Every company treasury must regularly decide where to park spare cash overnight. More often than not, the cash goes into money market funds, Treasury bills, commercial paper or overnight repo.

All these instruments are default options for two reasons: the treasurer knows the rate (of interest) and date (of maturity). Certainty is what makes these instruments work. They let a finance team plan knowing how much interest to expect and over what tenure.

On-chain lending has seldom offered certainty. Rates there float by the hour, which is fine for traders and useless for a treasurer. This is why the biggest market in finance, the $60 trillion world of corporate credit that runs on fixed rates and dates, has stayed almost entirely off-chain.

In today’s story, I explore if Morpho’s new Midnight protocol can change that and make DeFi lending attractive for corporate lending and borrowing.

On to the story…

The Need for Fixed Rates

Companies borrowed roughly $13.7 trillion in 2025, the highest annual figure on record, and about $60 trillion of corporate debt sits outstanding today. This machinery funds factories, acquisitions, and payrolls. It runs almost entirely on fixed rates and fixed maturities, because no business can plan around a borrowing cost that changes frequently.

For a decade, a parallel version of this market has been trying to form on public blockchains. It never made a dent in the traditional instruments for this precise reason. Almost all on-chain lending has been built on floating rates. The interest you earn or pay varies continuously with the amount of the shared pool being borrowed at any given moment. That design works well for crypto traders, which is a niche, limited group. It is useless for corporates.

But why is the on-chain credit market not offering fixed-rate lending and borrowing? It had, on many occasions in the past. But all those who offered fixed rates hit the same wall.

Yield Protocol wound down in October 2023 after peaking near $22 million in deposits. Notional Finance’s TVL climbed above $975 million in November 2021 before falling 90% within two years.

To promise a fixed rate for a fixed term, these protocols asked lenders to lock their money to a chosen maturity up front. That capital then was frozen, waiting for a borrower to take the other side. Much worse, that frozen capital was split across pools with different maturity dates, making liquidity thin in each. Thin markets set bad prices, bad prices drive users away, and the market starves to a slow death.

The problem was the steep cost of providing certainty. Each of those protocols was designed to keep every dollar passive until it was deployed.

This is the problem Morpho’s Midnight wants to solve.

Morpho is already one of the largest lending networks in crypto, with more than $11 billion in deposits.

Morpho’s infrastructure powers many consumer products, from Coinbase to Robinhood. Most users of those apps never know it is there, and that is its biggest moat.

On July 21, Morpho launched Midnight, a protocol built specifically for lending at a fixed rate for a fixed term. Instead of a shared pool with a rate set by a formula, Midnight works as a market of offers. A lender posts the rate it wants along with the maturity. A borrower posts what it is willing to pay. When two offers meet, the terms lock. Just as it would happen with a bond or a term loan.

But what happens to the lender’s money while it waits to be matched with a borrower with similar rate and term preferences? While the earlier protocols froze the funds, Midnight is designed to allow those funds to continue earning a floating return on Blue, Morpho’s legacy lending primitive. The capital doesn’t sit idle here.

This is a promising upgrade for every corporate treasurer who wants a known rate, a certain maturity and a defined counterparty. But this works only with scale.

The Time is Ripe

For the first time, an on-chain instrument is designed with a corporate treasury’s preference for a fixed rate and maturity in mind, rather than expecting the treasury to adopt a product centred around crypto traders.

The timing of a few other catalysts makes DeFi lending more practical for corporate treasuries this time.

Firstly, starting in 2024, the FASB Accounting rules let companies mark qualifying digital assets at fair value rather than treating every dip as a permanent writedown. Under the old rule, a treasury had to write down its digital assets each time their prices dipped. But a price recovery wouldn’t let them mark the asset back up. This meant that a bad quarter could permanently dent their balance sheet. This discouraged companies from holding digital assets altogether. The new rule lets the company record fair value to reflect both unrealised gains and losses.

Secondly, new stablecoin legislation has given corporate finance teams a clearer legal footing for holding these instruments.

The distribution Morpho has already put in place helps it gain adoption from the existing institutional networks of those platforms.

Coinbase has originated more than a billion dollars in loans through Morpho’s infrastructure.

Robinhood routes its savings product through Morpho. Société Générale’s digital arm, FORGE, runs lending markets on it. These establish Morpho’s credibility as a reliable integration via on-ramp platforms that corporate treasuries are familiar with.

But the DeFi mechanism isn’t as perfect when you swap the corporate treasury use-case with that of corporate debt.

The Corporate Borrower

The same DeFi lending protocols can even be used by corporates for borrowing on-chain. Except that it has some structural issues to fix before on-chain corporate debt becomes attractive.

Corporate debt is largely unsecured. When a company issues a bond, lenders are betting on its business, which is a function of its cashflows and its ability to pay. The company does not pledge assets worth more than it borrows. That is the entire point of corporate debt. It is raising money precisely because it does not already have that kind of money.

On-chain lending, including Midnight, works the opposite way. It is overcollateralised. No corporate treasurer will want to pledge $100 to raise $70. That resembles a margin loan more than a corporate financing. Corporate bonds work because it is a borrowing secured against the company’s future, not its present. This is what Morpho or any other DeFi lending protocol cannot do yet.

If Morpho Midnight wants corporates to prefer raising debt on-chain over their time-tested traditional channels, then it has to close this gap with unsecured, credit-based lending.

Why the Infrastructure Is Still Promising

Traditional public bonds need scale to make sense. Only when they scale up to at least a few hundred million dollars can they grab the attention of underwriters, rating agencies, lawyers, and roadshows. All-in issuance cost via public bonds can eat several percentage points of the money raised and weeks of time. A market on Midnight can be created by anyone, with protocol fees measured in fractions of a percentage. That removes the gatekeepers who price small and mid-sized companies out of public debt entirely.

Speed and liquidity are the next advantages. A leveraged loan can take twenty days or more to settle, and most corporate bonds are barely tradable once issued. A loan made on Morpho Midnight settles in a single step, and the position becomes a tradable unit instantly. A lender who needs cash early does not need to break the loan or hunt for a bilateral buyer. They can simply sell the units. Similarly, a borrower who wants out can buy units back. Credit that was locked until maturity becomes liquid without a secondary-market desk taking a cut in the middle.

Enforcement is another aspect in which on-chain lending contrasts with off-chain lending. Traditional default is slow and expensive, moving through breach, negotiation, restructuring, and sometimes bankruptcy. On-chain, a position remains healthy as long as its collateral covers its debt; the moment it does not, liquidation occurs automatically. On-chain lending cuts the entire manual procedure.

But faster, automatic liquidation comes with a price. Liquidation can be instant only because the borrower has already posted more than what they took.

Another advantage is composability, a feature traditional credit lacks. An on-chain position is much more valuable than a traditional loan entry on a balance sheet. A tokenised credit position can be moved, sold, or posted as collateral somewhere else. A fixed-rate credit unit can become the raw material for the next product built on top of it. Traditional corporate debt sits still until maturity.

None of this makes Midnight a viable substitute for the corporate bond market today. But it still makes it a prospective candidate that can offer a better set of rails than the one corporate credit currently runs on.

On top of the advantages I mentioned above, the whole thing plugs into the distribution that treasuries already use through Coinbase, Robinhood, and a regulated bank like Société Générale.

The one missing piece is DeFi’s ability to price a borrower’s creditworthiness in addition to its collateral. The infrastructure is ahead of the use case. That’s all the more reason I believe it should be further developed rather than written off.

The Case for Being Optimistic

Many crypto protocols already offer bitcoin-backed loans. But I think the path to making DeFi borrowing and lending credible substitutes to their traditional counterparts runs through tokenised real-world assets as collateral.

A corporate treasury is more likely to deposit a tokenised money market fund, a tokenised pool of receivables, or a tokenised slice of private credit, and borrow against it at a fixed rate than post a volatile crypto token as collateral. This is already happening as you read this. A tokenised version of an Apollo credit fund has been used as collateral inside Morpho’s markets. It’s evidence of a ready infrastructure. Yet the pool of tokenised real-world assets that a treasury could actually pledge is still only a few billion dollars, compared with a $60-trillion debt market. That’s because tokenised collateral is still overcollateralised borrowing. So, the main part of the puzzle to fix remains the overcollateralisation problem.

The closest historical parallel is the Eurobond market, which began in 1963 when borrowers went offshore to raise money faster and with fewer constraints than their home markets allowed. A parallel credit market formed outside the gated incumbent, the same move Morpho Midnight is making now by building credit rails outside the slow, permissioned machinery of traditional debt. But the Eurobond market took decades and an enormous amount of rigid settlement infrastructure to grow into the multi-trillion-dollar system it is today.

On-chain credit is at the same early stage. A corporate treasury can lend on-chain at fixed terms today, and Morpho Midnight can be the biggest beneficiary in enabling that. But for it to become a preferred substitute to off-chain corporate borrowing, it will have to resolve the overcollateralisation problem as a priority.

That’s it for today. I will be back with the next one.

Until next time, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 170,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

Last year, a single company settled about $4.7 quadrillion in securities transactions. That’s more than 35 times the global GDP. This month, that company - the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) - began using blockchain to process these transactions.

One of the biggest upgrades happening in global finance right now involves an infrastructure swap. The clearing house isn’t the only one. Messaging cooperatives that connect more than 10,000 banks globally and card networks that reach 200 million merchants are all rebuilding the infrastructure that moves assets with blockchains as the central part of this upgrade.

Crypto’s rails are being adopted faster by some of those very industries that spent a long time dismissing them.

In today’s story, I explain why they are warming up to using crypto as their backend and the role crypto companies are playing in this upgrade.

On to the story…

The Cost Problem

A share of Microsoft you pay for today on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) will still take a full day to legally be handed in your name. That’s because the infrastructure that moves share ownership was designed for an era involving paper certificates. Humans have spent over 60 years dematerialising shares and speeding up everything in a stock market. Yet, the part where money and assets change hands is still designed around the infrastructure that existed from the paper era.

It’d be naive to presume that this is just a convenience problem. Delays in processing asset and cash movements always incur a financial cost.

Consider a cross-border bank payment. Most global banks pre-fund accounts in different countries and currencies so that payments can clear in other time zones. They use local deposits and central bank reserves to settle cross-border transactions without waiting for real-time funding during different local business hours.

Even when stock market traders post collateral, that money sits idle and earns nothing. Settlement stops on Friday evening and resumes on Monday, following office hours, even when humans function and live their lives on weekends. Although none of this was initially intended to be an inconvenience, we all continue to pay a tax for using this infrastructure, even as faster and cheaper alternatives have emerged.

Meanwhile, exchanges are responding by expanding their trading hours. The London Stock Exchange just announced LSE 24, a venue that will trade for 23.5 hours from Monday to Friday starting from H1 2027. CME took its crypto futures 24/7 in May. Nasdaq has also planned to enable 23-hour trading days later this year.

Although trading is expanding its office hours, settlement of these trades still lags behind. This further punishes the trader by blocking capital.

This tax has grown to the point where it accounts for more than a fifth of global GDP.

Global corporates alone transferred over $30 trillion in cross-border payments last year. They incur transaction costs of more than $120 billion per annum.

This is the cost of this problem that the operators of the legacy financial infrastructure are beginning to take notice of.

In July 2026, they began taking first concrete steps to replace the legacy infrastructure with crypto rails.

The Infra Swap

On July 15, the DTCC, the backbone of the U.S. financial markets, ran its first live production trades of tokenised securities. The trades involved tokenised versions of the original underlying listed company shares, Treasuries, and ETFs.

As part of DTCC’s first on-chain trades, JPMorgan converted holdings of the Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ), one of the world’s most actively traded and liquid ETFs, into tokenised form and posted them as margin at CME. Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Vanguard and the NYSE were among more than 30 firms in the room. These tokens moved through repo, collateral pledges, securities lending and clearinghouse margin on production infrastructure.

This comes just months before the scheduled launch of the DTCC Tokenization Service in October 2026.

This single infrastructure move gives us a quantifiable magnitude of the economic benefit more efficient systems could bring to capital markets. In May 2024, US equities moved from settling in two days to settling in one. That single day cut in the settlement cycle reduced the margin that members must park at the clearinghouse by $3 billion, or 23%, from a three-month average of $12.8 billion in the T+2 cycle to $9.8 billion in the T+1 cycle.

If one day saved in one country’s equity market could free $3 billion in collateral, the value of collapsing settlement to minutes across equities, Treasuries, repo and FX, across borders and over weekends can blow up exponentially.

This is what blockchains commoditise. A stablecoin transfer settles in seconds for a few cents in cost, at any hour, on any day. On the other hand, a tokenised security can change hands and simultaneously serve as collateral without waiting for the infrastructure to open on Monday.

This is why operators of legacy infrastructure are warming up to the idea of using crypto rails as their backend. Because if they don’t, they risk losing business to their competitor who offers its clients the same services at much lower prices and faster speeds.

Crypto infrastructure allows customers to put their money to work more efficiently by eliminating idle time. A security that settles tomorrow cannot be used as collateral today. A tokenised security can be pledged and lent in minutes, around the clock. Collateral mobility is the difference between capital working in parts and capital working continuously.

Nine days earlier, SWIFT, the cooperative whose messages coordinate payments between more than 11,500 institutions, said 17 banks from six continents, including Citi, HSBC, UBS, Standard Chartered, and MUFG, are preparing to pilot tokenised deposits on its new shared ledger.

Tokenised deposits are bank money sans time barriers. Blockchains move funds overnight and on weekends while still remaining as a claim on a regulated bank. This is the perfect alternative for those who avoid bank-issued stablecoins due to the lack of FDIC coverage. Tokenised deposits give users the same convenience as stablecoins, while keeping their money within their own regulatory perimeters.

I wrote about this last month, in Defending the Deposit.

Even card networks like Visa are adopting crypto infrastructure.

On July 16, Cuy Sheffield, Head of Visa Crypto Labs, announced the launch of a platform that lets banks mint, move, and redeem stablecoins within the treasury systems they already run, hiding every key, gas fee, and chain from the client.

The biggest appeal for traditional finance giants in adopting crypto infrastructure as their backend is the ability to pass on cost and time efficiencies across their wide distribution. Roughly 15,000 financial institutions and more than 200 million merchants already sit on Visa’s network.

Its competitor, Mastercard, has built on its earlier pilots and initial live deployments by expanding stablecoin settlement options for banks across six regulated stablecoins.

Mastercard now supports settlement across Circle’s USDC, Paxos’s PYUSD, USDG and USDP, Ripple’s RLUSD and SoFi’s SoFiUSD. These stablecoins will be enabled across a range of supported blockchain networks including Arbitrum, Base, Canton, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, Tempo and XRPL.

The proof that this class of infrastructure works at scale already exists inside a bank. JPMorgan’s Kinexys has processed over $4 trillion in cumulative volume and now moves more than $7 billion a day, every day, including on days when the rest of the financial sector is closed.

Those still unconvinced and resistant to crypto infrastructure need to look no further than how money market funds have adopted blockchains. BlackRock’s BUIDL, a tokenised Treasury fund with roughly $2.5 billion in assets, is now accepted as collateral for derivatives at major venues. Standard Chartered and OKX, a fintech and crypto trading platform, came together to build that framework.

This is the real-world utility of adopting crypto as a backend. It has enabled collateral to earn Treasury yields while posted as margin.

This is the strongest pitch I’d make to anyone who asks “Why should anyone choose crypto rails?”

The single most important job of any new financial innovation should be to help you move, grow and store your money more efficiently.

By enabling these innovations, incumbent crypto companies are finding new roles.

Joining Them, Instead of Fighting Them

Instead of replacing traditional financial companies, as many crypto ideologues had envisioned, crypto companies are becoming the builders of the infrastructure that traditional companies demand.

Half a dozen crypto companies came together to make the DTCC’s July a reality. Chainlink wired the networks together; Digital Asset’s Canton network carried the Treasuries; Fireblocks and BitGo supported custody; and Circle and Ondo designed the service for the entire working group.

Some of these firms spent a decade building for a parallel financial system, but are now supporting traditional financial companies in building faster, cheaper infrastructure to move money and assets. Their revenue model has changed from replacing Wall Street to invoicing its companies.

These invoices are also stretching halfway across the globe.

On July 16, Ondo Finance, the largest tokeniser of equities, announced a partnership with Japan’s SBI Group to tokenise Japanese stocks. The tokenised equities will be distributed across SBI’s ecosystem and settled with JPYSC, SBI’s yen stablecoin.

SBI manages over $250 billion in assets. If it had to build tokenisation capability in-house, it’d have to start from scratch. Instead, it just procured the technology from a vendor that already runs on blockchains and paid rent for its expertise. Ondo already accounts for more than 70% of the tokenised equity issuer market and has a distribution arrangement with Deutsche Börse’s Clearstream in Europe.

Securitize plays the same role by supporting the issuance of BlackRock’s BUIDL.

What Happens Next?

There’s a precedent for what follows.

In 1956, a trucker named Malcom McLean put cargo in a standard metal box. This reduced loading costs from $5.86 per ton to $0.16 per ton. World trade reorganised around the container. Ironically, the carriers who owned the ships captured almost none of the value. That’s because the container box became a commodity and freight became a price war. The riches went to the firms that rebuilt their operations around cheap, reliable shipping. The great beneficiary of the container innovation was the retail giant Walmart, and not logistics giant Maersk.

A similar format could repeat in fintech.

For the container innovation to transform the logistics industry, an entire ecosystem of cranes, ports, chassis and customs had to be rebuilt around it. Similarly, tokenisation works only once custody, compliance and interoperability are rebuilt around it. This is where the value accrues as the settlement layer in banks and financial institutions gets commoditised. It’s this precise ecosystem that Chainlink, Fireblocks and Digital Asset are now targeting.

Tokens or chains will no longer capture significant value. Instead, value will pool in two places.

The first is in the utilities that adopt the crypto rails. DTCC, SWIFT, and Visa will charge for tokenised settlement, deposits, and stablecoins, just as they do for traditional, non-crypto systems. But there’s larger value elsewhere to capture. There will be institutions that reorganise their operations around continuous, atomic settlement by running treasury intraday, making collateral work more efficiently, and offering round-the-clock access to working capital. Think of the BUIDL fund that lets you earn Treasury yields on collateral posted as margin.

Crypto has already spent more than 15 years building a parallel, better financial product. I think crypto builders with foresight will stop building such products. Because crypto’s bigger triumph is being the backstage protagonist that makes your money move more cheaply and faster.

That’s it for today. I will be back with the next one.

Until next time, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 170,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

When you own a share of a company, you have a residual claim on whatever is left after the company pays everyone else. The company pays off employees first, bondholders and lenders next, then creditors, taxes, and preferred stock. Then comes equity, which is owned by the shareholders.

But that residual claim comes with exclusive privileges too. You get a vote on who runs the company, a share of any dividends the company distributes, and a claim on anything left over if the company is sold or wound down.

For a long time now, a token holder in a crypto protocol has been offered a similar deal, at least in language. If you held a token, you could participate in the network’s decision-making and get a share in its eventual success and earnings. But the deal has always been one-sided. Nobody in crypto admitted it all this while because they didn’t face the conflict. Except until now.

While crypto protocols have found a way to keep their token holders happy due to the lack of regulation, the passage of the CLARITY Act (which is underway) could close that leeway. Some crypto protocols that issue equity shares, even while having a class of investors holding their tokens, have further exposed the distinction between shareholders and token holders.

In today’s story, I will explain what could change for token holders of crypto companies that choose to issue equity.

On to the story…

What Ownership Entails

It’s not the return that makes equity the most durable financial instrument. Bonds often outperform equity with higher returns and lower volatility. Yet, equity is attractive to many because of its structure. It is a contractual claim to own a part of the company. If the company earns a profit, the board may pay a dividend, and shareholders receive it. If the board refuses, shareholders can vote for a new board. If a majority want to sell the company, they can. None of this solely depends on the CEO’s goodwill.

Over the past century, the corporate world has continually adjusted the extent of shareholders’ control over a company’s operations. Yet, the right to economic claims has largely remained untouched.

Google’s 2004 IPO gave founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and then-CEO Eric Schmidt 10 times the voting power of public shareholders by creating two classes of equity shares. Yet, the economic rights these public shareholders had were on par with those of founders and insiders. Snap Inc., the maker of Snapchat, issued shares with no voting rights in 2017. Berkshire Hathaway has run dual-class shares since 1996.

Although each of these experiments changed how classical shareholding was defined, they all preserved the part that makes equity equity - the legal, court-enforceable claim on the residual value of the business.

