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Top Signals This Week

DTCC brings capital markets on-chain

On May 4, 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 (Kraken’s parent). [RELEASE]

Why it matters: We recently dissected the importance of shareholders and voting for tokenised stocks and their impact on wrappers and native issuers. Platforms like Ondo Global Markets (voting rights using Broadridge’s Proxyvote) and Kraken’s xStocks built real traction, offering tokenized stock exposure. But these are structured as collateralized loans or derivatives, holders get price performance, not legal ownership. Whereas Superstate offers natively issued tokenised stocks with voting rights in partnership with Broadridge. DTCC makes this very simple. DTCC’s tokens will include full UCC Article 8 entitlements, voting rights, native dividends, and SEC protections. This chooses between a synthetic derivative with counterparty risk and a legally identical DTC-issued digital twin easy for institutions.

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

CLARITY Act takes a step further

Senators Tillis and Alsobrooks dropped the Section 404 compromise for the CLARITY Act. It strictly bans platforms like Coinbase from paying passive yield simply for holding stablecoins. But there’s a massive loophole: platforms can pay rewards if you actually use the network, like staking, providing liquidity, or voting, and they can scale those payouts based on your total balance. [NEWS]

Why it matters: Europe’s MiCA bans stablecoin yield absolutely, no activity exemptions, no loopholes. The U.S. preserved economic incentives. And, the US gained another edge over MiCA with the CLARITY Act becoming the dollar hegemony. This legislation creates three distinct lanes for the digital dollar. We have the offshore standard (Tether’s $187B USDT), the U.S. incumbent (Circle/Coinbase’s $75.6B USDC), and now, the compliant challenger. Tether’s launch of USAT (Genius Act compliant stablecoin) now feels like a better move to fight for U.S. institutional capital. This also works with China, offering yield on e-CNY.

Blockchain just bypassed global payment rails

On May 6, 2026, Ripple redeemed Ondo Short-Term U.S. Government Treasuries (OUSG) on the XRP Ledger. Instead of waiting days for legacy settlement, Mastercard’s Multi-Token Network (MTN) translated the on-chain action into a compliant fiat instruction. J.P. Morgan’s Kinexys then instantly debited Ondo’s blockchain account and routed U.S. dollars directly to a Singapore bank. The on-chain leg cleared in under five seconds. By utilizing this hybrid approach, the consortium bypassed the “stablecoin sandwich” model, and its 0.1%-1.5% friction fees, proving public blockchains can trigger regulated, real-time fiat settlement globally. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: This is a pure example of how trapped capital can be freed with blockchain. This transaction unlocks the “intraday repo.” Institutions can now borrow and repay funds on the exact same day using tokenized securities as collateral. Moreover, Mastercard faces an FCA antitrust probe over its traditional wallet rails. By building the MTN orchestration layer, it is preemptively disrupting its own legacy model before public blockchains render it obsolete. Meanwhile, SWIFT is scrambling to launch a defensive permissioned EVM chain this year. This pilot proves global institutions don’t need to wait for SWIFT; they can route around it right now.

Securitize brings atomic settlement to equities

On May 4, Securitize ($4B AUM) received FINRA CMA approval to operate as a regular broker-dealer capable of custodying tokenized securities, executing atomic swaps (T+0), and underwriting onchain IPOs. To operationalize this immediately, Securitize partnered with Jump Trading and Jupiter to launch regulated trading for tokenized equities directly on the Solana blockchain. Simultaneously, Securitize is merging with Cantor Equity Partners II in a $1.25B SPAC deal, slated to trade as $SECZ. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: Securitize just collapsed the roles of prime broker, clearinghouse, and transfer agent into a single smart contract. But it comes with a massive catch. Securitize bypassed traditional exchange fragmentation by tapping Jump Trading’s Automated Market Maker and Jupiter (which handles 90% of Solana’s $2T lifetime volume). They mathematically enforced US Regulation NMS within a permissionless blockchain, solving the liquidity drought that previously killed security tokens.

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AI just got a bank account

On May 5, 2026, Anchorage Digital and Google Cloud launched Agentic Banking, an institutional infrastructure granting AI agents regulated access to fiat and digital asset rails. Google provides the cognitive engine via Gemini and MPC key management; Anchorage, holding an OCC federal charter, acts as the execution layer. They introduced a “Know Your Agent” (KYA) standard to authenticate software identities and enforce real-time spending limits. Furthermore, Anchorage integrated with M0 to let firms spin up custom stablecoins to fuel these workflows. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: The machine-to-machine (M2M) economy operates on thousands of micro-transactions per hour. Legacy rails simply cannot support this velocity. Stripe’s 2.9% + $0.30 base fee, compounded by cross-border surcharges, pushes transaction costs above 4%. Anchorage circumvents the legacy processing bottleneck entirely, settling directly on high-throughput blockchain rails and stablecoins.

Morgan Stanley starts crypto price war

Morgan Stanley quietly launched a spot crypto trading pilot on E-Trade, BTC, ETH, SOL, at 50 bps, powered by ZeroHash custody infrastructure secured in September 2025. Full rollout targets all 8.6M E-Trade customers by year-end. [NEWS]

Why it matters: Morgan Stanley at 50 bps undercuts Coinbase's 60 bps entry tier, Schwab's 75 bps, and Robinhood's upper spread of 95 bps. Bloomberg's Eric Balchunas called it: "This mirrors the pre-ETF fee compression playbook, where managers slashed expense ratios to zero to capture share”. Execution is becoming a commodity. And, the fee war in crypto trading has just started.

Western Union’s stablecoin goes live

Western Union launched USDPT, a federally regulated, U.S. dollar-denominated payment stablecoin issued by Anchorage Digital on the Solana blockchain. The stablecoin is currently live for internal treasury settlement and partner liquidity, enabling 24/7 on-chain settlement and eliminating the need for idle pre-funded accounts. A consumer-facing spend layer called ‘Stable by Western Union’ will launch in June 2026 across Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and the Philippines. They have also introduced the Digital Asset Network (DAN). [RELEASE]

Why it matters: Western Union does not just want to kill its SWIFT bill, but also building an agentic network. The Digital Asset Network (DAN) connects the payment system to 600,000 cash-out points, making WU the cash-out layer for the entire stablecoin economy. Every stablecoin transaction that ends in physical local currency at a WU agent will not only build a network but also bring fee revenue.

SIX Group unifies crypto and capital markets

FINMA approved Switzerland’s SIX Group to merge its blockchain entity, SIX Digital Exchange (SDX), into its traditional CSD, SIX SIS AG, and simultaneously authorized crypto custody within that unified entity. SIX calls it “one plug to two worlds.” Separately, SIX struck a deal with Chainlink in April 2026 to pipe €2T in Swiss and Spanish equities data across 75+ blockchain networks via DataLink. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: For years, institutions ran two separate stacks: prime brokerage for equities, crypto-native custodians for digital assets, zero overlap. SIX just eliminated that duality. Also, there is cross-margining. When crypto and equities sit inside the same CSD, institutions can post tokenized Treasuries or Bitcoin as real-time collateral against traditional derivative positions. SIX's unified CSD creates the same opportunity across the TradFi-DeFi divide.

Other Signals

Infrastructure and Markets

Kraken launched CFTC-regulated crypto spot margin trading for U.S. retail users. This is the first product rollout utilizing licenses from Kraken’s newly acquired derivatives exchange, Bitnomial. Link
Solana Foundation and Google Cloud launched Pay.sh, a gateway service allowing AI agents to autonomously pay for APIs per request using stablecoins. Link
FalconX partnered with CFTC-regulated exchange Kalshi to offer institutional clients prime brokerage and block trading access to prediction markets. Link
Securitize, Jump Trading Group, and Jupiter have launched a fully on-chain, regulated secondary market for tokenized US equities. Link
Mastercard partners with Yellow Card for scaling stablecoin payments in the EEMEA region. Link
The NYSE filed a proposal to allow tokenized versions of stocks and ETFs to trade on the exchange under DTCC’s tokenization pilot program. Link

Regulation and Policy

Crypto custodian Taurus has been granted a MiFID II investment license by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC). Link
Taiwan lawmaker, Dr Ko Ju-Chun, proposed using part of the country’s $602B foreign exchange reserves to hold Bitcoin as a national reserve asset. He also asked Taiwan’s central bank to prepare a report within a month on stablecoins and digital asset reserves. Link

Banking and Payments

Anchorage Digital announced a seed investment into the newly launched State Street Federal Stablecoin Reserves Money Market Fund. Link
CME Group announced plans to launch Bitcoin volatility futures on June 1, 2026, pending regulatory review. Link
Stablecoin payments startup Rain has become a Mastercard Principal Member to expand its global card offerings. Link
Shinhan Card, one of the largest South Korean credit card companies, will pilot stablecoin payments on Solana. Link

Funds, Deals and others

Core Scientific has agreed to acquire Oklahoma-based bitcoin miner Polaris DS LLC in a $421M transaction. Link
Kraken’s parent company, Payward, announced the acquisition of Hong Kong-based Reap Technologies for up to $600M in a cash-and-stock deal. Link
21Shares launched the first U.S. exchange-traded fund tracking Canton Coin (ticker: TCAN) on the Nasdaq exchange. Link
Coinbase selected Centrifuge as its preferred tokenization infrastructure, making it the default issuance layer for assets across its ecosystem and the Base network. It also made a strategic equity investment in Centrifuge. Link
Strategy executives announced the company will likely sell portions of its Bitcoin holdings to fund dividend payments for its $8.5B STRC preferred stock. Link
Andreessen Horowitz’s digital asset arm raised $2.2B for its fifth dedicated crypto venture fund. Link
Crypto exchange Bullish has agreed to acquire global transfer agent Equiniti for $4.2B, assuming $1.85B in debt and issuing $2.35B in stock. Link
Bitwise will take over investment management of the $267M Superstate Crypto Carry Fund (USCC), renaming it the Bitwise Crypto Carry Fund. Link
SBI Holdings is in talks to buy a stake in crypto exchange Bitbank and make it part of the company. The deal is still under review, with details on timing and structure not yet finalized. Link

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

176: the disruptors are paying rent

Marc Baumann — Sat, 02 May 2026 01:16:16 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team,

I’ve been to several Bitcoin conferences. This time in Las Vegas, a sitting SEC Chair showed up. So did the Vice President. Here’s what you need to know:

Paul Atkins became the first SEC Chair ever to address a Bitcoin conference. He unveiled ACT (Advance, Clarify, Transform) and published a token taxonomy that puts four of five categories (digital commodities, collectibles, tools, stablecoins) outside the securities perimeter.
Vice President JD Vance told the audience: “Crypto and digital assets, particularly Bitcoin, are part of the mainstream economy and are here to stay.”
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino unveiled the “Resilience Stack”: Holepunch, the Keet messaging app, the WDK self-custody toolkit, and the QVAC local-AI development platform, alongside the open-source Mining Development Kit (MDK).

Corporate treasuries, sovereign allocators, and the people who used to send associates are now sending CFOs. This is the biggest signal of the week.

These are our highlights this week:

Morgan Stanley targets stablecoin issuers’ $320B reserve pool
Western Union to launch a stablecoin to kill its SWIFT bill
Broadridge’s tokenized stock landgrab
Meta shipped what Libra was supposed to be
Vanguard’s Index Engine bought $500M of BitMine
Bridge made Phantom and Metamask issue Visa card

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

🚨 51 is hosting a private event for institutional decision makers in Miami on May 4, ahead of Consensus. If you want to be in the room, sign up here.

Top Signals This Week

Morgan Stanley targets Stablecoin issuers’ $320B reserve pool

On April 23, 2026, Morgan Stanley launched the Stablecoin Reserves Portfolio (MSNXX). It’s a money market fund holding cash and U.S. Treasuries (under 93 days), charging a 0.15% fee with a $10M minimum. It’s built strictly for tier-one stablecoin issuers to comply with the 2025 GENIUS Act’s strict 1:1 reserve mandate. [RELEASE]

Concurrently, Morgan Stanley rolled out a spot Bitcoin ETP, MSBT, at a cut-throat 0.14% fee and launched “DAP Class“ tokenized treasury shares that mirror off-chain ledgers onto the blockchain.

Why it matters: Stablecoin reserves are the new prime brokerage. The market is $320B and growing. Tether alone holds $141B in U.S. Treasury exposure, which makes it the 17th-largest holder of U.S. government debt on the planet. Circle parks the bulk of USDC’s reserves in its own SEC-registered government MMF. The economics are simple. Every dollar of payment stablecoin must be matched 1:1 by a high-quality liquid asset in a regulated vehicle. The yield on that asset accrues entirely to the issuer. Holders get nothing under the GENIUS framework.

That means competition between stablecoin issuers cannot happen on price. It can only happen on distribution, compliance, trust, and utility. Tether and Circle have a decade-long head start on all four. Morgan Stanley plans to custody the reserves of those who don’t.

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Western Union to launch a stablecoin to kill SWIFT bill

During its Q1 2026 earnings call on April 24, McGranahan formally outlined Western Union’s three-layer digital asset strategy.

USDPT, a GENIUS Act compliant stablecoin issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, will launch in May 2026 on Solana in select countries with key agent partners. The goal is to replace Western Union’s existing SWIFT-dependent settlement infrastructure, utilized for agent network funding.
The Digital Asset Network (DAN) goes live this week with its first partner. DAN lets crypto wallet users, Phantom, Solflare, and any future integration, convert digital dollars into local fiat at any Western Union agent or retail location.
The USD Stable Card, built with Rain and Visa, launches later in 2026 across dozens of markets.

Why it matters: Western Union is launching a stablecoin to kill its own SWIFT bill. McGranahan was explicit during the Q&A: USDPT is not consumer-facing. It is internal infrastructure, a SWIFT replacement for the cross-border settlement Western Union uses to fund its agents in 200+ countries. Western Union pays SWIFT-network correspondent banking fees on every funding leg today. The SWIFT-based correspondent banking model requires massive pre-funded accounts across every corridor, traps working capital in 2–5 day settlement cycles, and bleeds the company through FX remeasurement losses. Replacing that with an on-chain USDPT transfer collapses cost and time-to-settle. The stablecoin’s entire purpose is to take a cost line off Western Union’s P&L. That is a different game from competing for stablecoin reserves like Morgan Stanley just launched.

Broadridge’s tokenized stock landgrab

On April 28, 2026, Ondo Finance integrated Broadridge’s new Web3-enabled ProxyVote platform across its tokenized stock and ETF catalog. Token holders now log in with a crypto wallet, receive prospectuses and issuer communications, and submit proxy votes that flow back into Broadridge’s traditional aggregation pipeline. Ondo Global Markets attributes votes from token holders to specific underlying securities. Broadridge bundles those preferences alongside conventional brokerage votes, provided Ondo Global Markets consents. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: TradFi is consuming the value layer. The crypto narrative was disintermediation, but, in reality, it is absorbing the new market structure with blockchain as an infrastructure. Decentralized protocols can’t magically replicate the multi-jurisdictional legal framework needed to interface with 10,000 public companies. They have to rent it. By extending its ProxyVote platform to Web3, Broadridge established a dominant foothold over the governance layer. The fees and margins for corporate plumbing will stay with the legacy gatekeepers. And, they are upgrading its backend through partnerships and acquisitions.

Meta shipped what Libra was supposed to be

On 29 April 2026, Meta began routing creator payouts in USDC to a select group of creators in two pilot markets, Colombia and the Philippines. Eligible creators receive an in-app notification, link a compatible self-custody or exchange wallet, and from then on receive Reels bonuses, ad-share earnings, and subscription revenue in stablecoins on Solana or Polygon. Meta does not handle local-currency conversion. That step belongs to the wallet (Bitso in Colombia, GCash and Coins.ph in the Philippines). Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron told Fortune the program will expand to 160+ countries by year-end. [NEWS]

How it works: Wallets are linked through Facebook. Settlement runs on Solana and Polygon. Stripe handles the tax reporting.

