENIUS Act is law. The CLARITY Act is on deck. Three of the five largest American banks have publicly confirmed they are exploring stablecoin issuance, and BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, and Franklin Templeton are racing each other to manage the reserves behind them.

That is not adoption. That is a phase change.

Today, live from Proof of Talk in Paris, we are publishing Money Movement 2.0 (2026), our most rigorous stablecoin report yet. The first edition documented adoption. This one documents the infrastructure being built on top of it, and the people who will own the rails when the dust settles.

Download Full Report

What’s In The Full Report

State of play. The biggest monetary realignment in 50 years. Why $323B in supply matters beyond crypto.
The rise of payment chains. Arc, Tempo, Plasma, Stable, Canton, ZRO, Avalanche subnets, the L2 “door” architecture.
The interoperability stack. CCTP, LayerZero, Wormhole, Axelar, and SWIFT’s interlinking pilot with BNP Paribas, Intesa Sanpaolo and Société Générale.
The institutional trust architecture. Attestation vs. audit, AICPA AT-C 205, Tether’s KPMG audit, the four-layer stack.
Top 7 use cases. Treasury demand, tokenized collateral, wholesale settlement, B2B/cross-border, capital markets, EM remittances, machine-tomachine payments.
Institutional case studies. BlackRock (BUIDL), JPMorgan (Kinexys), Goldman Sachs (Canton/GS DAP).
The regulatory map. GENIUS Act, MiCA, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, UAE, Brazil, India, Nigeria.
What’s next. The synthetic CBDC, T+0 settlement, the two-sphere stablecoin world, and the M&A wave that has not peaked.
Bonus: 2,000+ vendor database with 51 Trust Scores across stablecoin issuers, payment chains, wallets, custody, on/off ramps, AI-agent settlement.
Download Full Report

Let's Talk

How are Stablecoins Rewiring Global Finance?

If you read a stablecoin report two years ago, the question was whether they would survive. In 2026 the question is who controls the rails they run on.

What happened: ACH, the workhorse of American payments since 1972, was passed in monthly volume by a system that did not have a federal legal framework twelve months ago. Stripe paid $1.1 billion for Bridge. Mastercard paid $1.8 billion for BVNK, the largest stablecoin M&A deal in history. Visa quietly took its stablecoin settlement program from a pilot to a $7 billion annualized run rate. Western Union, which spent two centuries moving paper across borders, launched a stablecoin in May on Solana.

You can argue with the gross number. A lot of the $7.5 trillion is wholesale, DeFi, and bots. Real-world payment volume, stripped of trading and automated treasury sweeps, is closer to $400 billion a year. That sounds smaller, until you remember it is growing at 90% year-on-year off a base that did not exist three years ago.

The honest version: a parallel financial system is being laid down in production, in plain sight.

“Stablecoins are essential to transacting on blockchain rails. Using stablecoins will make it feasible for broker-dealers to engage in a broader range of business activities.”
— SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce

Stablecoin issuers quietly became sovereign creditors

Tether holds $122 billion in direct U.S. Treasury exposure. Add repos and the number is $141 billion. Circle's USDC reserves, managed by BlackRock inside the Circle Reserve Fund, hold another $30 to 40 billion of T-bills and overnight repos. Together they bought $56.6 billion in T-bills last year, a bigger source of incremental Treasury demand than Japan, Singapore, or Norway.

Standard Chartered projects $1 trillion of net-new T-bill demand from stablecoins by 2028.

This is the thing the GENIUS Act actually fixed. It mandated 100% reserves in cash, Fed balances, or short Treasuries. It clarified that 1:1 backed dollar coins are not securities. It made the issuer a kind of narrow bank, sitting on T-bills on one side and demand-redeemable dollars on the other, supervised at the federal level.

Download Full Report

Tokenized cash ate idle dollars

Tokenized money market funds went from $100 million in early 2024 to over $20 billion by May 2026. That is 150x in two years.

BlackRock's BUIDL is now accepted as Binance margin collateral. Translation: an institutional trader can earn ~3.4% on T-bills and simultaneously post that yieldbearing dollar as exchange margin. Before this existed, the same trader held USDT and ate the opportunity cost. Now they do not have to.

In May 2026, BlackRock filed for BRSRV (Daily Reinvestment Stablecoin Reserve Vehicle), a tokenized fund purpose-built to sit underneath stablecoin reserves. Morgan Stanley launched MSNXX, its Stablecoin Reserves Portfolio. JPMorgan launched MONY in December. SIFMA recommended classifying these things as cash equivalents under U.S. GAAP.

The 4% T-bill yield is no longer trapped in the issuer's P&L. That is a trillion-dollar incentive that just got unlocked.

🚨 The PRO terminal is launching soon. This means: real time intelligence on digital assets news flow, 2000+ digital asset vendors tracked with deep product data and our proprietary vendor ratings (like Gartner, but 10x better), 10+ sector maps, intelligent signal feed and a co-pilot that’s trained on all our data. 👉 Secure your spot on the waitlist & secure access to our beta.

Payment chains, or the part that is actually new

General-purpose blockchains were never designed to move money. They were designed to be uncensored and diverse, which is the opposite of what a global payments network needs. A merchant cannot run a business on a network where gas fees spike from $0.05 to $10 because someone minted an NFT. A corporate treasurer cannot hold ETH to pay gas, because every fee triggers a capital gain. So a category of purpose-built payment chains was born.

We have dissected the top chains in the report.

The future of payments is agentic

Today, 70 to 90% of stablecoin volume is already programmatic. Bots, market makers, algorithmic arbitrage, automated treasury sweeps. So when people ask whether AI agents will need stablecoins, the answer is they already use them. We just call those agents "trading systems."

What changed is standardization. Coinbase's x402 protocol turns the HTTP 402 "Payment Required" error code into a primitive. An agent calls an API, receives a 402, resolves it with a micropayment, and gets the data. 69,000 active agents and 165 million transactions as of April 2026. Visa Intelligent Commerce has 100+ partners and 20+ live agent integrations. Mastercard Agent Pay shipped. Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Payments went live in production, co-built with Coinbase and Stripe.

The reason traditional payment rails cannot serve agents is structural. Cards settle in three to five days. Cross-border requires currency conversion. Every authorization assumes a human. Subscriptions assume monthly billing. Agents need none of those things. They need internet-speed money that works at the cent level, 24/7, with no human in the loop.

That is what stablecoins are. Internet money for internet-speed commerce

Who's winning

The dust is settling. Incumbents are building to own the plumbing. Banks are talking the path of tokenised RWAs to handle collateral and distribution. Whereas, some crypto-native platforns are leading while some are getting acquired by traditional leaders.

We have also gave a sneak peak of our institutional vendor intelligence platform covering 2,000+ vendors across stablecoins and tokenization in the report.

Explore the Terminal

Circle and Stripe aren't improving SWIFT, they're building around it. Every year the parallel infrastructure gets more capable, cheaper, and better regulated. Every year the cost of ignoring it goes up.

The companies that move first on stablecoin integration will gain two things: direct cost savings (often 60–90% on applicable payment flows) and supplier network lock-in. Once your suppliers accept stablecoin payments and benefit from instant settlement, switching back to wire transfers looks like a downgrade.

The companies that wait will face margin compression as early movers reduce their cost structures and use the savings to undercut on price.

Central banks see this clearly, which is why European banks are launching a stablecoin even after the ECB president warned about stablecoins “privatizing money.”

Take care,
Marc

Download Full Report

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

Marc Baumann — Fri, 29 May 2026 19:49:56 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team

I’ve watched plenty of turf wars in this market. Never one like this.

Minnesota just made running a prediction market a felony. Punishable by five years in prison.

The same week, CFTC filed its proposed rule to govern prediction markets with the White House on Tuesday, and the same afternoon Donald Trump posted that the agency’s “exclusive authority over Prediction Markets” must be defended. Now, the Office of Management and Budget is reviewing the proposal.

All of this is happening a week after Minnesota became the first state to ban prediction markets outright (SF4760, effective August 1), with the CFTC suing within 24 hours to block enforcement. Meanwhile former CFTC and SEC Chair Gary Gensler told CNBC the agency may not even have authority under Dodd-Frank to regulate prediction markets, predicting the issue will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court. [Read more on prediction markets]

Here’s what else moved this week:

DTCC picked Stellar for tokenising securities
SoFi launches its first stablecoin
Coinbase added six new currencies to its institutional product
Bitwise just undercut 21Shares by 165 bps
Mastercard just cleared NYDFS
VanEck’s $61M treasury token got a DeFi lending venue

And 15+ more signals. Let’s jump in 👇🌆

🚨 SAVE YOUR SPOT: We’re running two live panels next week with BCG on what banks and asset managers should actually be doing about digital assets.