A token holder in a crypto protocol has none of this. They have neither a right to receive dividends nor a residual claim on the proceeds of the company’s sale. It is the whole difference between owning something and being told you own something. Every legal system built around ownership assumes the owner can enforce the claim. A token holder cannot enforce anything. All they have is a token whose price the protocol tries to support by using some portion of revenue to buy back the token on the open market and burn it. What’s worse? Even this isn’t set in a contract. The protocol can change it, pause it, or stop it without any board approval. You cannot call a lawyer if you are aggrieved.

But why are we talking about this now? This gap in the nature of ownership and rights was always there. But it didn’t matter for most of crypto’s history because there was no separate class of owners to compare against. The token was the only one that existed. All this while, the incentives of everyone who holds tokens, be it the community or the founding and leadership teams, are aligned in the same direction.

But that’s changing now.

When successful crypto protocols begin to operate like companies, actual revenue, product, and users begin to matter much more. Sooner or later, they will need more capital to scale, and the best way to raise serious money is still to seek it in wider markets. Just like how Google and Snap did when they went public, or like how Tesla and SpaceX did before they went public.

On July 1, Venice AI closed a $65 million Series A round led by Dragonfly and Coinbase Ventures, valuing the company at $1 billion. Investors got 8.98% equity plus a token grant. This changes how the ownership structure works. It exposed a structural flaw crypto has been ignoring for a decade, just because nobody decided to point it out.

Before the raise, Venice had one class of owners. Now it has two. First are the equity investors with contracts, board rights, information rights, anti-dilution protection, and a legally protected claim on 8.98% of the company. Second are the VVV (Venice’s native token) holders, with a burn programme the company runs voluntarily and can stop whenever it wants.

The fundraise puts an official price on Venice’s equity. When the company grows from here, the equity shareholders capture the growth through a legal, contractual mechanism. None of that directly accrues to the token holders. They benefit only if Venice keeps choosing to buy back and burn its tokens. This means that every dollar of future revenue has to be split between the two, that is, if Venice’s leadership decides to be fair to both classes of shareholders. They can always choose not to buy back.

Venice isn’t the only one. Aave routes 100% of protocol income into AAVE buybacks. Hyperliquid runs the largest buyback in crypto, with over $1.2 billion of protocol revenue allocated to HYPE, 97% of fees, and roughly 5-6% of market cap annually. None of these protocols has done a Venice-style equity raise yet. But all of them face the same underlying question. The buyback mechanism sits at the team’s discretion. Nothing prevents Hyperliquid’s team from redirecting the Assistance Fund.

For a small example of how this ends, Sol Strategies acquired Houdini Swap for $18 million in May 2026. The acquirer paid the founders and equity holders. Token holders of Houdini Swap’s LOCK received nothing. The token’s chart flatlined at zero.

In each case, the mechanism meant to protect token holders’ interests turned out to be one the protocol controlled. This meant that what they expected from holding tokens was just at the mercy of the protocol’s management changing its mind.

This is what happens when the acquirer isn’t legally required to buy anyone else.

The Legal Bind

The CLARITY Act, passed by the US House in July 2025 and stalled in the Senate as of July 2026, is likely to make this conflict even more pronounced by using its legal teeth. The legislation plans to sort every crypto token into one of two boxes. Digital commodities will be overseen by the CFTC, the agency that regulates oil, wheat, gold and other commodities. Under investment contract assets, the token will be categorised as a security and will be regulated by the SEC, the agency that regulates stocks and bonds. Almost every protocol wants its token to be in the first category because it allows the token to trade freely on public exchanges. The second would collapse liquidity and impose compliance costs that most tokens can’t survive.

The problem arises when you look at what comes bundled with each category.

The bill explicitly allows commodity tokens to have governance rights, staking rewards, and value that rises with the extent of use of the underlying protocol. It doesn’t allow any issuer to grant its token holders a legal claim to the issuer’s revenues, profits, assets, or debts. It means a token can capture value from the network, but cannot capture the value from the company that runs the network.

This doesn’t stop a protocol from designing a token whose value accrues based on trading activity. But the token cannot be designed to have its value accrue based on the revenue generated by the corporate entity behind the protocol. Buybacks and burns fall in this grey zone. So far, the SEC hasn’t clarified which side of the fence it falls on. But nothing forces the SEC to draw a line in favour of the token holders.

In the status quo, protocols existed in a legal fog where they could claim tokens were something like informal shares. It’s a case exploiting the absence of clarity. But wait, would you even call it exploitation where there is no law yet? There’s no CLARITY Act right now to outlaw the story that protocols continue telling their token holders. But once the Act comes into force, it will make it legally impossible to offer ownership rights to token holders while keeping it in the commodities category.

Some protocols are already trying to bridge the gap without crossing the line. Aave activated Aavenomics 3.0 on June 27, replacing its committee-directed buyback with an automated, non-discretionary on-chain mechanism that routes 100% of protocol and GHO (Aave’s decentralised, overcollateralised stablecoin) revenue into open-market AAVE purchases.

Stani Kulechov, Aave’s founder, called the mechanism immutable and automated. It is probably the farthest any DeFi protocol has gone to make a promise on record.

But Aavenomics 3.0 is still just code doing the job a contract ought to do. Aave’s governance team can still vote to halt the mechanism. An aggrieved token holder cannot sue for breach of promise. At best, it is a policy that most holders trust the governance team to uphold. Every protocol that has tried to build value accrual without securities registration is likely to face the same restraint imposed by the CLARITY Act.

In fact, Aave is also about to face the question Venice just faced. In late June, reports emerged stating Kraken’s parent, Payward, is negotiating a 15% equity stake in Aave Group at a $385 million valuation. But Kulechov disputed the consideration involved in the deal.

However, he didn’t deny that talks were underway. If this deal closes, Aave becomes the second major protocol to add a real equity class on top of a live token.

Is there any way crypto protocols can justify these dual structures?

The industry’s standard defence is often tokens that hold some genuine utility. Venice’s DIEM, a mint credit that buys a dollar of daily AI compute, is an example of a utility token. Fee tokens on trading venues are another example. But the problem here is that tokens whose value is linked to utility cannot appreciate. It’s like the chips a casino sells you so you can use them to play and cash out when you're done. Even if someone chose to hold these chips, they cannot serve as a store of value beyond their utility for playing in the casino. A DIEM that buys a dollar’s worth of compute should also be treated similarly. It can gain temporary value due to demand being higher than supply, but that cannot compound over time.

But the moment the primary pitch for selling a token is that the protocol will use its earnings to make the token more valuable, then it is nothing more than a pseudo-equity. And this instrument will be unable to evade CLARITY’s excluded categories.

The better alternative for protocols is to choose. They should accept that the token is a commodity and stop marketing it as a claim on the company’s success. The other option is to issue actual economic rights to token holders, register the token as a security, and bear the compliance cost.

For a decade, the capital asset framing worked because nobody insisted on reading the fine print. But it worked so long as everyone in the room was at peace with how it worked. Once equity shareholders arrive with signed papers, the act will stop. Aave’s automated buyback could be one of the best ways to reassure the tokenholders. But that will only last until the governance decides to change the rules they play by. That moment is just one term sheet away.

That’s it for today. I will be back with the next one.

Until next time, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 170,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

Tokenisation is stitching together two contrasting worlds: the always-on, permissionless DeFi protocols where prices move every few seconds, and traditional funds where settlement follows administrative time blocks for a set of permissioned holders.

Bringing the two together involves an unenviable orchestration. But it comes with a value to capture for those who can pull it off. In today’s piece, I will explore who is orchestrating the layer connecting the two worlds and who captures the value it provides.

On to the story…

The tokenised real-world asset (RWA) pool sits above $33 billion, with tokenised US Treasuries accounting for roughly $15 billion. Interestingly, though, its share has slipped from 55% to less than 45% in just a year. There’s been a rise in other tokenised funds, including institutional credit (eg: Apollo’s ACRED) and private credit (eg: Janus Henderson’s JAAA).

This coming-of-age of tokenisation has opened up a spectrum of options across risk profiles for a treasurer or a CFO managing corporate cash. Those seeking lower risk, lower yield, but higher liquidity can opt for treasury funds, while those seeking higher yield and greater programmability can pursue riskier options. The safety of the yield is no longer the problem it once was. These are Treasury-backed instruments audited by the same firms that audit their traditional cousins.

This is the strongest pitch for why tokenisation of real-world assets is ready to blow up among institutional investors.

If someone asked me what separates off-chain money from on-chain money, I’d say composability. It is what lets a dollar do much more across many avenues, helping it compound more. Instant redemption and the ability to make your money work harder make it look like funds on steroids.

Traditional finance made us pick between yield, liquidity, and mobility. Tokenised funds, if managed well, let us keep all three.

But the “managed well” part isn’t as easy. Composability with a fund involves an engineering problem.

Stitching Two Contrasting Worlds

Blockchains bring speed, cost efficiency and fast settlements to tokenised RWAs. But a tokenised money market fund is still a fund, not a stablecoin. It still has to update the NAV once per business day, according to the fund administrator’s clock. It still has to maintain a KYC’d set of holders. For example, BlackRock’s BUIDL has a minimum investment threshold of $5 million, and Circle’s USYC is limited to non-US persons. It still has to honour redemption cutoffs because the T-bills underneath settle on the off-chain infrastructure that closes at 5 pm Eastern Time.

This is the legal substance of the product that cannot be eliminated. If you kill the NAV daily strike, then it isn’t a money market fund anymore. If you do away with the whitelist, then the SEC will come knocking on your door with questions.

So how do you let a fund keep its clock, its holder set, and its redemption windows, while the token representing a share of that fund moves at internet speed? Funds need purpose-built infrastructure that maintains the NAV at period-end, supports epoch-based settlement, and upholds strict legal boundaries when moving assets across blockchains. It’s a tricky coexistence problem to solve.

A recent joint report from LayerZero and Centrifuge describes how they solve it.

Read LayerZero x Centrifuge report

Solving the Conflict Points

Three points of conflict determine whether the coexistence works. If the orchestration layer gets them right, the fund can move at internet speed without violating legal boundaries.

First is the price.

What is the token worth between NAV strikes? Some issuers freeze it at yesterday’s mark and accept the staleness. A frozen price is easy to game when interest rates move mid-day. A continuous price is harder to game but harder to reconcile with the fund’s actual accounting.

Second is the compliance factor.

Where does the whitelist verification layer run? If it runs on every transfer, the token can’t touch open DeFi and can move only between approved wallets. If the layer moves into a vault wrapper, the vault holds the regulated share and issues a freely-circulating receipt token to holders who have cleared KYC once. This receipt becomes composable via DeFi, with compliance embedded in the vault rather than checked on every transfer. Centrifuge’s deRWA framework is a good example of this.

The third conflict arises while moving assets cross-chain.

When a tokenised fund is deployed across nine chains, you need a single source of truth for who owns what and what it’s worth. Although on-chain infrastructure can be updated in real time, it still requires updates and reconciliation across nine chains in the event of discrepancies. The more points of failure there are, the more likely an error is to creep in.

LayerZero and Centrifuge addressed this by building a hub-and-spoke model. In this, a single authoritative chain covers NAV, accounting, and compliance. A messaging layer, orchestrated by LayerZero in this case, pushes those updates to the spoke chains where the token actually gets used.

Centrifuge’s V3 architecture is built on this model, in which each pool selects a hub chain as its source of truth, spokes serve as distribution endpoints for deposits, and DeFi composability is enabled. LayerZero carries the operational data between them that ensures NAV updates, compliance instructions, and cross-chain balance state.

It’s this unenviable orchestration that I was referring to earlier, one that accrues value to those who can carry it out. Whoever runs the infrastructure that keeps a fund’s authoritative state consistent across chains becomes hard to replace. While the fund administrator still holds the clock and the chain holds composability, a single player in the middle has to make both possible at once.

The most fragile part of moving assets is accounting for assets in flight.

When an asset is moving between chains, it can temporarily fall outside the fund’s visible balance sheet. Centrifuge V3 issues tokenised acknowledgements for in-flight assets, so the fund’s balance sheet remains continuous even while the underlying token is in transit. It’s the on-chain equivalent of trade-date accounting. Although boring, but essential.

Why should an institutional investor consider tokenised funds despite these conflicts?

One of the biggest optimisations of idle cash via tokenisation is the looping trade. A treasurer can deposit a tokenised Treasury fund and pledge it as collateral to borrow stablecoin. If the borrowing rate is below the fund’s yield, the position pays the treasurer to hold it. They can then redeploy the stablecoin funds into another yield source and repeat the cycle.

The entire looping trade works only if the above conflict points are addressed. That’s the next challenge facing those building the infrastructure for tokenisation. These points of conflict have been exploited in the past. For instance, if the on-chain NAV price remains stale on smaller tokenised products for even two to four hours and lags the underlying asset, it creates arbitrage opportunities before the next NAV strike.

Redemption-gate collisions can happen when off-chain NAV triggers a liquidity limit, while independent on-chain smart contracts attempt to process token redemptions instantly. This could leave smart contracts holding “orphaned” or unexecuted token transactions that attempt to continuously execute simultaneously against the off-chain cap.

Giant private credit funds and business development companies (BDCs) are currently experiencing this. Two weeks ago, Apollo Global’s $26 billion private credit fund, Apollo Debt Solutions (ADS), ‌had to curb redemptions at 5% of its shares after investors sought to withdraw approximately 16.8% of the total. If such an instance occurred for a fund with a tokenised version trading simultaneously, a redemption-gate collision would be hard to dismiss. In the second quarter, investors requested $15.6 billion in withdrawals from widely held private-credit funds, up from roughly $13.9 billion in the prior quarter.

Cross-chain messages can fail mid-flight, leaving positions half-settled. Trust from institutional allocators will have to be earned when each of these failure modes is monitored and accountable to someone with a licence.

If tokenisation needs to scale to the potential it shows, this is what it will have to deal with. It’s not merely about putting US Treasuries on a blockchain or creating a new asset class. Those building the infrastructure will have to end the archaic rule that forces investors to choose among yield, liquidity, and mobility. If tokenisation offers a way to make a dollar do more than one job at once without compromising on the credibility that comes with the guardrails, then the institutions running billions in cash are definitely going to notice.

I wrote last week about how SWIFT, as an orchestration layer today, is more valuable and powerful than the parties on both sides of the network it serves. How Visa is more valuable than every bank it serves worldwide, except J.P. Morgan.

Read: Who Captures Value in Web 2.5?

This is the incentive for being the orchestration layer in the evolving world of finance. It offers the player a seat at the table for the next decade of capital markets. Centrifuge is defining what the fund side of that seat looks like, and LayerZero is laying its hands on the connective layer between chains.

Read LayerZero x Centrifuge report

That’s it for today. I will be back with the next one.

Until next time, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 170,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

On May 21, I said in Strategy’s Alchemy of Capital that the corporate BTC treasury giant’s STRC preferred debt instrument bends before it breaks. I wrote that STRC was engineered to trade at $100 and that it could strain in unfavourable conditions, but is likely to hold.

Five weeks later, STRC trades at $74 today, down 26% from par. I’d admit that’s more than just bending, especially when I look at the other metrics around the debt instrument.

Just 10 days after I wrote that piece, Michael Saylor sold 32 bitcoin, worth ~$2.5 million at the time. That was the first time Strategy sold anything from its bitcoin stack in years. Although that barely dented its $65 billion stack, a lot has changed in the market in which Strategy operates. And that also changes a lot of things for Strategy.

In my last piece, I stress-tested scenarios that could undermine the thesis behind the debt instrument and the self-feeding reflexive loop that ensures STRC trades at par. But some of those scenarios unwound sooner and more aggressively than I’d expected.

In today’s piece, I look at what exactly happened and where STRC could go from here.

On to the story…

Even after adding 3,600 BTC in the last four weeks, Strategy’s bitcoin stack is worth 25% less. During this time, both the crypto market and bitcoin, which implicitly powered the market’s belief in STRC, have seen about 20% of their market cap erode.

STRC, whose price had never dropped below $90 since its launch, has slipped every single day from $99 on June 1 to $74 on June 26.

Its implied volatility, a forward-looking metric reflecting market sentiment and expectations, had crossed the 10% mark only on seven occasions in the three months before it sold its first BTC. That has shot up almost tenfold, from 8.22% to 78%, in 19 trading days.

Stripping out the numbers shows how the market’s perception of STRC has changed drastically over the last month. STRC was supposed to behave like a calm, boring instrument, in contrast to bitcoin. Strategy pitched it as a credit instrument that traded near $100 and paid a dividend. For months, it traded just like that. In the last 30 days, though, STRC has been closing lower every single day. The instrument that traded at about $100 consistently for months now trades at $74. Its 30-day historical volatility has risen from 4.3% to 34.6% over the last month.

Although Strategy has yet to miss a dividend payment on the outstanding STRC instruments, what’s changed drastically is that its price now fluctuates more wildly than the risky asset it was supposed to shield people from. While the prospective investors were promised predictability, that’s the one thing the instrument can no longer offer.

Implications for Strategy

The most immediate consequence is that Strategy’s funding machine is stressed.

When STRC traded at or near $100, Strategy could issue new shares through its at-the-market programme, collect the proceeds, and buy more bitcoin. That loop powered everything. But issuing a share with a $100 par value when the market will only pay $74 for it means Strategy must still pay an 11.5% dividend on $100 while receiving just $74 in cash. No company does that voluntarily. So the ATM issuance has paused, and the bitcoin-buying flywheel that ran on preferred capital has gone quiet.

The notional value of outstanding STRC preferred shares more than doubled, from $5 billion to $10.5 billion, between March 18 and May 18 this year. But Strategy hasn’t issued a single share ever since.

In my last piece, I described the loop running forward: issue STRC, buy bitcoin, bitcoin rises, confidence grows, issue more STRC. I treated the reverse as a tail scenario, where if the belief in the loop failed, the loop could unwind. That was less than six weeks ago.

But since STRC holders have a preferred right to receive their dividends, the company will still have to pay them out of its cash reserves or, worse, by liquidating its BTC stack.

In May, Strategy’s cash reserve had fallen to $871 million, down 60% from where it stood ($2.25 billion) when I wrote the last piece. That was after the company repurchased $1.5 billion in aggregate principal amount of convertible notes expiring in 2029, for approximately $1.38 billion in cash. It has since been rebuilt to around $1.4 billion, including expected cash proceeds from shares sold under Strategy’s ATM that had not yet settled as of that date.

Set that against annualised preferred dividend obligations that have climbed past $1.2 billion across STRC instruments. That figure swells even further when you add payment obligations toward other instruments.

Although Strategy is far from insolvency, thanks to its BTC stack that it can partly liquidate, the bigger trouble is not the math but the slipping investor confidence in its instruments.

Reviving Investor Confidence

There is a growing debate on crypto forums arguing that Strategy should sell a meaningful chunk of its bitcoin stack to rebuild confidence. But it’s a double-edged sword.

STRC was designed to trade at its par value of $100, and the entire loop of raising additional funds to pay off dividend obligations revolved around its ability to keep the trading price close to par.

If Strategy has to revive investor confidence in STRC and bring its par value back to $100 from $74, it must raise its dividend rate to make it more attractive. But raising the interest rate would mean a larger dividend payout. At the current level of outstanding STRC instruments, a 50-basis-point dividend hike would add about $50 million in annual obligations.

The interest rate hike might still attract enough buyers for STRC. In that case, it will be forced to repeat what it did on June 1: sell more of its BTC stack to pay its dividends.

The payment obligation is a math problem. But selling a portion of its BTC stack could pose a psychological and larger dilemma for Strategy.

In 2025, dozens of companies copied Strategy’s digital asset treasury playbook. They issued stock, bought bitcoin, traded at a premium to their net asset value, and used that premium to raise more capital. Nearly all of them stopped buying when bitcoin slumped, and premiums vanished.

Strategy survived that episode specifically because it did not sell. The “never sell” commitment was what held up the investors’ belief in the entire capital structure.

But that commitment has now taken a U-turn. Although Strategy remains a net buyer of BTC, Michael Saylor explicitly admitted during Strategy’s Q1 earnings call that the company will consider selling its BTC stack to fund its dividend payments.

That statement didn’t trigger investor concerns for over a month. But the single act of selling just 32 BTC, which is less than 0.004% of its BTC stack, on June 1, has done considerable damage to the investor confidence.

The STRC price has dropped by 25%, while the price of common equity stock MSTR has slumped by 45% since the day Strategy sold 32 BTC. In fact, MSTR’s price has slipped below $100 for the first time in more than two years.

This is where the psychological dilemma arises for prospective investors.

Strategy can solve the near-term payment problem by selling bitcoin. In accounting terms, that is possible. The company has a large BTC stack, and selling a small portion of it to fund preferred dividends doesn’t threaten solvency. But no public company is valued only on accounting logic. The story that the company tells the world plays an important role in deciding how the public values it. Strategy sold the story of being a company that buys through cycles, refuses to sell into weakness and uses capital markets to accumulate more BTC.