Why it matters:In 2019, Meta wanted to BE the stablecoin. Libra was issuer, association, governance, the full stack. Congress killed it. In 2026, Stripe owns the rails, Circle owns the dollar, Solana and Polygon own the chains. Meta just owns the users. Three billion of them. Issuance is regulated, capital-intensive, and politically radioactive. Distribution is just product. Meta got every commercial benefit of stablecoin distribution with zero issuer liability. Bridge is now the back-end for MetaMask, the issuance layer for Visa’s stablecoin card program, the rails behind Phantom’s debit card, and the payouts engine for Meta. Stripe’s stablecoin accounts are live in 101 countries. That is not a payments company. That is the AWS of money.

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Vanguard’s Index Engine bought $500M of BitMine

Vanguard Capital Management filed a Schedule 13G on April 29, 2026 disclosing a 5.13% beneficial ownership stake in BitMine Immersion Technologies (NYSE: BMNR), the largest Ethereum treasury company on the planet. The filing covers 23,340,410 shares with sole dispositive power, valued at roughly $480 to $500 million at recent prices. The position makes Vanguard one of BMNR’s top three institutional holders. [SEC Filing]

Why it matters: Vanguard’s reversal on third-party crypto ETFs went live December 2025. giving its 50M+ brokerage clients access to spot Bitcoin, Ether, Solana and XRP ETFs. The firm continues to refuse to launch its own. Internal mandates that block spot crypto ETFs do not block crypto-treasury equities. Pension plans, insurance general accounts, sovereign wealth funds, family offices with strict IPS language can all buy BMNR, MSTR, Metaplanet, Twenty One. The DAT structure converts blockchain-native risk into a CUSIP, a ticker, a 10-K, and a proxy ballot. That packaging is regulatorily neutral in a way ETFs are not.

Bridge made Phantom and Metamask issue a Visa card

On 29 April 2026, Stripe published a developer post detailing the full integration of Bridge stablecoin card programs with Stripe Issuing and Stripe Connect. To do so, Bridge has partnered with Visa. The technical convergence eliminates the need for developers to stitch together separate banking-as-a-service, custody, KYC, and stablecoin-to-fiat conversion vendors. One API now does all of it. [RELEASE]

Zooming in: The cards are Visa-branded prepaid debit cards issued by Lead Bank, the Kansas City fintech sponsor that already settles Visa stablecoin transactions on the Solana blockchain. Stripe handles fraud controls, dispute management, real-time authorization, and the global Visa network plumbing. Bridge handles wallet connectivity, just-in-time stablecoin-to-USD conversion, and onchain settlement.

Why it matters: The crypto card stack just collapsed from five vendors to one reputed vendor. Stripe has rolled out on-off ramp, custody, sponsor bank, card network and compliance to one product. Interestingly, Lead Bank, a $4B Kansas City community bank, has become the default sponsor for crypto-native card programs.

Other Signals

Infrastructure and Markets

Visa adds Polygon, Canton, Base, Arc and Tempo to its global stablecoin settlement program. Link
AWS Marketplace went live with the Chainlink Data Standard, making Data Feeds, Data Streams, and Proof of Reserve available to enterprise developers, with reference architectures routing reserve data through Amazon API Gateway, Lambda, and DynamoDB. Link
Coinbase Asset Management announced the Coinbase Stablecoin Credit Strategy (CUSHY), targeting institutional yield from onchain lending and private credit. Link

Regulation and Policy

Senator Cynthia Lummis vowed a Senate markup of the CLARITY Act in May at Bitcoin 2026, warning that missing this window pushes comprehensive crypto legislation to 2030. The House already passed the bill 294-134, the Senate Agriculture Committee has cleared its version, and the White House has publicly backed it. Link
Israel approved BILS, the first regulated shekel-pegged stablecoin, after a two-year supervised pilot on Solana. Link
Hong Kong’s HKMA warned that fake “HKDAP” and “HSBC” tokens are circulating despite no licensed stablecoins being issued yet. Link
The CFTC sued Wisconsin in federal court to block state action against Kalshi, Polymarket, and Coinbase, asserting “exclusive jurisdiction” over event contracts on registered exchanges. Link
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) approved rules allowing authorized funds to maintain primary investor records on public DLT networks. Link
On April 28, the CFTC, joined by the DOJ Civil Division, filed suit in the Western District of Wisconsin, asking the court to declare that state gambling statutes do not apply to event contracts listed on CFTC-registered Designated Contract Markets and to permanently enjoin the state from enforcing them. Link
Gemini’s Olympus unit secured a Derivatives Clearing Organization (DCO) license from the CFTC to clear trades natively. Link

Banking and Payments

Paystand launched USDb at Bitcoin 2026, the first Bitcoin-aligned stablecoin built for B2B finance. Link
Bitbank and Epos Card launched Japan’s first crypto-linked credit card on April 27, allowing Visa bill payments to be settled directly from BTC held on Bitbank. Link

Funds, Deals and others

MARA entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Long Ridge Energy & Power from FTAI Infrastructure for $1.5B. Link
Tether Investments announced a proposal to merge publicly-listed Twenty-One Capital (XXI) with global financial services firm Strike and Bitcoin miner Elektron Energy. Link
Securitize and Computershare have partnered to allow U.S.-listed clients to issue tokenized equity securities alongside traditionally registered shares. Link
MoonPay buys Sodot, a Isreali key management infrastructure company, for $100M. Link

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

175: Stress test of DeFi

Marc Baumann — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 22:27:48 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team

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

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

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

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

These are our highlights this week:

Why Treasury’s record buyback matters to USDT
Congress just rewrote Fed access rules
The $196M hole Aave didn’t code
Singapore just flanked PAXG with a bank
DTCC front-runs Crypto to own tokenized Wall Street
Japan’s banks ditch Euroclear for Canton JGB repo

And 15+ more signals. Let’s jump in 👇

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Top Signals This Week

Why Treasury’s record buyback matters to USDT

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

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

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

Congress just rewrote Fed access rules

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

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

The $196M hole Aave didn’t code

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

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

PRO Analysis:

Singapore just flanked PAXG with a bank

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

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

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

DigiFT obtained CMS + RMO licenses in December 2023.
Standard Chartered-backed Libeara launched the MG 999 synthetic gold fund.
Tokenized commodities and credit, under Project Guardian with 40+ financial institutions.

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DTCC front-runs Crypto to own tokenized Wall Street

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

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

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

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

PRO Analysis:

Japan’s banks ditch Euroclear for Canton JGB repo

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

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

Other Signals

Infrastructure and Markets

Coinbase introduced the app store for agents, Agentic.Market. Link
Kalshi is launching crypto perpetual futures on April 27. The CFTC-regulated prediction market, most recently valued at $22B, brings non-expiring crypto contracts to US retail for the first time. Link
Polymarket announced plans to launch perpetual futures with up to 10x leverage on BTC, gold, Nvidia, and other assets. Link
Core Scientific priced $3.3B in senior secured notes due 2031 at a 7.75% coupon. Proceeds fund data centre expansion across Georgia, Texas, North Carolina, and Oklahoma as the miner pivots deeper into AI hosting. Link
$350M in crypto shorts liquidated in 24 hours as Bitcoin rallied from $74K to $78K. A classic short squeeze, triggered as US-Iran tensions cooled and traders moved back into risk assets. Link

DeFi and Blockchain

North Korea’s Lazarus Group deployed “Mach-O Man,” a new macOS malware campaign targeting crypto and fintech executives. Link
Tether froze $344M in USDT across two Tron addresses in coordination with OFAC and US law enforcement. Link
Tether minted $1B USDT on Ethereum. Link

Regulation and Policy

Japan’s Cabinet approved reclassifying 105 cryptoassets, including BTC and ETH, as financial instruments under the FIEA. Same legal status as stocks and bonds, insider trading rules now apply, and a 20% flat capital gains tax is on the table. Link
The Swiss Federal Council published its final Capital Adequacy Ordinance (CAO) on April 22, 2026. The ordinance specifies the regulatory capital treatment for select, undisclosed assets for banks headquartered in Switzerland. Link
Belarus legalized crypto banks handling 26 cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and Toncoin. Licenses cover 11 services: deposits, loans, staking, transfers, token issuance, and exchange. Link
US Admiral Samuel Paparo confirmed INDOPACOM is running a live Bitcoin node for operational security tests. First time a US military combatant command has publicly acknowledged direct participation in the Bitcoin network. Link
A White House official publicly condemned the banking sector’s lobbying against a compromise on yield-bearing stablecoins within the proposed CLARITY Act. Link

Banking and Payments

Coinbase listed tGBP, the first UK-regulated pound-pegged stablecoin, on its global platform. Issued by BCP Technologies under the FCA’s sandbox framework, giving British users on-chain GBP without FX conversion costs. Link
Singapore Gulf Bank (SGB), a licensed digital bank in Bahrain, has launched a stablecoin minting and redemption service for corporate and high-net-worth clients. Link

Funds, Deals and others

Payward (Kraken) has agreed to acquire the U.S.-based digital asset derivatives platform Bitnomial. The transaction is valued at up to $550M in a combination of cash and stock. Link
Michael Saylor’s Strategy has bought another $2.54B in Bitcoin. Link

Our CEO Notes this week

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

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

174: Goldman's first Bitcoin ETF

Marc Baumann — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 23:37:52 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team.

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

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

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

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

Here’s what we’re covering:

Deutsche Börse front-runs Kraken IPO with $200M stake
Goldman Sachs files first-ever Bitcoin ETF
Charles Schwab launches spot crypto trading for 39 million accounts
UBS leads Swiss Banks into live CHF Stablecoin pilot
Visa is building to replace Visa
HSBC takes Stablecoin stack public on Canton blockchain
Ripple lands Kyobo to tokenize Korean Sovereign Bond
ECB undercuts US Stablecoin model with tokenization terms

And 15+ more signals. Let’s jump in 👇

Exclusive for 51 Readers:

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Top Signals This Week

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

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

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

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

Goldman Sachs files first-ever Bitcoin ETF

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

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

Charles Schwab launches spot crypto trading for 39 million accounts

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

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

UBS leads Swiss Banks into live CHF Stablecoin pilot

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

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

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

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Visa is building to replace Visa

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

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

Go to terminal

HSBC takes Stablecoin stack public on Canton blockchain

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

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

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

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

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

Ripple lands Kyobo to tokenize Korean Sovereign Bond

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

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

ECB undercuts US Stablecoin model with tokenization terms

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

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

ECB Macroprudential Bulletin 33, April 2026

Other Signals

Infrastructure and Markets

Chainlink puts €2T of Swiss and Spanish equities data on-chain. SIX, the operator of the Swiss and Spanish exchanges, partnered with Chainlink to pipe its equities data directly onto blockchain networks. Link
Ether.fi launches crypto card on OP Mainnet, driving record $680M single-day TVL increase. Link
Tether invests in $134M round for Stablecoin Development Corp, a public stablecoin-infra vehicle. Link
Galaxy launches GalaxyOne for Business, integrated treasury platform for US entities. Link

DeFi and Blockchain

BNB Chain burns 1.57M BNB (~$1.02B) in the 35th quarterly auto-burn. Link
Legal & General Asset Management tokenizes £50B liquidity funds on Calastone’s network. Link
Ondo Finance files with the SEC for the tokenised S&P 500 tracking fund on Ethereum. Link
Keyrock issues tokenized corporate bond on Ethereum via Sygnum and Obligate. Link
Tron announces plan to upgrade network with post-quantum cryptography. Link

Regulation and Policy

SEC Division of Trading and Markets issued staff guidance providing a five-year no-action relief for certain self-custody crypto apps and DeFi interfaces from registering as broker-dealers. Link
UK FCA opens consultation on comprehensive crypto asset regime for 2027 rollout. Link
JPMorgan reports US CLARITY Act nearing final agreement. Link
White House study finds weak case for stablecoin yield ban. Link

Banking and Payments

Societe Generale-FORGE to integrate MiCA-compliant Euro stablecoin EURCV into MetaMask. Link
AllUnity launches MiCAR-compliant EURAU euro stablecoin on Stellar. Link
Rakuten integrates XRP into its payment network for 44M users in Japan. Link
Quantoz launches licensed Polish Złoty and British Pound stablecoins under MiCA. Link
PayPal integrates Brazil’s Pix instant payment system for small business checkout. Link
X product lead hints at crypto integration for upcoming “X Money” payments service. Link

Exchange, ETP and Market Structure

Bitwise launches spot Avalanche ETP (BAVA) with in-house staking for AVAX rewards. The ETP provides spot exposure to Avalanche (AVAX) and stakes the underlying assets through its in-house division to generate yield. Link
Goldman Sachs files with SEC for Bitcoin Premium Income ETF. Competes directly with BlackRock on yield-generating crypto products. Link
21Shares files amended S-1 for spot Hyperliquid ETF (THYP) on Nasdaq. Link
OKX launches regulated perpetual futures “X-Perps” in the EEA.
Leverages its Malta MiFID license to capture EU derivatives share pre-MiCA. Link

Our CEO Notes this week

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

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

173: iran chose bitcoin

Marc Baumann — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 23:27:57 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team.

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

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

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

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

It was that kind of week.

Here’s what we’re covering:

The US just cracked open $7.7T in retirement savings to Bitcoin [Link]
Visa connected all agentic payment protocols to one rail [Link]
Morgan Stanley launched a spot BTC ETF that undercuts BlackRock by 44% [Link]
Three federal agencies published stablecoin rules in 48 hours [Link]
CME Group goes 24/7 for all crypto derivatives starting May 29 [Link]

And 20+ more signals. Let’s jump in 👇

Exclusive for 51 Readers:

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

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

Top Signals This Week

Visa connects all agentic payment protocols

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

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

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

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Morgan Stanley launches spot BTC ETF

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

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

(Source: Bloomberg)

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

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

Get Morgan Stanley’s full digital asset playbook in the 51 Terminal 👇

Go to terminal

U.S. just gave Stablecoins a banking rulebook

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

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

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

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

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

CME Group goes 24/7

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

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

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

Bitcoin in your 401(k)

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

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

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

Other Signals

Infrastructure and Markets

Broadridge’s DLT repo platform processed $8 trillion in March 2026. That’s 392% growth year over year. Repo is the plumbing of capital markets, $4T+ traded daily. Broadridge just proved DLT works at that scale. [RELEASE]
Circle launched cirBTC. A wrapped Bitcoin product designed to challenge WBTC. Circle is betting its institutional reputation that the market wants a trust-minimized, audited alternative. [NEWS]
Securitize hired Brett Redfearn as President. He ran the SEC’s Division of Trading and Markets. [NEWS]
Pyth Network data marketplace launches with Fidelity and Euronext. On-chain price feeds backed by TradFi institutions. [NEWS]
Tether testing investor appetite at $500B valuation. If they raise at that number, Tether would be one of the 20 most valuable private companies on earth. [NEWS]

Regulation and Policy

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

CFTC sued multiple states over prediction market jurisdiction. This ties directly to the Hougan quote at the top. Prediction markets are becoming a real asset class, and the turf war between federal and state regulators just went public. [NEWS]
Hester Peirce publicly apologized for the SEC’s past regulatory approach. A sitting SEC Commissioner said the agency got it wrong. That doesn’t happen often. [NEWS]
Todd Blanche named interim Attorney General. The DOJ’s approach to crypto enforcement is shifting. [NEWS]
EU considering centralizing all crypto supervision under ESMA. One regulator for all 27 member states. If adopted, this would be the most significant structural change to MiCA since it was enacted. [NEWS]

Banking and Payments

Schwab confirmed spot Bitcoin and Ether trading launching H1 2026. 35 million brokerage clients about to get direct access. [NEWS]
Standard Chartered exploring full takeover of Zodia Custody. A top-20 global bank potentially going all-in on digital asset custody. [NEWS]
Paysafe and MoonPay partnered for crypto payments. Paysafe processes $167B annually. [NEWS]
Swiss banks launched a CHF stablecoin sandbox. Seven banks including UBS. A consortium approach to national stablecoin issuance. [NEWS]
Circle’s CPN Managed Payments went live. [RELEASE]
Coinbase’s OCC trust charter received conditional approval. The largest US crypto exchange is becoming a nationally chartered trust bank. [NEWS]

Digital Assets and DeFi

Ethereum Foundation completed its 70,000 ETH staking target. $93M staked. The Foundation is eating its own cooking. [NEWS]
Ant Group / Anvita building AI agents on crypto payment rails. [NEWS]
IMF warned that tokenization could amplify financial stability risks. Worth reading for the counterargument. [Report]
Bitcoin quantum-resistant wallet prototype announced. [NEWS]
Solana launched STRIDE framework after the $285M Drift hack. [NEWS]
US Treasury launched cybersecurity threat-sharing for crypto firms. [NEWS]
Morgan Stanley plans a private credit fund. [Link]

Our CEO Notes this week

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

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

172: four rules, five days

Marc Baumann — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:10:52 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team.

