Welcome to Edition 14 of The Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading.

What I’m Watching and Reading

I spent the past two weeks prepping for moving cities. So cardboard boxes and last-minute checklists got all my attention. I haven’t read nearly as much over the past month as I usually do. But I did make one trip to the cinema (cannot miss that for sure).

I watched The Odyssey a little over a week ago and gave it 4.5.

Christopher Nolan’s storytelling is top-notch and the single biggest reason to watch it in theatres. Matt Damon and the rest of the cast are breathtaking in places, carrying the emotional weight of a journey whose scale could easily have overwhelmed its characters.

I found dialogue delivery and visuals slightly lacking by Christopher Nolan’s standards. Some stretches appeared dull and too monochromatic for a film built around one of literature’s most expansive journeys.

Ludwig Göransson compensates for much of that. He does with the music what only he seems capable of doing. Even when the film seems to be lost in the dullness of the visuals, Ludwig keeps the film alive and moving.

Between watching The Odyssey, packing up one home and attempting to make another feel like one, I have had a relatively quiet month of reading. But I promise to be back with some interesting reads over the coming fortnight.

Despite my thin reading list, the macro events kept the calendar full

Got any recommendations for nice watches or reads? Write to me?

The Fortnight That Was

In the final two weeks of July, US inflation cooled marginally (at least for now), while the US–Iran conflict refused to reach a durable conclusion.

US consumer prices rose 3.5% in the year to June. The Federal Reserve’s preferred Personal Consumption Expenditures index subsequently eased from 4.1% in May to 3.7% in June. Overall, inflation is slowing, but it remains too high for the Fed to feel comfortable.

US real GDP expanded at an annualised rate of 1.5% in Q2, slowing from 2.1% in the first quarter. Consumer spending, investment and exports increased, but lower government spending dragged on the headline figure.

Despite slower growth and inflation still above target, the Fed kept interest rates unchanged at 3.5%–3.75%. The 9–3 vote was divided, with a trio voting in the opposite direction for the first time since 2019. Economic activity is holding up, but the war-induced energy shock has made the path back to 2% inflation more difficult.

By the end of July, the pause in the US-Iran war looks less like a settlement and more like another interval between escalations. Iran said it had stopped or turned back vessels attempting to cross the Strait of Hormuz, while attacks on shipping and US-linked facilities revived fears of a wider regional conflict. Brent crude ended July roughly 22% higher.

The markets reflected all this uncertainty.

Bitcoin was the only major asset in the chart to end the fortnight meaningfully lower (-1.6%). Ether outperformed BTC with 1.3% gains in the fortnight. However, both ETH and BTC ended July in the green with 18.6% and 7.3% gains.

Underneath these price movements, we kept observing and writing about the same structural change across crypto, AI, fintech and capital markets.

Creating a financial asset, issuing a token or building a model is becoming easier. The more valuable layer is increasingly the one that provides product distribution, financing, liquidity, and a place inside the wider economy.

That was also the thread running through the stories we published at Token Dispatch over the past fortnight.

What We Wrote Last Fortnight

With Is Crypto VC Dying?, Vaidik examined why specialist investors such as Paradigm and Framework Ventures are broadening their mandates into AI, robotics and aerospace. The shift does not necessarily mean crypto has failed. It may instead signal the maturity of the technology, meaning the informational advantage once held by crypto-only investors matters less. Crypto founders must now compete for capital and attention inside portfolios increasingly dominated by AI.

In Equity Learns to Borrow, I explored why raising corporate debt is routine while issuing equity remains a ceremony involving bankers, roadshows and substantial fees. Tokenised issuance could widen the geographic pool of buyers and allow companies to distribute shares more continuously, making equity issuance behave a little more like tapping a debt programme.

That drove me to write further about the thesis of crypto transforming into fintech. DTCC, SWIFT, Visa and other financial infrastructure operators are beginning to use blockchains to move securities, deposits and collateral. Crypto’s biggest impact may come from becoming the infrastructure they use behind the scenes. Crypto companies that once hoped to defeat Wall Street are increasingly invoicing the traditional financial companies by offering them tailor-made crypto infra solutions.

Vaidik then challenged one of the industry’s favourite interpretations in Is Crypto Money Fleeing Crypto?. The growth of tokenised real-world assets is usually presented as evidence that traditional institutions are arriving on-chain. Yet much of the identifiable demand comes from crypto protocols and DAO treasuries converting volatile reserves into tokenised Treasuries and dollar yield. The RWA boom may currently be more about crypto dollarising itself.

Finally, in Robinhood’s Bigger Baskets, I looked at how Robinhood is increasing the amount each existing customer does within its ecosystem. Funded customers grew 7% year-on-year in the second quarter, but average revenue per user climbed 24%. Robinhood Chain and its forthcoming social feed may matter less as standalone businesses than as connective layers that encourage the same customer to trade, borrow, save and invest across more products without leaving the platform.

Across a majority of our stories, we focused on one recurring theme: crypto is making issuance easier. Distribution, financing and integration are becoming the moat.

We have plenty more coming over the next two weeks. Before we get there, here is some literature that should keep you in good company.

Some of these could be behind a paywall. Sorry!

Regulation & Policy

• Republicans Are Stuck in 2020. Maybe We All Are.: An argument that pandemic politics, election denial and anti-science grievance fused in 2020 into a coalition that continues to define the American right.