Once that selling line is crossed at scale, every future dip in Strategy’s cash reserves and every fall in STRC’s price will invite the same question: “Will they sell again?”

This question is the dilemma. If Strategy does not sell, investors may worry about how it will fund its dividend payments. If it does sell, investors will worry that the story of the BTC stack being untouchable is no longer true. The first stresses the cash-flow fundamentals, while the other tests the company’s story that the investors bought into.

This is the reflexive loop that I spoke about in my last piece. The same belief that helps a model like STRC sustain could lead to its downfall, even when the fundamentals seem healthy. Even now, Strategy’s reserves and BTC stack will keep it safe from bankruptcy, but eroding investor confidence alone can lead to reduced interest in buying more STRC and a free-falling STRC price.

We saw this exact pattern kill the DAT copycats. The moment a treasury company starts selling into weakness, the premium disappears, the issuance window closes, and the stock re-rates to a discount. With STRC, Strategy would be repeating 2025, but with its own capital structure at stake this time.

Looking beyond Strategy’s Stretch

When you step back from the company, this episode tells us what it could mean for the industry beyond this one instrument.

The broader crypto market shed roughly 20% of its market cap over the last month. Bitcoin ETFs have recorded seven straight weeks of net outflows, their longest streak ever since launch. The Fed has turned hawkish, and the May PCE inflation print was 4.1%. While none of these was about Strategy, the unwinding of STRC is happening inside this environment. It’s hard to deny that the two don’t feed off each other.

With exchanges making it easier for retail investors to gain BTC exposure, it could also be a case of capital rotation from high-cost or less stable Bitcoin instruments like ETFs, DATs, and proxy holdings like Strategy.

The rise of perpetual contracts and the ease with which retail investors can use leverage on these contracts, with minimal margin risk, allow them to do what they once could only do with MSTR. The wavering correlation between MSTR/STRC and BTC price is less trustworthy than the near-perfect correlation a BTC perp contract has to the spot BTC price. This makes it a no-brainer for an investor to prefer a perpetual contract over a proxy for BTC exposure.

But STRC failing is its own undoing. The instrument is struggling to find demand because its credit story has broken down. The investors have lost confidence in Strategy’s ability to sustain a loop around a credit instrument whose dividend payouts had to be sourced by issuing the same instrument. When that loop broke down, it dragged MSTR’s price down with it. MSTR’s premium to net asset value has compressed to near-parity, implying the market doesn’t value the company above its underlying assets.

This completely inverts the structure that Strategy relied on. For years, the BTC price drove Strategy’s stock, which in turn drove its ability to raise capital. This capital funded its bitcoin purchases. Now the instrument’s credibility is driving the stock price, which in turn feeds back into perceptions of bitcoin exposure. A tale of tail wagging the dog.

This raises a question I did not expect to be asking when I wrote the last piece. If STRC’s fate is increasingly about Strategy’s credit and less about bitcoin’s price, what does that mean for the dozens of other bitcoin treasury instruments that launched in its wake?

Strive’s SATA preferred stock, the closest structural clone of STRC, hit an all-time low of $79 the same week. SATA holders are paid a 13% annualised dividend daily. Strive holds roughly 19,800 BTC at a cost basis of $96,000, which is 60% above the current price levels. Strive has zero debt, no convertible overhang and no maturity-cliff risk. Yet, it broke below par.

Metaplanet in Tokyo holds over 40,000 bitcoin and has issued its own preferred instrument, MARS.

The fact that even a debt-free, structurally cleaner instrument like SATA could not hold par shows us that this is not a Strategy-specific problem. This might mean that the market is repricing the entire asset class for what they are. Not bitcoin proxies and crypto bets, but as credit instruments with all the fragility that comes with credit.

Strategy may recover from here if it were all about fundamentals. If BTC climbs back to $80,000, the collateral story revives in theory, and the ATM window reopens. But only if it were all that easy.

Strategically selling more of its BTC stack in the days to come might technically be far less than what the market’s daily trading volume can absorb. But a broken belief among investors alone can trigger a panic and lead to a market-wide sell-off.

That’s it for today. I will be back with the next one.

Until next time, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 170,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

There’s a hidden currency risk in today’s global payroll systems. A contractor in India, Argentina or Turkey may earn in dollars from a US company, but their rent, groceries and taxes are still paid in their local currency. The current payroll system assumes that the paycheck should be converted to the local currency immediately. That’s not practical in most cases and costs people money whose currencies fall quickly against the US dollar.

What if the worker could save in US dollars and spend locally? This is what stablecoin-enabled payrolls can offer.

If a designer in Mumbai converts the full paycheck into rupees on day one, they have exited the dollar. If the rupee weakens over the next few months, the designer does not benefit and is instead left holding money in a weaker currency. In fact, the Indian designer lost more than a tenth of their purchasing power over the last year simply because they couldn’t hold the money in USD. Instead, if the designer had been able to hold part of that paycheck in dollars or a dollar-like stablecoin, they could have avoided the loss due to currency devaluation.

In today’s piece, I will explain why global workers are increasingly choosing to be paid in dollars or stablecoins and what they actually gain from doing it.

On to the story…

The Currency Risk

A worker who lives in one country but works for an employer in another earns in one currency and spends in another. How they handle the conversion decides whether they quietly lose or gain.

If an Indian contractor earns $2,000 a month and spends it all within a few days, there is no currency benefit because nothing remains to be held. But if the contractor saves 25% of that monthly income, that small dollar position over time could lead to a sizable benefit to the worker. How big a benefit are we talking about?

Over the last 12 months, the rupee moved from roughly ₹85.6 per dollar to around ₹94.7 per dollar. That is a depreciation of over 10%.

This is how much an Indian contractor can save across different scenarios

On a monthly savings of 25% on $2,000 of earnings, that could add up to $600 of avoidable loss (10% depreciation avoided on $6,000 of annual savings). Sure, it’s not a life-changing amount. But in a metro Indian city, that avoidable loss could pay a month’s rent for a well-furnished two-bedroom apartment.

If that saved money had been converted into rupees every month, it would have sat in local currency and gradually lost its purchasing power.

The contrast gets starker as the local currency the contractor spends in performs worse against the US dollar. Consider an Argentine worker who was paid in dollars but held the entire money in pesos. The peso lost 25% of its value against the US dollar in the last 12 months.

By letting the earnings sit in dollars, the worker could have been a third richer. This is not a random, hypothetical abstraction that I came up with. It’s been the reality for many contract workers in Buenos Aires. About 85% of surveyed Argentinian workers chose to be paid in USD rather than their local currency, Deel’s State of Global Hiring report showed.

But the benefit of getting paid in dollars depends entirely on what the worker does with the money. The dollar advantage only appears when the money sits. The longer it sits, and the more of it that sits, the wider the gap grows.

For India, holding dollars could equate to optimising one’s earnings. But for Argentina, it’s more about insuring oneself against the erosion of local currency. The same is true for most struggling economies that face rising inflation and see their currencies devalue against the US dollar.

The Stablecoin Factor

Everything to this point is an argument for dollars. But it isn’t as easy to hold a US dollar in a foreign bank account.

Every bank takes a cut to hand you your own dollars. An inbound international transfer arrives after a flat wire fee, a correspondent bank’s slice, and a conversion spread that most contract workers are unaware of. The global average cost of moving money across a border still sits around ~6.5%. For a contractor billing $2,000 a month, the cross-border fee of moving that money could eat away more than half the currency depreciation cost they could avoid by holding the money in dollars. A stablecoin transfer sidesteps most of it: a couple of dollars in cost, settled in seconds rather than the three-to-five days it takes a wire to clear.

An Indian resident can’t freely keep a balance in dollars. The rules route dollar holdings through specific account types and cap how much you can hold each year; a normal inbound payment is expected to arrive in rupees. The designer who wants to keep three months’ pay in dollars has to comply with these regulations. Struggling economies with devaluing currencies could also restrict their citizens from holding US dollars to avoid hyperinflation and capital flight. Countries like Venezuela, Iran and Afghanistan have all done this in the past.

A set of self-custodial stablecoin accounts has emerged to fill this gap. Platforms like Altitude, built on Squads’ smart-account infrastructure, hold workers’ balances in stablecoins issued by regulated dollar issuers like Circle and Bridge, backed one-to-one by dollar reserves, and store them in a wallet the worker controls with a private key. The platform never assumes custody. The worker holds the dollars on-chain, and no institution stands between them and the decision to keep them in dollars. But self-custody cuts both ways; there is no bank to call if a key is lost, and the balance is not insured the way a bank deposit is.

These accounts let the worker off-ramp just enough to pay rent and utilities, and keep the rest in dollars. It also solves the access problem in places where a dollar account is capped or unavailable. The contract worker doesn’t need the bank’s permission to hold a dollar balance.

This dollar balance does more than just sit there. These accounts integrate the stablecoin balance with yield-generating products like on-chain lending and short-term US Treasuries. This money would have lost value in a local bank account.

That’s not all. These balances can be spent using the card layer built on top of them. Stablecoins move from the worker to the vendor in seconds, regardless of the on-ramp and off-ramp infrastructure each side uses. Multi-currency accounts, an FX engine, payments across 150-plus countries, the savings account, and the debit card all collapse into a single balance that the worker controls.

But I won’t sell this to you like a clean product.

The stablecoin balance is not yet an insured bank deposit. There are emerging versions of tokenised deposits (Read: Defending the Deposit) that could bridge the gap, but they haven’t yet achieved mass adoption. Contract workers still might be unclear about the grey zone in which digital assets and stablecoins operate in their countries. Yet the direction of where this is headed is hard to miss.

The same state of hiring report claimed that contractors in high-inflation markets are increasingly choosing USD or stablecoins over local currencies. In 2025, five of the 10 most common country-currency combinations globally featured USD.

Interestingly, this is not a new behaviour. For most of the last century, everyone wanted to hold the world’s reserve currency. Except that for a majority of that century, doing that was a privilege that didn’t come easy. You needed a foreign account, a broker, a tolerance for paperwork and to part with a bank’s cut. The worker in Istanbul, Buenos Aires, or Mumbai wanted dollars and was told, in various ways, that holding dollars was not for them. Stablecoin payroll inverts that and makes it possible. The dollar now arrives as income, on a rail that doesn’t care where the worker lives, and the act of holding it requires no one’s permission.

You don’t have to look hard to see why this is a big shift

Governments might be tempted to consider this as a leakage and attempt to plug it with their regulatory teeth. But the intent behind what the idea enables is hard to dismiss.

Any infrastructure that moves money cheaply and efficiently is bound to receive its due recognition and validation. The IMF recently told Nigeria not to ban dollar stablecoins, but to manage their risks. It was the same monetary fund that had, for years, maintained a strict stance against stablecoins. This shift in winds shows the mainstream credibility that stablecoins have earned in recent years.

Within the payroll industry, stablecoin infrastructure unbundles the unit of pay, the place it’s stored, the yield it earns, the card it’s spent from, and the border it crosses.

Just what money is supposed to offer: freedom and agility.

That’s it for today. I will be back with the next one.

Until next time, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 170,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

On June 9, London-based Janus Henderson signed a four-part deal with Ethena, the crypto company behind USDe stablecoin. As part of the agreement, the $480-billion asset manager agreed to place one of its own funds inside the reserves backing the digital dollar, whose circulating supply is $5.5 billion. It also agreed to package and sell Ethena’s products to its clients and park its corporate cash in USDe.

Janus is not alone. In the last four months, BlackRock and Apollo, two of the largest asset managers on earth, each made similar moves across different crypto protocols. Collectively, these three companies manage over $15 trillion in assets.

In today’s piece, I explain why Wall Street’s biggest names are buying stakes in the crypto rails and what the quid pro quo is for the crypto companies.

On to the story…

The TradFi-Crypto Deal

Let’s start with what Ethena and Janus will walk away with from the latest deal. Ethena took Janus Henderson’s tokenised credit fund into the reserves that back its USDe. This move strengthens Ethena’s latest attempt to revamp its collateral mix backing the USDe reserves.

In When the Yield Runs Out, I explained how Ethena is diversifying its collateral across traditional and crypto assets. Its earlier reserve strategy, which relied solely on capturing yield from crypto-backed basis trades and treasury bills, unwound amid the market downturn.

Janus’s AAA-rated fund is one of the safest slices of pooled corporate loans. These carry the lowest risk of default and the highest priority for receiving interest and principal payments. Ethena’s risk committee has already approved the fund as an eligible component of the collateral mix. This will be the first time USDe will be backed by a real-world corporate credit instrument.

Janus also did three more things as part of the deal. It bought ENA, Ethena’s governance token, through its blockchain venture ANTIK. It agreed to jointly build regulated exchange-traded products (ETP/ETFs) for USDe in the second half of 2026. This would allow ordinary investors to buy exposure to Ethena’s dollar from a normal brokerage account, without ever opening a crypto wallet. Lastly, it said it would hold USDe, and its yield-bearing version, sUSDe, as its own treasury cash.

For Janus, there’s now a consistent, captive demand from Ethena for its tokenised credit fund. Since Janus’ credit fund now sits in the reserves backing USDe, every dollar of new USDe minted forces Ethena to buy more reserve assets, including JAAA. This excess flow into Janus’s credit fund now happens without the asset manager having to market it.

In return, the asset manager became a customer of the protocol’s dollar, gained a share in its governance by buying the ENA token, and doubled down as a distributor of both products to its traditional clientele.

The other two managers had similar deals four months back. BlackRock bought an undisclosed amount of Uniswap’s token, UNI, while listing its tokenised Treasury fund, BUIDL, on Uniswap’s rails. However, access for BUIDL is gated and open only to large, qualified investors and approved market makers. Apollo signed an agreement to buy up to 90 million MORPHO tokens, nearly a tenth of the supply, while building lending markets on Morpho and using its own credit fund as collateral there.

One asset manager making a small investment toward a crypto protocol could be dismissed as “testing the waters”. But we are now talking about three of the most established money managers buying a protocol’s token and plugging their products into the blockchain-enabled ecosystem.

But why are they governance tokens? Two reasons.

The perspective of traditional finance towards crypto exposure has taken a 180-degree turn. A few years ago, the instinct was to get crypto exposure without touching the infrastructure. They opted to either hold crypto through a tokenised fund, a custodian, or an ETP wrapper.

But the evolving use case for crypto infrastructure has significantly redefined where value now lies. The rise of stablecoins and the tokenisation of real-world assets have shown traditional players that finance can be made much cheaper to operate on-chain. Settling a trade, holding the asset, and keeping the record of who owns what were all hard, expensive jobs that someone charged an expensive fee for. On-chain, they collapse toward the cost of running software.

When the plumbing commoditises, value moves to the layer that decides what flows through it, who sets the rules and who distributes the product. Those who control this layer get to capture the value flowing through it. Right now, the simplest way for traditional finance giants to do that is to buy a stake in these crypto infrastructure protocols that already control this layer. Since Uniswap or Ethena don’t have equity to purchase in the ordinary sense, their governance token offers Wall Street the closest way to own a share of the company.

The other reason is that an ownership stake brings a captive demand for its product. When someone demands USDe, they must pledge equivalent dollars to Ethena as collateral against which it issues the stablecoin. Ethena then has to park the incoming collateral in reserve assets to back the dollar it just minted. JAAA is now one of the assets it is approved to hold, so as USDe’s supply grows, a share of that fresh collateral flows into Janus’s fund. This excess demand arises as a by-product of USDe’s expansion, without Janush having to market it.

Both Apollo and BlackRock did the same with Morpho and Uniswap. In each case, the manager owns the token, supplies the product, and can then drive deposits into the protocol. Deeper deposits mean more demand for the fund that the asset manager just integrated.

For Wall Street, owning the crypto rail gives them control over the reserve, captures the distribution and lets them feed its products using the blockchain at a fraction of the cost.

What’s in It for Protocols?

Two words: Scaled distribution.

For Ethena, Janus opens its distribution network to people who would otherwise never open a crypto wallet or access a crypto protocol. The ETPs and ETFs that Janus and Ethena agreed to build together will allow advisors to buy into Ethena’s products without needing to understand blockchain. Janus’ $480-billion client book dwarfs the few billion Ethena manages by almost 100 times.

This adds on to the distribution boost Ethena got from another such deal it entered into with Coinbase two weeks back.

On June 2, Coinbase Ventures bought ENA and agreed to launch a savings product for Coinbase’s 100 million-plus users.

Coinbase already holds roughly $19 billion in its USDC ecosystem. If Ethena’s yield even marginally outperforms USDC, then Coinbase can route some of its idle USDC balance into Ethena’s product, offer users a better yield, and, in return, Ethena gets deeper funding and broader circulation.

In just four days since its launch, USDe circulation in Coinbase Vaults crossed $100 million.

Distribution also helps source cheaper funding to run its yield machine. By pulling in a slice of a $19 billion exchange balance, or a $480 billion manager’s client base, Ethena can lower the marginal cost of expanding its circulation. For a protocol with $5.5 billion in circulating supply today, even a 1% conversion rate of Janus’ $480 billion in AUM can almost double Ethena’s base.

But why should a Wall Street company hold a stablecoin over an ordinary money market fund?

With Janus’ AAA-rated loan funds now part of Ethena’s reserve strategy, USDe’s backing now looks like a conventional cash portfolio. The reserve now has short-duration, high-grade collateral along with more stable basis trades around commodities like gold. This makes the reserve look familiar to a money market fund that a corporate treasurer has been managing for decades.

That Janus took the extra step of holding the dollar itself as treasury cash shows the asset manager’s belief in Ethena’s ability to defend its dollar with the new collateral mix. It’s something which even BlackRock and Apollo didn’t do with Uniswap and Morpho.

But there are some points to note with caution.

First, a staked USDe still doesn’t guarantee returns. The yield depends on a set of trades on exchanges and market conditions. AAA credit is low-risk but not risk-free altogether, as 2008 showed.

Second, the governance token that the Wall Street companies are buying in crypto protocols pays its holders nothing yet. Ethena’s fee switch, which would route protocol revenue to ENA holders, met its conditions in September 2025 and has yet to be implemented.

So Janus, BlackRock and Apollo are not entitled to any cash flow. But what they are indeed buying is a claim to prospective income once the protocol decides to pay them. The fee switch is off at Morpho, too, and only half-resolved at Uniswap.

But these companies still have two big wins right now.

First is the captive demand they can generate for their products through the partnership with the protocols. Second is being early to position themselves where the value emerges. By buying a stake in blockchain-enabled products, these companies are also buying a share of the prospective income they generate once they become widely adopted across the broader financial markets.

BlackRock, Apollo and Janus are not the first set of institutions to recognise the value that a prospective infrastructure can generate.

We have been discussing this pattern in our last few pieces.

Banks operated as mere deposit-taking businesses until Merrill Lynch unbundled the account and paid savers a market yield. The banks then followed suit.

Read: Defending the Deposit

Exchanges were equivalent to the trading business until vertical integration forced them into price discovery platforms. All exchanges have now become (or are becoming) venues that offer perpetual contracts, pre-IPO markets, and prediction markets, all under one roof.

Read: Every Exchange is an ‘Everything Exchange’

A synthetic dollar is the latest chokepoint to come loose. The dollar, the rail it moves on, and the reserve that backs it are separating into layers, each claimed by whoever runs it best. While Ethena is rebuilding its reserve, players like BlackRock and Janus are offering distribution. Wall Street, having watched the fee on the infrastructure shrink toward zero, has decided to gain control over how the digital dollar is issued.

When you strip this entire phenomenon down to first principles, these asset managers are buying a stake in a crypto protocol that’s doing exactly what the BlackRocks and Apollos of the world have been doing all these years. They are buying a stake in a blockchain-enabled platform that still holds and moves assets (here, stablecoins) and seeks to maximise the return on those assets for its holders. Classical asset management stuff, isn’t it?

That’s it for today. I will be back with the next one.

Until next time, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 170,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

After the 2008 financial crisis, banks pulled back from middle-market lending. Private credit filled that void with pooled capital from pension funds, insurers and wealthy individuals, and lent it directly to borrowers. The private credit industry grew almost tenfold from 2007 to approximately $2.4 trillion by 2023.

The problem, though, has been that these lenders retained all of banking’s frictions. Think of the multi-day settlement windows, agent banks reconciling positions over email, and the “2 and 20” fee model that survived intact.

The new system is larger than the one it replaced, but also more susceptible to risk due to its high leverage.

The stress is already showing. In Q1 2026, redemption requests at non-traded BDCs exceeded new fundraising for the first time in the sector’s history. Blue Owl had to sell $500 million in bonds and restrict redemptions across its retail vehicles to address rising redemption activity. Blackstone’s flagship BCRED fund has already received $4.4 billion in redemption requests in the second quarter, accounting for 10% of its outstanding shares, compared with 7.9% in the preceding quarter. Capital is moving from smaller, software-heavy lenders to larger balance sheets. Ares Capital and Blackstone’s BXSL have held up. The rest are bleeding.