Webinar 1: June 5, 10am EST, with Nadine Chakar (DTCC), Christian Schmid + Roy Choudhury (BCG). Inside the DTCC’s $100T tokenization buildout that goes live in October.

RSPV

Webinar 2: June 8, 12:30pm CET, with Kim Hochfeld (State Street), Christian Schmid + Roy Choudhury (BCG). What live tokenization actually looks like, from the team that just shipped SWEEP, a tokenized private liquidity fund.

RSPV

30 min each, 10 min live Q&A.

Top Signals This Week

DTCC picked Stellar for tokenising securities

Why it matters: The chain selection is a signal. Stellar offers compliance-first protocol, native token primitives, and predictably lower operating costs. And, it is the only public blockchain that has run an SEC-registered tokenized money market fund (BENJI) continuously for five years. WisdomTree and Amundi are also running their funds on Stellar. It is not avoiding Ethereum or EVM compatibility as the DTCC AppChain is built on Hyperledger Besu. Hyperledger Besu is handling settlement infrastructure. The DTCC’s AppChain is not issuing assets, it is moving them, matching them, and settling them between institutions. While, for tokenizing which includes asset creation, Stellar’s native token primitives do this cleanly, without smart contract risk and without unpredictable costs. Surprising for us that DTCC didn’t select Canton for this, given their partnership.

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

SoFi becomes the first bank to offer a stablecoin on a public blockchain

On May 27, 2026, SoFi Technologies (NASDAQ: SOFI) made SoFiUSD available to retail members directly inside the SoFi app on Ethereum and Solana. The token is 1:1 redeemable for U.S. dollars from SoFi Bank, backed by liquid reserves on the bank’s balance sheet, and audited by an independent U.S.-licensed CPA. SoFi originally issued SoFiUSD in December 2025 to enterprise partners. Today’s announcement is the consumer rollout. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: Under the GENIUS Act, permitted payment stablecoin issuers cannot pay holders any form of interest or yield. Tokenized deposits sit outside that prohibition and qualify for FDIC insurance. Only a chartered bank can issue them and SoFi has the charter. In this process, SoFiUSD reserves remain at SoFi Bank. Also, SoFi has 14.7M banked customers and now it has become the first bank to offer a stablecoin on a public blockchain. The acquisition cost on each is zero.

Coinbase added six new currencies to its institutional product

Coinbase announced on 26 May that Standard Chartered will provide multi-currency banking rails for Coinbase Prime and Coinbase Exchange institutional clients. The integration adds new direct rails in Australian dollars, Singapore dollars, Canadian dollars and Swiss francs. Euros and pounds settle through G-SIB-backed infrastructure, Standard Chartered itself is a global systemically important bank designated by the Financial Stability Board. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: Coinbase’s Q1 2026 earnings showed institutional revenue of $136M, down 27% sequentially, with institutional trading volumes off 48% QoQ. The volume is drifting to competitors. Binance, Hidden Road, Kraken Prime and FalconX have spent two years building multi-jurisdictional prime brokerage with native multi-currency funding. A Tokyo hedge fund running BTC basis no longer has to convert JPY to USD to fund a Coinbase Prime account if it can use Hidden Road or Binance institutional in local currency. The Standard Chartered rails close that operational gap, retaining the users and capturing SEA markets.

Bitwise just undercut 21Shares by 165 bps

Bitwise Europe GmbH listed the Bitwise Canton ETP (BWCC) on Xetra today (ISIN: DE000A4ARTH9). The product tracks the Kaiko CANTO Reference Rate LDNLF index and holds CC tokens 1:1 in cold storage. Annual management fee is 0.85%. The ETP is BaFin-approved and domiciled in Germany, putting it inside the same regulatory wrapper as Bitwise’s BTCE, BTC1, and DA20 lineup.

Why it matters: Unlike traditional crypto networks, participants can keep transaction data private on Canton while still interacting with counterparties across the network. That combination of privacy and interoperability has become Canton’s key differentiator. Unlike Ethereum (fully transparent, front-running risk) or JPMorgan’s Kinexys (private but closed, no rival bank will trust JPMorgan’s rails), Canton uses configurable sub-transaction privacy. DTCC tokenized U.S. Treasuries on Canton, running a pilot with 26 participants across 21 nodes. Tradeweb and BNY Mellon scaled Canton to $10B/day in repo. HSBC completed a pilot simulating the issuance, transfer, and atomic settlement of its Tokenised Deposit Service (TDS) on Canton. HKEX’s Synapse platform facilitates post-trade workflows for cross-border Northbound Stock Connect trades on Digital Asset’s DAML smart contract language. These aren’t experiments. They’re attempts to rebuild the plumbing of capital markets.

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

Mastercard just cleared NYDFS

NYDFS approved Mastercard Transaction Services (U.S.) LLC for a virtual currency business license under New York’s BitLicense framework on 27 May 2026. The license authorizes the unit to conduct virtual currency business activity in New York, including custody, transmission, exchange, and issuance. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: The BitLicense is the keystone, because in U.S. payments, regulatory legibility is the moat. The federal GENIUS Act implementation rules are due by 18 July 2026, less than two months from this license. NYDFS approval is the most likely template federal regulators will recognize as fit-for-purpose. Mastercard acquired BVNK, partnered with SoFi to integrate SoFiUSD (SoFi’s dollar-backed stablecoin) as a settlement currency across Mastercard’s global payments network and its MTN is connected to JPMorgan’s Kinexys. Hence, they are pushing multiple startegies to connect different ledgers in the blockchain space.

Related reads:

VanEck’s $61M treasury token got a DeFi lending venue

Securitize, the SEC-registered tokenization platform issuing VBILL ($61M total value), launched the fund live on a KPK-curated Euler vault on Thursday, May 28. Users can post VBILL as collateral, borrow other crypto assets, and run DeFi strategies while continuing to earn the underlying Treasury yield. The integration runs on Securitize’s DS Protocol, a compliance-aware framework that enforces transfer restrictions and investor eligibility checks onchain. Pricing data is supplied through RedStone oracles. VBILL launched in May 2025 across Avalanche, BNB Chain, Ethereum, and Solana with Wormhole bridging cross-chain liquidity. It charges a 0.20% management fee.

Why it matters: Securitize is not building a fund, it is building a distribution layer. VBILL is the demo unit that proves regulated tokenized treasuries can multi-home across Aave and Euler without a vendor-lock decision. Apollo (ACRED), Hamilton Lane (SCOPE), KKR, and BNY all run on the same rails.

Related reads:

Other Signals

Infrastructure and Markets

Paxos Securities Settlement Company (PSSC) received formal clearing agency registration from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Link
Samsung Securities, Samsung Card, and Samsung SDS are acquiring a combined 4% stake in Dunamu from Kakao for $407.7M. Link
Aave Labs’ UK subsidiaries, Push Labs Ltd. and Push Virtual Assets Ltd., secured FCA registration as cryptoasset exchange providers. Link
CME Group is extending trading for its regulated cryptocurrency futures and options to 24 hours a day, seven days a week, starting May 29. Link

Regulation and Policy

On January 19 at Davos, Premier David Burt announced that Bermuda would become the first nation to put its entire economy onchain, with Circle providing the digital dollar plumbing, Coinbase wiring the onboarding rails, and Stellar issuing a sovereign-grade Bermuda Digital Dollar. Link
The French Financial Markets Authority (AMF) issued a June 30 deadline for unlicensed crypto companies to secure MiCA permits or exit the market. Link
Hong Kong’s FSTB and SFC finalized consultation conclusions to regulate digital asset advisory and discretionary management services. Link

Banking and Payments

United Texas Bank secured OCC approval to convert to a nationally-chartered bank, gaining direct Federal Reserve access. Link
Banca Sella became the first Italian bank authorized by the Bank of Italy to offer cryptocurrency services under the EU’s MiCA regulation. Link
Block’s Cash App is rolling out a USDC stablecoin payment feature to its nearly 60M users, starting with 25% of the base and reaching full deployment by the end of the week. Link
Nium has partnered with Circle to integrate its global payout infrastructure directly into the Circle Payments Network (CPN). Link
Phantom launched its own USD-pegged stablecoin, CASH, utilizing Bridge’s Open Issuance platform and Stripe’s infrastructure. Link

Funds, Deals and others

VanEck launched VBNB, the first U.S. spot BNB ETF, on the Nasdaq exchange. Link
Grayscale filed an amended S-1 to launch the ‘Grayscale Hyperliquid Staking ETF’ under the proposed Nasdaq ticker HYPG. Link
Bitmine Immersion announced its corporate treasury now holds 5.39M ETH, representing roughly 4.47% of the total circulating Ethereum supply. Link
Crypto prime broker FalconX has confidentially filed a draft S-1 registration statement with the SEC to pursue a U.S. IPO. Link
MicroStrategy repurchased $1.5B in face value of its zero-coupon convertible senior notes due in 2029 for a discounted $1.38B. Link

Chart of the day

(Source: Token Terminal)

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

Bitwise just undercut 21Shares by 165 bps

Marc Baumann — Thu, 28 May 2026 05:48:53 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc,

Privacy is underrated in the blockchain space. With institutional movement, this is changing. Bitwise just listed Europe’s second Canton Network ETP, and undercut the first mover by 165 basis points. The ETP is fully backed by CC, the native token of the Canton Network, a blockchain that is backed by JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas,…

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

Marc Baumann — Wed, 27 May 2026 08:22:20 GMT

Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️

“I’m not a fan of stablecoins being co-opted by the cards world. I’m not a fan of cards on the front end of stablecoins because then the stablecoin is just another account feeding the legacy beast. This is not the intended future.”

