Hey, it’s Marc,
For two years everyone’s asked the same stablecoin question: whose logo goes on the coin? Circle or Tether? Banks or fintechs?
Wrong question.
This week State Street and Fidelity answered the one that actually prints money: who manages the reserves behind the coin. State Street launched a money market fund built solely to hold stablecoin reserves. Fidelity opened one two days later. BlackRock, Goldman, and BNY are already there.
Here’s the tell: the GENIUS Act forces issuers to back tokens with T-bills and government money funds, and Citi says supply hits $1.9–4 trillion by 2030. The issuer’s name goes on the token. The asset manager keeps the carry on all of it.
Wall Street didn’t bet on a stablecoin. It bet on the float underneath every one of them. (Meanwhile, CME is suing the regulator that just opened the perps market — more below.)
Our highlights this week:
State Street and Fidelity opened the reserve land grab
CME is suing its own regulator
Europe’s MiCA deadline could cut off millions
Moody’s put credit ratings on Solana
Franklin Templeton filed a dividends-into-Bitcoin ETF
Morgan Stanley undercut every crypto ETF on fees
Coinbase joined the tokenized stock race
A Gulf dynasty is moving a $6T trade market on-chain
And 12+ more signals below.
Loading...
Top Boardroom Reads
Stablecoins 2030: Web3 to Wall Street (Citi Institute)
Euro Stablecoins and Their Potential Effect on Sovereign Bond Markets (ECB Macroprudential Bulletin)
Towards an Efficient and Integrated Digital Capital Market in Europe (ECB)
Tokenized Finance (IMF)
Effects of Stablecoin Yield Prohibition on Bank Lending (White House CEA)
🚀 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.
Wall Street found its stablecoin trade: managing the reserves
State Street Investment Management launched the State Street Stablecoin Reserves Money Market Fund, a GENIUS Act-aligned Rule 2a-7 government money market fund designed specifically to back stablecoin issuance. State Street Bank and Trust and Anchorage Digital are the initial investors. Two days earlier, Fidelity opened the Fidelity Reserves Digital Fund, which holds only US Treasuries maturing in 93 days or less, overnight repo, and government money market shares, at a 0.18% net expense ratio. Both products sit alongside GENIUS-aligned launches this year from BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and BNY. [State Street] [CoinDesk]
Why it matters: We think this is the cleanest institutional trade in the entire space. The GENIUS Act forces issuers to back tokens with short-dated Treasuries and government money funds, so the asset manager holding those reserves gets paid on the float no matter whose logo is on the coin. State Street runs over $5 trillion; it doesn’t need to win the consumer war to win this one. Our read: the issuer is becoming the commodity, and the reserve manager is the toll booth on a market Citi sees hitting $1.9–4 trillion by 2030. The only real question left is how fast the fee compresses once five of the world’s largest managers fight over the same mandate.
CME is suing the regulator that just opened the perps market
What happened: CME Group, the world’s largest futures exchange operator, said it will sue the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over the agency’s approval of crypto perpetual futures. Outgoing CEO Terrence Duffy announced the suit on CNBC, arguing that perps, which carry no expiration date and can run up to 50-to-1 leverage, are swaps rather than futures under the Dodd-Frank Act, and therefore face a different clearing and trading-venue regime. [CNBC] [Bitcoin Magazine]
Why it matters: We don’t read this as a safety fight. It’s a turf fight. CME isn’t claiming perps are dangerous; it’s claiming they’re swaps, a jurisdictional weapon to keep a $20 billion franchise routed through its own pipes. We think the lawsuit is the most bullish signal of the week. (The same day, a Michigan judge ruled prediction wagers aren’t swaps, so the swap-versus-future line is about to be drawn across the whole market.)
Europe’s MiCA cliff arrives July 1, and Binance and Tether are exposed
Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation hits its hard licensing deadline on July 1, and the industry is not ready. By one count, only 194 of more than 3,000 crypto firms operating in the EU have secured a license, and roughly 60% of European users still sit on unlicensed platforms. Binance’s passporting strategy ran through Greece, where regulators are reportedly preparing to reject its application, pushing the exchange to explore a France route instead. Tether, which has said it will not seek EU approval, has already seen USDT pulled or restricted for EU customers across Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, OKX, Bitstamp, and Crypto.com. Circle’s USDC, which is MiCA-compliant, is now the only major dollar stablecoin widely available on licensed EU venues. [CryptoSlate] [Decrypt]
Why it matters: We think MiCA was sold as a licensing framework but is really industrial policy. Euro stablecoins sit at ~€450 million against nearly $300 billion in dollar tokens and that gap is exactly what Brussels wants to close before a digital euro lands. Forcing USDT off licensed venues and slow-walking Binance shifts liquidity toward euro and compliant-dollar tokens better than any subsidy could. Our take: The offshore structure that defined crypto’s first decade does not passport into the EU, and the firms that treated compliance as optional are about to discover how much of their European user base was borrowed.