Blockchains can help address some of these frictions, and the world has begun to take notice.

In January this year, Apollo, the world’s largest private credit manager, put a slice of its diversified credit fund on six blockchains. The product, ACRED, settles redemptions daily. The traditional version settles quarterly, on paper, through a transfer agent.

In today’s edition, I look at how private credit’s $2.4 trillion empire is being rewired and who gets to capture the value from the new infrastructure.

Onto the story,
Prathik

What Concerns Private Credit?

After the 2008 financial crisis, regulatory guardrails were put in place to protect the banking industry from future financial shocks. The Dodd-Frank regulation in 2010, the Volcker Rule, and Basel III’s capital framework required banks to hold more capital against leveraged loans, while interagency guidance discouraged such deals.

The lending business is dominated by half a dozen key players. Apollo manages over $1 trillion in assets, with ~80% in credit. Ares has $422 billion in AUM. Blackstone’s Blackstone Private Credit Fund (BCRED) holds roughly $79 billion in assets. Blue Owl manages roughly $160 billion

Most of these institutions retained the old “2 and 20” fee structure, in which the banks charged a 2% management fee on AUM and a 20% carried interest above a predetermined profit threshold.

The mechanics behind processing a direct lending transaction are worse. The Loan Syndications and Trading Association (LSTA) targets seven business days to settle par syndicated loans and twenty for distressed loans. In reality, it often takes longer due to time-consuming paperwork.

In its market practice documentation, the International Securities Association for Institutional Trade Communication (ISITC) calls the process “highly manual (fax, email).” NAV calculations are performed quarterly by fund administrators, who are paid specifically for this.

At some levels, this system looks worse than the 2008 banking system. In 2008, the failing assets on bank balance sheets were backed by FDIC insurance. The US Fed’s emergency liquidity facilities (TAF, PDCF, TALF) plus TARP capital injections were available as the last resort. The problematic securities were still being traded, so the market priced in the stress as it unfolded.

Today’s private credit risk is entirely different.

The IMF’s October 2025 Global Financial Stability Report flagged that more than 40% of companies that borrowed from private lenders had negative cash flow from operations at the end of 2024. US life insurers are roughly 33% allocated to private credit.

This is the core problem that worries the private credit industry today. The system that replaced banks is bigger than the banks it replaced, more leveraged to insurance capital, and yet regulators have done little to change it.

Moving the Plumbing On-Chain

Lending has five layers: origination, underwriting, capital, servicing and distribution. A private credit fund collects a single fee for doing all five. Blockchains force them apart. Once they’re apart, you can see which ones still earn their fee.

Consider Maple Finance, an on-chain asset manager. Maple started five years ago as an undercollateralised institutional lender on-chain. When FTX collapsed in late 2022, so did Maple. Its largest borrowers walked away from loans they couldn’t repay. Active deposits fell by over 90% in a matter of months.

But Maple rebuilt. It brought underwriting in-house, tightened collateral and disclosure rules, and put walls between pool delegates and borrowers. By the end of 2025, it had originated over $20 billion in loans on-chain, with withdrawals settling in under five minutes.

Compare this with a 20-business-day window in the traditional market. Maple’s rise from a near-death experience shows that on-chain lending is not necessarily fragile. If on-chain lending adopts the same institutional safeguards as traditional credit, a robust model is achievable. Maple showed this by rebuilding its underwriting layer while skipping the agent bank, correspondence via fax or email, and the 20-day wait.

Securitize is experimenting at the distribution layer. Its tokenised feeder for Hamilton Lane’s Senior Credit Opportunities Fund cut the minimum investment from $2 million to $10,000. That opens up lending opportunities to a much wider range of investors. The product still requires a qualified purchaser status, but the operational cost of qualifying has been compressed.

In traditional rails, a private credit position is an inefficient, passive position on the balance sheet. The company holds it to maturity, sells it at a discount, or worse, pledges it through paperwork that could take weeks. On Aave’s Horizon, a private credit position can be used as live collateral. An institution can borrow stablecoins against it on the same day. This is because NAV updates flow through an oracle without waiting for an agent bank to apply them manually once a quarter.

There’s one caveat to all this, though. Most institutional tokenisation today is just a wrapper around traditional permissioned rails. Only two out of every 10 dollars in tokenised credit is distributed through blockchains. The remaining eight dollars is represented and recorded on-chain only for reconciliation, but is distributed using traditional lending mechanisms.

But the trend over the past 12 months indicates that the proportion is increasing rapidly. While the represented value of tokenised credit doubled in the last year, loans originating on-chain more than tripled, from $1.7 billion to $5.3 billion.

Capturing Value On-Chain

For decades, banks charged fees for ‘features’ that should have been considered as frictions. Think of the time-consuming paperwork, 20-day processing windows and the human labour involved to manoeuvre all the procedures. Blockchains promise to eliminate most of these frictions. So, where will the lending protocols earn from once blockchain commoditises the lending infrastructure?

Consider Charles Schwab, the financial services and brokerage firm. For decades, Schwab undercut every full-service brokerage in the US on trading commissions. Eventually, it charged nothing at all. Yet, Schwab didn’t get poorer. It made money elsewhere. Revenue from commissions got replaced by net interest income on idle customer cash.

BlackRock built a trillion-dollar empire on this very trade. The asset manager built Aladdin as the tech platform that unifies the investment management process. This platform became a moat for BlackRock.

In private credit, too, Apollo’s relationships, Ares’ workout expertise, and Blackstone’s deal flow remain unique to each firm. No matter what aspect of private credit tokenises, these aspects won’t. Blockchains unbundle different layers of lending. So protocols that can bundle these layers on-chain by vertically integrating across the stack can capture maximum value across the lending infrastructure.

Securitize is mimicking what transfer agents like SS&C Technologies and Apex Group did in the traditional private credit industry. They act as intermediary between the fund or lender and its investors. For decades, they have maintained investor records, processed subscriptions and redemptions, paid distributions and handled the tax paperwork. Without them, no private credit fund could operate. But that’s also why this was the largest cost centre. With Securitize, the transfer agent is turned into a smart contract.

Aave Horizon is acting like a prime broker for on-chain lending. They provide secured financing, leverage facilities, asset custody, and liquidity solutions to help funds optimise their capital structure and execute complex lending structures. Maple gives us an early peek into what an on-chain BlackRock might look like.

We are seeing similar patterns emerge with the dollar deposits. Earlier this week, I discussed how banks are reinventing to defend their deposit.

Read: Defending the Deposit

The deposit is being unbundled into yield, settlement, insurance, and convertibility, and those who can bundle those layers back again using blockchain at the lowest cost can capture maximum value from their customers.

Private credit is in the same place now. Blockchains split the single fee that used to pay for both underwriting judgment and back-office procedures into two parts. The value emerging from capturing the back-office half is what the new infrastructure will fight for.

But there is one counterargument here. One reason investors hold private credit is that it doesn’t trade frequently. Quarterly NAVs make it seem like the volatility doesn’t exist. Once blockchains make the asset liquid, volatility returns. So blockchain does not make all private credit better. It compresses the operational layer. But that’s where it offers advantages. Blockchains can affect how the asset behaves by making it less likely to default or more likely to recover.

Consider the First Brands and Tricolor bankruptcies from last September. They were cases of fraud where executives pledged the same collateral to several lenders at once. The traditional lenders overlooked the duplicate pledges. On-chain collateral records make that mechanically impossible. The IMF, the FSB, and the Fed have all flagged opacity as the central systemic risk in private credit. Transparency is the feature regulators should demand the most from private credit.

As an industry, private credit was supposed to be a better alternative to the loopholes in banking. Now, an alternative to traditional private credit is emerging in on-chain credit.

This pattern will keep repeating wherever there are inefficiencies to address and value to capture. We saw it with banks that were equivalent to deposit businesses until Merrill Lynch unbundled them and offered much more than just a savings-account-level return; exchanges were synonymous with the trading business until perpetual and event contracts forced them to become multi-asset brokerages.

The impact of blockchain infrastructure on lending extends beyond the asset class itself.

Lending is one of the oldest businesses in the world. Most of what makes it expensive is not the lender’s judgment but the friction around it, including agent banks, transfer agents, lawyers, and quarterly cycles. Once you compress these, lending gets cheaper to deliver.

Additionally, on-chain dollars can be routed to a tokenised loan book that earns the holders far more than 0.6% in a savings account. This is a big win for a retail user with dollars.

The infrastructure that rests between the underwriter and the borrower is up for grabs. Whoever expands across different layers of that infrastructure will stand to gain the most.

Securitize already owns the distribution layer, with BlackRock, Apollo and Hamilton Lane using its infrastructure. Aave Horizon operates on the composability layer. But Maple is the only on-chain native that already does credit underwriting at scale. It is also the only one of these three that owns both judgment and infrastructure. Its in-house credit team underwrites the loans, its smart contracts settle them, and its syrupUSDC product distributes the returns across DeFi pools at Aave, Pendle, Kamino and Sky. This is similar to what BlackRock does with capital, judgment and platform under one roof. Maple’s balance sheet is also the only one that has been stress-tested in the aftermath of the FTX collapse. That episode has forced Maple to build institutional discipline that others have not yet had to develop.

That’s it for today. I will be back with the next one.

Until next time, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 170,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

Markets continuously evolve. It’s what they do. They eventually outgrow the product they were initially built for. What started as a Chicago butter-and-egg exchange in 1898 became the world’s largest derivatives market (CME). Amazon started by building warehouses and payment rails to ship paperbacks. Today, the same systems don’t care what they ship. Books are probably a footnote in Amazon’s revenue now.

This pattern stays relevant today. You start by building infrastructure for one thing, discover that it works for many other things, and then you keep expanding your business to absorb everything your infrastructure can support.

Crypto exchanges are living this moment.

The infrastructure they built to trade tokens works just as well for trading crude oil, silver, equity indices, pre-IPO stocks or event contracts. Non-crypto perpetual contracts accounted for 99% of all trading volume over the past seven months on a permissionless market that didn’t exist two years ago.

You can see this market playbook happening everywhere. Every exchange is racing to become a multi-asset brokerage, and blockchain rails are providing the cheapest path to get there.

Onto the story,
Prathik

The Cheapest Path

A perpetual futures contract or a prediction market contract doesn’t care whether the underlying is bitcoin or crude oil. All you need is a stablecoin-funded wallet to buy a futures contract on a memecoin or place a bet on the outcome of Apple’s quarterly earnings. The rails are asset-agnostic. Just as the internet and logistics networks were agnostic to what was traded on Amazon’s marketplace.

But why would traders abandon their current venues to trade silver and stocks on an exchange that has barely existed for a couple of years? The same things that drove people to choose online commerce: convenience and cost savings.

Amazon cut the intermediaries and allowed distant sellers to ship directly to buyers. This enabled the sellers to undercut their competitors by offering subsidised prices. It also allowed buyers to browse a host of options, add items to their shopping carts, and make payments from the comfort of their homes (or anywhere else).

Although the cost advantage that blockchains offer was originally built for crypto transactions, it applies equally to equities settlement, commodity clearing and cross-border stock access.

The 24/7 live markets on the blockchain also allow traders around the globe to price events at any time. We saw their impact on non-crypto assets multiple times in the past few months.

Since October 2025, Hyperliquid’s permissionless markets (HIP-3) have processed ~$270 billion across seven builder-deployed venues. Of this, 99% of trading came from commodities, equities, FX, equity indices, and pre-IPO contracts. Crypto stayed below 1% throughout. And the asset mix continues to diversify each month.

When the US-Israel conflict with Iran escalated over the last weekend of February this year, the world’s largest commodity exchange (CME) was closed. Hyperliquid’s WTI perpetual wasn’t. Trading volume on the platform surged from $25 million to over $550 million in three weekends. Hyperliquid had priced in roughly 80% of the subsequent WTI crude move before CME reopened on Monday, according to a recent report by TD Securities.

Even the perpetual contracts on silver hit nearly $1 billion in daily volume during the precious metals rally earlier this year. Trading on blockchain-enabled venues continued even when traditional markets were shut.

This isn’t limited to perps. The same behaviour is seen in equities trading.

US equities represent more than 60% of global equity market capitalisation. For most of the world’s investors, buying them requires intermediaries, foreign exchange conversion, minimum balances, and restricted account types.

Everyone wants a taste of the world’s largest economy and a place in its growth story. This explains why almost every crypto exchange wants to let its traders buy and sell U.S. equities or derivatives with U.S. equities as the underlying.

On June 1, Binance announced zero-commission access to 7,000 U.S.-listed shares and fractional ownership starting at $5 for all its 300 million registered users. The vast majority of them are outside the U.S. and can now gain exposure to U.S. equities using their stablecoin-funded wallets.

Kraken’s xStocks has already shown how tokenisation can impact access to public equities. The platform has tokenised over 100 public equities, generating $25 billion in trading volume with 80,000 on-chain holders.

Blockchains also unlock pre-IPO price discovery for traditional markets. SpaceX is preparing what could be the largest IPO in history by raising roughly $75 billion. On June 1, Anthropic confidentially filed its IPO papers. OpenAI is likely to follow. Before these companies go public, price discovery is opaque and restricted to accredited investors.

In Pricing the Private, I explained how the market is interested in pricing assets that behave like public companies.

Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have brand recognition, revenue at scale, and hundreds of millions of users. They have everything a public company has except public shareholders. Their marketing has ensured that everyone has an opinion about them. In fact, there has never been a wider gap between everyone having an opinion on SpaceX, and yet almost nobody being able to price it.

Blockchain enables multiple tools to let the market price these private companies.

For instance, many platforms that started as crypto exchanges now offer pre-IPO perpetuals, prediction-market contracts, and tokenised IPO access for companies that have yet to go public.

Multiple market makers have offered perpetual contracts on Hyperliquid for companies such as SpaceX, Cerebras, and Anthropic. The trading volume on these contracts has jumped about 300 times over the last six months, from $16 million to $4.7 billion. The perp contracts on pre-IPO stocks accounted for 7.7% of all HIP-3 activity in May, up from 0.2% in December 2025.

These venues are not just always on and cheaper, they also provide deep liquidity traders can trust.

During the Iran escalation, Hyperliquid’s WTI contract handled hundreds of millions in daily volume at tight spreads. Between January and April 2026, the open interest in a WTI Oil perp contract rose from $1.8 million to $560 million.

Traditional exchanges can also offer users cross-margin and deep liquidity by tapping into their user deposits. Binance offers its users access to pre-IPO stocks through its integration with PreStocks, while Payward (Kraken’s parent firm) allows its users to invest in tokenised IPO.

Less than 24 hours ago, Coinbase also joined Kraken and Binance by launching perp contracts on pre-IPO stocks, starting with SpaceX.

Building a Full-Stack Fintech

The convergence of traditional finance and crypto from both directions is creating a full-stack fintech platform for many of these companies. While crypto-native platforms are adding traditional asset classes, traditional exchanges are rapidly adopting blockchain infrastructure.

On the crypto side, Kraken spent over $2.7 billion on acquisitions in the past 12 months to turn into a multi-asset brokerage. In March 2025, it bought NinjaTrader for $1.5 billion — the largest deal ever to secure a CFTC-registered futures commission merchant.

It followed that up by acquiring Backed Finance to control xStocks issuance, trading and settlement in-house. Its product grew from 60 tokenised equities to 100 by early 2026. Five more acquisitions followed across payments, clearing and automated trading infrastructure.

It then launched Krak, a payments app supporting 300+ assets across 160 countries, that helps users spend, send and earn yield on their crypto.

Coinbase has lined up a similar stack.

At its December 2025 product event, Coinbase launched commission-free stock trading across all 50 states and prediction markets via Kalshi.

In August 2025, it acquired Deribit for $2.9 billion, giving it control of the largest crypto options market. Coinbase is now positioning USDC and its Layer-2 chain Base as settlement rails for everything from agentic payments to equity trades.

Each of these platforms entered finance through crypto and now boasts a distribution network that incumbents spent decades building. Binance has 300 million registered users. Kraken serves 15 million clients across 190 countries. These user bases are their biggest moats as they expand into multi-asset brokerages.

When Binance adds 7,000 US stocks, it doesn’t have to build demand from scratch. Access to these equities and pre-IPO stocks is being offered to people who have already topped up their wallets with stablecoins multiple times and have verified identities. The marginal cost of adding equities to an existing crypto brokerage is a fraction of what a traditional broker spends to acquire a single new customer.

The traditional incumbents are also adapting aggressively to stay relevant.

The same day Binance launched US stocks, the CME Group, the world’s largest derivatives exchange, announced 24/7 trading for all its crypto futures and options.

DTCC, which custodies $114 trillion in assets, will pilot tokenised securities this July and move to full production in October. The pilot covers Russell 1000 stocks, major index ETFs, and US Treasuries. More than 50 firms joined the effort, including BlackRock, JPMorgan and Circle.

NYSE partnered with Securitize to build a 24/7 tokenised stock venue. Nasdaq received SEC approval in March to trade tokenised equities within its existing rails.

It’s an interesting convergence. CME and other legacy institutions are adopting 24/7 operations because crypto has shown markets don’t need to close. Crypto exchanges are adopting traditional assets — oil, silver, indices — because users have shown that demand will shift to any platform that offers deep liquidity and a cheaper way to price information.

Blockchains are serving as a common bridge between the two.

Crypto’s Evolution as Fintech

As with any technology, online forums have defaulted to binaries about crypto’s use case. They expect crypto to either build a new, separate financial world or crumble under its own weight. But crypto is evolving in the area in between. The same happened with the internet.

While people were busy either writing it off or celebrating it as a new world, the internet, over time, became commoditised to the point where it is now invisible. Pretty much the entire world runs on it. Nobody argues anymore about the internet’s use case. It has become the common denominator enabling newer technologies on top of it.

This is exactly what I see unfolding for crypto. The technologies that come with crypto may not be achieving what the founding cypherpunks expected. I doubt most of them would even care; at least I don’t.

While the endogenous markets are busy debating BTC cycles and downturn narratives, a parallel exogenous side to the market is steadily expanding across multiple layers of the finance stack. Payment infrastructure, agentic commerce, integrated price discovery platforms, and now multi-asset brokerages. These businesses are thriving independent of whether BTC is at $60,000 or $100,000.

Hepworth Iron Capital’s Charlie Booth explains the endogenous-exogenous market evolution beautifully in his guest op-ed on Token Dispatch last week.

What interests me the most here is that a technology built to trade tokens is being used to give a retail investor $5 worth of access to Apple stock on a Saturday, settled in stablecoins with sub-cent fees, on infrastructure originally built for memecoins.

These possibilities happen only when the new infrastructure is significantly better than what it replaced. We all know old habits die hard. And the world is discovering blockchains as the magic pill to make finance work better. In some cases, by lubricating the legacy financial systems; in others, by altogether replacing the old, dilapidated systems. There is no wisdom in resisting change for the sake of it.

It’d also be suicidal for any industry run by humans to resist change that improves how existing systems work. That’s because of humans’ innate desire to improve inefficient systems. Things that make inefficient systems efficient are always adopted. No matter how new and how radical they might seem. Blockchains have evolved in a space with plenty of room to reduce such inefficiencies. The fact that legacy institutions and markets like Nasdaq, NYSE, and CME are adopting blockchain technology is a testament to blockchain’s evolving role in the future of finance.

Every exchange is a brokerage now (or will soon become one). Not all would have planned it, but that’s what they want to become. But what unfolds next? Who wins when every platform offers stocks, derivatives, prediction markets and crypto on the same app? It will come down to how well they integrate these assets across their platforms and enable their users to carry out some of the most fundamental tasks in the world of finance: spending, sending, receiving, and earning money.

That’s it for today. I will be back with the next one.

Until next time, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 170,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

In March this year, OpenAI shut down a feature that let AI agents shop on your behalf. Barely 30 Shopify merchants used the feature in five months since its launch. There was nothing wrong with the payments infrastructure. The problem was that there were no rules in place to ensure a seamless shopping experience. What the agent could buy, who collected sales tax, how fraud was caught, who handled returns — none of it was settled.

Giving an agent a wallet or building payment infrastructure has been easy to crack. But allowing individuals or businesses a trusted and governed way to use an agent to spend their money is tricky. Only programmability and rules can ensure a trusted environment. This gap in the governance layer has become an opportunity in the agentic economy.

Last year, AI agents settled $73 million across 176 million transactions. The number might seem insignificant now, McKinsey projects that AI agents will mediate $3-5 trillion in global consumer commerce by 2030.

Companies building this economy are racing to own the governance layer, including spending controls, identity checks, and policy enforcement that determine which agents are trusted with budgets.