Tony McLaughlin spent two decades at Citigroup as managing director of emerging payments, where he authored the Regulated Liability Network whitepaper, the conceptual scaffolding the Fed prototyped in its RLN proof of concept1 and the BIS extended into Project Agora. He then founded Ubyx, where he raised $10M to build the the clearing system for tokenized money.

In this conversation, we unpack why the “Tether/Circle duopoly” is a temporary trend, why every bank on earth is about to become a wallet provider, and why the “general-purpose” technology of blockchains will inevitably subsume special-purpose rails like ACH and SWIFT.

“I disagree with anyone who believes there’s going to be an oligopoly in stablecoin issuance.”

About Tony: Tony McLaughlin spent 20+ years at Citigroup, most recently as Managing Director of Emerging Payments. Earlier in his career he worked on continuous linked settlement at ABN AMRO and travelers' checks at Barclays in 1993, three decades of building payment infrastructure across every form factor that has ever existed. In March 2025 he left Citi to found Ubyx, the first global clearing system for stablecoins and tokenized deposits, with backing from Galaxy, Founders Fund, Coinbase Ventures, VanEck, Paxos, LayerZero, Monerium and as of January 2026, Barclays, in what was the British bank's first-ever direct stablecoin infrastructure investment. He also convened the Tokenized Cash Management Advisory Group, a 20-corporate body that published its core principles for digital money in April.

Why is it important: The total stablecoin float crossed $323B in May 2026. Barclays just took its first stablecoin equity position in Ubyx. JPMorgan moved JPMD onto Canton in January and is now processing $5B in daily transactions through Kinexys. Citi’s tokenized deposit volumes went from millions to billions in a year. Genius Act issuers are queuing up in the US. Europeans banks are racing with Qivalis. And the Bank of England's proposed £20,000 retail holding cap on systemic stablecoins.

Proof of Talk is known as the Davos of Web3, bringing together the core 2500 decision-makers in Web3, happening on the 2nd and 3rd of June at the Louvre Palace in Paris.

Major speakers include Jenny Johnson (CEO, Franklin Templeton), Tom Lee (Chairman, Fundstrat), Stani Kulechov (Founder & CEO, Aave), Tom Zschach (CIO, Swift), Adam Back, Elliot Hentov (State Street, Chief Macro Policy Strategist) and more.

🎧 Jump to the best parts

00:00 Tony McLaughlin Introduction
01:29 Why Tony Left Citi
03:38 Why Stablecoin Monopolies Will Fail
07:16 Why Tony Built Ubyx
09:20 Why Stablecoins Could Collapse Payment Rails
13:19 Why Banks Need Stablecoin Deposits
17:27 The Real Stablecoin Business Model
22:14 Consortium Stablecoins and CBDCs
25:32 Building Ubyx
29:14 AI Agents and Stablecoin Payments
31:38 What Could Kill the Stablecoin Thesis
34:00 TThe BlackBerry Comparison
38:00 Corporate Adoption of Tokenized Money
42:58 Lightning Round

Proof of Talk is known as the Davos of Web3, bringing together the core 2500 decision-makers in Web3, happening on the 2nd and 3rd of June at the Louvre Palace in Paris. 51 Insights will be the official research partner.

👉 A few days to go: Grab your ticket now!

Important Links

LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tony-mclaughlin-7b627a3
X: https://x.com/stablemaximus
Whitepaper: https://www.ubyx.xyz/whitepaper
Website: https://ubyx.xyz/

Watch or listen now:
YouTube • Apple Podcasts

Our biggest takeaways from this conversation:

1. The stablecoin duopoly is not the endgame

More than 82% of the stablecoin market sits with two issuers: Tether ($189B) and Circle ($76B). And, almost everyone is looking at them as the dominate players even in the future. Tony’s argument and it’s the most important reframe of the conversation, is that this is exactly what every adolescent payment network looks like before it pluralises. There was a point in time when there were only a few credit card issuers, all dollar-denominated, all US-based. Today, there are roughly 16,000 card issuers globally and the market shows no fragmentation. The acceptance layer absorbs all of them invisibly.

“Hundreds, and then thousands, of issuers. Hundreds of thousands, and then millions, of accepting points. I’ll be judged by that prediction over time.”

Tony's analogy to AOL and CompuServe is sharp: walled-garden pioneers always look unassailable until the open network arrives and the moat turns out to have been the entire business.

“America Online was the pre-internet portal to the information superhighway as we used to call it. There was something called CompuServe … All I'm saying is that what you observe at a point of time at the early stages of a market, if you extrapolate forward, you're probably making a mistake. And I think what's a far more likely outcome is that we will have eventually, and in the not too distant future, hundreds and then thousands … then millions of accepting points for tokenized money.

Why do we agree with him: Currently, Stablecoin accounts for 0.02% of global payments volumes. We are just at the start.

Related reads:

2. General-purpose technology always subsumes special-purpose technology

Tony uses the “iPhone vs. Walkman” analogy to explain the future of payment rails. ACH, SWIFT, and Card Networks are special-purpose devices, they only do one thing (carry low-value messages, high-value messages, or authorizations).

“In the same way that we don’t have physical alarm clocks and calculators and Walkmans anymore, I think the business case to build a special-purpose payments rail... will become difficult to justify.”

Blockchains are general-purpose. They can represent a dollar, a stock, a piece of real estate, or a contract on the same infrastructure. Tony’s bet is that the cost-efficiency of general-purpose rails will eventually make special-purpose rails (like the current banking stack) obsolete.

Related reads:

3. Banks are running the wrong playbook (Issue vs. Accept)

The $10B hammer, the yield ban, and 401(k)

Marc Baumann — Mon, 25 May 2026 16:22:09 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc,

We’ve watched Wall Street lobby against crypto for a decade, but what happened in April was a masterclass in regulatory weaponization. Three U.S. federal agencies moved on digital assets within two weeks:

The Department of Labor proposed opening $12 trillion in 401(k) retirement savings to crypto via a new fiduciary safe harbor.
The Trea…

179: Wall Street pushes back

Marc Baumann — Sat, 23 May 2026 02:33:41 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team,

Before we get into this week’s signals, one thing worth flagging at the top.

Karl from Proof of Talk pitched 51 as official research partner for June 2-3. My instinct was to decline. But I met this team for the first time 4 years ago at in Paris, just before they launched. And they've built it into one of the top digital asset conferences of the year:

2,500 attendees from banking, regulation, and institutional capital. 95% C-suite. Zero pay-to-speak.

So we said yes.

We’re producing two reports as the official research partners: 1) Money Movement 2.0: State of Stablecoins and 2) The Agent Economy 2026, second editions after last year’s became one of our most-read reports of 2025.

👉 3-5 partner slots open for companies that belong in the conversation.

The report goes to every attendee via email and print and hits our 100K+ institutional audience in the week of the event, and lives on our socials for months.

If you run marketing or BD at a stablecoin issuer, custody platform, or B2B fintech, reply to this email. 15 minutes, I’ll tell you if it’s the right fit.

Now to this week’s signals 👇

I’ve tracked every SEC rule change this year. None of them prepared me for this one:

Anthropic tried to disown tokenized versions of its own stock last week. It couldn’t pull them off Solana.

The SEC is about to make that the default for every blue chip on a US exchange.

CLARITY, PARITY Act, and American Reserve Modernization Act (ARMA) are all moving through Congress this month. Trump just signed an EO ordering federal regulators to identify barriers to fintech and crypto. The door isn’t opening anymore. It’s open.