Moody’s puts credit ratings on Solana
Moody’s Ratings expanded its Token Integration Engine to Solana, letting issuers embed Moody’s credit assessments directly into tokenized bonds and other fixed-income securities. The rollout, in partnership with tokenization specialist Alphaledger, follows the engine’s first deployment earlier this year on the institutional Canton Network and a 2025 municipal-bond pilot on Solana. “Investors need independent credit analysis wherever they transact, and increasingly, that’s onchain,” said Rajeev Bamra, Moody’s head of digital economy strategy. BCG and Ripple estimate the tokenized-asset market could reach $18.9 trillion by 2033. [Moody’s] [CoinDesk]
Why it matters: Tokenization spent two years proving you can put a bond on a chain. We think the harder, more valuable problem is putting the rest of the bond’s world there: the ratings, pricing, and compliance data desks actually trade on. A tokenized bond with no embedded rating is a curiosity; one carrying a live Moody’s assessment any app can read is something a credit desk can underwrite. And watch where Moody’s went: first Canton (permissioned), now Solana (public). It’s hedging because it expects real volume on both.
The ETF arms race moves from access to engineering
What happened: Three of the biggest names in asset management filed or launched crypto products inside a single week. Franklin Templeton filed for two “Bitcoin DRIP” ETFs that hold US stocks and reinvest the dividends into Bitcoin, a structure the market hasn’t seen before. Morgan Stanley filed amended registrations for spot Ethereum and Solana ETFs at a 0.14% sponsor fee, the lowest in both markets, undercutting Grayscale’s 0.15% Mini Ether product and Franklin Templeton’s 0.19% Solana fund, with 95% of staking rewards flowing back to shareholders. And BlackRock launched a Bitcoin income fund that pairs BTC exposure with a cash-flow overlay. [Decrypt] [CoinGape] [CoinDesk]
Why it matters: The first ETF wave sold access: own Bitcoin without a wallet. We think that race is over, and a 0.14% fee proves it: ETH and SOL exposure is now a commodity priced like an index fund, so the margin has to come from engineering. Franklin Templeton’s dividends-into-Bitcoin wrapper and BlackRock’s income overlay are both ways to manufacture yield on top of volatile assets. It’s what you build when the underlying no longer differentiates you. Our read: the same firms now managing stablecoin reserves are compressing ETF fees to zero because they’ve decided digital assets are a distribution business, and they win those on scale and cost.
News Flashes
Infrastructure and Markets
Coinbase joins the tokenized stock race. Coinbase will offer onchain shares with dividend payments, plus an AI advisor, stock options, and pre-IPO markets, pushing deeper into full-stack finance.
A Gulf dynasty moves a $6T trade market on-chain. The heir to a 135-year-old Gulf trading house is building blockchain rails for global commodity trade finance.
Regulation and Policy
Congress moves to ban a CBDC until 2030. A bipartisan housing bill now includes a prohibition on a US central bank digital currency through 2030, hard-coding the private-stablecoin-first model.
Banking and Payments
Alchemy ships an AI-agent payment card on Visa’s rails. Alchemy introduced AgentCard, a payments and identity platform for AI agents built on Visa Intelligent Commerce, extending last week’s agent-payments push from the card networks.
Funds, Deals and Others
Trace Finance raises $32M for stablecoin settlement. The startup closed a round to expand cross-border stablecoin settlement infrastructure.
Ripple backs Flutterwave’s Series E. Ripple invested in African payments giant Flutterwave to accelerate stablecoin settlement across the continent.
One quick favor
We want to make this the best briefing in digital assets.
Loading...
Or just hit reply and tell us the one thing you’d change. We read every response.
51 Intelligence Stack: Related Reading
Issue 181: Goldman tokenizes real estate, The stablecoin supergroup, Deel’s 1.5M wallets, and “The Bridge.”
Money Movement 2.0: 2026 Edition, Full report on stablecoin infrastructure convergence and institutional adoption.
Inside JPMorgan’s $3T tokenization machine, How Kinexys became the largest bank-run blockchain.
Stablecoin issuance is overrated, Why acceptance and settlement infrastructure matters more than token creation.
🚨 The PRO terminal is launching soon. This means: real time intelligence on digital assets news flow, 2000+ digital asset vendors tracked with deep product data and our proprietary vendor ratings (like Gartner, but 10x better), 10+ sector maps, intelligent signal feed and a co-pilot that’s trained on all our data. 👉 Secure your spot on the waitlist & secure access to our beta.
That’s all for now, folks.
– Marc & Team