Today, we map out who is building the banking layer for the bots and what’s in it for those who dominate it.

Onto the story,
Prathik

Why Own Multiple Layers

The economics of processing agent payments are brutal. The average payment made by AI agents over the last 12 months was 31 cents.

Consider what a 31-cent payment would leave behind for those orchestrating the transaction across several layers in the background. Stripe’s standard pricing of 2.9% plus 30 cents in fixed fees leaves the merchant with less than a tenth of a cent. Visa interchange swallows a third of it. On the other hand, Layer-2 stablecoin rails process the same transaction for $0.0001.

These economics established the case for crypto’s use across the settlement layer.

The payment infrastructure across the settlement layer is largely solved. Coinbase’s x402 protocol processed the vast majority of last year’s 176 million transactions, with around 3,900 merchants now accepting agent payments. Stripe and Tempo co-authored a competing protocol, Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), that launched in March with over 100 integrated services. Google, Visa and Mastercard all shipped agent payment products in the same window. That’s five competing payment architectures in 12 months.

But the problem with agentic payments is that nobody will get rich by processing 31-cent payments. So, the value concentrates in the float and in enforcing the rules around how agents make the payments.

Last week, we explained how businesses could capture value by owning the wallet layer that holds the stablecoin balances for AI agents. But the float is only one of many such value layers worth capturing. The other is the rules governing how that float gets spent.

These rules include spending controls, agent identity, policy enforcement, audit trails, and liability allocation when transactions fail. This layer is wide open.

In April, American Express launched Agent Purchase Protection, an insurance product that covers erroneous purchases made by AI agents. This is an implied admission of the state of the governance layer across AI agents. There’s value to be captured here by addressing the missing governance in an industry expected to grow to $3-5 trillion in less than five years.

This is why the incumbents are now racing to capture the governance layer.

But at what level should this layer be built? It can be a bank, a developer API or even a wallet.

Wallet as the Governance Layer

Every dollar that an agent spends passes through the wallet. This makes it the best point to enforce spending limits, identity checks and human approvals. Once you control the wallet, you control the governance. Stripe, the payments infrastructure company, learned this early on.

In June 2025, Stripe acquired Privy, a company that built embedded wallets for consumer crypto apps. Through the acquisition, Stripe inherited 75 million wallets across 1,000+ developer teams. These wallets now sit at the very chokepoint where every policy, spending limit, and human approval can be enforced before any money moves.

Stripe has also assembled an entire agentic payments stack. It acquired Bridge to handle stablecoin orchestration and fiat conversion. It also partnered with Paradigm to incubate Tempo, a payments-focused Layer 1 blockchain. Stripe and Tempo co-authored the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), an open standard for how agents request, authorise and settle payments.

Read: Why Stripe built its own chain

Stripe’s agent-ready financial stack now lets software check balances, pay invoices, store funds, create virtual cards and send money. An agent can execute routine payments on its own, but escalates anything outside its policy parameters for human review. Treasury balances are backed by noncustodial Privy wallets across more than 150 markets.

Even when Amazon had to allow its developers to give AI agents the ability to spend money, it chose two wallet companies - Privy and Coinbase. Not seasoned financial players like banks or card networks, but a wallet provider that is barely five years old.

This is because the wallet serves as the ideal checkpoint, allowing the right level of human intervention to ensure the necessary checks and balances.

In its report ‘Who Pays the Agent’, Keyrock argued the agentic commerce market will “settle in the middle, where agents operate with significant autonomy but within cryptographically enforced boundaries that humans can audit and revoke.”

Read Keyrock's Report

This is the position Privy occupies inside Stripe’s stack. The wallet enforces the boundaries within which the agent has to operate.

Here’s how the governance strategies on this stack function.

Privy offers two models for agentic wallets. In the first, the agent controls the wallet entirely and executes transactions within policy constraints without requiring human approval. This model works best for fully autonomous agents like trading bots and portfolio managers. In the second, users retain ownership of the wallet but grant the agent restricted permissions to operate as a signer. Users can revoke access at any time.

Stripe’s MPP follows a similar governance strategy.

MPP introduced a feature called sessions for high-frequency agent tasks. Under sessions, an agent pre-authorises a spending budget and then streams payments within that limit continuously without needing a separate request for each individual on-chain transaction. The MPP has implemented sub-cent billing for LLM inference and per-query pricing for data APIs.

This is the governance granularity that card networks cannot support.

Vertically Expanding the Stack

Although Coinbase’s x402 leads AI agentic payments today, Privy has an advantage that has little to do with crypto. It’s the distribution moat via Stripe.

Coinbase has 3,900 merchants that accept agentic payments. For every Coinbase merchant accepting agent payments, Stripe has roughly a thousand. In February, Privy said that if every Stripe merchant chose to accept machine payments, agentic commerce could scale through Privy wallets today. Stripe merchants don’t need to build bespoke crypto infrastructure.

While the race between Stripe and Coinbase is tightening, other traditional giants are also joining the race to expand vertically across the stack.

Keyrock mapped 179 projects across six layers of the agent payments stack: settlement, wallets, routing, protocols, governance and applications.

Coinbase and Stripe each span five of those six layers. Circle covers four. Despite their scale, Google covers two layers and Visa just one.

The incumbents spent over $8 billion in twelve months filling gaps in their stacks. Capital One acquired Brex, an AI-native software platform, for $5.15 billion. Mastercard acquired BVNK for $1.8 billion. Among these, the wallet layer and the AI software layer attracted the most aggressive acquisition activity. Stripe bought Privy, Fireblocks bought Dynamic, and Arbitrum bought ZeroDev. In each case, payment infrastructure bought a standalone wallet provider.

These deals collectively suggest that the market has picked a scarce layer. Settlement has become cheap and interchangeable, but programming permissions, budgets, and liability are where the value lies.

Vertically integrating across multiple layers also has a compounding effect.

Whoever owns this checkpoint can set the rules for spending, capture the float before it moves, decide which merchants, agents, and applications get trusted access and earn a fee to enable all these things. We saw it with the Privy-Stripe distribution moat.

Even Coinbase’s position shows how this works. Every x402 payment creates USDC demand on Base, its Layer 2. That generates revenue on float. That revenue funds more agent tooling through AgentKit, which ships with session caps, per-transaction limits, and allowlists that restrict transfers to vetted contracts. More agents on AgentKit means more x402 payments. Every layer feeds into the other.

There’s a lot more investment activity by the incumbents.

Coinbase Ventures has also invested in Catena Labs, Skyfire and Payman, the three most prominent standalone governance startups. Circle’s cofounder Sean Neville founded Catena, and Circle invested in Skyfire. a16z led rounds for both. Visa backed Payman and partnered with Skyfire.

The same names that built the payment settlement infrastructure are funding the governance layer. The idea is that if governance remains a feature within the existing infrastructure, as Privy has built it with its two models, then incumbents can maximise their revenues. If governance becomes a standalone layer, they win through their portfolios.

What’s in Owning the Governance Layer?

Processing payments has never been the most valuable position because, at some point, financial rails commoditise. Once that happens, the margin shifts toward the layers that decide whether a transaction is allowed to happen and under what conditions.

Historically, many industries have gone through the same commoditisation.

Consider what happened when the internet commoditised cable. All internet service providers (ISPs) became indistinguishable and interchangeable. So the telecoms had to expand vertically to stay competitive.

India’s top telecom networks - Jio and Airtel - started bundling hundreds of TV channels, subscriptions to half a dozen OTT platforms, unlimited voice calling, a set-top box and a free router into a single broadband plan. Similarly, AT&T acquired Time Warner for $85 billion to become an integrated media and telecom giant. The idea was to combine Time Warner’s premium content, like HBO, Warner Bros., and CNN, with AT&T’s massive distribution network to compete with streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon.

When broadband connection - the underlying infrastructure - became the least valuable part of the package, the value shifted to the content, the relationship and the bundle of offers that best attracted customers.

We saw this play out in crypto, too.

Settlement was supposed to be at the protocol level. Think of Ethereum as the shared ledger everyone settles on. When Coinbase launched Base as a faster, less congested Layer-2 chain, the company began earning money from gas fees on every transaction it settled on its own chain. Coinbase now earns roughly $60 million in annualised sequencer revenue by processing transactions on Base.

The players building agent payment rails have learned from watching this.

In The Agentic Float, we explained how an economy can emerge by controlling the stablecoin balances agents hold between transactions. This allows the companies that capture the wallet layer in the stack to add a revenue stream.

The governance layer adds another revenue stream, and possibly a larger one.

Visa earned 0.28% on $14.2 trillion of its annual payment volume. That take rate not only includes a processing fee but also an implicit governance fee for the trust the payments company has built by preventing fraud, resolving disputes, and enforcing network rules.

Applying even a fraction of that take rate to agentic commerce, it tells us the magnitude of value it adds to the companies building on the governance layer. At McKinsey’s projection of $3 trillion in agentic commerce by 2030, a governance take rate of just 0.1% (about 35% of what Visa charges) would generate $3 billion a year. For context, Coinbase’s entire subscription and services revenue stood at ~$2.8 billion in 2025. The revenue from the governance layer on agent transactions alone could rival what Coinbase currently earns from staking, custody, and Coinbase One combined.

A company that has a presence across the wallet, settlement and governance layers of the agentic finance stack can earn yield on idle agent balances (revenue on float), fees from settlement (sequencer revenue on every transaction), and compliance fees (from enforcing the governance).

This is why vertical integration across the stack will be the only business model that lets a company remain competitive in the agentic era.

That’s it for today. I will be back with the next one.

Until next time, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 170,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

New technologies rarely come as clean replacements. They usually attach themselves to the infrastructure people already trust. That’s where teething troubles often emerge.

Cards did not eliminate cash overnight. Neither did mobile payments. Now, stablecoins are learning the same lesson.

One of the hardest parts of transitioning from older to newer rails for moving money is making that technology usable within the systems where people already live, shop, travel, and get paid. That’s where the value leaks, but it’s also where great businesses find opportunity.

At a pharmacy in Buenos Aires, a customer can hold USDT or USDC in a wallet, but the cashier still wants a card that can move those stablecoins and make a payment. The merchant doesn’t care about Tron, Base, gas fees or settlement finality.

Stablecoins only solved part of the problem by giving people access to hold dollars. Crypto cards help move digital dollars between the holder and the merchant. But when all cards offer similar rewards and move money between the same players, the differentiation lies in owning the deeper payment stack behind every swipe.

In today’s analysis, I will explain why crypto cards must vertically integrate across the payment stack.

Onto the story,
Prathik

The Anatomy of a Swipe

A card swipe is one of my favourite things about finance. It looks so simple yet conceals a dozen actors orchestrating a complex chain of tasks. On the face of it, you just tap or swipe the card, the terminal approves, and the merchant hands you the receipt. But underneath it is a stack that includes an issuing partner, a processing gateway, a card network, a compliance partner, and a fraud monitoring body. The process also has to maintain custody of funds and process the FX when the user’s balance and the merchant’s currency differ.

When stablecoins enter the picture, you must address additional questions: Who holds the stablecoins, who converts them, who manages the routing, and who covers the volatility and settlement risk?

A crypto card solves the user’s problem at the surface. If you have USDT or USDC in a wallet, the card lets you spend it without forcing the merchant to touch crypto.

But as a business, the card is the least interesting part. In a world where everyone is offering cards to spend your crypto with similar rewards stacked on top, the only differentiation is owning enough of the stack so that every transaction creates value in more than one place.

Every layer of the payment stack charges the merchant a fee to pass the money along to the next layer. The best way to optimise such a stack is for a player to vertically integrate multiple layers and undercut other players by charging the user a substantially lower fee for moving the money.

Saurabh explains how this works for cross-border payments in his Stripe piece for Decentralised.co.

Crypto cards sit at a similar intersection.

A report by Memento Research notes that most cards today have similar propositions, usually built around prepaid balances, cashback or points. The moat in this environment is no longer the card itself.

Read report here

How do you differentiate in such an industry? By operating across different layers of the stack underneath. One card may own more of the API orchestration, settlement logic and compliance stack. Another may mainly own the consumer relationship. How deep each one goes determines how much it earns.

Consider a crypto-native case of Rain cards. Rain powers stablecoin cards and global money movement for platforms, fintechs, and institutions. It makes tokenised money like stablecoin usable in the real world through cards, wallets and everyday payments.

The Rain Case: Depth as Moat

Rain is a Visa Principal Member, which is the regulatory wedge that lets it issue cards or card programmes directly on Visa rails rather than renting infrastructure from an issuing bank.

When it offers a crypto card to its users, it also provides backend infrastructure spanning APIs, compliance layers, and settlement logic. This allows fintechs and wallets to launch stablecoin-linked card programmes.

Rain cannot afford to focus solely on winning customers who can tap their cards at stores. In that case, it will be competing with half a dozen other card providers trying to do the same thing. Instead, it is branding itself as a product that coordinates accounts, cards and global money movement through a unified API. Rain’s status as a Visa Principal Member allows it to help its partner wallets launch card programmes in just six weeks. Without a platform like Rain, a wallet would have to separately coordinate for months with an issuing bank, a processor, a compliance vendor, a settlement partner and local payment providers. Rain compresses all these into one single infrastructure layer.

Joel’s piece on vertical integration is useful here. In this, he argues how durable crypto businesses are those that control the supply side, demand side and distribution together. A similar argument can also be applied for cards in payments.

Here, the user’s stablecoin balance is the supply, the desire to spend it is the demand and wallet or fintech integrations form the distribution. Rain shows how owning the layers across these three layers helps in standing out.

The numbers in Memento’s report validate the vertical integration thesis for cards.

It shows that Rain-based cards consistently led in deposit volumes because Rain offered the underlying infrastructure for multiple card programmes, including EtherFi Cash, KAST, Offramp, and the Avalanche Card. From the second half of 2025, a wave of new card programmes launched with Rain as their core infrastructure partner, helping Rain-based cards gain deposit-share leadership.

Building across multiple layers of the stack also gives a distribution advantage.

A normal card brand has to acquire customers one by one through ads, referrals, rewards or community campaigns. Rain can acquire them in batches by becoming the card infrastructure inside wallets and fintech apps that already have users. If EtherFi Cash, KAST, Offramp and Avalanche Card all run on Rain, each partner brings its own community and distribution, while Rain sits underneath the transaction flow.

The front-end brand may still belong to the wallet, but the programme operations, compliance, settlement and orchestration sit deeper in Rain’s stack. So the pharmacy in Buenos Aires may never know that the Avalanche card being used at the counter is powered by Rain. The user may not know either. But Rain still benefits because the swipe runs through infrastructure it helped build.

This is why comparing crypto card brands at face value is misleading.

A RedotPay card and a Rain-powered card may both let a user spend stablecoins at a merchant terminal. But from a business-model perspective, the value they capture depends on how many layers in the stack they operate on.

Better Risk Control and Higher Ceiling

The more of the underlying stack a card company owns, the more it can shape the user experience and the economics. If the business is only a front-end, it is fragile and vulnerable to changes made underneath.

It could lead to the problem of over-dependency and create a single point of failure.

A crypto card brand can promise cashback, points, metal-card aesthetics and instant spending. But if the issuing partner changes its risk rules, the card can stop onboarding users. If a processor tightens merchant category restrictions, some payments may fail. If a banking partner pulls out, off-ramp availability can shrink. If a card network changes compliance requirements, the business has to adjust overnight.

The user experiences the most disruption. Uncertainty around the terms of using the card can lead to frustration, which in turn leads to a customer-support nightmare. The rented infrastructure comes back to bite the card providers.

Memento’s report also notes that most card programmes sit on top of issuers, processors and a few crypto card-as-a-service providers. This could leave the card providers at the mercy of others who own various layers across the stack. We have seen this happen before.

In October 2023, Binance ceased its debit card services in the European Economic Area (EEA) after Paysafe, its banking partner in the region, ended offering its embedded wallet solution to the crypto exchange.

It also acts as an economic ceiling.

If a crypto card company rents issuing, processing, compliance, FX and settlement, then its room to monetise is limited to what remains after all those partners take their cut. It may still grow fast, but its ceiling is capped at the number of customers it can sell its cards to. This doesn’t give it control over the most important cost lines in the transaction.

The more fragmented the stack, the harder it becomes to offer lower fees, better rewards or more reliable settlement without going underwater on every transaction.

Vertical integration changes that equation.

A company that owns more of the stack can decide where to undercut its competitors with compressed fees. A vertically integrated brand can subsidise the front-end card because it earns from settlement and orchestration layers on the back-end. It can offer better rewards because it captures economics across multiple layers. The multi-layer presence even allows the company to move faster into new markets because it is not busy stitching together the compliance, issuer and processor stack in each new country across different geographies.

When half a dozen other card providers offer cashback and rewards to acquire customers, Rain can subsidise deeper and make money by coordinating the movement of stablecoins from wallets to merchants across compliance, orchestration and settlement layers.

This is the journey I see more crypto cards heading toward.

Card providers can still choose to continue building branded card programmes to acquire more users. Some might even build successful businesses by packing an attractive reward structure with intuitive design and token incentives. But their margins will still depend heavily on the infrastructure providers that they will have little control over.

On the other hand, there will be card companies that serve as the infrastructure underneath. These brands might still be less visible to the end users, but more important to the market. When five wallets launch cards on top of the same provider and compete for the same consumer, the infrastructure provider will be sitting cross-legged in the background, earning from all of them, irrespective of who wins the race.

This is how any industry matures. Swiping a card will remain the simplest activity in finance, and so the least profitable. The value for capturing will be in running the stack that coordinates the complex web of tasks underneath the swipe or tap of the card.

That’s it for today. I will be back with the next one.

Until next time, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 170,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

By 2015, European banks had been online for nearly two decades. You could check your balance, transfer money, and pay bills, all from your phone. Although the infrastructure worked, every financial service still had to run through the bank as a gatekeeper. Nothing else could plug into your money without the bank’s permission.

Then PSD2 forced banks to open their plumbing via APIs. Stripe built its European Treasury on open banking, Plaid connected hundreds of millions of accounts, and Shopify started underwriting loans using transaction data. By 2030, embedded finance is expected to exceed €100 billion in annual revenue across Europe alone.

But for the industry to arrive there, it had to pass through 15 years of online banking, which had already taught hundreds of millions of people that digital financial infrastructure was reliable. The API layer didn’t conjure trust from nothing. It was built on the trust that had accumulated over the years.

This is the story of how trust evolves around any new technology. Tokenisation is living through the same moment right now.

Last week, Pantera Capital published a report on the state of tokenisation in 2026.

In this report, they scored 542 out of the 593 live tokenised assets across three dimensions of on-chain maturity — issuance and redemption, transferability and settlement, composability — and arrived at an average Tokenisation Progress Index (TPI) of 2.04 out of 5. About 77% of tokenised assets are still digital receipts of the original assets off-chain. In these cases, the off-chain ledger remains authoritative, and the token adds just a data layer on top of it.

Read the Report

It’s tempting to read these scores as a poor grade. Crypto natives might call it a stalled industry. But no technology can build sustained, mass adoption by skipping the trust-building phase. Here is why.

Onto the story,
Prathik

Wrapper: The First Stop

The Pantera report found that 460 out of 593 (77%) tracked assets fell into the ‘Wrapper’ bucket, while only 16 were natively launched, managed, and recorded on-chain. Tokenised wrappers are assets whose minting and redemption still occur off-chain through a centralised issuer. About 66 fell into the hybrid category.

Pantera calls the current state the “newspaper-on-a-website phase.” The phase isn’t a failure of the industry to mature quickly. It’s the first stop that tests the thesis that on-chain representations of existing traditional assets can offer any benefits.

Let’s rewind two decades. Imagine reading about online commerce for the first time. You scroll, you click, and a stranger ships you a box. The thought felt magical back then. You’d order once to experience what it feels like, perhaps. But you would pay before the box arrived?

The early e-commerce era was heavy on cash-on-delivery because customers were slowly warming up to the idea of buying something without first touching and feeling it. Users preferred to pay on delivery because it let them cross the first hurdle of believing that something like e-commerce was even possible. Technology to facilitate online transactions wasn’t the problem. SWIFT-enabled interbank transfers have been around since the early 1970s, and consumer payments became possible via platforms like CyberCash and PayPal in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Yet, the switch to paying online came much later.

Similarly, the first drive toward tokenisation is setting the stage for what comes next: programmable compliance, autonomous collateral management and real-time yield optimisation. Then follow the financial building blocks that separate ownership, cash flow, and risk, and recompose them.

A tokenised version of an off-chain asset shows that the new tech can do faster settlement, cheaper transfers and cleaner ledgers of record. Each time a tokenised Treasury or money market fund settles faster than its off-chain equivalent, it builds confidence among its customers.