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

The US Labor Department proposed allowing Bitcoin in 401(k) plans, opening digital assets to $7.7 trillion in American retirement savings.
US Congress advanced a payment stablecoin framework, pushing dollar-backed digital currencies closer to formal regulatory recognition.
The Treasury published its first rule under the GENIUS Act. Under $10B, you stay with your state. Over it, you move to the OCC.

Other highlights we’re watching this week:

U.S. Treasury publishes first GENIUS Act regulation
Arizona opens $7.43B of pension money to crypto
Franklin Templeton settles an acquisition in its own token
Citadel-backed EDX Markets applies for US trust bank charter
Moody’s rates first Bitcoin-backed $100M bond

and much more. Let’s jump in 👇

Top Signals This Week

The $500B stablecoin rulebook

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

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

🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline. Win in digital assets. We produce institutional-grade research that positions you as the authority in your category, then distribute it to 100,000+ decision-makers who act on what we publish.[let's talk →].

Arizona plugs pensions into the bitcoin reserve

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

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

Read our full CEO Notes👇

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Franklin paid in its own token

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

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

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

Read our full CEO Notes👇

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Citadel wants a bank charter

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

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

Moody’s just priced bitcoin as collateral

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

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

Other Signals

The US Labor Dept proposes Bitcoin in 401(k) plans. Link
Square enables Bitcoin payments for millions of merchants. Link
Senate Banking Committee to mark up the CLARITY Act in April. Link
S&P Dow Jones indices announce first tokenized index for onchain markets. Link
SoFi announces 24/7 banking hub that blends traditional cash with crypto. Link
Fed Vice Chair Barr calls for strong stablecoin oversight. Link
US Congress advances payment stablecoin framework. Link
StraitsX 40x stablecoin volume growth in SE Asia. Link
CoinShares begins trading on Nasdaq via SPAC. Link
HKMA Project Ensemble for wholesale CBDC. Link

Our CEO Notes this week

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

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

171: NYSE and Nasdaq pick sides

Marc Baumann — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 21:44:12 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team.

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

A bipartisan Senate deal on stablecoin yields finally broke months of gridlock on the Clarity Act (banks won).
Both NYSE and Nasdaq announced tokenization partners this week, but they have very different ideas about what comes next.

Our other highlights this week:

Franklin Templeton puts five ETFs on the blockchain
Coinbase and Better bringing crypto collateral to mortgage market
MoonPay launches open wallet standard for AI agents

and much more. Let’s jump in 👇

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

Top Signals This Week

Franklin Templeton puts five ETFs on the blockchain

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

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

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

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

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

🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline. Win in digital assets. We produce institutional-grade research that positions you as the authority in your category, then distribute it to 100,000+ decision-makers who act on what we publish.[let's talk →].

Senate reaches stablecoin yield deal, unblocks crypto bill

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

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

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

Read our past coverage on Clarity Act and stablecoin bills👇

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

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

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

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

👉Subscribe to PRO for our our daily, institutional-grade analysis

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

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

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

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

MoonPay launches open wallet standard for AI agents

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

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

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

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

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

Read our past Coverage on AI agent payments👇

News Flash

Basel Committee publishes first data on global banks’ crypto exposures. Link
FSB flags crypto risks, outlines 2026 regulatory priorities. Link
Tether hires a Big Four firm for the first full USDT reserves audit. Link
BlackRock CEO Fink backs tokenization, cites ~$150B digital asset exposure. Link
Invesco takes over Superstate’s $900M tokenized Treasury fund. Link
Coinbase brings exchange data on-chain via Chainlink DataLink. Link
Backed sunsets bTokens, shifts focus to xStocks tokenized equities. Link
Ethereum rethinks the scaling roadmap amid AI and quantum pressures. Link
Bitmine launches MAVAN, a US-based Ethereum validator network. Link

Our CEO Notes this week

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

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

Mastercard, PayPal, Stripe

Marc Baumann — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 12:19:40 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team.

The SEC did something this week that people will look back on.

They issued a 68-page joint interpretation on token classifications together with the CFTC, for the first time in 183 years of combined existence.
Chairman Atkins proposed a principles-based framework, replacing stock-market checklists with broad standards like disclosure and investor protection.
Director Moloney declared the end of the Howey Test for crypto, the 80-year-old standard used to classify tokens as securities, proposing a tailored registration path for digital assets instead.

Folks, let’s be real: If you've spent any time in crypto regulation, you know that these moves are a breakthrough.

Here are the highlights this week:

SEC approves Nasdaq’s plan to trade tokenized securities.
HSBC and Standard Chartered received Hong Kong’s first stablecoin licenses
Mastercard agreed to acquire BVNK for 1.8 billion
Figure launched private credit infrastructure on-chain with Apollo and Pantera
ICE (NYSE’s parent) launched a private credit intelligence platform with Apollo as anchor partner.
Morgan Stanley filed an amended S-1 for a spot Bitcoin ETF on NYSE Arca.
Flow Traders launched a 24/7 OTC desk for tokenized assets, including Franklin Templeton’s BENJI and Tether Gold.

and much more. Let’s jump in 👇

🎙️ Bonus: We also spoke with SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce about crypto’s new rules, and she had some surprising things to say. “I apologize”, listen to the full conversation 👇

Top Signals This Week

SEC and CFTC jointly define what a security is, and what it isn’t

The SEC and CFTC issued a joint 68-page interpretive release (legal guidance) on March 17, setting out a five-part token taxonomy: digital commodities, digital collectibles, digital tools, stablecoins, and digital securities. The release treats protocol staking, mining, and airdrops as non-securities activities when they do not involve a separate investment contract. The same day, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins previewed “Regulation Crypto Assets,” a forthcoming safe harbor (temporary exemption) proposal offering early-stage token projects up to four years and $5M in capital formation without full SEC registration. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: The Howey test now has an expiration date: the SEC formally recognizes that investment contracts can terminate, and a token does not remain a security forever once the network reaches maturity, clearing the path for DeFi protocols and VC funds that previously had no clean exit to secondary distribution. The infrastructure response is already visible: Mastercard is acquiring BVNK, and Standard Chartered and DBS are securing stablecoin licenses in Hong Kong. Every compliance team that blocked institutional exposure to crypto on securities grounds now has to update the memo.

Read our full CEO notes on this topic👇

🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline. Win in digital assets. We produce institutional-grade research that positions you as the authority in your category, then distribute it to 100,000+ decision-makers who act on what we publish.[let's talk →].

SEC approves Nasdaq’s plan to trade tokenized securities

The SEC on March 18 approved Nasdaq‘s rule change to let market participants settle trades in Russell 1000 stocks and ETFs tracking the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 as blockchain-based tokens, with settlement running through the DTC‘s tokenization pilot that received no-action relief (regulatory comfort letter) on December 11, 2025. Tokenized shares trade on the same order book as traditional shares, with the same ticker and CUSIP. Holders keep the same voting rights, dividends, and execution priority. First token-settled trades are not expected until Q3 2026 at the earliest. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: For years, the problem with crypto tokens was that once they got classified as securities, there was no way out. The Howey test was a roach motel. You checked in, you never left. The SEC just changed that. They formally said investment contracts can terminate. A token doesn’t stay a security forever once the network matures. That sounds technical but the consequences are huge. Every DeFi protocol and every VC fund that couldn’t figure out how to get to secondary distribution now has a path. You can already see the reaction. Mastercard is buying BVNK. Standard Chartered and DBS are locking down stablecoin licenses in Hong Kong. The institutions aren’t waiting to see how this plays out. They’re moving now.

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

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HSBC and Standard Chartered to receive Hong Kong's first stablecoin licenses

HSBC and a joint venture between Standard Chartered, Animoca Brands, and Hong Kong Telecommunications are expected to receive Hong Kong’s first stablecoin issuer licenses as early as March 24. The licenses fall under Hong Kong’s Stablecoin Ordinance, which took effect in August 2025 and requires all fiat-referenced stablecoin issuers to obtain HKMA approval, 1:1 high-quality liquid asset (HQLA) reserves, and T+1 par redemption (redeemable at face value within one business day). The HKMA is prioritizing institutions already authorized to issue physical banknotes. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: Beijing killed onshore RWA tokenization in February. Hong Kong then did something interesting: it gave the first stablecoin licenses to the banks that already print Hong Kong’s physical banknotes. That’s not a coincidence. It tells you exactly how seriously they’re treating this. When the same institution is trusted to print paper money AND issue digital money, stablecoins stop being a fintech category and become monetary infrastructure. Now add one detail: the HKD is pegged to the dollar. Which means HSBC and Standard Chartered are effectively issuing a dollar that runs on Chinese distribution rails. The people who still think of stablecoins as a crypto thing are going to have a bad year.

👉Subscribe to PRO for our our institutional-grade analysis that drops on Monday

Mastercard pays $1.8B for BVNK

Mastercard agreed to acquire BVNK, a UK-based stablecoin infrastructure company processing $30B in annualized volume across 130+ countries, for up to $1.8B. $300M is contingent on performance milestones. The deal is 2.4x BVNK‘s $750M Series B valuation from December 2024. Coinbase entered exclusivity at roughly $2B in late 2025 and walked. Over the past 18 months, Mastercard had been steadily building its stablecoin presence partnering with MoonPay, SoFi, Fiserv, and Chainlink, and launching an 85-company Crypto Partner Program in March 2026. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: In just over a year:

Stripe paid $1.1B for Bridge in February 2025.
MoonPay paid $100M+ for Iron a month later.
Mastercard just paid $1.8B for BVNK in March 2026. Every transaction prices stablecoin infrastructure higher than the last.

Whoever controls the fiat-to-stablecoin conversion layer at enterprise scale owns the toll booth on a corridor where stablecoin transfers on public blockchains hit $27.6 trillion in 2024, more than Visa and Mastercard‘s combined annual card volume. Instead of card networks competing with stablecoins, they are acquiring their way onto the new rails before they get disintermediated. Simple.

Read our full CEO notes on this topic👇

PayPal expands PYUSD to 70 markets

PayPal made its dollar-backed stablecoin, PYUSD, available across 70 markets spanning Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America and North America, adding 68 countries in a single release after operating exclusively in the U.S. and U.K. since the token’s August 2023 launch. The first wave skews toward remittance-heavy corridors. Users earn 4% annually in the U.S. on holdings and can convert to local currency on withdrawal. PYUSD is issued by Paxos Trust Company, a federally chartered trust company regulated by the OCC, making it the largest dollar stablecoin from a U.S. federally supervised issuer to go global. Its market cap has grown from under $500M in early 2025 to roughly $4.1B. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: Most stablecoin issuers have the token but not the distribution. PayPal has both: 439M active accounts, 35M merchants, and now 70 countries switched on in one go. Cross-border fees still average 6.49% worldwide. PayPal made it free to send dollars to any PayPal wallet, with local-currency conversion at the other end. Western Union is still piloting stablecoin settlement in select corridors. MoneyGram is experimenting. The PYUSDx framework, launched in February 2026 with MoonPay and M0, goes one step further: it lets any app issue its own branded stablecoin on top of PYUSD reserves, turning PayPal from a payment company into a stablecoin infrastructure provider.

Stripe is building network for AI agents

On March 18, 2026, Stripe and Tempo co-released the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), an open specification that lets AI agents request, authorize, and settle payments in milliseconds without human approval at checkout. Tempo’s simultaneously launched mainnet, backed by $500 million from Paradigm and Thrive Capital at a $5 billion valuation, settles the stablecoin leg with sub-second finality at 100,000-plus TPS. MPP accepts both stablecoins and fiat through a single integration, with Visa, Mastercard, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Shopify all listed as design partners on the specification. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: Most agent payment protocols pick a lane: Coinbase’s x402 is crypto-native, Mastercard’s Agent Pay is card-native. Stripe is the only company right now that checks all the boxes: crypto rail, fiat rail, merchant base, AI protocol (both payment rails and commerce), Web3 interface (Privy), AI billing (Metronome), trust bank charter (Bridge) and blockchain (Tempo). It’s Stripe’s bid to become the default financial infrastructure for the agent economy, the same way it became the default for human e-commerce. This will compound if Stripe goes public in 2026.

Read our past CEO notes on Stripe👇

News Flash

US Senator Lummis signals compromise on crypto market structure bill. Link
Coinbase tokenizes its Bitcoin Yield Fund on Base with Apex Group. Link
S&P licenses S&P 500 to Trade[XYZ] for perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid. Link
Anchorage launches institutional collateral management on its Atlas network. Link
Vietnam to license domestic crypto exchanges and block offshore platforms. Link
Sygnum’s off-exchange custody surpasses $1B in assets. Link
LayerZero and Centrifuge partner for omnichain RWA distribution. Link
Ironlight raises $21M Series A for tokenized securities infra.Link

Our CEO Notes this week

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

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

169: NYSE, OKX, Kraken, ECB, Revolut

Marc Baumann — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 21:17:27 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team.

NYSE picked OKX. Nasdaq picked Kraken. America's two largest stock exchanges are now both building tokenized equities through crypto-native settlement partners, and neither picked a bank.

Also this week, the SEC and CFTC signed a historic MOU to coordinate on digital asset oversight, with Chairman Atkins pushing for a unified framework including joint product reviews.

Here are our highlights this week:

Nasdaq to build tokenized equities with Kraken
ECB launches tokenization roadmap
DATs’ shopping spree: BitMine bought 60,976 ETH (~$120M), while Strategy added 17,994 BTC ($1.3B).
The CLARITY Act is still stuck over stablecoin yield, but Senators are crafting a compromise tying rewards to transaction activity. Polymarket odds of passage sit at 69%.
Aon (one of the world’s largest insurance brokers) completed the first stablecoin insurance premium payment.
~50% of US spot Solana ETF assets are now held by institutional investors.
USDT and USDC control 84% of a $312 billion stablecoin market. This week the ECB said: enough. Pontes launches Q3 2026, and it’s designed to make sure Europe’s tokenized markets settle in euros, not dollars.

and much more. Let’s jump in 👇

Top Signals This Week

Nasdaq to build tokenized equities

Payward, Kraken’s parent company, has partnered with Nasdaq to build an equities gateway connecting regulated tokenized equity markets with permissionless blockchain networks. The gateway is powered by Kraken’s xStocks framework, which has surpassed $25 billion in total transaction volume, including $4 billion settled on-chain since launching less than a year ago. Payward will serve as the primary settlement layer for Nasdaq’s upcoming equity token design, which preserves issuer control, regulatory compliance, and shareholder rights, targeting H1 2027 launch. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: NYSE chose OKX. Nasdaq chose Kraken. The two largest U.S. exchange operators are now both building tokenized equities through crypto-native settlement partners, NYSE targeting H2 2026 via OKX’s120 million users, Nasdaq targeting H1 2027 via xStocks’ $25 billion in live volume. Both follow the SEC’s January 2026 staff statement classifying tokenized equities the same as regular securities under federal law. The synthetic equity products already circulating on permissionless chains now need to be upgraded.

Read our full CEO notes on this topic👇

🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline. Win in digital assets. We produce institutional-grade research that positions you as the authority in your category, then distribute it to 100,000+ decision-makers who act on what we publish.[let's talk →].