Here’s what else moved this week:

VanEck and Grayscale file Binance ETF
Qivalis hits Europe’s 37 banks
Basel walks back its 2022 crypto rules
Ripple Prime + EDX go live
Standard Chartered acquired Zodia

And 15+ more signals. Let’s jump in 👇🌆

Top Signals This Week

SEC will let DeFi trade stocks

On May 18, Bloomberg reported that the SEC is preparing to release its long-signaled Innovation Exemption for tokenized securities. The framework allows digital tokens linked to public-company shares, including tokens issued by third parties without the underlying company’s consent, to trade on decentralized platforms and automated market makers under lighter-touch registration. [NEWS]

Why it matters: Issuer consent just died. The 1933 Securities Act gave public companies veto power over where their stock trades. The Innovation Exemption removes it. That rule lasted 93 years.

Here’s how it works in practice. Backed Finance wraps AAPL, NVDA, or TSLA, sells SPL-token versions on Solana, and Apple has no recourse. The token settles against real shares Backed holds in a regulated brokerage account. Shareholder rights route through Broadridge’s ProxyVote platform. Superstate and Ondo already pass through votes and dividends.

Be smart: Anthropic figured this out last week. It publicly disowned tokenized versions of its own stock. The tokens kept trading. Every blue chip on a US exchange will face the same problem.

Wall Street pushed back: traditional exchange representatives, including the World Federation of Exchanges, warned the framework creates a regulatory shortcut for crypto platforms, forcing the SEC to delay its plans.

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

VanEck and Grayscale filed for Binance ETF

On 15 May 2026, VanEck filed Amendment No. 5 to its Form S-1 for the VanEck BNB ETF (Nasdaq under ticker VBNB). The same day, Grayscale filed Amendment No. 2 to its competing BNB ETF registration, slated to list as GBNB. VanEck disclosed a 0.39% management fee; Grayscale has not yet published one.[NEWS]

Why it matters: Altcoin ETFs used to mean fighting the SEC over fund architecture. Now you just swap the ticker. Bitcoin and Ether ETFs already cleared the legal framework. BNB inherits it. One detail makes this bigger. The SEC dropped the Rule 19b-4 requirement for every individual crypto ETP. Generic listing standards now apply across the category. That bottleneck is gone. Notice what the issuers are doing in response. They’re not arguing anymore. VanEck compromised early on staking yield to preserve speed-to-market. Grayscale followed. The race stopped being about winning the regulatory argument. It became about being first to file the next altcoin.

Qivalis hits Europe’s 37 banks

On May 20, Qivalis announced a 25-bank expansion that takes the consortium from 12 founding members to 37. Spain led the new wave with five additions: ABANCA, Banco Sabadell, Bankinter, Cecabank and Kutxabank. France, Sweden, Greece, the Netherlands, Finland and Ireland each contributed two new institutions. Italy added BPER and Intesa Sanpaolo to founding member UniCredit. Iceland, Luxembourg, Poland and Austria entered the consortium for the first time via Landsbankinn, Banque et Caisse d’Épargne de l’État, Bank Pekao S.A. and Erste Group respectively.

Why it matters: Europe’s biggest euro stablecoin is American. Circle’s EURC controls roughly half the market at ~$438M. Société Générale’s EURCV sits at ~$123M. That’s the entire institutional euro stablecoin space, ~$560M combined. Both numbers are rounding errors against the $323B total stablecoin market. Spain is now the leading retail market for EURC in Europe. Think about what that means. Spanish savers are choosing a Boston-based issuer over their own banks for digital euros.

That’s what dragged 25 new banks into Qivalis in one announcement. They’re not building this because they want to. They’re building it because they’re losing.

Basel walks back its 2022 crypto rules

On May 20, BIS published a press release confirming progress on the expedited targeted review of SCO60, its prudential standard for banks’ cryptoasset exposures. The standard came into force on 1 January 2026 after being deferred from 2025 under industry pressure. Its centerpiece, a 1,250% risk weight on Group 2b cryptoassets (which captures virtually every stablecoin issued on a permissionless chain, including USDC and USDT), functions as a near-total ban on bank balance sheet exposure. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: Basel set the 1,250% risk weight in December 2022. Bitcoin was the frame back then. Every dollar of crypto on a bank’s balance sheet required a dollar of CET1 capital. The rule did exactly what it was designed to do: keep banks out. The world doesn’t look like December 2022 anymore. Three of the four largest US banks have on-chain dollar products live. Stablecoins crossed $323B. Tokenized money market funds keep growing. The rule designed to slow banks down is now blocking them from a market they want to enter. Banks don’t lobby Basel to walk back their own rules unless they’re ready to deploy capital. This is what that looks like.

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EDX just became Ripple Prime’s liquidity spine

On May 19, Ripple Prime, the rebranded Hidden Road (acquired for $1.25B), has plugged into EDX Markets’ US spot venue and EDXM International’s Singapore perpetual futures exchange. Clients can now route spot and perps through EDX while financing, clearing, and net-settling across the rest of their book through Ripple Prime. Backed by Citadel Securities, Virtu, Fidelity Digital Assets, Charles Schwab, Sequoia, HRT, and Miami International Holdings, EDX Markets ran roughly $200M in average daily spot volume by December 2025 and applied for an OCC national trust bank charter in April. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: Crypto’s prime brokerage market is splitting in two: conflicted and non-conflicted and Ripple is the second one. Coinbase Prime is the obvious incumbent: $236B quarterly trading volume, $300B in assets under custody, 80%+ of US bitcoin and ether ETF custody. But Coinbase Prime is vertically integrated, clients route flow through Coinbase the exchange. EDX applied for an OCC trust bank charter in April. That looked like a move to give institutional clients an alternative venue. This week's deal completes the picture. Ripple Prime becomes the credit layer. Clients face EDX, CME, Hyperliquid, and OTC desks under one collateral pool. No conflict, because the credit provider doesn't run the exchange.

The bet: institutions will pay for separation of powers.

Standard Chartered acquired Zodia

On 18 May 2026, Standard Chartered confirmed that minority Zodia shareholders had accepted its non-binding offer to consolidate the custodian’s regulated activities into the bank itself. The Financing and Securities Services (FSS) division, which already operates Standard Chartered’s internal digital asset custody platform, will absorb Zodia’s licensed custody book.

Why it matters: The joint venture model just died. We're past pilots and experiments. Asset managers need real custody at scale, and banks want to own the rails themselves. Standard Chartered absorbing Zodia into FSS isn’t an org chart change. It bundles custody with the things only a bank can offer: collateral mobility, capital introductions, FX, and intraday financing against tokenized positions. A standalone custodian can’t compete with that stack.

Be smart: Expect Fireblocks, BitGo, and Anchorage to face the same compression. Either get acquired or get out-bundled.

Other Signals

Infrastructure and Markets

Coinbase Derivatives is launching perpetual-style futures contracts tracking the top 100 Nasdaq firms and three thematic equity indexes: AI, China, and US national security. Link
On-chain perpetuals exchange Ostium partnered with Nasdaq to integrate the exchange operator’s equities data into its trading venue. Link

Regulation and Policy

Rep. Nick Begich introduced the American Reserve Modernization Act to create a permanent, legally codified U.S. strategic Bitcoin reserve. Link
The White House has cleared major legal hurdles to operationalize the U.S. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Link
The FCA and Bank of England launched a joint consultation to gather industry feedback on regulating tokenized wholesale financial markets in the UK. Link

Banking and Payments

Boerse Stuttgart’s Seturion partnered with Societe Generale and flatexDEGIRO to build a pan-European blockchain securities settlement system. Link
Kraken’s parent company, Payward, secured preliminary approval from Dubai’s VARA for a broker-dealer, investment, and management license. Link
Zero Hash secured an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license from the Dutch central bank, becoming the first firm under MiCA to hold full EMI status. Link
The New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) granted GalaxyOne Prime NY a BitLicense and Money Transmission License. Link

Funds, Deals and others

SpaceX officially filed its S-1 with the SEC for an anticipated June Nasdaq listing, targeting a $1.75T valuation and an $80B raise. Link
SpaceX disclosed it holds $1.45B worth of Bitcoin on its balance sheet. Link
Tether acquired SoftBank’s equity stake in Twenty One Capital (XXI). Link
Securitize announced record Q1 2026 revenue of $19.5M, a 39% YoY. Link
Bitmine disclosed that as of the prior afternoon it held 5,278,462 ETH at $2,191 per token, 202 BTC, $685M cash, a $200M stake in Beast Industries, and $83M in Eightco Holdings (NASDAQ: ORBS). Link

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

Qivalis hits Europe’s 37 Banks

Marc Baumann — Fri, 22 May 2026 14:41:16 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc,

Qivalis, the Amsterdam-based banking consortium building a regulated euro stablecoin, added 25 banks on Wednesday, pushing its membership to 37 institutions across 15 countries. This is the first biggest push of European banks after the US’s GENIUS Act was passed. The U.S. is turning stablecoins into a geopolitical weapon by making the U…

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

Marc Baumann — Fri, 22 May 2026 00:27:30 GMT

Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️

“Any asset that has annualized volatility four times greater than the stock market is not a safe haven asset. So we’re done right there.”