The data in the report also backs this idea.

Of Pantera’s three Tokenisation Progress Index (TPI) criteria, the one that measures transferability and settlement scores the highest at 2.29. The fact that 205 assets have reached a score of 3 on this dimension indicates that the industry is leaning toward using blockchains as the authoritative management and settlement layer. By contrast, the TPI of the issuance and redemption layer lags at 1.82. Over 91% of assets still rely on admin-gated minting and custodian-mediated exits.

These scores indicate that the market is more comfortable with reliably moving assets on-chain before it can trust the chain to autonomously originate and redeem assets.

This maturity curve is inevitable for any technology. That’s because even the greatest technology cannot magically generate demand for that asset.

Demand is for the Asset, Not the Rails

Introducing a native on-chain asset will not automatically attract capital. The data from the report reinforces this idea.

Stablecoins account for 91.6% of the $320 billion tokenised market. US Treasuries add another $12 billion. Together, that’s roughly 95% of the total. Everything else, including private equity, real estate, and corporate bonds, accounts for a negligible 5% today.

This shows that the market isn’t following the most interesting native tokenised asset. The demand follows for those assets that people have wanted to invest in all along. People don’t care whether something comes in a wrapper or a native on-chain treasury fund. As long as the new infrastructure offers them an incrementally better experience of holding, transferring, and recording the asset, they will prefer it to the old infrastructure.

We have seen this across multiple primitives in the crypto ecosystem.

Hyperliquid’s HIP-3, launched in late 2025, enabled permissionless perpetual futures markets for real-world assets, including equities, commodities, indices, and FX. These markets have recorded over $240 billion in trading volume since launch. In January 2026, Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 perps market on Silver captured 2% of the global trading volume for the metal in just one month of its launch.

Read: A Sliver of TradFi

All this demand didn’t materialise because Hyperliquid invented a new format. The traders who chose Hyperliquid already wanted exposure to Tesla, silver, gold, and the S&P 500. The format that Hyperliquid offered, which is a 24/7, permissionless, non-custodial venue, simply minimised the friction and time between an event happening and a trader expressing a view on it. The underlying assets were popular even outside Hyperliquid. The technology succeeded because the platform amplified access.

The same dynamic is playing out inside tokenisation.

At 64%, Private Credit accounts for the highest share of its supply actively deployed in DeFi protocols. That’s far more than Stablecoins at 9% and Treasuries at 3.2%. The demand isn’t specifically for “tokenised” private credit.

People who deploy their funds into DeFi protocols via tokenised private credit do so because these wrappers offer them yield denominated in stablecoins. The underlying appetite remains for non-crypto yield. They don’t care whether the underlying rail is merely a wrapper for an existing private credit product or a native on-chain one.

Even the surge in commodities reinforces this idea.

Native on-chain products around tokenised commodities have grown fivefold from $1 billion in January 2025 to $5 billion today. That’s not because these rails offered something different. The jump tracks gold’s 65% rally in 2025, its sharpest annual gain since 1979. Tokenised gold products gained value largely because gold gained value. The blockchain just facilitated better settlement, transfer, and ownership of the asset.

If the underlying asset is compelling, tokenisation can make it more accessible, cheaper to settle, and easier to move. If the underlying isn’t that exciting, no amount of on-chain composability can fix that.

Where does that leave the industry?

The Pre-API Moment

I find striking parallels between the PSD2 moment and the journey of tokenisation.

Europe’s regulatory breakthrough, passed in 2015, took effect in 2018, and produced scaled native products like Stripe Financial Connections and embedded lending by 2020–2023. It took roughly five to eight years for native products to thrive on the underlying open infrastructure.

Tokenisation’s regulatory breakthrough moment began to take shape in 2024, and it’s arriving in parts across jurisdictions. MiCA took full effect in December 2024, with 102 crypto-asset service providers authorised across Europe by year-end 2025. The GENIUS Act was signed in July 2025, the first federal US legislation for digital assets. A couple of weeks later, the SEC launched Project Crypto, with Chairman Atkins acknowledging that firms from Wall Street to Silicon Valley were lining up to tokenise.

If the embedded finance timeline holds, we should expect native on-chain products to emerge in the next 3-4 years. They may not be everywhere and for every asset class. But in the pockets where the wrapper phase has already built enough trust and where the underlying demand already exists, we will see the change coming sooner than later.

Private credit is the clearest candidate. Two out of every three dollars of on-chain private credit are already active in DeFi. The composability that makes private credit products like Maple’s syrupUSDC useful in DeFi was built on top of a lending infrastructure that first had to prove it could reliably underwrite, disburse, and collect on-chain. The native features will arrive as extensions of trust already earned.

The $320 billion tokenisation market scored 2.04 out of 5. That still reads like a poor grade. But that’s where a new industry starts to build trust and position itself to grow through faster settlements, cheaper bookkeeping, and more transparent ledgers, until the demand for native on-chain assets catches up.

That’s it for today. I will be back with the next one.

Until next time, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 170,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

The company earned billions in revenue from interest on Treasury reserves it held as collateral backing its stablecoins and paid other platforms to distribute and settle USDC across the payment stack. For every dollar Circle earned, it paid roughly 60 cents to the partners who moved the USDC around. It could afford to part with that money as long as the margin it retained was significant. But with the low-interest regime underway, the USDC-issuer was leaving too many cents on the table. For most of its life, Circle owned one product: USDC.

In its recent Q1 2026 earnings release, the USDC-issuer announced multiple moves to capture value across the stack it operates in. A $222-million presale for its native Layer-1 token, ARC, at a $3 billion fully diluted valuation; the launch of AI agentic infrastructure; and the expansion of its Circle Payments Network to enable banks to facilitate stablecoin payments by avoiding the volatility of digital assets. That is set to change with what Circle has built over the last few quarters.

Collectively, they mark Circle’s attempt to go from a single-layer company to a full-stack financial platform that operates and captures value across multiple layers of the payment stack.

Today, I assess whether Circle can capitalise on vertical integration to offset the shrinking yield business, which is getting thinner with every Fed cut.

Onto the story,
Prathik

The Vanishing Float

In Q1 2026, Circle made $694 million in total revenue, up 20% year-on-year (YoY). That growth is solely attributable to the growing pie of stablecoins in circulation, with nothing specifically improving for USDC. Stablecoins in circulation grew over 30% from $235 billion in March 2025 to $315 billion in March 2026. During the same period, USDC lost 62 basis points in market share.

Circle faces a bigger problem. The low-interest-rate regime is here, with the Fed rate down from 4.5% a year ago to 3.75% today.

While average USDC circulation through Q1 2026 grew 39% YoY, Circle’s revenue from reserves grew only 17% YoY to $653 million. That’s because it was heavily offset by a 66 bps YoY decline in the average reserve rate, from 4.16% in Q1 2025 to 3.50% in Q1 2026.

This is not a one-time phenomenon. The gap between the growth rates of Circle’s reserve income and USDC’s supply has consistently dropped across the last four quarters.

Circle’s predominant source of income is not growing in proportion to its stablecoin supply in circulation.

The company also faces a value-leakage problem.

The 60-Cent Wake-Up Call

That’s more than 60 cents per dollar paid to platforms for holding and distributing USDC. Out of the $405 million, Circle paid $330 million (~80%) to Coinbase alone as distribution costs in Q1 2026. Of the $653 million in reserve income this quarter, Circle paid $405 million to partners under distribution and transaction costs.

That’s a lot of money left on the table in an industry that’s seeing new players expand and integrate across various layers of the stack.

At this point, there are too many signs for Circle to not wake up to the reality. Interest rates are falling and dragging down the reserve income with them; distribution costs are sticky and leaking value; and Circle’s core business remains a yield proxy, getting thinner with every Fed cut. The expectations of a dovish Fed stance have only intensified under U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration.

What’s Circle’s answer to all this? A vertical integration to capture more value across the stack and reduce reliance on interest rates for its topline.

To understand what Circle is building, consider what it has today.

The USDC-issuer started at the issuance layer, which is the bottom of the stablecoin stack, and spent years watching others capture value at every layer above it.

At the issuance layer, Circle mints USDC and EURC, holds reserves in US Treasuries via BlackRock’s Circle Reserve Fund, manages the 1:1 peg and processes mints and redemptions through Circle Mint. It earns 94% of its total revenue through reserve income by parking dollars in government debt.

It then expanded to the interoperability layer via Circle’s Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP), which moves USDC between blockchains and handles approximately 60% of all cross-chain bridged volume. Although this plumbing routes USDC across chains, CCTP itself runs on chains owned by others. So, Circle doesn’t capture meaningful direct revenue from it.

All the other layers in the stack were owned by others.

Settlement ran on Ethereum, Solana, and Tron. Every USDC transaction paid gas in someone else’s token (ETH, SOL, TRX), while Circle had no control over congestion, fees, or governance on those chains.

Distribution relied on Coinbase, exchanges, and wallets. Circle paid revenue shares, incentive programmes, and integration costs to get USDC into the hands of users.

Third parties such as DeFi protocols, fintechs, neobanks, and prediction markets built applications and products that used USDC. This meant that the end customer, whether retail or institutional, never dealt with Circle directly.

The structure left Circle with barely 40 cents per dollar.

Owning the Stack

On May 11, Circle announced three bets to vertically integrate different layers of the stack it previously didn’t own.

First, settlement. With its native Layer-1 blockchain, Arc, Circle aims to capture fees that Ethereum, Solana, and Tron currently pocket by moving USDC on their chains.

The EVM-compatible Arc offers sub-second finality and uses USDC as its native gas fee token at roughly $0.001 per transaction. To make its chain more attractive for institutional users, Circle is offering configurable privacy and quantum-resistant architecture. The generic public chains, like Ethereum and Solana, are completely transparent and offer no privacy for sensitive transactions such as institutional payments.

Read: Making Blockchains Great Again

Circle has also raised $222 million at a $3 billion valuation via a presale of its ARC token. The investment was led by a16z’s $75 million round, along with BlackRock, Apollo, ICE (the NYSE’s parent), Standard Chartered, ARK Invest, SBI Group, IDG Capital, Bullish, and Haun Ventures.

Second, distribution. The Circle Payments Network (CPN) helps the USDC issuer reduce its dependence on Coinbase.

CPN connects financial institutions directly to Circle’s rails to mint, redeem, and route USDC without going through an exchange. The network has 136 enrolled institutions (up 36% QoQ), $8.3 billion in annualised volume (up 17% QoQ), and fiat payouts in 50+ countries.

As a result, the USDC sitting on Circle’s own infrastructure has almost tripled, from roughly 6% a year ago to 17.2%. The RLDC margin (Revenue less distribution and transaction costs as a percentage of revenue) has steadily climbed back to 41% in Q1 2026, from 38% in Q2 2025, even as the reserve return rate has fallen.

Circle isn’t monetising CPN yet, prioritising adoption over fees. But when it does, every dollar of CPN volume adds usage-based income without depending on interest rates.

Circle has built an entire Agentic economy through products such as Agent Wallets, Nanopayments (which enable gas-free USDC transfers as small as $0.000001 [a millionth of a dollar]), Agent Marketplace (where agents discover and pay for services), and Circle CLI (to accelerate agent onboarding and wallet provisioning).

Third, the application layer. With this third layer, Circle is positioning itself to capture consistent value across the entire Agentic economy by charging a small fee on high-volume transactions that AI agents are expected to carry out.

How big is the agentic payment opportunity? Last month, Circle’s marketing head, Peter Schroeder, posted that USDC accounted for 98.6% of 140 million transactions AI agents made in nine months.

The Stack Race

Circle’s move across the payment stack won’t be easy. Payment giant Stripe started at the top and has since made its way down with deals and launches. Acquiring Bridge gave Stripe ownership over licensing, custody, FX, and issuance layers. By launching Tempo, Stripe has entered the settlement layer. Stripe now controls all seven layers and serves 5 million merchants.

Read: Why did Stripe build its own chain?

Tether uses Plasma, which the USDT issuer incubated, as its settlement chain. However, Tether still doesn’t have the same regulatory might as USDC.

While Stripe owns human commerce, Tether leads in terms of emerging-market dollar access and crypto trading. So, Circle is positioning itself for institutional settlement and machine commerce, an area where regulatory credibility and programmable infrastructure will likely matter more than checkout integration that Stripe owns.

The CRCL Pushback

Although Circle raised $222 million from the presale of ARC tokens to institutional investors, it was the CRCL shareholders who funded the initial stage of Arc’s development. The irony is that Circle’s biggest headwind could be managing internal pushback.

What is the point of accruing value to the Arc token for a publicly listed company? I flagged this complication in November last year.

“The nature of the native token will ruffle a few feathers in the public markets. Why would the market approve of or attach value to a native token that captures the value Arc and CPN generate, rather than letting it flow back into Circle’s income statement? Why would Circle’s surplus be used to fund the cost centre that is not expected to plough back profits to the shareholders? The current shareholders won’t stand for it. Public market investors buy CRCL for its reserve income. They will likely not watch a new asset absorb the upside of the infrastructure they’ve financed.”

How will Circle thread this needle? Would a separate IPO for Arc justify its case? We will know this only in the first quarter after Arc goes live on the mainnet.

For now, Circle’s forward bet is to capture as much value as possible by compounding its presence across these layers. Each time USDC settles on Arc, Circle earns the settlement fee. When institutions route transactions through the CPN, Circle will retain the distribution margin. Finally, when agents transact via Nanopayments on Arc, Circle expects to collect the fee on that layer, too.

That’s it for this week’s quantitative analysis. I will be back with the next one.

Until next time, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 170,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

Galaxy Digital’s crypto book continued to bleed through Q1 2026, but its operating businesses are beginning to detach from crypto cycles, and the company is betting that keeping them together is the right strategy. In Q1 2026, BTC price fell by more than 20% and ETH by ~30%. Yet Galaxy’s trading desk volumes held flat. That’s the first sign of Galaxy’s business decoupling from the market’s cyclical nature.

In previous analyses of Galaxy’s earnings, I argued that the Helios data centre could become its hedge against crypto cycles. However, that argument was forward-looking and conditional on the company sticking to its construction schedules and contracted cash flows that hadn’t yet started.

In April, Galaxy delivered its first data halls in Texas to CoreWeave and is showing signs of diversifying its overall business towards the high-margin, non-cyclical nature of the data centre business. Although its revenue from the data centre business is insignificant, expect its financials to start looking different starting Q2 2026.

In today’s analysis, I will show you how Galaxy plans to evolve its two businesses together rather than split them, and how that will help the company achieve the stability few others can boast.

TL;DR:

• Galaxy’s Digital Assets segment delivered $49M in adjusted gross profit, roughly flat with Q4 ($51M), even as crypto prices dropped by around 25%

• Trading volumes at Galaxy held steady while industry-wide volumes declined by more than 20%

• Helios delivered its first data hall to CoreWeave, shifting from construction milestone to operational revenue

The First Correlation Crack

Galaxy’s financials still look like those of any other crypto company. Its Q1 adjusted EBITDA of negative $188 million was almost entirely driven by adjusted gross loss of $140 million in the Treasury & Corporate segment. Most of that loss was attributable to unrealised markdowns on its net digital asset exposure. Galaxy trimmed down its digital assets position to $667 million as of March 31, 2026, down 27% from $920 million at year-end.

The Digital Assets segment, which facilitates crypto trades, lends, manages assets, and builds infrastructure, earned $49 million in adjusted gross profit. That was nearly identical to Q4’s $51 million, despite higher crypto prices in that quarter. Lower prices hurt Galaxy’s business by driving away participants and drying up trading volumes. This also shrinks the loan collaterals on which Galaxy earns interest.

Activity in Galaxy’s trading desk also reinforces this trend. It processed roughly the same volume quarter-over-quarter while total industry trading activity contracted by more than 25%.

But what’s holding up Galaxy’s operations during a market meltdown?

The Stable Pillars

Diversifying its risk by expanding its product and client base has been Galaxy’s secret to staying afloat while its peers face the wrath of the market meltdown.

It spent the past 18 months layering fee-based and recurring revenue onto its trading desk. Asset management recorded $69 million in net inflows, although the AUM fell to $8 billion from $11.4 billion due to mark-to-market revaluation of existing holdings. Shortly after the quarter ended, Galaxy also secured a $75 million single-client mandate, one of the largest in its history. Galaxy added new clients and diversified its counterparty base despite the lending book shrinking by 20% due to depreciation in crypto prices and natural loan roll-offs.

In May, it will launch a fintech hedge fund that will invest in companies building tokenisation rails. It will also open its consumer-facing trading app, GalaxyOne, to businesses and allow institutions to trade, manage digital custody, finance, stake, and access crypto research. Both these ventures are expected to generate recurring revenue regardless of where Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency trades.

The second move is strategic positioning.

Galaxy trimmed its Bitcoin exposure and rotated a significant portion of its balance sheet into Hyperliquid.

This rotation helped the balance sheet outperform what a pure beta position would have delivered.

But the biggest takeaway for Galaxy’s investors and analysts will be that the lights are finally on in Texas.

Lights, Camera, Data Centres

Galaxy’s Helios data centre site delivered its first set of halls to CoreWeave in Q1, which is expected to bring $1 billion in annualised revenue at full-capacity deployment by 2028.

Read: Galaxy Builds Beyond BTC

What was once planned as a Bitcoin mining site has been converted into a functioning AI data centre with live power distribution, cooling, and network connectivity.

Although the revenue from the data centre business was modest at $3 million, the company has stayed on schedule for its 133-megawatt Phase 1 launch. There are three aspects that I am most excited about in this business segment: the margin, the lack of seasonality and the contract length. These are 15-year contracted cash flows at approximately 90% lease-level EBITDA margins. When Phase 1 ramps fully in H2 2026, proportionate estimates suggest $250 million in annualised revenue entirely uncorrelated to digital asset prices.

For context, the Digital Assets segment generated $49 million in adjusted gross profit this quarter. That’d add up to $200 million in annualised revenue rate (ARR). Helios’ Phase 1 alone would generate more operating profit at $250 million in ARR and 90% EBITDA margins.

Galaxy has also secured approval for an additional 830 MW capacity from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).

The company is in active conversations with additional tenants beyond CoreWeave regarding this expanded capacity. But why chase new tenants?

Galaxy doesn’t want to repeat the mistake of over-reliance on a single business or a single client. That’s probably why its president, Christopher Ferraro, wants the company to focus on a multi-tenant, multi-campus strategy.

But how will it fund these multiple sites, each requiring capital-intensive computing power, cooling equipment, and other infrastructure?

At Phase-1 of the Helios data centre, CoreWeave’s end customer using the GPUs is a multi-trillion-dollar investment-grade public company. This credit quality flows down to Galaxy’s financing terms for its future data centre projects.

Galaxy Dual Business Mode

Galaxy Digital’s two businesses are evolving with different capital needs, earnings profiles, and visibility. They seem to add little synergy and have no apparent reason to be run under the same entity. So, why not split them?

The company isn’t convinced that the segments will stay uncorrelated.

Most will see Galaxy as a simple crypto company about to spin off a data centre. But they miss out on the link that connects its crypto trading and data centre operations. When Galaxy’s data centre segment generates a billion dollars in annual revenue at 90% EBITDA margins, it can afford to run a crypto infrastructure business through bear markets without flinching.

While the data centre covers the fixed costs, the crypto business provides upside when markets turn. In that model, Galaxy’s cost of capital across both businesses falls because each one de-risks the other. The crypto business doesn’t need to generate enough margin to survive a downturn on its own. It can help the business stay afloat, as it did in Q1 2026, if it just covers its variable costs. The data centre can work independent of token prices, as it gets its demand from hyperscalers rusing to lock up computing power. But sharing balance sheet with a cash-generating crypto business gives Galaxy flexibility to self-fund early-stage development costs and move faster on new sites than a standalone data centre startup could.

None of this is conclusive. It’s the first quarter that gave signs of decorrelation as an observation. For it to be a pattern, the thesis needs to hold across the next 2-3 quarters.

What cannot be debated, though, is that the structure Galaxy is building is in the right direction. While its data centre business offers high-margin, contracted, predictable income, its trading segment offers low-margin, high-volume, cyclical crypto trading.

Three more quarters like this one, and Novogratz says he’ll celebrate.

That’s it for this week’s quantitative analysis. I will be back with the next one.

Until next time, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 170,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

Over the past year, we have spent a lot of time at Token Dispatch writing about perpetual futures (perps) venues. Their rise to fame made it impossible to ignore them. Perps allow participants to price events close to their occurrence, with high leverage and deep liquidity available around the clock. Existing exchanges never offered that because of their constrained trading time and days. An 11-member team rode on this 24/7 trading pitch and made Hyperliquid the fastest-growing crypto exchange, with almost a billion dollars in annualised revenue.