ECB launches roadmap to build euro-anchored tokenized markets

The European Central Bank published the Appia roadmap on March 11, a dual-track initiative to build Europe’s tokenized wholesale financial markets entirely around central bank euro settlement. Track one, Pontes, is a DLT-based settlement layer connecting blockchain platforms to Eurosystem’s TARGET Services, launching Q3 2026. Track two, Appia, is the long-term ecosystem framework targeting a full blueprint by 2028. Starting March 30, the ECB will also accept DLT-issued securities as eligible collateral for central bank refinancing, first for the eurozone. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: The vast majority of stablecoin activity in Europe is USD-denominated. The ECB is building sovereign tokenized rails before dollar settlement becomes Europe’s default, and Pontes launching in Q3 2026 gives it a two-year head start as Europe’s only central bank settlement layer before the digital euro retail pilot begins H2 2027. The sequencing makes sense: MiCA set the regulatory frame, 12 European banks formed Qivalis, seeking EMI authorization from the Dutch Central Bank, to launch a euro stablecoin by H2 2026. Now Pontes gives them settlement rails. USDT and USDC control 84% of a $312 billion stablecoin market. This is the ECB’s counterbalance.

Listen to our podcast with Sveinn Valfells, to understand the European market 👇

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

Citi issues first digitally native structured note on Euroclear’s D-FMI platform

Citi has issued its first digitally native structured note on Euroclear’s D-FMI DLT platform, the first structured note and the first wealth management product issued on the platform. The note settles on T+0, carries a standard ISIN, and is immediately accessible to the wider market through Euroclear’s existing network of OTC desks, exchanges, and MTFs. Citigroup Global Markets Funding Luxembourg is the issuer, with Citi acting as issuing and paying agent. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: Euroclear’s D-FMI settles cross-border transactions across 50 markets and 2,000+ participants, a structured note issued here gets a standard ISIN on day one and plugs into the same OTC, exchange, and MTF rails institutional investors already use. The World Bank, AIIB, Emirates NBD, Doha Bank, İşbank, and Akbank have pushed total D-FMI issuance past EUR 1.2 billion. What the ECB’s Pontes is building as public infrastructure for central bank euro settlement, Euroclear D-FMI already operates as private infrastructure for commercial bank money. The standalone tokenization platforms built on separate chains are still disconnected from secondary market infrastructure. Euroclear just showed the path those assets eventually need to take.

👉Subscribe to PRO for our our institutional-grade analysis that drops on Monday

Florida passes first state-level stablecoin payment bill

The Florida legislature has passed SB 1568, creating a pilot program that allows state fees, licensing, registration, applications, renewals, to be paid using approved stablecoins. The House approved the bill 108–3 on March 11, sending it to Governor DeSantis for signature. Only GENIUS Act-compliant issuers with reserves above $1 billion qualify. If signed, Florida becomes the first state in the nation to accept stablecoin as payment for government fees. [BILL]

Why this matters: The GENIUS Act created the federal framework. Florida is the first state to build on top of it. The bill references GENIUS Act definitions directly, it doesn’t create a parallel regime, it plugs into the federal one. That’s the template other states will copy. The $1 billion reserve threshold locks out smaller issuers and funnels state payment flow through Circle and Tether. In practice, two companies just got a government distribution channel no competitor can access and no other state offers. The bill also authorizes the Department to conduct examinations and investigations of permitted issuers, Florida isn’t just accepting stablecoins, it’s building stablecoin regulatory infrastructure. Federal framework, federal rulemaking, state adoption, a full regulatory stack materializing in under 12 months.

Revolut secures full UK banking license

Revolut received full UK banking authorization from the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority on March 11, exiting the mobilization phase that had capped its total deposits at £50,000 since July 2024. The license allows Revolut Bank UK Ltd to offer lending, deposit accounts with FSCS protection up to £120,000, and full retail and business banking to its 13 million UK customers. Revolut, valued at $75 billion, holds 70 million customers across 40+ markets. One week earlier, it filed for a U.S. national bank charter with the OCC and FDIC.[RELEASE]

Why this matters: Revolut now holds banking licenses in the EU, the UK, and has filed for a U.S. national charter, lending in one, deposits in another, direct Fedwire and ACH access pending in the third. The FCA selected Revolut for its stablecoin regulatory sandbox in February, one of four firms chosen from 20 applicants. Banking license plus stablecoin issuance plus crypto trading is the full stack from one entity. The U.S. filing landed on an OCC pipeline that conditionally approved Circle, Ripple, Paxos, Fidelity, and BitGo for national trust charters in December.

Be smart: Revolut is the first to seek a full-service charter, not just a trust or custody wrapper. Morgan Stanley is building into crypto from the bank side. Revolut is building into banking from the crypto side. Same stack, opposite direction.

News Flash

Mastercard launches Program to connect crypto payments with global banking. Link
HSBC, Standard Chartered to Get Stablecoin Licenses in Hong Kong. Link
ECB unveils tokenized finance roadmap for EU autonomy. Link
SEC and CFTC sign MOU on digital asset regulation. Link
Ripple launches $750M buyback at $50B valuation. Link
US Senators negotiate stablecoin yield compromise for crypto bill. Link
Luxembourg's Wealth Fund (FSIL) has allocated 1% of its portfolio to Bitcoin. Link
SEC outlines approach to fund tokenization and crypto custody. Link
Ethereum Foundation tests DVT-lite with 72,000 ETH. Link
SEC Chairman pushes for unified SEC-CFTC crypto framework. Link
Bitmine reports $10.3B in crypto holdings including 4.5M ETH. Link
IMF flags global economic risks from Middle East conflict. Link

Our CEO Notes this week

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

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

168: NYSE, OKX, Kraken

Marc Baumann — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:39:02 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team.

The SEC submitted a proposal outlining how securities laws apply to crypto. This means: SEC won’t wait for Congress. And Washington is betting on private stablecoins and regulated crypto. [SEC] More on that below.

Here are our highlights this week:

ICE (NYSE’s parent) invested in OKX at a $25 billion valuation, with plans to let OKX users trade tokenized NYSE-listed stocks on-chain by H2 2026. [RELEASE]
- We sat down with the man responsible for this. Watch our interview here.
Morgan Stanley (AUM: $7T) applied for a crypto broker-dealer license, moving to offer direct BTC, ETH, and SOL trading to its E-Trade users through ZeroHash. [FILLING]
Kraken became the first digital asset bank to receive a Federal Reserve master account. This is historic. [RELEASE]
Five US regional banks (Huntington, First Horizon, M&T, KeyCorp, and Old National) are building “Cari,” a shared tokenized deposit network targeting launch by Q4 2026. [RELEASE]
Stripe is not buying PayPal. PayPal officially denied being in sale talks, and its stock dropped after the denial, reversing the initial 7% pop.
Mastercard processes 160 billion transactions a year. Now it’s letting AI agents spend that money for you. [RELEASE]

Let’s jump in 👇

Top Signals This Week

ICE (NYSE’s parent) invests in OKX at a $25B valuation

Intercontinental Exchange, NYSE's parent company, has taken a minority stake in OKX, valuing the crypto exchange at $25 billion. ICE invested roughly $200 million, secured a board seat, and licensed OKX's spot crypto prices to launch U.S.-regulated futures contracts. In return, OKX's 120 million users gain access to ICE's futures markets and NYSE tokenized equities, pending regulatory approval. OKB surged over 35% on the news. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: This is ICE's third major crypto infrastructure move in four months — it's buying infrastructure, piece by piece. Polymarket gave it a data layer it can license into derivatives pricing. The BNY and Citi partnership locked in clearing and settlement. OKX adds distribution: 120 million crypto users who will get access to NYSE tokenized equities by H2 2026. The business model is straightforward, licensing OKX's spot crypto prices to launch regulated U.S. futures, the same data-licensing playbook ICE has run for 20 years. It now controls the exchange, the clearing houses, the data pipes, the prediction layer, and the crypto user base.

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Kraken receive Federal reserve master account

Kraken Financial, Kraken’s Wyoming-chartered bank, has become the first digital asset company in U.S. history to receive a Federal Reserve master account, granted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City on March 4, 2026, after a 5.5-year regulatory process. The account is a limited-purpose Tier 3 structure: Kraken must hold 100% reserves, earns no interest on deposits, and has no access to the Fed’s emergency lending window. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: With this approval, Kraken settles directly on the Fed’s balance sheet in real time, no intermediaries, no holds, full U.S. government-backed finality. That closes the last major gap between crypto and traditional finance settlement. BNY Mellon and State Street‘s institutional pitch was built on exclusive Fed rail access, that exclusivity just ended. Timing matters too: this lands right before Kraken’s IPO, and a Fed master account is one of the most powerful things you can put in an S-1.

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Morgan Stanley applies for a crypto broker-dealer license

Morgan Stanley has applied for a crypto broker-dealer license with the SEC, moving to offer direct BTC, ETH, and SOL trading to its E-Trade users through ZeroHash as the backend settlement layer. This follows the bank’s earlier OCC filing to create Morgan Stanley Digital Trust, a federally chartered national trust bank focused on crypto custody. [FILLING]

Why this matters: Over the past six months,Morgan Stanley has filed for Bitcoin and Solana ETFs, hired its first Head of Digital Asset Strategy, applied for a crypto trust charter throughMorgan Stanley Digital Trust for custody, and updated its Investment Committee guidance to recommend 2-4% crypto allocations to its 16,000 financial advisors. The broker-dealer license connects it all: custody via the trust charter, trading viaE-Trade andZeroHash, product access via the ETFs, and distribution through the advisory network. These two filings alone, a trust charter for custody and a broker-dealer license for spot trading, gives Morgan Stanley the full client stack in crypto, with E-Trade’s retail base as the distribution engine.

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US regional banks launch “Cari” tokenized deposit network

Five U.S. regional banks, Huntington Bancshares, First Horizon, M&T Bank, KeyCorp, and Old National Bancorp have formed a consortium to build Cari Network, a permissioned blockchain platform for tokenized deposits. Led by former U.S. Comptroller of the Currency Gene Ludwig, the network targets an MVP in March, a pilot in Q3, and full customer rollout in Q4 2026. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan all ran private and permissioned blockchain experiments first, then graduated to public chains like Ethereum and Solana for live products, with BlackRock’s BUIDL fund and Franklin Templeton’s BENJI being the clearest examples. The regional banks building Cari on a permissioned network today may be on the same trajectory. With the GENIUS Act regulatory clarity may be exactly what pushes regional banks to eventually move from permissioned networks to public blockchains.

Santander and Mastercard complete Europe’s first AI agent payment

On March 2, Banco Santander and Mastercard completed Europe’s first live payment executed entirely by an AI agent inside a regulated bank, on real rails, with real money. The AI agent acted within rules set in advance by the user — a spending limit, approved merchant types, and a time window — completing the purchase without any human involvement at checkout. DBS in Singapore and Commonwealth Bank of Australia have run similar pilots under both Visa and Mastercard. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: AI agents are becoming a new buyer class, and the $5 trillion checkout is being rebuilt around them. Card rails settling in 3–5 days can’t support machine-speed transactions, making stablecoins the natural settlement layer and Mastercard is already there, enabling stablecoin spending at 150M+ merchant locations via Circle, MetaMask, and OKX. The real stakes sit in the standards battle: Stripe and OpenAI back one protocol, while Google, Visa, Shopify, and Walmart back a rival open standard — and whoever wins controls how $3T–$5T in annual agent-driven commerce gets routed, discovered, and settled.

The companies doing this are closing enterprise deals 5X faster because they’re following up on research that prospects already forwarded to their Board. Learn more.

News Flash

BBVA Joins Banking Consortium to Issue European Stablecoin. Link
Bitcoin ETFs inflows for first time in a month. Link
Rumours HK entity behind the crypto dump. Link
Hong Kong proceeds with stablecoin plans despite Beijing’s reservations. Link
Approval grant to launch first UAE dirham-backed stablecoin DDSC. Link
Chainlink to participate in the Bank of England’s Synchronisation Lab. Link
China to ban RWA tokenisation. Link
Bithumb puts South Korea regulators on alert. Link

Our CEO Notes this week

CEO Notes for PRO readers covers why the Kraken Fed master account changes the custodian pecking order for every allocator running an RFP right now, and what the ICE-OKX deal signals about which public chain wins the tokenized equities race. If you're making infrastructure or allocation decisions in the next 6 months, this is the briefing your competitors are already reading.

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

167: Stripe wants to eat PayPal alive

Marc Baumann — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:43:08 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team. Welcome back to your weekly briefing.

The US stablecoin regulation is maturing. The OCC just proposed new rules to put guardrails around stablecoins (digital money tied to the U.S. dollar), following the GENIUS Act that passed last year. The rules cover everything from who can issue them to how they must be backed and managed. [RELEASE]

👉 Join the 51 live session with SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce on March 6, 3pm EST. Spots are limited!

Reserve your spot

Other things we watched this week…

Digital asset treasury companies bought the dip: BitMine bought 51,162 ETH (~$100M), while Strategy added 592 BTC ($39.8M), and American Bitcoin (Eric Trump’s company) added 392 BTC ($25M).
Adoption: Meta is reportedly exploring stablecoin integration for its 3B+ users. BNP Paribas (largest bank in Europe) launches a tokenized MMF on Ethereum.
Circle reported strong Q4 results, with revenue up 77% year over year and USDC circulation reaching $75.3B, a 72% increase. On the news, its stock jumped over 20%, indicating that institutions are bullish, even as the broader crypto markets remain fearful.
The UK has been slow on stablecoin innovation, but the FCA is taking its first steps — it selected four firms, Monee Finance, ReStabilise, Revolut, and VVTX, to pilot stablecoin development in its Regulatory Sandbox.

Our 2026 Outlook is live. Inside you’ll find: A clearer read on what moved markets in 2025, where the market is headed and our highest conviction calls for 2026.

Our highlights this week:

Stripe weighs PayPal acquisition
Meta is exploring stablecoin payments integration
Circle posts strong Q4 revenue growth
BNP Paribas launches a tokenised MMF on Ethereum
Ethereum team outlines 2026 roadmap

Let’s jump in 👇

🚀 A lot more is going on that we’ll tell you in our PRO briefings.

If you're an institutional professional making decisions in this space, you're flying blind without PRO. 35k+ executives read us every single week.And they don't just skim headlines — they use our intelligence to make actual decisions.

Top Signals This Week

Stripe weighs PayPal acquisition

Stripe is reportedly weighing an acquisition of PayPal or some of its key assets, in talks that remain preliminary and may never result in a deal. The leak landed just as Stripe’s own valuation jumped to about $159B in a secondary sale. PayPal, by contrast, lost roughly a third of its value in 2025, currently being valued around $43B. Operationally, PayPal has been missing earnings expectations and losing market share to Apple Pay and Google Pay. According to the reports, possibilities range from a full takeover of PayPal Holdings to a more surgical deal for assets such as Braintree, its merchant acquiring and gateway unit, or Venmo, its consumer P2P wallet. [NEWS]

Why this matters: Stripe already dominates online payment processing for businesses, while PayPal brings more than 430M active accounts and availability in over 200 markets worldwide, along with PYUSD, its own dollar-backed stablecoin that has grown to a $4.1B market cap, making it already the 6th largest stablecoin globally. Folding that consumer network and native stablecoin into Stripe’s stack, and pairing it with Tempo, a payments-focused L1 blockchain incubated by Stripe, and Bridge (Stripe’s stablecoin platform that recently secured a conditional OCC national trust charter) would dramatically accelerate Stripe’s push into consumer finance and stablecoin payments. This positions Stripe to become a dominant stablecoin issuer and puts it on more equal footing with today’s leaders, Circle and Tether.

🔒 PRO Insight:

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Meta exploring stablecoin payments integration

Meta is reportedly testing stablecoin payments integration into WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, instead of launching its own token like Libra/Diem. It is planning to plug into existing stablecoins under the new U.S. GENIUS Act framework. Stripe is widely seen as the frontrunner for infrastructure, a natural fit given that CEO Patrick Collison already sits on Meta’s board. [NEWS]

What they are saying: Meta spokesman Andy Stone in a post on X. “This is about enabling people and businesses to make payments on our platforms using their preferred method”. (embed tweet on substack)

Why this matters: Social platforms are quietly becoming the next payments infrastructure. Elon Musk has been talking about integrating payments into X (Twitter), and Telegram has already integrated in‑app crypto payments. But Meta is a different scale entirely. With over 3B users across its apps individually, and already testing business payments in markets like Brazil and India via WhatsApp, Meta has both the distribution and the on‑ramp. If it integrates stablecoins at scale, it can move billions in payment volume off legacy card networks that charge 2–3% fees to near zero — and bring billions of people onto blockchain rails without them ever knowing it.