I just spent an hour with Cam Harvey. Economist and Duke finance professor. He advises Man Group with $325B in AUM. His 1986 yield curve model has called every US recession since. Five for five. We sat down to unpack why his recession model gave a “false signal” in 2023, why AI agents are the secret growth engine for stablecoins, and why we are currently living through the most disruptive decade in human history. In this conversation, he prices Bitcoin’s digital-gold thesis, the agent-to-agent economy, the yield curve’s eight-of-nine recession record, and the four simultaneous technology disruptions he says CFOs are dangerously underestimating.

Watch on Youtube

Back in 1986, as a University of Chicago PhD student, he introduced a model that used the shape of the yield curve to predict recessions. It was heavily scrutinized at the time. Today, it boasts an 8-for-9 track record. [Read Thesis]

“Bitcoin is not a substitute for gold. It might be a complement, but it is not a substitute.”

That is a provocative stance from a man who literally wrote the book on DeFi and the Future of Finance. But Cam’s perspective isn't anti-crypto; it's hyper-rational.

“Just gambling on crypto, that’s not solving any problem. What I’m interested in is doing stuff that increases both economic growth and economic well-being. And something like a stablecoin is fully equipped to do that.”

Cam believes that DeFi will disrupt the traditional financial system by removing costly middlemen, increasing financial inclusion, and driving mass tokenization. And, this will happen as DeFi will eliminate centralized institutions like commercial banks, stock exchanges, and brokerages.

About Campwell: Cam Harvey is Professor of Finance at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a past President of the American Finance Association. He is also Partner and Senior Advisor at Research Affiliates ($150B+ AUM) and an investment strategy advisor at Man Group, the world’s largest publicly listed hedge fund. He co-founded the Duke-Fed CFO Survey in 1997, still the most cited corporate sentiment study in the US, and authored “DeFi and the Future of Finance.” His Coursera specialization on decentralized finance has trained more than 102,000 students. His September 2025 paper “Gold and Bitcoin” is driving the institutional conversation about Bitcoin’s real risk profile in 2026.

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🎧 Jump to the best parts

00:00 Cam Harvey Introduction
02:09 The Aave Exploit Explained
07:53 Why DeFi Still Matters
12:30 What Happened With Aave and Kelp
15:34 The Origin of the Yield Curve Model
22:35 Why the 2022 Recession Never Happened
30:20 Why Cam Entered Crypto and DeFi
43:19 Why DeFi Solves Real Problems
51:55 Bitcoin vs Gold
57:18 Can Bitcoin Be Attacked
01:00:56 The Duke Fed CFO Survey
01:03:25 Stablecoins vs Banks
01:07:13 Why CEOs Underestimate AI
01:09:42 The Four Technological Disruptions
01:15:18 AI and the Future of Education

Important Links

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/camharvey
X: https://x.com/camharvey
Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business: https://www.fuqua.duke.edu/faculty/campbell-harvey
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=cajqjGAAAAAJ&hl=en
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell_Harvey
Gold and Bitcoin: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5530719
Tokenised Gold: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5995434

Watch or listen now:
YouTube • Apple Podcasts

Our biggest takeaways from this conversation:

1. The yield curve model worked because everything else was wrong

When Harvey presented his recession-prediction model in 1986, the criticism was simple: not enough data. Four recessions, four correct calls. Now it's five for five.

The mechanism is elegant, the spread between a 10-year Treasury and a 3-month T-bill encodes forward-looking expectations about growth in a way that stock prices, with their volatility and absent maturities, never could.

“A model is a simplification of reality. It looks at one thing, the difference between the yield on the 10-year and the yield on the Treasury bill. That’s it, one variable.”

The 2022 inversion looked like a sixth hit coming. It wasn’t. Harvey went on record in real time calling it a false signal, and laid out five reasons: the model’s own publicity had changed CEO and CFO behavior, companies undertook prophylactic layoffs and slashed investment even without an actual downturn, and COVID-era stimulus artificially propped up consumption. The recession was partly managed away because enough people believed the model.

“You might even think that that inversion in 2022 sufficiently changed behavior so that we dodged a potential recession.”

This is a great example to assess how outcome changes when the signal is widely known. Market is very dynamic and the signal that work eventually change the behavior they were measuring.

2. The Kelp DAO exploit will trigger regulatory extinct

The Aave incident that preceded this conversation, in which attackers drained $292 million from a smaller protocol, KelpDAO, used the stolen tokens as collateral on Aave to borrow ETH, and left Aave holding bad debt, got significant press. Harvey’s response was careful to avoid both dismissiveness and alarm.

“The protocol operated exactly as it should have operated. Don’t interpret this as ‘we’ve seen this before, it’s no big deal.’ It is a big deal. It does point to improvement that’s necessary.”

The regulatory problem is genuinely hard. am has a paper forthcoming in Research Policy on how to regulate decentralized protocols, and his point of view should worry anyone who thinks “ban it” is a viable response.

His partial solution is indirect: regulated entities like Coinbase, if they choose to interact with a decentralized protocol, have legal liability exposure that gives them an incentive to pressure protocols toward better security.

He also makes a point that frequently gets dropped in these conversations: 80% of the value of all U.S. paper currency is held in $100 bills. Almost no one uses them for legitimate transactions.

Related reads:

3. Bitcoin is not digital gold, and calling it that is the wrong sale

Harvey has published research on both Bitcoin and gold, and his conclusion is direct: they are not substitutes. The “digital gold” framing, he argues, is a marketing pitch that doesn’t survive contact with the data.

“Any asset that has got annualized volatility that is four times greater than the stock market is not a safe haven asset. So we’re done right there.”

The case against Bitcoin-as-gold runs on three tracks.

Volatility: drawdowns approaching 70% are not consistent with a store-of-value thesis.
Tangibility: gold has industrial, technological, and artistic applications that put a floor under its price. Bitcoin does not.
The 51% attack vector.

Harvey sketches a credible scenario in which a well-capitalized actor takes a large short position in Bitcoin derivatives, then spends what he estimates is a feasible sum to acquire 51% of network hash power, driving the price toward zero as they profit on the short. For gold, no equivalent attack exists.

On quantum computing, the other threat frequently cited, he is notably less alarmed. The technology to build quantum-proof wallets already exists.

“The quantum attack I’m not as worried about, other than if these old public keys are harvested, there’s going to be a big sale of Bitcoin that could drive the price down somewhat.”

Bitcoin may still be valuable. Harvey does not dismiss it. But it is a complement to gold, not a replacement, and conflating the two misleads both asset classes.

Related podcast and reads:

4. Stablecoins are the dollar rails for the agent-to-agent economy

SEC will let DeFi trade stocks

Marc Baumann — Wed, 20 May 2026 19:33:38 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc,

The SEC is about to legalize the most disruptive shareholder-rights workaround in nine decades. This week, SEC Chair Paul Atkins is expected to release the agency’s Innovation Exemption, a 12-to-36-month sandbox that lets tokenized US stocks trade on public blockchains and DeFi venues, with the issuing company’s consent expressly not required.

Let’s unpack.

The Signal: This looks like an attempt to regulate an offshore market ($25B in xStocks’s transaction volume is on Solana and other public chains with 100 listed equities). Nasdaq, NYSE and DTCC already won approval to put equities on-chain. The Innovation Exemption is the SEC’s bet that DeFi-native venues stay onshore, instead of jurisdictions like UAE or Singapore.

[P.S. Don’t miss our recommended reading below.]

👉PRO: Download the PDF below

Download the Full BCG Report

What happened

The agency is targeting issuance on or around May 18, 2026, with full guardrails: KYC/AML, verified-buyer whitelists, exposure limits, and disclosure requirements during the sandbox window.

Zooming in: Tokenised stock is moving rapidly. Nasdaq won SEC approval for its tokenized-share order book on March 18, 2026. NYSE is building a separate 24/7 venue with BNY Mellon and Citi for tokenized deposit and stablecoin settlement. DTCC, which custodies over $114T in assets, is scheduled to begin limited production trades of tokenized stocks and ETFs in July 2026, with full platform launch in October.

