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 Boardroom Reads
Making the Case for Tokenized Collateral (Nasdaq & The ValueExchange)
Stablecoins and the Future of Payments: Evidence from Financial Markets (IMF)
A Cross‑Border Guide to the New Era of Stablecoin Regulation (Gibson Dunn)
The UAE Blockchain Ecosystem 2026 (Blockchain Centre Abu Dhabi & Binance)
The Friday newsletter only scratches the surface. A lot more is going on that we’ll tell you in our PRO briefings.
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