Circle posts strong Q4 revenue growth

Circle reported strong Q4 2025 numbers: USDC circulation rose 72% year‑on‑year to $75.3B, with quarterly on‑chain volume up 247% to $11.9T. Full‑year revenue and reserve income grew 64% to $2.7B. Circle generated $582M of cash‑style operating profit for the full year, but still reported a $70M accounting loss because it had to book $424M of stock‑based pay linked to its IPO. Meanwhile, EURC circulation grew 284% year‑on‑year to €310M, making it the leading euro‑denominated pledged stablecoin. [REPORT]

Key trends: USDC’s market share grew about 3% to ~25% while Tether fell 6% to ~62%, and USDC now accounts for roughly 47% of stablecoin transaction volume, signaling higher real usage than USDT. Other revenue grew 625% to $110M (from a near‑zero base), with management projected $150–170M for FY2026.

Why this matters: USDC’s market share is growing while Tether is losing ground, and Circle’s business is diversifying beyond being a pure interest-rate proxy. With Arc mainnet on track for 2026 — backed by strong testnet usage of 166M+ transactions — Circle is positioning USDC as the native payment layer for AI agent transactions. Circle’s early-mover advantage in agentic payments could be the most underappreciated part of this story.

🔒 PRO Insight:

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BNP Paribas launches a tokenized MMF on Ethereum

On February 19, 2026, BNP Paribas Asset Management issued a tokenized share class of an existing French-domiciled MMF on Ethereum. This made it the first major European bank to launch a regulated MMF on a public blockchain. The entire fund lifecycle; issuance, custody, dealing, and settlement is controlled in-house. No major competitor has demonstrated this level of vertical integration on a public chain. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: BNP Paribas timed this carefully. MiCA is now fully in place across the EU, with its Title V securities rules launching in mid-2026. This is when banks need the infrastructure to shift from pilots to large-scale production. BNP Paribas Asset Management, Securities Services, and CIB’s AssetFoundry are designed to meet the complete needs of European institutions. This setup allows them to plug in and scale quickly to compete with US $10.84B tokenized funds globally.

Ethereum team outlines 2026 roadmap

On February 18, 2026, the Ethereum Foundation published its 2026 protocol priorities: three big themes — Scale (increase transaction throughput), UX (make wallets behave like normal bank apps), and Harden the L1 (security and censorship resistance as Ethereum carries more real assets), with two major upgrades, Glamsterdam and Hegotá, planned across the year. Vitalik also published a quantum resistance roadmap this week. Noting that Quantum computers’ risk of breaking cryptography aren’t here yet — but Ethereum is engineering for that future now, while the window is still open. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: Over the past year, activity has moved away from Ethereum, with speed and low fees driving the shift. Retail users in particular moved to Solana, Base, and BNB Chain. But with the roadmap now focused on making L1 itself faster and cheaper, both retail and institutional activity have a reason to migrate back. For institutions, Ethereum still commands the deepest liquidity in crypto —$164B stablecoins,$55B TVL, and the broadest custody infrastructure.

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News Flash

MetaMask and Mastercard launch crypto cards in the United States. Link
ETHZilla rebranded to Forum in strategic evolution toward RWA tokenization. Link
IMF endorses US crypto regulatory framework in 2026 Article IV. Link
Progmat migrates $2B+ of its tokenized securities to Avalanche. Link
Japan’s SBI launches ¥10B ($64.5M) tokenized bond on ibet for retail investors. Link
Bitwise acquires Chorus One in a $2.2B staking expansion. Link
World Bank’s IFC invests $40M in Zetrix AI to expand blockchain infrastructure. Link
Crypto exchange HashKey launches RWA issuance for institutions. Link
BitGo secured a pivotal role to issue FYUSD stablecoin. Link
Tether assists the US DOJ in seizing $61M USDT linked to fraud. Link

That’s all for now, folks.

This quarter we've been deep in competitive intelligence for two top-10 asset managers. If your team needs similar support, please contact me at marc@fiftyone.xyz.

– Marc & Team

More feedback? Reply to this email.

166: Apollo bought 9% of a DeFi protocol

Marc Baumann — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 02:13:07 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team. Welcome back to your weekly briefing.

Here's where we are:

BTC is holding around $67K with the broader market steady near ~$2.3T. Polymarket odds for BTC reaching up $75K in February sit at 15%.
Institutions kept averaging into the drawdown: BitMine bought 45,759 ETH ($90M), while Strategy added 2,486 BTC ($168M).
Now, DeFi had an interesting week. Strong announcements (BlackRock x Uniswap, Apollo x Morpho), but the sector hasn’t seen a meaningful bid outside of MORPHO itself, which is up ~37% on the week. So we're looking at positive catalysts, but the market isn't rewarding the sector broadly yet. Keep that in mind.
Onchain infrastructure keeps growing regardless of price action. This is what I always tell people to watch. Hyperliquid is doing ~$5B in daily perp volume with ~$5B in open interest. More than Coinbase’s. Prediction markets are holding strong too: Polymarket and Kalshi combined for over $2.4B in weekly volume, with monthly notional staying above $13B even outside election cycles.

So the setup right now? Regulatory clarity advancing, protocols shipping, price sideways. That’s where we are.

Our highlights this week:

Stripe-owned Bridge secured conditional OCC [RELEASE]
BVNK secures MiCA Licence in Malta [RELEASE]
SEC’s new rule is bullish for stablecoins
Apollo bets on on-chain lending via Morpho
Citi completes a tokenization PoC on Solana
Kraken Plugs Into Wall Street’s Chat Network

Let’s jump in 👇

🚀 A lot more is going on that we’ll tell you in our PRO briefings.

Top Signals This Week

Regulatory progress

SEC staff dropped the net-capital haircut on payment stablecoins from 100% to just 2%, bringing them in line with money-market funds. That’s a big deal for broker-dealers — it removes a major barrier to actually holding stablecoins on their books. Commissioner Peirce called the old 100% charge “unnecessarily punitive.” [Peirce statement]

On top of that, the White House has set a March 1 deadline to break the stablecoin-yield impasse that’s stalling the CLARITY Act. A third closed-door session between banks and crypto reps went down Thursday — the White House signaled limited rewards will stay in the next draft, and banks are working on compromise language, but still no handshake. [CoinDesk coverage]

Bridge wins OCC approval for a national trust bank

On February 12, 2026, Stripe-owned stablecoin platform Bridge received conditional approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency(OCC) to establish a federally chartered national trust bank. If the charter is finalized, Bridge will be able to custody digital assets, issue stablecoins, and manage their reserves under direct federal oversight across all 50 United States. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: Stripe is the dominant global payments infrastructure provider processing $1.4 trillion in 2024 (roughly 1.3% of global GDP), embedded in over a million live businesses worldwide. It is now building Tempo, a purpose-built blockchain designed specifically for payments, and if Bridge secures full OCC approval, Stripe will have the federal license to issue its own stablecoin positioning it as a credible challenger to USDT ($184B market cap) and USDC ($73B market cap), backed not by a crypto-native startup but by the company already moving more money annually than most nations’ GDP.

🔒 PRO Insight:

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Citi completes a tokenization PoC on Solana

On February 13, 2026, Citigroup completed a proof of concept (PoC) tokenizing a bill of exchange on the Solana blockchain through its Trade and Working Capital Solutions division, working with PwC and the Solana Foundation. The pilot simulated the full lifecycle of the instrument using synthetic data: issuance, financing, distribution, and settlement. By converting the bill into a digital token, the bank embedded payment amounts, counterparties, and maturity dates directly into the asset’s code. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: Tokenization unlocks two structural shifts: fractionalization turns illiquid trade finance instruments into tradable tokens, opening a projected $24 trillion secondary market and letting banks optimize RWAs by offloading portions to non-bank investors; and atomic settlement on Solana kills the T+2 window entirely, eliminating counterparty risk and enabling just-in-time funding where cash moves at transaction completion, not days later.

🔒 PRO Insight:

Apollo bets on on-chain lending via Morpho

On February 13, the Morpho Association announced a cooperation agreement with Apollo. The deal: Apollo may acquire up to 90 million MORPHO tokens — 9% of total supply over a 48-month window. This isn’t Apollo‘s first collaboration with Morpho. The firm already has exposure through ACRED. On Morpho, investors can already deposit ACRED as collateral and borrow USDC. The cooperation agreement formalizes what was already an indirect relationship and escalates it from user to governance stakeholder. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: Morpho coined the phrase: “fintech in the front, DeFi in the back”. This model already powers $1B+ in Coinbase and Crypto.com loans. Bitwise launched an institutional-grade USDC yield vault on Morpho. Apollo joined as a governance stakeholder when lending yields fell below 10% for the first time in three years, and 57% of sponsor-backed deals in Q3 2025 priced below a 500 bps spread. Meanwhile, the sACRED levered strategy on Morpho has delivered up to ~16% versus ACRED’s standard 8–9%. This suggests Apollo might be exploring ways to leverage Morpho for better yield.

Punchline: For years we were debating whether institutions would ever touch DeFi. In 2026, it’s clear that the convergence is coming. This was the first big step.

🔒 PRO Insight:

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Kraken plugs into Wall Street’s chat network

On Feb 17, Kraken announced it has integrated its OTC trading desk with ICE Chat. This messaging platform serves 120,000 institutional users, including banks, brokers, hedge funds, and trading desks. They use it for real-time negotiations and execution across equities, fixed income, commodities, and derivatives. Kraken is the first cryptocurrency platform to connect with ICE Chat. Now, institutional traders can communicate directly with Kraken’s OTC desk through ICE Chat to trade crypto. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: By meeting institutions where they already work — inside ICE Chat’s compliance-ready infrastructure — Kraken removes the workflow friction that has long slowed institutional crypto adoption. This reinforces the growing trend of blockchains and DeFi becoming the backend of traditional finance, as seen with recent moves by BlackRock and Apollo. In this case, rather than building a crypto trading arm leveraging its NYSE systems, ICE is taking a lighter approach by simply opening its communication infrastructure to Kraken.

BVNK secures MiCA licence in Malta

On February 16, 2026, BVNK secured a MiCA CASP (Crypto Asset Service Provider) licence from Malta’s MFSA (Malta Financial Services Authority), positioning BVNK as one of the only European platforms combining MiCA-regulated crypto-asset services, an EMI licence for euro payments, and direct SEPA access in a single stack. Granting it rights to offer regulated digital asset services across all 30 EEA member states under a single, unified regulatory framework. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: With euro stablecoins and tokenized RWAs collectively projected to become a multi-trillion-euro market by decade-end and European institutions from SocGen (Société Générale – FORGE) to Clearstream already moving bonds and settlement on-chain. BVNK‘s unique single-stack offering of MiCA-licensed crypto services, euro payments, and direct SEPA access makes it critical plumbing for the institutions building in stablecoins and tokenized RWAs and stocks.

Listen to our podcast with BVNK👇

News Flash

Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala doubles Bitcoin ETF stake to $630M. Link
Harvard buys $86.8M in Ethereum ETF, trims Bitcoin position by 21%. Link
World Liberty Financial partners with Apex Group to pilot USD1 Stablecoin. Link
OpenAI launches a benchmarking system to secure crypto tokens. Link
Billionaire Peter Thiel fully exits Ethereum Treasury firm ETHZilla. Link
TON Foundation partners with Banxa to enable stablecoin payments. Link
Animoca brands secures Dubai crypto license for institutional services. Link
Ethereum protocol priorities for 2026. Link
Polymarket markets are now natively integrated with Substack. Link

That’s all for now, folks.

This quarter we've been deep in competitive intelligence for two top-10 asset managers. If your team needs similar support, please contact me at marc@fiftyone.xyz.

– Marc & Team

More feedback? Reply to this email.

165: The dip is being bought

Marc Baumann — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 07:08:00 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team.

After last week’s brutal sell-off that pushed BTC toward the low around $60k (2024 level), the market has finally staged a calm. Institutions are back in business buying the dip;

BitMine bought 40,613 ETH ($79M) while Strategy added 1,142 BTC ($90M).
Binance’s Secure Asset Fund for Users (SAFU) added about 8,770 BTC ($600M).
Goldman Sachs’ recent SEC filing showed about $2.36B in crypto exposure through ETFs, including Bitcoin ($1.1B), Ethereum ($1B), XRP and Solana (we assume that most of it is trading on clients’ books)

Regulatory momentum: The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) formed the Innovation Advisory Committee (IAC) — a 35-member panel including crypto CEOs and industry leaders tasked with shaping U.S. rules around blockchain and AI in financial markets. [RELEASE]

Meanwhile, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins told the Senate Banking Committee that while the agency can introduce temporary crypto rules, durable policy must come from Congress through legislation such as the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act.

“We need a firm grounding in statute so we can’t have any backsliding in the future.” — Paul Atkins, SEC Chairman

This push toward structured rulemaking comes as institutional adoption continues to deepen.

BlackRock BUIDL is now tradable on UniswapX and made a strategic purchase of UNI tokens. [RELEASE]

“This collaboration with Uniswap Labs alongside Securitize is a notable step in the convergence of tokenized assets with decentralized finance. The integration of BUIDL into UniswapX marks a major leap forward in the interoperability of tokenized USD yield funds with stablecoins,”
— Robert Mitchnick, Global Head of Digital Assets at BlackRock.

That’s what we can tell you here. A lot more is going on that we’ll tell you in our upcoming PRO briefing.

Our highlights this week:

LayerZero announced a Zero blockchain
State of the crypto market analysis
BlackRock BUIDL is tradable on UniswapX
Robinhood Chain public testnet is now live
Franklin Templeton and Binance collaboration

Let’s jump in 👇

Top Signals This Week

LayerZero announced Zero blockchain

On February 10, 2026, LayerZero launched Zero, a Layer 1 blockchain with backing from Citadel Securities, the DTCC, the New York Stock Exchange, Google Cloud, ARK Invest, and Tether. It will launch in fall 2026. Citadel Securities (processes one-third of U.S. retail equity orders) and ARK Invest (with Cathie Wood joining the advisory board) bought ZRO tokens directly. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: For the first time, major Wall Street infrastructure players like Citadel Securities, DTCC, ICE, and Google Cloud are directly backing a new public Layer 1 blockchain, signaling that traditional financial markets are seriously shifting toward on-chain settlement and need to maintain interoperability across fragmented blockchain ecosystems through zero blockchain. Citadel’s decision to acquire $ZRO tokens rather than equity represents direct economic alignment with network success.

Get all the alpha below👇

State of the crypto market

In January-February 2026, three major macro shocks occurred at the same time.

The U.S. Treasury removed $200B from bank reserves.
The Bank of Japan increased rates to 0.75%, and unwound over $500B in carry trades.
The AI disruption from Anthropic’s autonomous agents led to a crypto sell-off.

This pushed Bitcoin’s price down 45% from $126K to below $62K, erasing $800B in market value. [CEO NOTES]

Why this matters: Roughly 20–35% of Bitcoin ETF inflows came from hedge funds running cash-and-carry basis trades, not long-term allocators. These flows do not provide price support because they are fully hedged. The same institutions showing up as ETF buyers also appear as CME futures shorts. Net exposure: zero. Net price support: zero. This capital doesn’t “hold through volatility”. ETF redemptions rise, futures shorts are covered, and spot selling accelerates. What looks like a sentiment-driven drawdown is, in reality, a forced unwind. For allocators, this breaks the ETF signal. Inflows no longer equal conviction. Outflows no longer signal panic, but simply yield math. A dovish Fed, falling rates, or easing financial conditions can now increase selling pressure, not relieve it, by further collapsing the basis. Until the basis trade is fully flushed, Bitcoin is not trading on adoption or macro narratives.