The state of market: Tokenized equity value grew from $350M in mid-2025 to $1.43B by May 2026. The leading platforms include Ondo, xStocks, Securitize, WisdomTree and Superstate.

Kraken acquired Backed Finance (issuer of xStocks) in December 2025, capturing an AUM of $400M. But, tokenised stocks are not available to US persons due to US securities regulations. The day the exemption goes live, that wall comes down.

Why it matters

Issuer consent dies as the bedrock of US equity markets. The 1933 Securities Act gave public companies veto power over where their stock trades. The Innovation Exemption removes it. Backed Finance can wrap AAPL, NVDA, or TSLA, sell SPL-token versions on Solana, and Apple has no recourse. The token settles against shares Backed holds in a regulated brokerage account. Shareholder rights route through Broadridge’s ProxyVote platform, with Superstate and Ondo already passing through votes and dividends. Anthropic learned this last week. It publicly disowned tokenized versions of its stock and could do nothing to remove them. Every blue-chip name on a US exchange will face the same problem.

the Binance ETF

Marc Baumann — Mon, 18 May 2026 20:47:45 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc,

VanEck and Grayscale filed amended S-1 registrations for the first spot Binance ETFs on the same day. This is not the first Altcoin ETF. In April, Bitwise launched a spot AVAX ETF and just four days ago, they launched a spot HYPE ETF. In January, VanEck debuted on NASDAQ with an AVAX ETF. The altcoin ETF wave has accelerated in 2026. Ins…

BCG's new digital asset playbook

Marc Baumann — Mon, 18 May 2026 12:40:05 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc,

I just spent the weekend reading something that should sit on every bank CEO’s desk by Monday morning.

Today, BCG released the most important report on digital assets in banking this year. 68 pages. Real scenario models for every banking business line. We got early access.

And the timing is not a coincidence.

Just in the past 10 days:

JPMorgan launched its second tokenized money market fund on Ethereum.
BlackRock and Janus Henderson got a $1 billion facility for instant redemptions on tokenized funds. Fidelity International put a Moody’s-rated tokenized fund on Chainlink.
And Ondo, working with J.P. Morgan’s Kinexys, Mastercard, and Ripple, completed the first cross-border, cross-bank redemption of tokenized U.S. Treasuries.

There’s a line on page 64 I keep coming back to.

It explains why most bank digital asset strategies are quietly failing. And it explains why a few will be worth billions in five years.

I’ll show you the line in a moment.

First, the number that frames everything.

Download the Full BCG Report

The $88 Trillion Number

Tokenized real-world assets are $30 billion today. By 2035, in BCG’s progressive scenario, they hit $88 trillion. That’s 16% of all global investable assets.

Think about what that means.

It’s not a crypto number. It’s a capital markets infrastructure number. The same securities, the same real assets, just issued, held, transferred, and serviced through new digital rails. Everything that touches issuance, settlement, custody, collateral, and asset servicing gets re-architected.

Most banks are still asking whether tokenization is real. BCG just modeled the answer business line by business line, and the answer is brutal in both directions.

The downside and what’s at risk

In BCG’s rapid digital expansion scenario, banks that don’t adapt face ~10% smaller balance sheets, ~14% lower revenues, and ~30% lower profits by 2035 versus a no-digital-asset base case. The hardest hits land on transaction banking (~$300B in fees compressed as payment flows migrate to stablecoins) and net interest income (~$200B in pressure as stablecoin adoption drives deposit loss and more expensive funding).

The upside, what’s addressable

Banks that position deliberately can capture billions. BCG quantified it per G-SIB: $340-600M annual revenue upside in retail and wealth (recapturing crypto assets held off-bank), $200-600M in corporate banking (programmable treasury and cross-border), $1.2-2.5B in asset management for a $2T AUM manager (tokenized funds, alternatives, capture rate), and $1B+ profit upside in capital markets from a ~4% RoE lift through tokenized settlement and collateral mobility.

BCG built them bottom-up by business line.

The framing that matters

BCG splits digital assets into three categories. This distinction alone is worth the read.

Crypto (~$3 trillion): the revenue pool that exists today. Cyclical, volatile, but real. Banks with the right risk controls can capture client-driven fee income. The total crypto revenue pool is ~$90 billion annually. For regulated banks, the addressable slice — trading, derivatives, custody/prime, and staking — is ~$55 billion.

Digital money (~$300 billion in stablecoins): the most immediate disruption vector. Stablecoins are 0.5% of global M2 money supply today. BCG sees a natural ceiling of about 15% of broad money supply. Even getting to 2-3% would fundamentally reshape cross-border payments, treasury management, and deposit economics.

Tokenized real-world assets (~$30 billion today): the deep structural play. This category grew roughly 300% in 2025. BCG’s progressive scenario: 16% of global investable assets tokenized by 2035. That is approximately $88 trillion.

Most banks still treat all three as one “crypto strategy.” That is the first mistake.

The Line That Reframes Everything

Here’s what stopped me on page 64:

“Drift between models is the highest-risk posture. If a bank does not deliberately choose its digital asset ambition and incrementally adds activities without strategic coherence, it accumulates risk faster than revenue. Drift is not neutral. It is unmanaged exposure.”

Most banks are drifting. They’ve got a crypto custody pilot in one division, a tokenization proof-of-concept in another, a stablecoin partnership someone’s exploring. No board-level archetype. No quantified business case per business line. Eighteen months later: infrastructure debt, vendor lock-in, and no strategic clarity.

BCG gives bank boards three archetypes to choose from. The choice has to be explicit:

Defensive integrator. Protect the client interface. Focus on bank-grade custody, wallets, and orchestration. Win by being the trusted aggregation layer for whatever rails emerge.
Scaled participant. Compete on issuance, collateral, prime services, and tokenized funds. Build product depth where existing client relationships create unfair advantage.
Infrastructure shaper. Invest to influence settlement networks, interoperability standards, and the rules of the next stack. Win by helping write them.

Different business lines inside the same bank can pick different archetypes. The mistake isn’t picking the wrong one. The mistake is picking none.

What The Market is Telling Us Right Now

Here is what makes this report feel urgent rather than academic.

While BCG was finalizing their analysis, the market started moving faster than most boardrooms expected.

From our 51 Terminal intelligence feed this week alone:

The largest institutions are no longer piloting. They are building. A selection of key developments in the last 6 months:

The New York Stock Exchange announced a tokenized securities platform in January — 24/7 trading, instant settlement, stablecoin-based funding
NYSE parent ICE invested in crypto exchange OKX at a $25B valuation, giving OKX’s 120 million users access to NYSE tokenized equities in H2 2026.
Mastercard acquired stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK for $1.8B, its largest crypto deal ever, to bridge fiat payment rails with on-chain settlements across 130+ countries.
In his annual shareholder letter, Jamie Dimon said JPMorgan “must move faster” as tokenization reshapes payments, trading, and asset management.
JPMorgan launched two tokenized money market funds on Ethereum. The second (JLTXX) is explicitly designed to hold reserves for stablecoin issuers under the GENIUS Act. a signal of where JPMorgan sees institutional demand heading.
BlackRock’s BUIDL fund — the world’s largest tokenized Treasury fund — hit $2.5B in AUM.
The DTCC confirmed a July 2026 pilot and October 2026 full launch for tokenized securities covering Russell 1000 equities, major ETFs, and U.S. Treasury bills. 50+ institutions confirmed, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley.
Goldman Sachs publicly stated it is going “all in” on digital assets and tokenization, with CEO David Solomon citing regulatory clarity as the catalyst for institutional scale.

Stablecoins are going institutional and global.

Fidelity Investments launched its Digital Dollar (FIDD) on Ethereum in February
BNY Mellon and JPMorgan are now running tokenized deposits around the clock, 24/7/365
State Street launched a full Digital Asset Platform in January for tokenized funds, stablecoins, and blockchain-based financial products.

Cross-border settlement is being rewritten.

Ondo Finance, JPMorgan’s Kinexys, Mastercard, and Ripple completed the first cross-border, cross-bank redemption of tokenized U.S. Treasuries — settling in under five seconds.
SWIFT is building a blockchain shared ledger to run live cross-border tokenized deposit transactions by end of 2026, connecting its 11,000+ member banks to on-chain settlement.

Regulation is clearing the path.

The U.S. Senate Banking Committee advanced the CLARITY Act, landmark legislation establishing a clear regulatory framework for crypto market structure.
Kevin Warsh was confirmed as Fed Chair. widely considered the most crypto-friendly Fed leadership in history.
The GENIUS Act was signed into law in July 2025, the first federal regulatory framework for payment stablecoins. The OCC is now implementing regulations for bank-issued stablecoins.

Tokenized credit is the next frontier.