Throughout 2025, perp trading volume averaged seven times that of spot trading. It seemed like a guaranteed way to build a sustainable business. So the inevitable happened: others jumped on the bandwagon.

Last week, the two largest prediction markets, Polymarket and Kalshi, announced perpetual futures and crypto trading within hours of each other. This comes just months after Hyperliquid said it’d launch event contracts. The convergence of perps and prediction market venues is a no-brainer. Everyone wants to be the everything exchange, and offer a one-stop shop that brings together attention, capital and leverage.

Three weeks ago, Saurabh wrote in a note on X about why Hyperliquid’s expansion into prediction markets will help the exchange take over finance. But is that true the other way round too? Can Polymarket and Kalshi’s moves be similarly rewarding?

Today, I will tell you all about it.

Why Perps Matter for PMs

Prediction markets have a stickiness problem. They are often cyclical and see record-level trading volumes when there are events to bet on. Just like we saw it during a U.S. Presidential election, a Super Bowl season, or an FOMC meeting.

Polymarket’s monthly active users peaked at 321,500 in November 2024 during the U.S. Presidential Elections. Three weeks later, the number had dropped by 25% to 245,000.

However, with seasonal events, the monthly user count kept swinging in both directions.

In January 2025, it peaked at 500,000 users, then dropped below 200,000 in September. This tells us about Polymarket’s user-retention rate.

Dune’s cohort data shows that across every monthly cohort since 2024, only 8-11% of users are still trading a year after joining. About 75% of them vanish within 90 days. Users return for events and don’t necessarily find the platform sticky.

But that’s just part of the problem.

PMs also block capital until the issue is resolved. Perps are different. They price the event every second. It captures attention for extended periods and builds sustained engagement. It also makes economic sense for the PMs, since perps record far more trading volume and proportionally higher fee income.

In 2025, perps recorded over $60 trillion in notional trading volume, compared with $28 billion for PMs.

So, this adjacency expansion for PMs becomes a natural evolution. Platforms that capture one form of speculative intent often extend their reach to the next. They either build the capability or buy another player with that capability. We’ve seen this happen multiple times: Robinhood went from stocks to options to crypto to prediction markets (PMs). Coinbase acquired Deribit for a record $ 2.9 billion to venture into derivatives trading. Binance expanded from offering spot to futures to creating its native blockchain.

We see this often in the traditional world. A company expands the breadth of its services and hopes to cross-sell the new offerings to the same customers. It does two things: increases the average revenue per user (ARPU) and insulates the business from market cycles by diversifying reliance across multiple revenue streams.

In the early 1970s, the Chicago Board of Trade’s (CBOT) revenue from its commodity futures was dwindling. So they launched the Chicago Board Options Exchange (now known as Cboe) in what used to be a 4,000-square-foot smoking lounge of its parent company, CBOT. Both the products worked in sync because they needed a common infrastructure: risk management, clearing and a network of professionals who understood derivatives pricing.

But there’s a wide strait between wanting to run a perps venue and actually being able to execute one.

The Perps Stack

Running a perps exchange has too many moving parts. Let’s start with liquidity.

Hyperliquid processes over 200,000 orders per second through a fully on-chain order book. The perps venue clears over $6-7 billion in daily volume with two-sided market making. Lack of liquidity would lead to extreme volatility, wide bid-ask spreads, and high slippage. This makes it easy for whales to manipulate prices.

Second is the risk engine - the heart of any derivatives platform. It tracks every position and checks margin requirements on every order. When $19 billion were wiped out of the crypto market in October 2025, Hyperliquid processed billions in liquidations without downtime.

Then there’s the funding rate mechanism that keeps perps tethered to the spot price of the underlying asset. It runs continuously by settling small payments between long and short positions every few hours.

Building this entire stack isn’t the main problem. That I’m sure the prediction markets will manage to put together. The bigger problem is stress-testing that stack.

Hyperliquid built all this and stress-tested it in real-world scenarios, like the 10/10 crypto liquidation event and the U.S.-Israel-Iran war. It then launched event contracts via HIP-4 once the entire stack was in place to support that. Kalshi and Polymarket are trying to go the other way round. They have been running successful prediction markets that required none of the above stack in the first place. They are now going to fight for a share of the pie by not only competing alongside a highly successful Hyperliquid but also with an infrastructure that has not been stress-tested for the high-frequency activity seen in perpetual trading.

There’s a lot more stacked against PMs that makes the expansion to perps more difficult than the other way around.

The Hedging Synergy

On Hyperliquid, the risk engine sees all your positions across perps, spot and, soon, event contracts. Saurabh explained this in his note on HIP-4.

This common risk engine solves a core money problem by optimising the same capital across multiple trades a trader makes on the venue.

Consider a trader on Hyperliquid who is long ETH at 5x leverage. The trader is worried about the Fed decision next week, so she buys an outcome contract that says “Fed holds rates steady” at $0.65. With a common risk engine, both positions are held in the same margin account. If the Fed surprises with a cut, ETH rallies, her perp profits and the outcome contract loses only what she paid. If the Fed holds the rates, the PM contract pays out and partially offsets any drawdown on her perp.

This is why a PM platform or a perp venue cannot be a mere add-on feature. This hedging possibility is what makes HIP-4 valuable on Hyperliquid. An average trader on the platform sees PMs as insurance cover in case their existing perps position flips over.

Currently, the collateral on Polymarket and Kalshi is locked until the event resolves. So, unless they offer a common risk engine across their perps and prediction markets venues, it loses a crucial catalyst that keeps traders on the platform. Right now, neither platform has announced cross-margining between their PM and perps venues.

The category breakdown and average trader profile on PMs raise further concerns about their ability to replicate their success in perps trading.

Over 80% of Kalshi’s total monthly trading volume occurs in the sports category. For Polymarket, that share was over 40% in 2025. Now, how would you create a continuous pricing mechanism for a perps venue around these sporting events? That takes away a big chunk of its traders out of the perps equation.

Additionally, an average Kalshi trader is a retail user who has never touched crypto and funds their PM account via ACH transfers from their bank account. So, even if I assume the theoretical possibility of cross-margining on Kalshi, I doubt that these traders have the sophistication required to double down on their positions on the platform and use perps as a hedging strategy.

What Could Work for PMs

There’s one scenario where I expect the bets to work if Kalshi and Polymarket do announce cross-margining. Their institutional partnership with prime brokerages and clearing firms can encourage high-value, frequent trading activity across event contracts and perpetual futures.

It would let institutional desks treat PMs as part of a broader risk management toolkit.

Both Kalshi and Polymarket can boast about partnerships that will give them access to institutional clients.

Kalshi’s tie-up with FIS and Tradeweb data, and Polymarket’s deals with Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) could help retain institutional clients who value hedging their prediction market positions with perpetual contracts on the same platform.

That’s still a far-fetched wedge that rests on many things going right for both the prediction markets. They need to set up stress-tested infrastructure, ink partnerships and show their clients that their platforms can help optimise capital.

But this is what it takes for them to survive a cut-throat competition. With the distribution wedge already with Hyperliquid, they have no other choice but to maximise their chances elsewhere.

That’s it for today. I will be back with another deep dive.

Until next time, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 170,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

Can a business generate more revenue on an unchanged or much lower trading volume base? Economics 101 suggests that when you raise the price, you lose customers. But Polymarket just raised the price, lost a customer, yet made more revenue.

Until earlier this year, the world’s largest prediction market by trading volume operated on a zero-revenue model. Users could trade, deposit, or withdraw without paying the prediction market a dime for most of its existence.

All that changed in less than a quarter.

Polymarket first announced fees on some of its market categories early this January. Three months later, on March 30, the prediction market went full throttle, announcing fees for all categories, barring geopolitical markets, and even increasing rates on categories that already attract fees.

The platform has now collected more fees in the 8 days since its announcement than it did in the entire month before it.

In today’s analysis, I will show you how Polymarket’s new fee structure reshapes how it builds liquidity on its platform amid market uncertainties.

The Volume-Fee Inversion

When Polymarket increased its fee rates across categories, the inevitable happened. The higher cost of making a prediction reduced trading volume. Did they expect that? Most likely. That’s Economics 101. But there was little cause for concern.

Although a higher fee reduced demand for Polymarket trades, the decline was not proportional to the price increase. Again, that’s Economics 101. As a result, Polymarket’s total fee collections increased.

Despite a

0 wasn’t the first time Polymarket moved away from the “more volume equals business growth” view. It first announced fees on some of its market categories in January this year.

This shift is evident in Polymarket’s daily take rate — fees as a percentage of total volume, which has been consistently rising.

From January through late March, this ratio crept upward, doubling from roughly 0.001 to 0.002. After March 30, that rate tripled and shot past 0.007. That’s about 70 cents of earnings on a sale of $100.

But how does a business generate more revenue on the same (or in fact lower) trading volume base? That’s what happens when a business targets users willing to pay a premium for access to better markets.

The fun part is in the formula it uses to calculate the fees.

Pricing Uncertainty

Polymarket doesn’t charge a flat fee, unlike conventional commission mechanisms. Instead, its fee varies depending on the likelihood of the outcome. The fee changes with probability: Fee = Shares × feeRate × Price × (1 − Price).

Every market on Polymarket is structured as a yes/no share. These shares trade between $0 and $1, reflecting traders’ estimates of the likelihood of the underlying event occurring. For example, a $0.90 price means traders collectively believe there is a 90% chance of the event occurring. Polymarket’s fee is designed to be the highest when the likelihood approaches 50% probability and to minimise toward zero as the outcome approaches certainty in either direction, 0 or 1.

This model ensures that Polymarket earns the most when traders trade in markets where the outcome is most contested. That’s because it makes economic sense (Economics 101, again). Think about it. A trade on an outcome with a 90% or 10% probability of occurring will yield a minimal payout. Why would such a trader trade anyway if the high cost of such a trade, via fees, further squeezes out their winnings? That would stifle trading activity at the margins.

Let’s understand this using a sample market: ‘Will Bitcoin hit $100K by June 30?’ Say the “Yes” share is trading at 90 cents. This means the traders are 90% certain that the BTC price will hit $100,000 by June 30. If you buy 100 shares at that price, you spend $90 and stand to win $100 if you’re right, giving you a profit of $10.

A flat fee of 1.5% on the $90 trade would cost you $1.35, reducing your maximum potential winnings of $10. Polymarket’s probability-scaled fee fixes this problem. When you buy the same trade of 100 shares on Polymarket, it charges you a fee depending on the likelihood of the occurrence of the event.

If the likelihood stands at $0.90 per share, then Polymarket’s fee comes up to $0.65. [100 shares x 0.072 (fee rate) x $0.90 (price) x $0.10 (1-Price)].

However, at 50-50 probability, the fee is maximum at $1.80 [100 shares x 0.072 (fee rate) x $0.50 (price) x $0.50 (1-Price)].

This ensures that fee collection is concentrated at that point on the probability curve where the stakes are the highest.

The Rebate Flywheel

There’s an interesting part about this bell-shaped fee model.

Polymarket doesn’t stop at charging takers a premium for offering tighter bid-ask spreads and good liquidity. Takers are those who want to make a trade by simply clicking on “Buy”/”Sell” at the market price. Polymarket allocates a share of the fee income to market makers as a rebate. Market makers help improve liquidity by placing deeper order books at limit prices.

These rebates attract more market makers, which in turn improve liquidity and attract more takers. The rebate share varies across categories 20% for crypto, 25% for politics and sports, and 25% for finance. Only geopolitical markets charge no taker fees and offer zero maker rebates.

Polymarket’s zero-rebate and zero-fee policy for markets related to geopolitics and world events reveals its approach to the category. It expects these markets to draw traffic by offering low friction, zero cost, and maximum visibility. Once it has captured the trader on its platform, Polymarket expects the trader to cross-trade across categories and pay fees across other categories.

The Liquidity Bet

Polymarket has been around for more than half a decade. Yet, it kept struggling to achieve its product-market fit for almost four years. Few knew about it or used it until the 2024 U.S. Presidential Elections gave it its aha moment.

After the election euphoria died down, people doubted whether the prediction markets would stay. Sports and crypto categories filled that gap.

Its fee announcement has boosted Polymarket’s revenue for now. But can it retain its users from leaving for its competitors?

History has some answers.

When Uber launched in 2012, it took 20% of every ride before giving the rest to the drivers. Over the years, the fee kept creeping up. By 2025, it even exceeded 40% in some instances. Drivers protested. Some quit. Yet, it didn’t matter. New drivers kept joining, and riders stuck to their favourite app.

The lesson was that if a platform raised fees gradually, users would absorb them as long as the alternatives were worse. Is it the most ethical thing for Uber to do? I may have my reservations about that.

But Polymarket is doing something more than just raising fees.

A flat fee hike extracts value from users who have nowhere better to go. But Polymarket’s bell curve charges the most where traders have the highest stakes and uses a share of that fee to reward the market makers who make the platform worth staying on.

Better rebates attract more market makers. More market makers create tighter bid-ask spreads and deeper order books. And that matters, because Polymarket runs a central limit order book where every trade pays a spread and large orders walk the book, incurring slippage. These costs don’t show up on a fee schedule, but they come out of the trader’s pocket.

A taker paying zero fee on a low-liquidity platform still loses to wider spreads and greater slippage on every trade. A taker paying a small fee on Polymarket gets tighter execution funded by the very rebate that fee pays for. If this flywheel is well-managed, the all-in cost of trading on Polymarket, with deep liquidity, will feel lower than on a platform with shallow liquidity. In this case, the fee becomes a small price to pay for better pricing.

That’s it for this week. I will be back with another one.

Until next time, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 170,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

Money often becomes useful only when it reaches its destination. A salary earned abroad can’t pay for rent, school fees, utilities and groceries back home until it passes through banks, FX desks, payout partners, and local compliance checks. Until then, it is a mere value in motion and not a medium of exchange.

The same problem is now showing up on-chain. Stablecoins move money globally in code, but their usefulness is tied to where they can plug in, who is allowed to use them, and which rules govern their reserves and redemption.

This concept stood out to me when I was reviewing Dune’s ‘Beyond Dollarisation: The Rise of Local Currency Stablecoins’ report.👇🏾

Read the Report Here

In today’s quantitative analysis, I will explain the factors that influence the growth of non-dollar local-currency-pegged stablecoins.

Onto the story,
Prathik

The Regulatory Teeth

Nowhere is the role of regulations more evident than in what happened with Tether’s euro-pegged stablecoin. When Europe’s Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation became applicable in 2024, it almost immediately spelt a death knell for Euro Tether (EURT).

One of the earliest and once-largest non-dollar stablecoins, EURT saw its circulation fall from over $400 million to around $50 million. As a result, the total supply of local currency stablecoins in circulation fell from $1 billion to $350 million.

Crypto enthusiasts often assume that code alone is enough. They create a token, add liquidity, and expect the market to do the rest. But non-dollar stablecoins are not just abstract internet money. They are trying to become better digital versions of euro, yen, baht and other local currencies that can move on public rails without being at the mercy of banking hours. Yet they operate within a domestic financial system, with reserve requirements, licensing norms, payment networks, and redemption expectations.

The shutdown of EURT is a reminder that being early and the largest is not enough. A change in the domestic rulebook can wipe out the first-mover advantage.

But regulation is not all bad for stablecoins. If that were the case, non-USD stablecoins might have stalled after the discontinuation of EURT.

If we exclude EURT, the total non-USD stablecoin supply nearly tripled, from ~$350 million in January 2023 to $1.1 billion by February 2026.

Widening the Market

Along with circulation, the number of addresses holding such a stablecoin balance grew from approximately 42,000 to over 1.2 million during the same period.

Monthly transfer volume rose from $600 million to $10 billion, a 16-fold increase. Monthly sending addresses climbed 22 times, from around 6,000 to 135,000.

The fact that both holders and senders grew faster than the supply suggests that the market expanded through increased participation.

Therefore, regulation is not always detrimental to the market, like it was for Euro Tether. Here, it attracted more stablecoin issuers and users.

Where is Non-USD Money Flowing?

By early 2026, unidentified transfers accounted for 38% of the total transfer activity in local-currency stablecoins. This likely reflects payment and settlement activity, including peer-to-peer transfers and transfers from self-custodial wallets to payment providers.

This was followed by lending at 29%, DEX activity at 17%, and CEX-related flows at 14%.

This breakdown shows that non-USD stablecoins are being used for two main purposes on-chain. One is using them to make payments, while the other is using them as money in motion between peers or businesses. Another is using them across DeFi primitives, such as lending and trading.

But there’s a caveat in this data. When you exclude euro-pegged stablecoins from the picture, the market takes a different trajectory.

Euro stablecoins, which account for over 90% of total transfer volume, are being used like financial assets in their own right. Users are parking them in lending markets, using them in DEXs, and treating them more like on-chain cash that can earn, collateralise, and circulate across DeFi. This gives local-currency stablecoins a more mature appearance.

EURC, along with EURS, EURm, and EUROe, has found its way into DeFi yield-generating venues such as Aave, Morpho, and Fluid.

When you strip out euro stablecoins, the remaining non-USD digital money is mostly used for settlement infrastructure.

Almost 8 in 10 non-USD, non-euro stablecoins fall into the unidentified transfers bucket. It likely captures wallets moving money, businesses settling obligations, remittance-style transfers, and payment flows passing through service providers.

The dominance of euro-pegged currencies among non-USD stablecoins suggests that the next phase of growth is more likely to be concentrated in DeFi primitives. Outside of the euro, the non-USD stablecoins will first scale as infrastructure to move domestic money across digital rails before they can be used in DeFi primitives.

This growth remains crucial, as it will come from stablecoins used for payroll, treasury management, merchant settlement, remittances, and foreign exchange (FX).

All of these sectors are more regulated than DeFi primitives, since operational money cannot tolerate ambiguity as well as a speculative asset can. If a token is expected to operate within domestic payment systems, treasury workflows, and compliance-heavy environments, it will demand predictable reserves, clear redemption processes, and legal clarity. Thus, regulation will play a crucial role in the adoption of non-USD stablecoins.

This also explains why growth is showing up in areas with mature financial systems. The report pointed out that activity in Brazilian Real (BRL) and Japanese Yen (JPY) accelerated following improvements to local frameworks. At the same time, the report noted that markets without dedicated regimes, such as Indonesia, lagged.

I also find an economic case for non-USD stablecoins.

Cross-border payments still carry high conversion costs, and remittances lose a significant chunk to FX spreads and intermediaries. More local-currency stablecoins can reduce the value that needs to be detoured through dollars before it reaches its destinations. That can reduce FX costs, remove settlement friction, and let businesses and individuals hold value in the currency they earn, spend and save in.

The potential is much larger than DeFi alone. Euro stablecoins have set a strong precedent for integrating local digital money into financial systems. However, reducing the cost, speed, and dollar dependency in cross-border money movement will be a bigger win on a global scale.

The issuers who can make local currencies easier to send, settle, and embed into existing payments infrastructure will be the ones to benefit from the enormous potential of non-USD stablecoins. If they can build conducive conditions for better adoption, DeFi integration will follow naturally.

That’s it for this week. I will be back with another one.

Until next time, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 170,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

DeFi protocols often report on their volume, sharing TVL charts and fee dashboards. What they rarely do is publish a full set of financial statements, including income broken down by segment, cash flow reconciliations, and treasury positions by quarter.

For a Solana liquidity protocol, Meteora’s 53-page annual token holder’s report for 2025 sets a new precedent.

The headline number shows over $182 billion in trading volume facilitated, growing 250% year-on-year (YoY). Meteora generated over a billion dollars in fees and a healthy treasury, earning it a 24-month runway. In a year when SOL lost nearly a third of its market capitalisation, Meteora remained one of the busiest platforms on Solana.

Read Meteora's 2025 Annual Report

One of the interesting stories in this report is its income statement, which reveals how Meteora’s flagship product and its most profitable products are two different things.

In today’s analysis, we will examine how this model works and explore where the billion dollars in fees flow after each stakeholder takes their share.

The Volume-Revenue Inversion

Meteora runs four on-chain programmes: DLMM, DAMM v1, DAMM v2, and DBC. The Dynamic Liquidity Market Maker (DLMM) is the protocol’s flagship product, the one the Liquidity Provider (LP) Army rallies around, and the one most people associate with the protocol. DAMM v1 and v2 are constant-product automated market makers (AMMs). Dynamic Bonding Curve (DBC) powers token launches through customisable bonding curves. Each programme collects swap fees from traders and splits them between liquidity providers and the protocol.

In FY2025, DLMM facilitated $168.3 billion in trading volume, while the remaining flowed through DAMM ($11.5 billion) and DBC ($2.4 billion) pools. It’s evident that DLMM is Meteora.

Yet, volume is not revenue.