Get all the alpha below👇

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BlackRock BUIDL is tradable on UniswapX

On February 11, 2026, Uniswap announced that BlackRock $2.4B BUIDL fund (tokenized U.S. Treasuries) is tradable on UniswapX. Facilitated by Securitize, the integration allows whitelisted institutional investors to swap BUIDL shares for USDC 24/7 with near-instant settlement. Simultaneously, BlackRock also purchased an undisclosed amount of UNI governance tokens, causing the asset to surge as much as 40% in a single day. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: While BlackRock has explored private ledgers, like JPMorgan’s Onyx, their move to public infrastructure highlights that private blockchains may not be effective for liquidity. Public DeFi platforms like Uniswap ($3B liquidity and $700M daily transaction volume) are cheaper, faster, and more liquid than what they could create on their own. By launching BUIDL on Ethereum and integrating with UniswapX, BlackRock is acknowledging that public blockchains are the best settlement layer. This move also validates Uniswap’s decision to prioritise compliance, and we can expect to see more DeFi protocols build compliance into their systems.

Punchline: For years we were debating whether institutions would ever touch DeFi. In 2026, it’s clear that the convergence is coming. This was the first big step.

👉Subscribe to PRO for our our institutional-grade analysis that drops on Monday

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Robinhood Chain public testnet is now live

On February 11, 2026, Robinhood officially launched the public testnet for Robinhood Chain, its proprietary Ethereum Layer 2 built on the Arbitrum Orbit tech stack. Designed as a “financial-grade” ecosystem, the network allows developers to test tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), including simulated stocks like Tesla and Amazon, and integrates directly with the Robinhood Wallet. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: Coinbase’s Base has championed a general-purpose ecosystem for memes, NFTs, and identity, but this model is increasingly viewed by the Ethereum community(including Vitalik) as redundant to the mainnet. Robinhood effectively sidesteps this critique by focusing on the RWA niche, adopting the same application-specific logic that made Hyperliquid a giant in the perpetuals sector. As this thesis proves, we can expect to see a wave of more specific Layer 2s focused on distinct niches.

Franklin Templeton and Binance collaboration

On February 11, 2026, Franklin Templeton and Binance launched an industry-first “Institutional Off-Exchange Collateral Program”. This initiative allows institutional traders to use Franklin Templeton’s tokenized money market fund shares issued via Franklin Templeton’s Benji Technology Platform as collateral for trading on Binance, without ever moving the assets onto the exchange (that’s the key!). Instead, the tokens remain held in regulated custody via Ceffu (Binance’s institutional partner), while their value is mirrored on the trading platform to margin positions. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: With this program, institutions have no reason to hold non-yield-bearing stablecoins as margin. Why hold USDT at 0% yield when you can hold Benji (FOBXX) at ~4.5% yield and still have the exact same trading power on Binance? Historically, exchanges like Binance made massive profits not just from trading fees, but from holding user deposits and earning interest on them. With “Off-Exchange Settlement,” the assets sit with the custodian, not Binance. Binance becomes a pure matching engine business.

The companies doing this are closing enterprise deals 5X faster because they’re following up on research that prospects already forwarded to their Board. Learn more.

News Flash

BBVA Joins Banking Consortium to Issue European Stablecoin. Link
Bitcoin ETFs inflows for first time in a month. Link
Rumours HK entity behind the crypto dump. Link
Hong Kong proceeds with stablecoin plans despite Beijing’s reservations. Link
Approval grant to launch first UAE dirham-backed stablecoin DDSC. Link
Chainlink to participate in the Bank of England’s Synchronisation Lab. Link
China to ban RWA tokenisation. Link
Bithumb puts South Korea regulators on alert. Link

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

164: Capital is repricing

Marc Baumann — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 00:46:43 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team.

What a week, folks – and only in crypto. We have a packed newsletter for you today to untangle everything that happened.

In case you missed it: Bitcoin crashed 30% in 7 days below $60K (is not already back at $70K) amid a brutal market-wide crash that wiped over $1T in value and lead $5B+ in liquidations.

Strategy and Bitmine are sitting on billions in unrealized losses, choosing not to sell and instead continuing to buy more, with Strategy adding 855 BTC this week. BlackRock's IBIT posted record-setting redemptions.

And the FUD machine is running full speed:

Epstein files just revealed he tried to steer Bitcoin's early development, funded Bitcoin Core devs through MIT, invested $3M in Coinbase in 2014, and Blockstream's CEO is facing calls to resign over island visit emails.
Traders are hunting for a hidden blowup. Pantera's Franklin Bi says the seller looks like a large Asia-based player with limited crypto-native counterparties.
Mining capitulation is accelerating. Hash rate economics are breaking down at these prices.

That’s what we can tell you here. A lot more is going on that we’ll tell you in our upcoming PRO briefing.

Now what? One thing to remember: the people building have never been more serious. Even if the people trading have never been more scared.

On top of that, we have major highlights this week:

Xi Jinping pushing Yuan to global reserve
Hong Kong crypto institutional capture
Tether $100M Investment in Anchorage
Fidelity FIDD stablecoin launch
Vitalik Buterin said that Ethereum L2 don’t scale
Polymarket hit with a nationwide class action

Let’s jump in 👇

Top Signals This Week

Xi Jinping pushing Yuan to global reserve

On February 1, 2026, President Xi Jinping made internationalizing the yuan a top national priority. He issued a directive in the Communist Party journal Qiushi to create a “powerful currency” for global reserve status. This move, described as monetary reform, is in line with the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) starting a multi-year effort to accumulate large amounts of gold. The bank officially holds over 2,300 tons of gold, but some estimates put the actual amount much higher. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: This directly challenges the US dollar’s reserve status and boosts de-dollarization through BRICS trade. This strategy indicates a shift toward a hard-asset-backed currency system. The discussion highlights the need to review investments in gold, Bitcoin, or hard assets as geopolitical changes aim to avoid the US dollar’s debt-based valuation.

📩 Work with us. We take 3 sponsors slots per quarter. Two are filled. We're selective because our readers are 35,000+ executives (75% C-level or founder). If you have a product that actually solves a problem for institutional crypto, [let's talk →]. If you're looking for cheap impressions, we're not the right fit.

Hong Kong crypto institutional capture

Hong Kong has shifted from “New Money” speculation to “Old Money” stability. Officials enforced strict bank-grade rules, pushing out major retail exchanges like OKX and Bybit. In their place, traditional giants like HSBC and state-linked Chinese firms are creating a regulated settlement layer. Through “Project Ensemble,” the city is now testing tokenizing real-world assets like bonds and shipping bills.

Why this matters: Hong Kong has deliberately moved crypto away from retail speculation and towards institutional infrastructure. Now, only large state-linked funds dominate Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs, creating trusted channels for future investment from mainland China. The main goal is tokenization: if banks and funds transfer trillions of dollars in assets to this platform, Hong Kong will become Asia’s key settlement hub, but for now, liquidity remains limited.

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The companies doing this are closing enterprise deals 5X faster because they’re following up on research that prospects already forwarded to their Board. Learn more.

Tether $100M investment in Anchorage

On February 5, 2026, Tether invested $100 million in Anchorage Digital, the federally chartered U.S. crypto bank and the issuer of its new compliant USA₮ stablecoin. The move tightens an already close partnership and gives Tether equity in the regulated infrastructure it now relies on for institutional growth in US. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: For years, U.S. institutions preferred USDC over USDT due to Tether’s offshore and opaque nature. Now, with USA₮ being fully federally regulated and this $100M investment in its U.S. chartered issuer, Tether gains the regulatory trust that institutions require. It maintains its massive liquidity advantage while shedding its old baggage, putting it in a favorable position for the next wave of serious institutional demand.

DAT death spirals as markets crash

As Bitcoin drops below $65K, the biggest DATs face billions in unrealized PnL. The industry now splits into two paths: firms turning treasuries into financial franchises and those in liquidity and valuation death spirals. Some large DATs keep buying—Strategy added 855 BTC this week. Smaller DATs struggle, making 2026 a key year for consolidation. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: In 2026, DATs will consolidate. The largest and best-capitalized ones, like Strategy and Bitmine, will survive. DATs that actively manage assets for yield, such as Bitmine with $374M in annual staking rewards, will also thrive. Smaller treasuries that can’t raise capital or generate yield will have to sell, either by merging or closing.

Read our full analysis below:

Fidelity FIDD stablecoin launch

On February 4, 2026, Fidelity Investments officially launched its USD-pegged stablecoin, the Fidelity Digital Dollar (FIDD), issued by Fidelity Digital Assets on the Ethereum blockchain. Backed 1:1 by cash, cash equivalents, and short-term U.S. Treasuries, FIDD complies with the recent GENIUS Act framework. The token went live for both retail and institutional clients via Fidelity’s platforms, with an initial market cap exceeding $59M. [RELEASE]

Why this matters: Fidelity leveraged the most underestimated advantage in financing existing customer relationships by skipping the distribution model that forces Circle, Tether to work with exchanges, giving Fidelity 100% margin retention, while maintaining the regulatory legitimacy Tether lacks through its OCC-supervised national trust bank charter and direct access to 50M retail accounts plus $17.5 trillion in institutional assets.

Shift in Ethereum L2 strategy

On February 3, 2026, Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, made a post that sparked a lot of discussion. He said that most current L2s stopped short and therefore don’t function as true scalability extensions of Ethereum, even though L2 technology itself remains essential and here to stay. Buterin now suggests we see Layer 2s as specialized chains. Each has its own unique features, like privacy and app-specific tools. [POST]

“L1 itself is scaling, fees are very low, and gas limits are projected to increase greatly in 2026. Original vision of L2s and their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense, and we need a new path.”
— Vitalik, Co-founder of Ethereum. [POST]

Why this matters: With L1 scaling improvements, not every institutional L2 has to use the same general-purpose model. Major general-purpose L2s like Coinbase’s Base, OKX’s X Layer, and Kraken’s Ink need to rethink their strategies, while institutions will focus on specialized L2s for regulatory compliance, performance or privacy. Example: Hyperliquid. It cuts costs, speeds up innovation, and better meets customer needs while securely linking to Ethereum.

News Flash

Polymarket hit with a nationwide class action lawsuit in the SDNY. Link
Gemini to exit U.K., EU and Australia, and focus on U.S. Link
Tether launches open-source MiningOS to challenge Bitcoin mining giants. Link
Hong Kong to start granting stablecoin issuer licenses in March 2026. Link
Wall Street giant CME Group is exploring issuing its own ‘CME Coin’. Link
ARK Invest goes on $19M buying spree as crypto stocks nurse losses. Link
Ripple Prime adds support for Hyperliquid for institutional access. Link
U.S. crypto policy shows hints of progress with bipartisan regulatory. Link

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

💎 Investor Insights (Alpha)

163: The Canton moment

Marc Baumann — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 14:30:04 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team.

While Blackrock took a quiet $100M stake in Canton, BitGo IPO’d at $2B and Tether launched its US stablecoin USAT, the biggest shift in crypto this week came from Capitol Hill:

“Advancing this bill brings us closer to a U.S. regulatory framework that protects consumers while allowing American innovation and businesses to thrive.”
— John Boozman, U.S. Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Chairman

The Senate Agriculture Committee advanced the first-ever crypto market structure bill, voting to give the CFTC authority over digital asset spot markets, but a full Senate vote is still pending. [RELEASE]
On Jan 28, SEC released a statement saying stocks and other securities don’t avoid U.S. securities laws just because they’re issued or wrapped as tokens. It also drew a clear line between issuer-issued tokens and third-party “synthetic” versions, signaling tighter scrutiny of tokenized markets. [RELEASE]
The SEC and CFTC formally launched “Project Crypto,” committing to work together on clear regulations. [RELEASE]

Meanwhile, Standard Chartered has issued a warning: stablecoins represent a "real threat" to bank deposits.

Our highlights this week:

BitGo’s $2.1B custody IPO
Fidelity announced the launch of the FIDD Stablecoin
Tether launches “USAT” stablecoin
BlackRock’s $100M Canton position
Coinbase rolls out prediction market
SEC taxonomy for tokenized securities

Let’s jump in 👇

Top Signals This Week

BitGo $2.1B public IPO

On Jan 22, BitGo Holdings (NYSE: BTGO) successfully priced its initial public offering of 11.8M Class A shares at $18.00 per share, beating the marketed range of $15-$17 according to reports and closed its first day of trading at $18.68 per share, just above its IPO price. The offering raised approximately $212.8M , with only 6.7% of the IPO’s shares being sold by existing stockholders. Goldman Sachs and Citigroup as lead underwriters.

Why it matters: BitGo’s IPO serves as the definitive litmus test for institutional crypto appetite in 2026, marking the first time a federally chartered digital asset bank has hit the public markets to bridge the gap between "wild west" volatility and fiduciary-grade stability. Also proving that the market is ready to value the "boring" but essential plumbing infrastructure of institutional custody.

Read our full analysis below:

Fidelity Investments announced the launch of the FIDD Stablecoin

On January 28, 2026, Fidelity Investments formally announced the launch of its native stablecoin, the Fidelity Digital Dollar (FIDD), marking the entry of the first major U.S. asset manager into the regulated issuance space. [RELEASE] [See analysis]

Rails: Issuance is vertically integrated through Fidelity’s National Trust Bank.
Scope: Targets active settlement infrastructure and institutional on-chain cash.
Goal: Replacing regulatory arbitrage (shadow banking) with federally compliant liquidity under the GENIUS Act.

Why it matters: Unlike crypto-native issuers, Fidelity already sits inside millions of retail accounts, retirement plans, and institutional portfolios, letting it move money on-chain without relying on banks or third parties. That means faster settlement, new yield products, and tighter integration between traditional investing and digital assets, all while keeping economics in-house. Plus, it brings its $6.8T powerhouse to vertically integrate reserves and custody under the federal GENIUS Act.

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Tether launches “USAT”

On January 27, 2026, Tether officially launched USA₮ (USAT), a new dollar-backed stablecoin explicitly designed for the U.S. market. Unlike its global counterpart USDT, this token is issued by Anchorage Digital Bank, the first federally chartered digital asset bank. The token operates on Tether's Hadron platform and is backed by 1:1 reserves in U.S. currency, demand deposits, or short-term Treasuries, exactly as mandated by the GENIUS Act (enacted July 18, 2025). [RELEASE]

Why this matters: Regional banks are in trouble. Community institutions like Huntington Bancshares, M&T Bank, and Truist Financial rely on deposit bases to fund lending. Their Net Interest Margin (NIM), the spread between deposit costs and loan rates, is how they fund the credit that powers Main Street. When a corporation moves $1M from a bank account to USA₮, it is permanent. The bank loses the ability to lend that $1M as a mortgage or business loan. To attract deposits back, the bank must raise savings rates, which increases funding costs, which compresses lending. Plus, it also threatens the value proposition of Circle.

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BlackRock’s $100M Canton position

BlackRock acquired a 2.2% passive stake in Tharimmune, Inc. (765,829 shares via Schedule 13G filing), the publicly traded Super Validator operator on the Canton Network. This stake translates to indirect ownership of approximately 75–120 million Canton Coins (valued at ~$100M). Concurrently, the DTCC received SEC approval (No-Action Letter) to tokenize U.S. Treasury securities on Canton, with production launch expected H1 2026 and broader rollout H2 2026. [FILING] [NEWS]

Why it matters: Canton is the privacy-enabled settlement layer chosen by DTCC, Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, Citadel Securities, and Euroclear, institutions processing $9T in monthly transaction volume and $100T in custodied assets. The DTCC co-chairs the Canton Foundation alongside Euroclear, effectively controlling governance over tokenized finance infrastructure. BlackRock's entry into the cap table of Canton's only public exposure vehicle signals institutional confidence in the migration path for Treasury securities and, eventually, all DTC-eligible assets.

Coinbase Rolls Out Prediction Market to U.S. Customers

On January 29, 2026, Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) officially launched its prediction market platform to users across all 50 U.S. states. The rollout, built in partnership with the CFTC-regulated exchange1 Kalshi, allows verified U.S. customers to trade "event contracts" directly within the main Coinbase app using USD or USDC. [RELEASE]

In December, they acquired The Clearing Company. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: The overlooked catalyst is a new U.S. law taking effect in 2026 that makes traditional sports betting far less tax-efficient, especially for frequent bettors, while prediction markets sit under a different regulatory regime and avoid this penalty.

Read the full analysis below👇

SEC taxonomy for tokenized securities

On January 28, 2026, the SEC’s Divisions of Corporation Finance, Investment Management, and Trading and Markets issued joint guidance clarifying the application of federal securities laws to tokenized assets. The statement categorizes the market into two distinct frameworks:

issuer-sponsored tokenization (direct issuance) and
third-party sponsored models (custodial entitlements or synthetic exposure).