Bernstein cited a $4 trillion addressable market for tokenized credit, naming Figure Technology as a key player.
Figure is targeting Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in a first-lien mortgage push, claiming 91% cost reduction by originating and servicing loans entirely on-chain.

[All data points above sourced from the 51 Terminal, which tracks 2,300+ companies and processes 6,000+ intelligence items across regulation, infrastructure, stablecoins, tokenization, and institutional adoption.]

BCG’s report gives you the strategic framework. The market is giving you the urgency.

Banks are stopping the drift, fast.

The Wallet Thesis is Becoming Consensus

BCG’s conclusion on personal banking is sharper than any report I’ve read this year. For an average G-SIB with 30-40M retail and wealth clients, recapturing just 20% of off-bank crypto assets translates to ~$80M in annual incremental revenue today. As digital RWAs scale, that number reaches $340-600M per year.

But the deeper insight is in Tony McLaughlin’s framing from his recent interview with us: the age of accounts is ending. A bank account contains dollars and one bank’s liability. A wallet contains stablecoins from many issuers, tokenized deposits from many banks, tokenized money market funds, and tokenized real-world assets. His advice to banks was stark: you must offer every one of your clients a wallet.

BCG arrives at the same conclusion through different math. Same destination.

What BCG Recommends

The report lays out a five-step playbook for boards. I will share the sequence but not the detail:

Quantify the economics within 90 days. Map revenue at risk, revenue addressable, deposit sensitivity, and the cost of running dual rails. By business line.
Lock in the ambition and governance. Choose an ambition archetype for each business line, appoint an accountable executive sponsor, and establish a board-level review cadence.
Secure the client interface. Wallet, custody, on/off-ramping, advice, reporting. This is the no-regret move.
Industrialize 2-3 high-value use cases. Cross-border treasury. Tokenized funds. Repo and collateral mobility.
Build the bank-grade control plane. Common DLT platform, key management, contract governance, AML tooling, partner framework.

The sequencing matters more than any individual step. Most banks skip steps 1 and 2.

The best line in the report: “Do not try to predict the single winning rail. The real objective is to remain systemically relevant regardless of whichever rail scales.”

Our Take

The key insight buried in BCG’s risk section is the one that should change every bank board agenda this quarter: in traditional banking, controls sit around the product. In programmable markets, controls sit inside the product. AML logic, transfer restrictions, and freeze authority are now lines of code embedded in the smart contract itself, not procedures executed by a compliance team after the fact. That changes everything about how custody, AML, and intervention authority get designed.

Do not try to predict the single winning rail. Stay systemically relevant regardless of whichever rail scales.

Download the full report

The 7-page CEO summary is worth your morning coffee. But the value is in the four executive views (Board, CRO, CTO, ExCo), real scenario models by business line, the four global regulatory archetypes, and a 10-step CEO action guide. Free download.

If you sit on a bank board, advise one, run risk or technology at one, or allocate capital to financial services, this is the report you wish your competitors had skipped.

Take care,

– Marc & Team

178: Moody’s AAA for an ERC-20

Marc Baumann — Fri, 15 May 2026 23:04:15 GMT

🚨Coming Monday: BCG’s flagship report on the future of digital assets in banking. 68 pages, and probably the most important report on digital assets in banking this year. 51 got early access. Free download lands May 18. Reserve your copy below.

Reserve your copy

Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team,

There is a lot happening in the United States. The CLARITY Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday, 15-9.

But the real signal wasn’t the vote. It was the joint statement from six bank trade associations (ABA, BPI, Consumer Bankers, the Forum, ICBA, and NBA) saying they support the bill and just want the stablecoin yield rules tightened. The banking lobby isn’t fighting crypto regulation anymore. They’re negotiating the terms. Plus:

Kevin Warsh is confirmed as the Fed Chair. He’s pro crypto.
The CFTC is federalizing prediction markets through litigation. On May 12, it filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in KalshiEx LLC v. Matthew T. Schuler, et al. (No. 26-3196). If the Sixth Circuit follows the Third, state gambling regulators lose authority over sports event contracts. [RELEASE]

These are our highlights this week:

Moody’s just rated AAA a tokenized fund
DTCC just rewired $25T of collateral
BlackRock files to squeeze stablecoin yield
Circle isn’t a stablecoin company anymore
Schwab opens crypto to 39M accounts at 75bps
Strategy ends ‘never sell’

And 15+ more signals. Let’s jump in 👇🌆

🚀 51 Insights and Proof of Talk are co-publishing the institutional digital assets report of 2026, launching at the Louvre, June 2 to 3.

See the partner brief

Top Signals This Week

Moody’s just rated an ERC-20

Moody’s gave a AAA-mf rating to an ERC-20 token. That’s the same grade it gives Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan’s money market funds.

The token is FILQ, a USD liquidity fund from Fidelity International, issued through Sygnum Bank’s Desygnate tokenization platform. It holds short-dated government securities, mirrors Fidelity’s Irish-domiciled $7B LVNAV money market fund, and starts with roughly $10M in on-chain AUM. It settles via smart contracts with 24/7 stablecoin-funded subscriptions. No CUSIPs, no transfer agents, no end-of-day NAV strikes. Restricted to non-US institutional investors. [Explore FILQ]

Why it matters:Moody’s is saying the blockchain wrapper doesn’t degrade sovereign debt quality. That’s the whole game. Capital allocators whose investment policies blocked “blockchain-native assets” can now point to a AAA-mf rating from the same agency that rates their existing Treasury MMFs. The institutional firewall just fell. And it sets the benchmark every other tokenized fund will be measured against.

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

BlackRock files to squeeze stablecoin yield

The GENIUS Act prohibits stablecoin issuers from paying interest to holders. BlackRock just filed two products designed to capture exactly that yield.

On 8 May 2026, BlackRock filed two post-effective amendments with the SEC.

Filing 1: BRSRV (BlackRock Daily Reinvestment Stablecoin Reserve Vehicle), a new fund holding cash, sub-93-day Treasuries, and overnight Treasury repos. Shares issued as “OnChain Shares“ through a permissioned system across multiple public blockchains. Securitize Transfer Agent LLC¹ keeps the official ownership records. Off-chain identity systems link wallet addresses to verified investors. $3M minimum. The filing does not yet name the chains.
Filing 2: An on-chain share class for the existing $7B BlackRock Select Treasury Based Liquidity Fund. BNY Mellon Investment Servicing acts as transfer agent, recording shareholders on Ethereum using the ERC-20 token standard ². Off-chain KYC links wallets to investor records. This is the first time a public ETH share class has been bolted onto an existing BlackRock money-market product.

Both build on BUIDL, BlackRock’s first tokenized MMF launched in March 2024 with Securitize.

Why it matters: If stablecoin issuers can’t share yield with holders, the yield stays in the reserve pool. By law, that reserve pool has to sit in short-term Treasuries, repos, or 2a-7 money market funds. BRSRV is a 2a-7-aligned fund packaged for on-chain settlement — designed for institutional investors who want to move out of non-yield-bearing stablecoins into a regulated fund that pays daily yield. Context: Circle’s Reserve Fund (USDXX) manages ~$66B, with ~90% managed by BlackRock. BlackRock already runs the money. Now it’s offering the product that keeps the yield too.

DTCC just rewired $25T of collateral

On May 12, DTCC confirmed that its Collateral AppChain, first introduced at last year’s Great Collateral Experiment, is on track for production in Q4 2026. The platform is built as shared infrastructure: collateral providers, receivers, managers, triparty agents and custodians all work from one ledger rather than reconciling across systems that today run in silos. [RELEASE]

On May 13, 2026, they also released white paper with Finadium and modeled what happens when a single institution moves 25% of its book onto the platform: $1.9B in capital freed by year three, plus another $225M from capital relocation. [Whitepaper]

Be smart: DTCC is solving the two biggest bottlenecks in collateral management: the weekday-only settlement window and triparty silos. BNY, JPMorgan, Euroclear, and Clearstream each run separate triparty platforms today. The AppChain doesn’t replace them, it gives them a shared layer to settle and reconcile on. This is the plumbing upgrade global finance has needed, and DTCC is building it.

Why it matters: Right now, if a bank wants to move collateral from one triparty agent to another, say, from BNY to JPMorgan, it’s slow, expensive, and often manual. Each agent runs its own system, its own collateral pool, its own rules. Nothing talks to anything else. DTCC just said it’s fixing that.

Circle isn’t a stablecoin company anymore

Circle Internet Group (NYSE: CRCL) released Q1 2026 results before the bell on May 11, 2026. [Quarterly Report]

Total revenue and reserve income hit $694M, up 20% YoY. Adjusted EBITDA rose 24% to $151M.
But net income dropped 15% to $55M as operating expenses surged 76% (heavy post-IPO stock comp).