DLMM generated $43.1 million in protocol revenue, barely a third of total revenue, despite generating 92% of the total volume. However, fees from DAMM pools and the launchpad partner (DBC) together generated $78.0 million, about 64% of Meteora’s total revenue.

This shows that Meteora’s flagship product, with utmost attention, and the major revenue-generating product are not the same. DLMM brings the volume, the brand recognition, and the LP community, while the DAMM and launch infrastructure bring the margin. Both are essential, and the interplay between them is what makes the model work.

But why does its flagship product generate only a third of the protocol’s revenue? To understand that, we need to look at the various kinds of assets that trade on each programme and the fees they generate per dollar of volume.

The Compounding Advantage

The gap in contribution is partly explained by the take rate, calculated as a percentage of fees retained by Meteora after paying the LPs. This rate varies across programmes. On DLMM, LPs keep 95%, and Meteora retains 5%. On DAMM and DBC, LPs keep 80%, and Meteora retains 20%. That’s because Meteora charges a premium on the newer programmes for the additional infrastructure they provide, including anti-sniper protections, dynamic fee mechanisms, and composable launch tooling that goes beyond routing swaps.

That’s a 4x differential between the flagship product and the one that contributes the most to its margins. But that explains only part of the gap.

The other part is explained by varying fee intensity, the amount of swap fees generated per dollar of volume.

DLMM primarily routes established trading pairs. SOL-USDC, major tokens, assets with deep order books and tight spreads. These pools compete on execution quality, which means fee tiers are set low to attract aggregator flow. Across FY2025, DLMM pools generated $907.3 million in fees on $168.3 billion in volume, with a fee-to-volume ratio of 0.54%.

The DAMM and DBC pools serve a different market. New token launches, memecoins, long-tail assets, and high-volatility, low-liquidity pairs. Fee tiers on these pools run wider to compensate LPs for the impermanent loss risk that comes with providing liquidity to assets that can move 30% in a day. DAMM pools generated $254.4 million in fees on $11.5 billion in volume, with a fee-to-volume ratio of 2.21%, roughly four times that of DLMM.

This is what compounds the gap between what both products contribute. For every dollar of volume, the DAMM and DBC pools generate approximately 4x as much in fees. Meteora then retains 4x more of those fees as protocol revenue.

This differentiation of how these two programmes work is key to Meteora’s structure. DLMM is built to win on execution and scale, while operating in a tight-fee, high-throughput and aggregator-friendly environment. The launch infrastructure stands out for its unique tooling, configurable economics, and a fee structure that reflects the premium value it provides to token creators. Together, they give Meteora a diversified top line that most single-product DeFi protocols lack.

But diversification only matters if both engines keep running. The quarterly data shows what happens when one of them stalls.

When the Launch Cycle Cools

In Q1, Meteora’s entire $36.5 million in revenue came from LP pools, when the launchpad infrastructure hadn’t shipped yet. DLMM contributed 58% of that quarter’s revenue. By Q2, partner fees first appeared at $8.6 million after Meteora went fully permissionless and launched DBC and DAMM v2. Immediately, DLMM’s share of revenue dropped from 58% to 17%.

Q3 was the launchpad quarter. Believe’s Internet Capital Markets (ICM) trend drove launch volume through Meteora’s bonding curves, and partner fees surged to $15.1 million, more than half the quarter’s total. For the first time, launch infrastructure was contributing more to the top line than both LP pool programmes combined.

Then Q4 arrived. Partner revenue fell 77% to $3.5 million as launchpad activity cooled. DLMM’s share climbed back to 47%.

The quarterly view reveals the trade-off.

The high-margin launch business can dominate revenue in a good quarter, but it’s cyclical. The lower-margin DLMM business doesn’t spike as hard, but it’s not over-reliant on narratives. In Q4, when launchpad revenue hit its lowest point, LP pool revenue from DLMM and DAMM still covered $13.8 million, comfortably above the protocol’s $1.5 million monthly burn rate.

While DLMM holds the fort during testing cycles, the launch infrastructure works as a catalyst during favourable times.

Where the Billion Dollars Go

In FY2025, Meteora generated $1.31 billion in swap fees, of which LPs received $1.19 billion (~90%). After their cut, Meteora retained $121.1 million in protocol revenue.

But Meteora did not receive all the $121.1 million it earned.

Fees are collected in the same tokens being traded. On a SOL-USDC pool, that means fees arrive in SOL and stablecoins. On a memecoin launch pool, fees accrue in the just-launched token, and that token can depreciate by 80% before the protocol converts it into a stable asset. Of the $121.1 million in accrued revenue, only $72.5 million was captured in the treasury as SOL and USDC/USDT. The remaining $48.6 million, roughly 40%, eroded in the gap between earning the fee and liquidating the token.

However, this difference between what is accrued and what is earned is present in every crypto protocol similar to Meteora.

The protocol has since addressed the leakage. Starting January 2026, a programme-level update periodically converts non-stablecoin fees into USDC. If it works as intended, the gap between earned and realised revenue should narrow meaningfully in FY2026.

What This Means

Meteora’s report gives us a complete picture of its economics, something that a DeFi protocol rarely offers.

It offers us a transparent understanding of how a protocol can facilitate $182 billion in trades, generate over a billion in fees, and still see only $72.5 million land in its treasury. But that’s the reality of running liquidity infrastructure, where most of the value rightly accrues to the capital providers who make it work.

What is most compelling is the architecture underneath. Meteora has built a model where a high-volume, lower-margin product sustains the brand and community, while a lower-volume, higher-margin product funds the protocol’s growth.

The 2026 roadmap signals that the team clearly sees this. Their planned convergence of LP and trading tools is an attempt to widen DLMM’s revenue potential by pulling traders, a far larger user base, onto the same platform. Meteora Labs and the Bedrock initiative are bets on expanding the variety and quality of assets launching through its infrastructure, which is where the margin lives.

Both moves point toward strengthening both engines rather than choosing between them.

For the broader DeFi industry, the lesson is not to lean too much into volume as a metric. Revenue composition is what determines whether a protocol can survive a down cycle, fund its own development, and compound over time. Meteora had the confidence to publish the numbers that make this distinction visible. More DeFi protocols should follow suit.

Until next time, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 170,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

Everyone agrees that stablecoins are growing. Their supply in circulation has more than doubled, while the adjusted volume has more than tripled. All in just two years. Last month, stablecoins recorded a new all-time high in monthly adjusted volume. Some dismiss these figures, while Crypto Twitter (CT) celebrates them in real time.

But numbers alone tell us little about growth. What also matters is the context in which the growth is occurring, like who is using stablecoins, for what purposes, and whether the pattern of usage is changing. Allium was kind enough to give us an early glimpse of their latest report on stablecoin infrastructure, ‘Stablecoins: The emergence of a new payment rail’. It’s an important read because the charts show that stablecoin usage is shifting from enabling low-cost cross-border remittances to supporting general commerce and vendor payments across businesses.

Most of the debate around stablecoins today centres on whether they are financial products, such as narrow banks, Treasury-bill wrappers, yield vehicles, or simply payment infrastructure. The policy-level arguments over stablecoin interest assume that stablecoins are primarily financial instruments. But the data in the report suggests otherwise. The recent composition of stablecoin activity increasingly resembles a payment rail rather than a savings product.

It’s the same pattern we saw with the evolution of the Automated Clearing House (ACH) network: from replacing paper cheques in payroll to becoming a foundational backbone for general commerce, B2B payments, and consumer bill payments.

In today’s deep dive, I will weave together data from Allium’s stablecoin infrastructure report to show why it changed how I think about where stablecoins are heading.

The Velocity Divergence

Since January 2024, the stablecoin supply in circulation (calculated by deducting non-circulating supply from total supply) has grown by over 100%. Over the same period, adjusted volume (calculated by removing wash trading, entity-internal flows, and round-trip transfers) grew by 317%.

In the accumulation stage of any new asset, supply typically grows faster than usage. As the asset matures, usage grows faster than supply. That’s because asset holders are spending more of the asset. Here, as adjusted volume grows much faster than the circulating supply of stablecoins, it shows the maturity of stablecoins from store-of-value assets to a preferable medium of exchange or transfer of value.

This shift is reflected in stablecoin velocity, calculated as adjusted volume divided by circulating supply.

Stablecoin velocity has increased from 2.6x to over 6x in the past two years, reflecting that each dollar of stablecoin supply is now turning over 2.3 times more actively than it was in January. If you benchmark this against traditional payment rails, it shows how mature stablecoin usage has become.

Another metric that establishes the maturity of stablecoin usage is transaction count. It’s least susceptible to large-value noise. So, when the payment transaction count grows faster than the volume, it indicates that the average payment amount is decreasing. This behaviour is typical of a payment rail finding its footing, rather than of an experimental tool being shuttled between exchanges.

This raises the question of who is making all these payments and what they are paying for.

In 2025, the consumer-to-consumer (C2C) category remained the largest channel, ahead of consumer-to-business (C2B), business-to-business (B2B), and business-to-consumer (B2C). But its growth rate was the slowest among the four.

The slower growth in C2C reinforces the maturity of stablecoin usage, since person-to-person transfers are the simplest use case. They require no merchant integration, no invoicing tools, no API and face few procedural barriers to adoption. This is how every new payment technology typically begins.

In India, when the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) was launched a decade ago, retail users were the first to jump on board, driven by cashbacks and other customer acquisition strategies. I recall how I used to make transfers between my two accounts using Google Pay, initially launched as Tez in India, when it offered me a dollar in cashback. Shops and establishments joined the party only when business tools, reports, and a dedicated payment-confirmation audio device system were rolled out.

As infrastructure matures, commercial use cases begin to absorb market share. And that transition appears to be happening now.

High growth in C2B suggests that more users are using stablecoins for general commerce, subscriptions, and merchant payments. Meanwhile, B2B growth indicates adoption among commercial counterparties for invoicing, supply chain payments, and treasury operations. Both growth rates (131% for C2B and 87% for B2B) are outpacing the 76% overall payment growth, indicating that the commercial share of payment volume is expanding.

When you pair the growing C2B volume with the average ticket size of C2B transactions, which fell from $456 to $256, it suggests a trend of people paying for recurring purchases using stablecoins.

Although the peer-to-peer category remains dominant in absolute terms, it is soon ceding ground.

The quarterly share data makes this rotation even harder to miss.

The share of C2C as a percentage of total payment volume has never crossed 50% after dropping below the halfway mark in Q1 of 2025.

The world appears to be moving beyond experimenting with stablecoins for low-risk, less frequent peer-to-peer transfers to consistently using them for frequent payments.

When I first started tracking stablecoin adoption, one of the dominant narratives in favour of stablecoins was about how it enables cross-border remittances and could disrupt the Western Union thesis by allowing workers in developed economies to send money home. But the data says something different.

About three-quarters of stablecoin payment volume now occurs domestically. Over the past year, cross-border volume at the country level has dropped from 44% of total payments to roughly 25-29%. At the regional level, 84% of payment flows remain within the same geographic region.

Based on all our earlier charts, it’s clear that stablecoins aren’t competing with SWIFT for international settlement. Instead, the B2B metrics, including 74% domestic dominance, a falling average transaction size, payroll, and growing invoicing use cases, point to stablecoins competing with domestic payment rails like ACH.

For context, ACH B2B payments grew about 10% in 2025, while stablecoin B2B payments grew 87% over the same period. I am aware that the absolute scale isn’t even comparable, and we have to consider the low-base effect of stablecoins. Yet, the growth is hard to ignore.

The Path Ahead

For a long time, I viewed cross-border remittances and peer-to-peer transfers as the primary drivers of stablecoin adoption. The idea that someone in India could receive dollars from a family member in Dubai without losing 7-8% to an intermediary on a bank holiday is a compelling narrative. This story still exists, but perhaps no longer the main story.

I find it interesting how quietly and quickly the domestic commerce thesis has overtaken everything else. The fact that the C2C category has not reclaimed 50% market share for over a year now has not been a metric I have seen go viral in any of the CT chatter. But it’s the metric where stablecoins pivot from being a crypto product to financial infrastructure that enables commerce between a consumer and a business, or between two businesses.

It’s also worth noting that Allium’s labelled payment volume is an analysis built on the wallets they managed to cover, identify and label. While that analysis shows payment volume to be just 2-3% of the total adjusted stablecoin volume, that can only be a lower bound, considering that there will most likely be so many more wallets that Allium couldn’t include in its coverage.

Going forward, I will be closely watching whether C2B and B2B shares continue to gain ground and whether the average ticket-size compression holds in the upcoming quarters. If both trends persist even through a crypto market downturn, it would confirm that stablecoin payment infrastructure has begun to decouple from speculative crypto activity on a sustained basis.

That’s it for this week’s piece. I will be back with the next one.

Until then, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 200,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.

“Forecasts usually tell us more about the forecaster than of the future.”

— Warren Buffett

Hello,

Money filters out cheap talk. Advocates believe this is why prediction markets are reliable. We saw people accurately predict the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election results on Polymarket and Kalshi. However, prediction markets aren’t new, nor is their success in accurately predicting political outcomes.

In October 1988, a group of economists at the University of Iowa backed their academic curiosity with a small-scale, real-money prediction market. They launched a futures market on the presidential election where participants could buy contracts that paid $1 if George H.W. Bush won and $0 if Michael Dukakis did. On election eve, Bush contracts were trading at 53 cents, while the conventional polls called the race tight. Bush ultimately won with 53.4% of the vote and a healthy 8-point margin.

Since that academic experience, such real-money futures markets have outperformed the conventional polls in every election in which forecasting was done more than 100 days in advance. In 74% of U.S. presidential elections since 1988, prediction markets have come closer to the eventual outcome than the polls.

This success stems from the mechanism that forces the expression of genuine belief backed by real money at stake, something the surveys could never do. The person who actually believed Bush would win bought the contract and held it. There was little incentive for random participants to spoil the prediction by placing $50 behind a claim they didn’t believe in. When this behaviour is aggregated across thousands of traders, the information converges on a price that reflects the genuine conviction of a larger population, rather than a small, disproportionate sample.

Iowa’s small academic experiment, run on a shoestring budget, has evolved into an institutional infrastructure today.

Last week, a working paper by Fed-affiliated economists said Kalshi, the largest regulated prediction market in the U.S., could serve as a valuable real-time benchmark for policymakers. The same week, NYSE president Lynn Martin said Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market by volume, moved S&P futures on election night by pricing a Donald Trump victory before any news organisation called the race. Later, Kalshi announced a partnership with a trading platform handling $2.6 trillion in daily institutional volume.

In today’s deep dive, I will examine whether prediction markets can serve as a reliable barometer for policymaking and what risks they pose.

Prediction Markets as Policymaking Tools

The working paper found that Kalshi’s predictions were statistically similar to Bloomberg’s consensus, with almost identical forecast errors for core CPI and unemployment.

In fact, the paper also finds that Kalshi’s forecasts for the core CPI are significantly superior to Bloomberg’s estimates.

Despite similar statistical performance, what sets Kalshi apart is its ability to provide more frequent, real-time updates to probability curves for macroeconomic indicators such as GDP growth, core CPI, and unemployment. For estimates like inflation, the Bloomberg consensus is available only in the months leading up to a release. That makes conventional estimates less frequent, with wider gaps that don’t reflect real-time updates to expectations.

Kalshi not only provides predictions for an outcome but also the real-time range of uncertainty and tail risks. In early April 2025, uncertainty about trade policy temporarily heightened inflationary expectations. Although the uncertainty did not materialise, Kalshi priced the changing dynamics in real time. The monthly Bloomberg estimates will never capture this nuance.

Today, Kalshi’s market odds move in real-time when a Fed governor speaks at an FOMC meeting. They price in every remark by the governor and offer policymakers a glimpse of how traders interpreted the intended message.

For instance, when Christopher J. Waller made accommodative remarks ahead of the July 2025 FOMC, the probability of no rate change dropped to 75%. After the June jobs report came in stronger than expected, it snapped back above 90%. The entire expectation of traders, backed by real money, is visible to policymakers in a way that no other instrument currently does.

Who’s Trading on These Markets?

Before deciding how much to trust prediction markets, it is important to examine who is trading and what the volume represents.

Between September 2024 and January 2026, the volume on the FOMC meetings grew 11-fold from $59 million to $660 million on Polymarket. In total, Polymarket’s FOMC markets have processed $2.6 billion, more than the platform’s culture, economics, geopolitics, and science categories combined.

So, who is trading such volumes on FOMC meetings? While there’s no easy way to find out on a pseudonymous prediction platform like Polymarket, I’d like to guess. It’s difficult to look beyond macro hedge fund analysts involved in drafting the labour statistics report or money market fund managers who profit if rate cuts don’t come.

Why them? Iowa markets worked because people putting money where their mouths are outnumbered participants who were just betting on noise without reliable information. Noting the risk of over-assuming, I’d like to think that when real stakes and money of this magnitude are involved, people with reliable information will gravitate toward the market, leading to more accurate price discovery.

What to Watch Out For

None of this means that prediction markets can be the perfect measuring tools for policymakers.

The probability in prediction markets also reflects traders’ risk preferences. It is not a raw reflection of expectations of an outcome. For example, when Kalshi prices a 15% probability of an adverse CPI print, whereas conventional surveys price at 10%, the gap can be justified by two factors. First, prediction markets may be pricing in real-time information that the Bloomberg consensus misses. Second, traders might be paying a premium on prediction markets to hedge against unfavourable outcomes.

Policymakers must understand what the gap reflects before they look at the information as a signal for their policymaking.

While Kalshi appears to be reliable for macroeconomic signals to policymakers, over 85% of its total notional volume is accounted for by the Sports category.

Currently, at least 20 federal lawsuits are contesting the regulatory arbitrage enabled by prediction markets through nationwide sports betting. FOMC markets on Kalshi are reliable partly because sports betting provides the platform’s baseline liquidity through active traders, tight bid-ask spreads, and market-making infrastructure that keep all Kalshi markets functioning. Macro markets benefit from this foundation even though they operate independently. If sports betting disappears under regulatory pressure, the platform loses the liquidity engine that keeps spreads tight and prices continuous across all categories, including FOMC. Thinner macro markets become easier to move with less capital, and therefore more susceptible to manipulation.

The working paper recommends using Kalshi as a monitoring tool, not a decision-making input. But making that intention public is itself the problem.

The authors suggest using Kalshi more as a tool to interpret incoming data and check the real-time interpretation of Fed communications. Yet, since the intention to refer to prediction markets is made public, it could create a feedback loop.

For example, a policymaker at the Fed could see Kalshi pricing a 15% probability of a rate cut, lower than what they expected to convey with their decisions. In response, they might soften the phrasing in their next remarks, which could then prompt conventional rate markets worldwide to move. The problem here is that while Kalshi’s FOMC market is $660 million, the Fed Funds Futures market is tens of billions of dollars. The former needs a relatively small position to swing the odds. A well-capitalised actor who understands that moving Kalshi can influence what the Fed says next, if not what it decides, can use a relatively small position to move a much larger market. Policymakers’ communication can become the target of manipulation.

This scenario highlights the difference between Iowa’s 1988 futures markets and the prediction markets of 2026. The Iowa economists were trying to determine whether a market with real stakes could produce better forecasts than a survey. At the time, policymaking wasn’t being closely watched enough to deter manipulators.

The prices reflected genuine belief because these prices did not move the world. They merely allowed those with opinions to monetise them. Once the Fed publicly announces, if and when it does, its intention to use prediction markets as policy input, that property is lost. It also introduces a performative element to trading.

Yet, it is not a miscalculated suggestion to include prediction market odds in the policy toolkit. Financial commitment still filters out cheap talk. Informed participants continue to dominate price discovery. What results is a signal that surveys can never match in terms of speed and distributional richness. And this case is stronger for FOMC markets than any other application. There are participants on both sides, enabling genuine hedging capabilities, and the markets are more reflective of real-time expectations through frequent pricing of real-time events.

Policymakers should make it mandatory to demand open-source data transparency as a condition of official adoption. If the data cannot be audited, the manipulation could go undetected. They should understand that both the signal and noise come from the same place. People with real money and genuine beliefs can tell you in real time what they think.

The window of opportunity for anyone powerful enough to game the system did not exist when Iowa economists ran their academic experiment for decades. Today, that window is wide open than ever before.

That’s it for this week’s piece. I will be back with the next one.

Until then, stay curious,
Prathik

Token Dispatch is a daily crypto newsletter handpicked and crafted with love by human bots. If you want to reach out to 200,000+ subscriber community of the Token Dispatch, you can explore the partnership opportunities with us 🙌

📩 Fill out this form to submit your details and book a meeting with us directly.

Disclaimer: This newsletter contains analysis and opinions of the author. Content is for informational purposes only, not financial advice. Trading crypto involves substantial risk - your capital is at risk. Do your own research.