The staff reaffirmed that the use of distributed ledger technology (DLT) to record ownership does not change the fundamental legal status or registration requirements of a security. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: This guidance establishes a clear regulatory preference for “issuer-led” models, where DLT is integrated into the master securityholder file, over third-party synthetic products. By classifying many third-party “linked” tokens as security-based swaps, the SEC is effectively restricting retail access to these instruments. This provides a compliant roadmap for institutional infrastructure providers, like DTCC and regulated transfer agents, while creating significant legal hurdles for DeFi platforms offering synthetic price exposure.

News Flash

Avalanche gets first US ETF as VanEck debuts AVAX fund. Link
WisdomTree expands tokenisation ecosystem to Solana. Link
Ripple launches ‘Ripple Treasury’. Link
Revolut scraps US merger plans in favour of push for standalone licence. Link
Binance and OKX will introduce tokenised U.S. stock products. Link
The Central Bank of Iran has acquired US dollar stablecoins worth $0.5B. Link
Robinhood to enable 24/7 trading and “self-custody” with tokenized stocks. Link
Mesh hits unicorn status, raising $75M. Link
Republic Europe announces the launch of a new Kraken SPV. Link

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

💎 Investor Insights (Alpha)

162: Davos just confirmed it

Marc Baumann — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:37:41 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc.

Davos is usually where the establishment pats itself on the back. This year, they looked over their shoulder.

Suddenly, crypto isn’t a “scam” , but national defense. And the bankers who spent a decade mocking it? They are panic-buying the infrastructure. Jamie Dimon (and others) are realizing that if they don’t upgrade to the “new physics of money”, they won’t just lose market share, they’ll be displaced.

“We can now move infinite data at the speed of the internet at zero cost... the physics of money becomes the physics of the internet”, says, Jeremy Allaire, CEO Circle.

Sergio Ermotti, UBS CEO, declared blockchain “the future of traditional banking”, while UBS is launching Bitcoin and Ethereum trading.

Meanwhile, President Trump reasserted his stance on crypto:

“I’m also working to ensure America remains the crypto capital of the world... China wanted that market too... We have to make it so that China doesn’t get the hold of it.” — Donald Trump, President of USA

Davos just confirmed it: Fighting the future is no longer just bad business. It’s "un-American." Money is being rewired.

Our highlights this week:

NYSE develops 24/7 tokenized securities trading
UBS to launch Bitcoin and Ethereum trading
WEF crypto sentiment is bullish
Bermuda becomes the first on-chain nation
FanDuel enters prediction markets

Let’s jump in 👇

Top Signals This Week

NYSE announces 24/7 tokenized securities trading

On January 19, 2026, ICE filed with the SEC to launch a fully electronic, 24/7 on-chain tokenised exchange for U.S.-listed equities and ETFs. The platform combines the NYSE’s high-performance Pillar matching engine with blockchain-based settlement to enable atomic delivery-versus-payment. This is the same centralised limit order book (CLOB)¹ used by institutional High-Frequency Trading (HFT) firms (like Citadel Securities and Jump Trading). [RELEASE]

Why it matters: Consider a European investor who wants to buy technology stocks. Currently, they might trade on a local exchange that closes at 5:00 PM CET or wait for the US open. In the new regime, they can trade Apple or Nvidia on the NYSE at any hour. This creates a massive competitive moat against regional exchanges like the London Stock Exchange (LSE) or the Tokyo Stock Exchange (JPX) that still operate on limited hours. Why hold a dormant asset when you can hold an active one? The NYSE effectively becomes the “World Stock Exchange”.

Read our full analysis below:

UBS enters Bitcoin & Ethereum

UBS ($6.9T AUM) is launching Bitcoin and Ethereum trading for private clients, with CEO Sergio Ermotti declaring blockchain “the future of traditional banking.” This pivot isn’t random; it immediately follows the January 1st activation of new Basel III standards, which dramatically lowered the capital requirements for banks holding digital assets.

Why it matters: With half the world’s billionaires on its roster, even a conservative 1% allocation from UBS clients creates $60 billion in buying pressure. This signals that the world’s most conservative capital—wealth that survived two world wars—is now comfortable moving on-chain, effectively de-risking the asset class for every other wealth manager on the planet.

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WEF 2026 top crypto narratives

Davos 2026 confirmed what insiders already knew: The financial system is restructuring in real time. Here are the top narratives that we observed:

Stablecoins are now globally accepted: High optimism regarding utility and adoption; Friction regarding regulatory limits on yield and competition with traditional banks.
Tokenisation of RWAs: Strong consensus on the inevitability of tokenization for efficiency; Divergence on whether the settlement layer should be private stablecoins (US view) or CBDCs (European view).
The convergence of AI and crypto: The “Machine Economy” is viewed as a primary driver for future crypto volume.
Regulation and political will: The political backdrop of 2026 is defined by the “Genius Act,” a bill establishing a US federal framework for digital assets.
The future of banking and finance: Banks are now acknowledging the threat of the rise of fintechs. Consensus that “hybrid” models, where banks integrate crypto rails for settlement, are the immediate future, rather than a total replacement of banks.

The prevailing sentiment is that the technology (tokenisation and stablecoins) has won the argument on utility.

The remaining battles are political: who controls the rails (sovereign vs. private), who captures the value (banks vs. tech firms), and which nations set the rules (US vs. Europe/China).

👉Subscribe to PRO to receive the full analysis on key statements from Trump, Fink, Dimon, Ermotti, Allaire, Armstrong, Musk and what it means for investors

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Bermuda goes on-chain

On January 19, 2026, the Government of Bermuda formally partnered with Circle and Coinbase to transition to a “fully on-chain national economy.” [RELEASE]

Rails: The government selected Base (an Ethereum Layer-2) as its national settlement layer and USDC as its medium of exchange, rejecting the CBDC model.
Scope: The migration covers government tax collection, welfare disbursements, and retail merchant systems.
Goal: To eliminate the “island tax” of correspondent banking and reduce the cost of capital for its $780B insurance market.

Why it matters: Bermuda hosts 75% of global Insurance-Linked Securities (ILS). These are catastrophe bonds, capital set aside to cover hurricanes, earthquakes, or cyber events. The money is locked up for one to three years by design. If a pension fund commits $5M, that capital is inaccessible until maturity. That structure broke in 2023. As interest rates rose, investors lost patience with long lockups. The reinsurance market faced a $60B capital gap almost overnight. Traditional funding simply pulled back. Now, tokenization turns locked, long-dated insurance capital into something flexible: smaller entry sizes, real liquidity, and faster payouts. It brings new capital back into reinsurance without changing the underlying risk.

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Fanduel enters prediction markets

FanDuel, the American gambling company with 12M users, has launched “FanDuel Predicts” nationwide. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: The overlooked catalyst is a new U.S. law taking effect in 2026 that makes traditional sports betting far less tax-efficient, especially for frequent bettors, while prediction markets sit under a different regulatory regime and avoid this penalty.

The Loophole: Trades on these platforms are classified as Section 1256 ² contracts.
The Impact: Losses are fully deductible, and gains receive the favorable 60/40 tax treatment (60% long-term / 40% short-term capital gains).
The Consequence: We are witnessing a mass migration of “whale” capital from traditional sportsbooks to regulated exchanges to avoid the OBBBA cap.

More below.

News Flash

Coinbase established independent advisory board on Quantum computing. Link
HK to issue stablecoin licenses in Q1. Link
Strategy buys $2.1b BTC, largest buy in 1+ year. Link
Central Bank of Iran has acquired US dollar stablecoins worth $0.5B. Link
Trump hopes to sign the crypto bill ‘very soon’. Link
Ondo launches tokenised stocks on SOL. Link
BitGo raises $213m in IPO, $2b+ valuation. Link
US M2 supply hits $22.3T. Link

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

💎 Investor Insights (Alpha)

161: Washington stalled. Bitcoin didn’t.

Marc Baumann — Sat, 17 Jan 2026 15:21:11 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc.

Big week for crypto regulation: The industry just shot itself in the foot.

“We’d rather have no bill than a bad bill.”
— Brian Armstrong, CEO and Co-founder of Coinbase

Twenty-four hours before Congress was set to vote on the most comprehensive crypto bill in U.S. history, Coinbase pulled its support. His stance: the CLARITY Act would ban stablecoin yield, narrow tokenized asset pathways, and expand surveillance in DeFi. Plus: Coinbase would lose around $1.4B in annual revenue.

Now, the Senate Banking Committee has postponed the markup meeting, which was scheduled on January 15, 2206 - and billions of dollars in investment, and years of bipartisan work could evaporate. Policy chaos.

Our highlights this week:

CLARITY Act collapse reveals deep fractures in U.S. crypto coalition
Polygon pivots to payments with $250M acquisition
BNY Mellon launched tokenised deposits
Bitmine invests $200M in MrBeast
Swift proves tokenised bonds work on existing rails

Let’s jump in 👇

Top Signals This Week

The CLARITY Act collapse

What happened: The U.S. Senate Banking Committee's CLARITY Act, designed as a comprehensive crypto regulatory framework, collapsed on January 14, 2026, when Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong withdrew support less than 24 hours before the markup. The bill's "Market structure draft," released January 12, included three provisions that triggered industry revolt: a ban on stablecoin yield payments (worth ~$1.4B in annual Coinbase revenue), mandatory SEC clearing for tokenised equities, and extended Bank Secrecy Act compliance to open-source developers. Chairman Tim Scott cancelled the vote.

Why it matters: The legislative failure exposes a growing divide between crypto operators and venture capital interests. While firms like a16z supported the bill to achieve asset liquidity and commodity status for tokens, Coinbase prioritised protecting its high-margin stablecoin business. Furthermore, it also highlights the ABA’s successful lobbying to protect traditional deposit bases, despite a more pro-crypto Senate leadership.

So what? China weaponised yield on January 1st. The People’s Bank of China announced that commercial banks can pay interest on e-CNY wallets, transforming the digital yuan into a direct “yield-bearing” competitor to the USD in international stablecoin settlemet.

What's next: The legislative window is closing fast. Senate insiders expect revised drafts in February, but passage before the November 2026 midterms is increasingly unlikely, pushing comprehensive federal crypto regulation into 2027 at the earliest.

Read more below.👇

🙌 Work with us: We arm financial institutions and digital asset leaders with bespoke research, thought leadership to shape the most important conversations, scale trust, and win business.

Polygon pivots to payments with $250M acquisition

Polygon Labs announced on January 13, 2026, that it will acquire Coinme and Sequence in deals totaling over $250M, positioning itself as a regulated U.S. payments provider. [RELEASE]

The deal bundles to form the “Open Money Stack”:

Coinme’s licensed fiat on-/off-ramps and retail touchpoints (48 state Money Transmitter Licenses)
Sequence’s wallet abstraction and cross-chain orchestration
AggLayer liquidity (a ZK-powered settlement engine)

So what? Polygon is undergoing a radical “narrowing.” By moving away from being a general-purpose “World Computer” and focusing on being the “Global Payments Layer,” they are positioning themselves to capture a good share of the $300B+ stablecoin market.

More below.

BNY Mellon launched tokenised deposit

What happened: BNY launched tokenised deposits on the Canton Network, a privacy-enabled interoperability protocol designed by Digital Asset. Clients (Citadel Securities, Intercontinental Exchange, Circle) can now move commercial bank money across blockchains 24/7 with atomic settlement and zero counterparty risk. A $100M deposit becomes $100M in tokens. Transfers are instant. Redemption is instant. No T+2 settlement window. No trapped capital over weekends. [RELEASE]

So what? Citi projects tokenized deposits could handle $100–140T in annual transaction flow by 2030. Stablecoins, the public alternative, are projected at $95–200T in velocity, but that's misleading. A dollar in a stablecoin circulates faster than a dollar in a tokenized deposit because it's used for retail payments and DeFi. But for the $2.5 quadrillion derivatives market, for margin optimization, for collateral management, where trillions of dollars sit idle every weekend, tokenized deposits win on utility.

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Bitmine invests $200M in MrBeast

What happened: Bitmine Immersion Technologies, the largest corporate holder of ether (valued at $13.6B), is investing $200M in Beast Industries, the company behind YouTube creator MrBeast. The deal closes by January 19 and gives Bitmine equity in a platform commanding 450M+ YouTube subscribers. Beast Industries plans to launch a decentralized finance–enabled financial services platform, building on earlier trademark filings for "MrBeast Financial." [RELEASE]

Why it matters: By targeting Gen Z and Gen Alpha, demographics increasingly resistant to legacy banking, the initiative seeks to normalise blockchain-based financial products through creator-led trust. For Bitmine, which holds 3.36% of the circulating Ether supply, the move creates a direct pipeline to onboard millions of new users into the Ethereum ecosystem, effectively turning its reserves into productive consumer capital.

Our view: With DATs1 losing momentum, this looks like a bottom-up approach by Bitmine to manufacture organic utility for its $13.6B Ether position, pivoting from a reliance on institutional catalysts to a strategy of aggressive retail onboarding through creator-led trust.

Swift proves tokenised bonds work on existing rails

What happened: Swift, in collaboration with partners including BNP Paribas, Société Générale – FORGE, and Intesa Sanpaolo, has completed a series of trials for orchestrating tokenised bond transactions and cross-border payments. The initiative demonstrated seamless delivery-versus-payment2 (DvP) settlement and lifecycle management across multiple blockchains and traditional systems. Consequently, Swift is now integrating a blockchain-based shared ledger into its infrastructure to enable real-time, 24/7 global transaction execution. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: Crypto startups bet on replacing SWIFT's network. SWIFT just proved it can layer blockchain settlement UNDER the existing network. Every bank already trusts SWIFT. Nobody needs to migrate. The 200+ billion daily messages keep flowing through SWIFT - just with better back-end plumbing.

News Flash

Dubai moves to ban privacy coins. Link
Wells Fargo allows BTC as collateral for loans. Link
Venezuela used USDT to bypass sanctions. Link
Ripple secures FCA authorisation in the UK. Link
BitPanda eyes Frankfurt IPO in 1H26. Link
StanChart plans crypto prime brokerage. Link
Interactive Brokers adds 24/7 USDC funding. Link
Anchorage enables off-chain collateral for lending. Link
Visa Direct will use BVNK’s infrastructure. Link
DFSA shifts crypto token oversight to firms. Link
80% of Venezuela’s oil revenue is collected in stablecoins. Link

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

💎 Investor Insights (Alpha)

160: The signal showed up fast.

Marc Baumann — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 23:07:12 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc.

2026 didn’t wait. Last week, we shared our top 12 narratives for 2026.

Seven days later, the market started confirming them.

On January 5, Bank of America opened the door for 15,000 advisors to recommend Bitcoin ETFs. Forty-eight hours later, Morgan Stanley crossed a bigger line: filing to launch its own Bitcoin and Solana ETFs. You’re right: Not distribution, but issuance.

Coincidence? No. It’s regulation finally doing its job. These are the regulatory drivers that will shape 2026:

Genius Act: Federal framework for payment stablecoins in the U.S..
MiCA: The transition period ends July 1, 2026. From that point on, no license means no business in the EU.
OCC expansion: The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) became the primary regulator for non-bank stablecoin issuers in the U.S.
CARF: Effective January 1, 2026, forcing global crypto platforms into full tax reporting mode.
CLARITY Act: poised for a Senate vote next week, finally resolving the SEC vs CFTC tug-of-war and giving clear market structure rules.

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Our highlights this week:

United States seized 3% of Bitcoin
Morgan Stanley files for crypto ETFs
Real-estate enters prediction markets
A deeper look at XXI after it became public

Let’s jump in 👇

Top Signals This Week

United States seized 3% of Bitcoin

U.S. military operations in early January 2026 detained Nicolás Maduro on narco-terrorism and corruption charges. This creates a clear legal path: by labeling the regime a criminal enterprise under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), it allows the Treasury to seize all illicit proceeds, including cryptocurrency holdings. [NEWS]

The estimated seizure of Bitcoin is 600,000 BTC (~$55–67B) along with 303B barrels of crude oil.