Circle also disclosed an ARC token presale (stablecoin-native L1) of 740M tokens at $0.30 each. The buyer consortium spans VC (a16z crypto, Haun, General Catalyst, IDG), TradFi (Apollo, BlackRock, Janus Henderson, Marshall Wace, SBI, Standard Chartered Ventures), and exchanges (ICE, Bullish). [ARC Whitepaper]

Circle also introduced the Agent Stack, Circle CLI, Agent Wallets, Agent Marketplace, and Nanopayments built on Circle Gateway, designed for machine-to-machine payments down to $0.000001.

Why it matters: Circle’s net income fell 15% even as revenue grew 20%. The squeeze is structural. Distribution, transaction, and other costs hit $407 million in Q1, up 17% YoY. Most of that is the Coinbase revenue share: Coinbase takes 100% of reserve income on USDC held on its platform and 50% of off-platform reserve income, per the 2023 amended agreement. As USDC balances on Coinbase have grown, Circle’s economics have compressed. Confirmed by Coinbase CFO Alesia Haas and CLO Paul Grewal during the Q1 2026 earnings call, the USDC distribution agreement between Coinbase and Circle automatically renews every three years. So, Circle is leaning towards Arc. If USDC lives natively on Circle’s own chain, with USDC as gas, Circle keeps the sequencer fees, the float, and the network economics. The ARC consortium is a who’s-who of distribution partners buying tokens before mainnet. Circle is turning itself from a stablecoin issuer into an infrastructure company.

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Schwab opens crypto to 39M accounts at 75bps

On 13 May 2026, Charles Schwab announced the phased rollout of Schwab Crypto, opening spot bitcoin and ether trading to eligible US retail clients. Custody sits at Charles Schwab Premier Bank, SSB, with Paxos providing sub-custody and trade execution. Clients open a separate Schwab Crypto account linked to their existing brokerage account, with BTC and ETH viewable alongside traditional holdings on Schwab.com, Schwab Mobile, and thinkorswim. The pricing, 75bps on dollar/ trade, sits below Fidelity (1% on ETPs) but 50% above Morgan Stanley’s E*Trade pilot, which launched at 50bps on 6 May 2026 with BTC, ETH, and SOL. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: Schwab’s “lowest in the industry” claim was outdated the day it launched. The 75bps fee benchmarks against Coinbase retail (tiered 0.5%+ depending on payment method) and Fidelity (1% on most crypto routes). Robinhood remains effectively free via spread-based PFOF. Morgan Stanley turned on the E*Trade spot crypto pilot at 50bps on 6 May 2026, one week before Schwab’s announcement. E*Trade has 8.6M accounts. [Morgan Stanley’s CEO note]

Strategy ends ‘never sell’

On the Q1 2026 earnings call (May 5) and a follow-up CNBC interview on May 8, Phong Le formalized what the market had begun to suspect: Saylor’s “never sell” doctrine is now governed by a math test. Le named two conditions. [NEWS]

Strategy will sell BTC when doing so is more accretive to Bitcoin-per-share than issuing equity to fund the company’s preferred-stock dividend obligations, specifically the Series A Perpetual Stretch Preferred (STRC), which carries an 11.5% coupon.
Strategy will sell to harvest tax positions, either realizing deferred gains or capturing losses.

Le said the sell calculation activates when MSTR trades below book value or when mNAV drops below 1.22x.

Why it matters: Strategy has raised $8.5B through Stretch in 10 months ($2.07B in Q1, another $3.51B between April 1 and May 3) and faces roughly $1.5B in annual cash dividend obligations across its preferred stack. Saylor had earlier floated selling Bitcoin to cover dividends, which sent MSTR down ~4% intraday. The Bitcoin pile is the asset; the preferred dividends are the liability. Le is preparing the market for the moment the dividend stack can’t be paid by issuing more common equity.

Other Signals

Infrastructure and Markets

Franklin Templeton and Kraken parent Payward announced a strategic partnership to bring tokenized equities and yield products to blockchain networks. Link
Animoca Brands and Nuva Labs launched NUVA, an Ethereum-based marketplace designed to connect $19B of tokenized real-world assets to decentralized finance. Link
DTCC announced it will use Chainlink’s infrastructure and data standards for its upcoming blockchain-based Collateral AppChain. Link
Broadridge expanded its core tokenization engine to support equities, funds, alternative assets, and money market instruments on a single platform. Link
CME Group plans to launch cash-settled, Nasdaq-backed crypto index futures on June 8, pending regulatory review. Link

Regulation and Policy

The Bank of England confirmed it is treating stablecoins as a ‘new form of money’ on par with e-money and tokenized deposits. Link
Vietnam’s Deputy Minister of Finance announced that a regulated domestic crypto asset market could launch as early as Q3 2026. Link
Bhutan’s Gelephu Mindfulness City (GMC) launched an accelerated licensing and banking framework for crypto firms already regulated in major global hubs. Link

Banking and Payments

Anchorage Digital and major Mexican conglomerate Grupo Salinas partnered to process cross-border payments using federally regulated stablecoins. Link
Privy integrated its embedded wallet infrastructure with Stripe Terminal and the Tap to Pay SDK to enable in-person stablecoin payments. Link
Global forex and CFD broker Pepperstone has deployed Fireblocks’ digital asset infrastructure to manage custody, compliance, and DeFi execution. Link
Paybis secured both a MiCA crypto-asset service provider license and a PSD2 payment institution license from Latvia’s central bank. Link

Funds, Deals and others

JPMorgan filed its own competing tokenized money market fund (JLTXX) for stablecoin reserves. LINK
Japanese telecom giant KDDI is acquiring a 14.9% stake in Nasdaq-listed crypto exchange Coincheck Group for $65M. Link
21Shares launched the first U.S. spot Hyperliquid ETF (ticker THYP) on Nasdaq, offering exposure to the HYPE token. Link
Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic raised $120M in a Series D funding round at a $670M valuation. Link
MARA sold 20,880 Bitcoin for approximately $1.5B in Q1 to repurchase convertible notes and fund infrastructure expansion. Link
Arkham published an on-chain map of Tron wallets tied to Iran’s central bank following their OFAC designation. Link

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

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

Marc Baumann — Fri, 15 May 2026 17:34:59 GMT

Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️

Brent Johnson has spent roughly 25 years in financial markets, and he has one of the cleanest frameworks afor thinking about the dollar. Back in 2018, when the "de-dollarization" narrative was just starting to simmer, he stepped onto the global stage with a theory that sounded almost arrogant at the time. He called it the Dollar Milkshake Theory.

Watch on Youtube

But one phrase that made me more curious was:

“Stablecoins are a stealth weapon of empire. They are quietly re-dollarizing the world from the bottom up. They do something no military base or trade agreement ever could.”

That is a strong phrase, but in this conversation, it was not used for effect. It was used as a description of what is already happening. The logic is straightforward. If people around the world want to hold dollars, but they want them in a form that is faster, cheaper, and easier to move than the legacy banking system allows, stablecoins become the obvious answer. And because dollar stablecoins have to be backed by dollar assets, that creates new demand for U.S. Treasury securities.

Dollar Milkshake Theory, a framework he first laid out in 2018 that argued, against almost universal consensus at the time, that the U.S. dollar would strengthen precisely as the rest of the world printed more money. It was controversial then. It looks prescient now. The DXY is hovering around 99.66 even as gold has already crossed $5,000, which is, strangely, exactly what Brent said would happen.

So I sat down with him to ask the next question. Now that the milkshake thesis has largely played out, what is the new chapter? And where do stablecoins, tariffs, a $39 trillion national debt, and a potential sovereign crisis all fit together?

His answer was one of the most coherent explanations I have heard of, where the dollar actually goes from here, and why the U.S. government’s decision to let private companies issue dollar-backed stablecoins may be the smartest geopolitical move of the decade.

About Brent: Brent Johnson is the founder and CEO of Santiago Capital, a San Francisco-based registered investment advisor founded in 2011. He holds an MBA in International Business from the Thunderbird School of Global Management and began his career as an auditor at Philip Morris before moving through Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette in New York City. He has spent roughly 25 years in global macro markets and is the creator of the Dollar Milkshake Theory, first articulated publicly in 2018. Alongside his RIA practice, he runs a standalone institutional research subscription at research.santiagocapital.com. In June 2025, he joined Monetary Metals' advisory board, advising on the distribution of gold-backed fixed-income products, including gold leases and bonds. He hosts a weekly show called Milkshakes, Markets and Madness on YouTube.