Why it matters: The U.S. now controls approximately 4–5% of total Bitcoin supply when combining existing holdings (~200,000 BTC from prior seizures) with the Venezuelan acquisition.

Zoom out: This concentration of the world’s most powerful entity into digital assets triggers a geopolitical game theory problem: rival nations cannot afford to leave the U.S. as the sole hegemon of the crypto ecosystem. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs immediately condemned the seizure as a violation of international law. Russia (holding >50K BTC) views it as an escalation of “hybrid warfare.” Both nations hold cryptocurrency from their own seizures (China: ~190,000 BTC from PlusToken).

Our take: In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order establishing the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The policy is explicit: seized Bitcoin “shall not be sold and shall be maintained.”U.S.-controlled seizure of Venezuela’s Bitcoin isn’t a sell-off risk. It’s the ultimate supply shock.

Read more below.👇

🙌 Work with us: We arm financial institutions and digital asset leaders with bespoke research, thought leadership to shape the most important conversations, scale trust, and win business.

Morgan Stanley files for crypto ETFs

Morgan Stanley ($1.5T in wealth management assets) just became the first major U.S. bank to issue its own crypto ETFs, Bitcoin and Solana, not just distribute it. By moving to capture issuance fees, custody economics, and staking yields directly, the bank has signaled that the era of agency is over; the era of vertical integration has begun. [SEC filing]

Be smart: The SEC’s 2025 “Generic Listing Standards” changed everything. Approval timelines for new crypto ETFs were slashed from 270 days to just 75 days. And regualtion in the US is no longer a hurdle.

Our take: While others banks focus on tokenization, custody or stablecoins, Morgan stanley went for the highest margin product. BlackRock’s IBIT with $69B AUM makes $138-172M in annual recurring revenue from a single product. Morgan Stanley wants that 0.20-0.25% management fee on EVERY dollar of AUM.

More below.

Real-estate enters prediction markets

Polymarket, the largest decentralized prediction market, partnered with Parcl Labs to bring real-time, settlement-grade real estate contracts to crypto. Instead of tinkering with old systems, they rebuilt the data layer entirely. And in doing so, they’ve unlocked the world’s largest asset class, real estate, as a liquid, tradeable market. [RELEASE]

So what? Parcl updates daily and includes cash sales, new construction, and listing changes, unlike Case-Shiller, which lags 60+ days and excludes 60% of market activity in places like Boston and Miami.

Twenty One Capital is a monetary stack play

On December 9, 2025, Twenty One Capital began trading on the NYSE under the ticker “XXI” as the third largest Bitcoin holder (~$4B). [RELEASE]

Be smart: Everyone sees Twenty One Capital as another MicroStrategy clone. The market saw it too: XXI dropped 25% on its NYSE debut to $11, trading at 0.80x NAV. But, the catch is its investors: Tether, Cantor Fitzgerald, and SoftBank.

Zoom in: Howard Lutnick was confirmed as U.S. Commerce Secretary on February 18, 2025, after divesting his Cantor positions. But his family still controls Cantor Fitzgerald, which controls XXI's structure. As Commerce Secretary, Lutnick oversees semiconductor export controls and GPU/ASIC supply chains, directly impacting both AI datacenter builds (Stargate) and Bitcoin mining equipment availability. This creates a potential competitive moat for U.S.-aligned firms like XXI/Cantor/SoftBank. Whether intentional or not, XXI now has implicit policy protection that no other Bitcoin treasury enjoys.

Our take: while investors fixate on the Bitcoin treasury playbook, they're missing what Tether, Cantor Fitzgerald, and SoftBank actually built: a closed-loop monetary infrastructure disguised as a public company.

News Flash

BoA started advising crypto ETPs to clients. Link
J.P. Morgan will bring USD JPM Coin (JPMD) to Canton. Link
MSTR will remain in MSCI indexes. Link
Vitalik shares Ethereum roadmap. Link
Maduro Polymarket win triggers bill to bar government officials from insider trading. Link
Polymarket partners with Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Link
Nike quietly sold its digital products subsidiary RTFKT in December 2025. Link
Tether launched Scudo, a new unit of account for Tether Gold (XAU₮). Link

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

💎 Investor Insights (Alpha)

159: 2026, the year of...

Marc Baumann — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 22:52:33 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc.

Happy Holidays! Below are the sharpest signals we’ve seen hiding beneath the year-end noise. Here are my top 12 narratives I am interested in going into 2026:

RWA’s & 24/7 settlements
Stablecoin TradFi implementation and rails
Onchain cross-border payments
Tokenized treasuries & deposits (vs stablecoins)
Public vs. corporate chains
DeFi x TradFi (yield products)
Privacy
Quantum resistance
Prediction markets
Perp DEXes
Autonomous finance
Crypto-as-a-service infra plays

What are you looking at?

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My prediction is that RWAs are going to have their comeback in 2026, starting with equities. Don’t forget: we’re still SO early.

Our highlights this week:

Coinbase doubles down on prediction markets
J.P. Morgan to launch crypto trading for institutional clients
Stripe’s 1.5% tax on the old world
Klarna integrates USDC funding

Let’s jump in 👇

🙌 Work with us: We arm financial institutions and digital asset leaders with bespoke research, thought leadership to shape the most important conversations, scale trust, and win business.

🚨 We have a series of killer podcasts coming up & just opened new sponsorship slots. Grab your spot here!

News Flash

Aave, the biggest DeFi lending protocol, is entering governance war. Link
Pro-crypto Michael Selig sworn in as new CFTC Chair. Link
Amplify debuts stablecoin and tokenisation ETFs on NYSE Arca. Link
Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, considers launching crypto-backed loans. Link
Solstice and Cor Prime completed the first institutional stablecoin funding trade using public blockchains. Link

Top Signals This Week

Coinbase doubles down as prediction markets go mainstream

Coinbase announced its tenth acquisition this year - The Clearing Company, a prediction markets startup. The deal closes in January 2026. This follows Coinbase’s launch of its own prediction platform, positioning it as a direct competitor to Robinhood, Interactive Brokers, and CME-FanDuel. [RELEASE]

After the U.S. election, multiple use-cases expanded beyond politics:

Financial macro outcomes (S&P500, oil, CPI, GDP)
Policy outcomes
Sports + entertainment
Broader “trade on headlines” consumer behavior

Why it matters: Prediction markets reached $44B in trading volume in 2025, with Polymarket and Kalshi accounting for $21.5B and $17.1B, respectively. Prediction markets are transitioning from niche speculative tools into a primary financial infrastructure, bridging the gap between digital assets and traditional derivatives. The sector’s projected growth to $1T by 2030 is fueled by tokenization, which allows these contracts to be used as DeFi collateral.

Be smart: The IRS has yet to guide whether gains should be classified as capital assets, gambling winnings, or Section 1256 contracts.

Fun fact: AI bots are already making millions per month on Polymarket by exploiting market inefficiencies.

Our view: Prediction markets are becoming a new consumer financial rail. The institutional and crypto-native ecosystem convergence benefits from high-frequency retail engagement. However, the distinction between "investment" and "gambling" will ultimately determine long-term liquidity and institutional adoption of these markets.

JPMorgan to launch crypto trading for institutional clients

JPMorgan is weighing spot and derivatives crypto trading for institutional clients. This is driven by regulatory change: OCC issued Interpretive Letter 1188, confirming national banks can act as “riskless principal” intermediaries, buying from one counterparty and selling to another without holding inventory risk. [NEWS]

In the last 60 days alone, the bank:

Launched the JPMD deposit token on the Base (Ethereum L2) public blockchain.
Arranged the first U.S. commercial paper issuance (for Galaxy Digital) on the Solana blockchain, settled in USDC.
Launched its first tokenised money-market fund, MONY, on Ethereum.

Why it matters: J.P. Morgan doesn't need to "win" crypto-native users. By acting as an intermediary, they allow institutional allocators to trade crypto within their existing compliance and reporting frameworks. If a hedge fund can trade BTC through its JPM Prime account, the incentive to use a crypto-native exchange vanishes.

Stripe’s 1.5% tax on the old world

Stripe has launched Tempo, its payment blockchain on public testnet. It is also charging a 1.5% transaction fee for businesses accepting payments in stablecoins. While that looks pricier than pure-play crypto processors, it’s a masterclass in vertical integration. [SEE FULL ANALYSIS]

Why it matters: This isn't a fee for a blockchain transfer; it's a fee for payment acceptance. Stripe is providing the "last mile" of commerce: fraud protection, 101-country compliance, and instant conversion to USD for merchant bank accounts. For a business, 1.5% is significantly cheaper than the 3%+ often charged for cross-border credit card transactions.

Our view: Traditional card networks solved for authorization speed (the “swipe”), but they never solved for settlement speed (the “cash”). Merchants typically wait 3-5 days for international funds. Tempo collapses this timeline to near-instant settlement, eliminating the need for corporate treasuries to hold idle “buffer cash” across global subsidiaries.

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Klarna swaps banks for blockchains

Klarna is bypassing traditional bank loans to fund its business using USDC. Through a partnership with Coinbase, the "Buy Now, Pay Later" giant is tapping into a $78B pool of digital dollar liquidity to settle its institutional debts faster and cheaper than ever before.[RELEASE]

How it works: Klarna needs massive amounts of short-term cash to pay merchants while they wait for customers to pay them back. Usually, they get this from consumer deposits or bank loans. Now, they’re getting it by issuing "Commercial Paper" (short-term debt) directly in USDC on public blockchains.

Why it matters: Enabled by the regulatory framework of the 2025 GENIUS Act, the partnership allows Klarna to tap into a $78B USDC market, bypassing traditional banking intermediation for faster, 24/7 settlement. It creates a dual-layer strategy: using institutional USDC for operational funding while preparing "KlarnaUSD", their own stablecoin, for consumer-facing payments in 2026.

That’s all for now, folks.

PRO Readers: Read our alpha insights below!

– Marc & Team

💎 Investor Insights (Alpha)

158: Exchange everything

Marc Baumann — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 22:31:17 GMT

Hey, it’s Marc.

“Public blockchains are more transparent than any legacy financial system ever built... crypto could become the most powerful financial surveillance architecture ever invented.”
— Paul Atkins at SEC crypto task force roundtable

The real action this weeks are infrastructure updates: Coinbase, DTCC, SoFi, JP Morgan. The winners? Ethereum, Canton, and Solana.

On top of that, the OCC has approved five national trust bank charters for digital asset entities. Now, these entities will be reviewed under the same standards used for traditional banks.

Our highlights this week:

JPMorgan launches its first tokenized MMF “MONY” on Ethereum
Coinbase launches tokenization and stablecoin as-a-service
SoFi becomes the first national bank to issue a public stablecoin
DTCC picks Canton to tokenize U.S. Treasuries
OCC grants federal bank charters to Circle, Ripple, and Fidelity
Visa launches 24/7 USDC settlement for U.S. institutions

Let’s jump in 👇

🙌 Work with us: We arm financial institutions and digital asset leaders with bespoke research, thought leadership to shape the most important conversations, scale trust, and win business.

PS: We have a series of killer podcasts coming up & just opened new sponsorship slots. Grab your spot here!

Top Signals This Week

JPMorgan’s $100M “MONY” Move on Ethereum

JPMorgan just launched MONY, a $100M tokenized money-market fund live on the Ethereum mainnet. Powered by their Kinexys Digital Assets platform (formerly Onyx), the fund is seeded with JPM’s own capital and marks their most aggressive step into public DeFi rails to date. [NEWS] [ANALYSIS]

Why it matters: While BlackRock’s BUIDL fund ($1.8B) and Franklin Templeton’s BENJI led the way, JPM’s entry signals that the largest bank in the U.S. now views Ethereum as a legitimate settlement layer. But the real “innovation” isn’t the fund itself, it’s the funding mechanism. Investors can subscribe and redeem using USDC. By integrating Circle’s stablecoin into the plumbing of a major MMF, JPM is admitting that private bank coins can’t compete with the liquidity and reach of public stablecoins.

Our view: By treating public blockchains as settlement rails, JPM is commoditizing the infrastructure while maintaining the customer interface.

The First Nationally Chartered Stablecoin: SoFiUSD

SoFi Bank, N.A. (an OCC-regulated, FDIC-insured institution) officially launched SoFiUSD, a fully reserved stablecoin on the public Ethereum blockchain. Unlike JPMorgan’s “JPM Coin” which exists on a private ledger, SoFiUSD is permissionless, meaning it can interact with the broader DeFi ecosystem while maintaining “bank-grade” oversight. [NEWS]

Why it matters: By issuing a stablecoin from a national charter, SoFi eliminates the two biggest hurdles for institutional adoption: counterparty risk and regulatory ambiguity. Because SoFi holds its reserves directly at the Fed, it has zero liquidity or credit risk, something even USDC (Circle) and USDT (Tether) cannot claim as non-banks. This creates a “Triple-A” equivalent stablecoin that can move 24/7 with instant finality.

Our view: SoFi isn’t just launching a product; they are offering “Stablecoin-as-a-Service.” Through its technology arm, Galileo, SoFi can now…. (continue below)

Coinbase is no longer a crypto exchange

On December 17, 2025, Coinbase rolled out a coordinated set of upgrades aimed at becoming a full-spectrum financial platform, aka the “everything exchange”:

Trading of major stocks & ETFs, 24/5. zero fees. Thousans more coming.
Perpetual futures for stocks (outside of US). Massive for global liquidity. Coming early 2026.
Prediction markets: together with Kalshi, Coinbase is turning the world’s events – elections, Fed rates, sports – into tradeable assets.
Tokenization as-a-service
Stablecoins as-a-service

…marking a clear move to bring traditional assets and payments onto a single, regulated digital stack. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: By using the Base blockchain as the settlement layer and USDC as the medium of exchange, they are bypassing legacy clearinghouses. This allows for cross-collateralization: you can now theoretically use your Nvidia stock to instantly hedge an election outcome or a sports contract.

Be smart: For a decade, Coinbase was a "leveraged bet" on crypto volatility; when trading slowed, revenue vanished. The “Everything Exchange” strategy breaks that dependency.

Our view: The most slept-on part of this? Stablecoin-as-a-Service. Coinbase is now (continue below)…

Crypto just became the banking system

The U.S. banking regulator OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) approved five crypto-focused firms to operate as national trust banks, pending final conditions. Two are brand new banks (Ripple and Circle), and four: BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Paxos are upgrading from state to federal oversight. [RELEASE]

The OCC’s actions are the executive implementation of the GENIUS Act, passed by the 119th Congress on July 18, 2025.

So what? This puts major digital-asset players under the same federal framework as traditional trust banks. The regulator is signalling that crypto custody and settlement can sit inside the mainstream banking system, not outside it. This opens an $85T institutional custody market without traditional banks’ permission.

Canton won the $100T settlement race

DTCC announced that it will begin tokenising U.S. Treasury securities that are already held at DTC, its core custody arm. This will happen on the Canton Network, with a live production MVP targeted for the first half of 2026. [RELEASE]

So what? DTCC is the core utility of U.S. capital markets. Its subsidiaries process securities transactions valued at approximately $3.7 quadrillion annually and maintain custody of assets valued at $99T. By choosing Canton, a permissioned, privacy-preserving network designed for regulated institutions, DTCC is also signalling how it thinks tokenisation should happen: inside existing rules, with known participants, and without exposing sensitive trading activity to the public.

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Visa launches 24/7 USDC settlement for U.S. institutions

Visa has officially launched USDC settlement for U.S. financial institutions, moving its stablecoin program from a global pilot into the core of the American payment system. U.S. issuers and acquirers, starting with Cross River Bank and Lead Bank, can now settle their obligations using Circle’s USDC on the Solana blockchain. Additionally, Visa is a design partner for Arc, Circle’s new Layer 1 blockchain, where it plans to operate a validator node and further scale its onchain settlement. [RELEASE]

So what? The traditional banking system operates on a “business day” schedule, leaving a 48-hour liquidity gap every weekend. By using USDC, Visa enables seven-day settlement, letting banks move money and manage liquidity without waiting for Fed systems to reopen. With Visa’s stablecoin volumes already running at a $3.5T annualized pace, this is a live upgrade to the plumbing of global commerce.