• Resist the Technocrats: A critique of international institutions that disguise political choices as neutral expertise, and a case for restoring democratic disagreement without rejecting knowledge itself.

Crypto & Tech

• The Machiavellian Case for Decentralized Networks: Omid Malekan argues that decentralisation matters not because distributed systems are flawless, but because they constrain how much power any single institution can accumulate.

• One Human, Once: A deep dive into proof-of-personhood systems, comparing centralised biometric databases with identity systems built around passport chips and zero-knowledge proofs.

• Onboarding the Next Generation: Binance Research examines how younger users are entering crypto, what they use it for and which products could turn early experimentation into durable adoption.

• Lending Markets Are the New Kingmakers: As issuing stablecoins and tokenised assets becomes easier, lending protocols may decide which versions matter by setting collateral caps, LTVs, liquidity, and borrowing utility.

• The Broken Link Between Protocol Revenues and Token Value: A useful reminder that a successful company or protocol does not automatically make its associated token a good investment, as Ripple’s equity and XRP increasingly demonstrate.

• I Believed…: A reflection on crypto’s retreat from its 2021 utopian promises and its maturation into a more regulated industry built around stablecoins, tokenisation, perps and prediction markets.

• The Changing Shape of Onchain Ownership: Noelle Acheson explains how BNY’s onchain transfer-agent service could make tokenised funds more useful by allowing legal ownership to move alongside the token itself.

Finance & Economy

• In Defense of Markets That Sometimes Close: A case for nights and weekends as natural circuit breakers that give institutions time to negotiate rescues, reorganise risk and stop financial stress from compounding continuously.

• An SPV of an SPV of an SPV: A map of the hidden fees, ownership ambiguity and exit risks inside layered private-market SPVs, followed by a plea for boring but enforceable investor protections.

• Singapore’s Average Wealth Is Climbing, but There’s a Catch: Singapore ranks far higher in average wealth than median wealth, exposing how gains from financial assets disproportionately accrue to richer households.

• What Would It Look Like If the AI Bubble Popped?: Matt Stoller traces how an AI bust could travel through retirement funds, universities, utilities, private equity and public budgets without necessarily resembling the 2008 crisis.

• Information Timing and Release: The Gaming of Guidance: Aswath Damodaran connects corporate reporting with central-bank guidance and argues that more frequent information is not necessarily more useful information.

• The Situation Deteriorated: Matt Levine uses the unwinding of Situational Awareness’s leveraged AI trades to show how a long-term thesis can be right while its short-term funding structure still destroys the trade.

• Elevators Won’t Repair Themselves: A look at independent sponsors and search funds through a basic private-equity question: does value come from financing the acquisition or operating the company afterwards?

AI & Innovation

• Why Compute Might Get 10x More Expensive: Dwarkesh Patel argues that increasingly valuable AI output could make demand for compute grow faster than supply, concentrating frontier intelligence and pricing out lower-value uses.

• Inference Market—and Micro—Structure: A framework that treats AI-inference providers like market makers competing through quotes, latency, compute inventory and token-level economics.

Culture & Beyond

• The Writing Habit That Saved My Brain—and My Future: Dan Koe presents writing as a system for thinking clearly, learning faster and gradually building a body of work that compounds into opportunity.

• Overthinking Hates a Moving Target: George Mack recommends walking, sketching and speaking thoughts aloud as practical ways to make vague worries concrete and interrupt rumination.

• Streamlining Addiction: An essay on how mobile gambling and prediction markets remove the physical and social friction that once limited addiction, repackaging vice as seamless trading.

• Extreme Heat Is Costing Us Hours of Lost Sleep: Three charts show how hotter nights are reducing sleep worldwide, with the heaviest burden falling on people living in warmer and lower-income regions.

• Humanity’s Golden Age of Language May Have Occurred 2,000 Years Ago: New modelling suggests humans may once have spoken many times more languages before empires and large states accelerated linguistic homogenisation.

• How Art Invented Humanity: A philosophical argument that art was not merely produced by an already formed human mind, but helped create human self-awareness and cognition.

• Propaganda I’m Not Falling For: 21 short provocations rejecting familiar scripts around careers, hustle, retirement, constant news consumption, passion, talent, legacy and luck.

• How the Creator Economy Took Over Media: Scott Galloway examines a barbelled media economy where a handful of creators capture enormous value while most struggle to convert attention into a sustainable livelihood.

• Why Talented People Outside the US Keep Losing Roles They Should Win: An essay on how proximity bias, self-promotion and cultural discomfort with workplace politics can make capable remote and international workers invisible to the institutions evaluating them.

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

P.S.: Want to recommend interesting literature? Write to me, and I shall include them in the next edition 👇🏾

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.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Welcome to Edition 13 of The Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading.

What I’m Watching and Reading

I am on a book break this week. I have not quite found the next one yet, and I would rather wait than begin something out of obligation.

I did finish I Will Find You, the eight-episode mini-series. It moves quickly and, unusually for an adaptation, does not feel like it is merely borrowing a book’s reputation. It knows when to keep things moving. If you want an easy-yet-thrilling watch, I’d strongly recommend watching this one on Netflix.

This weekend is for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Nolan remains, in my view, one of the few filmmakers whose intellectual ambition is matched by control over the actual filmmaking. The film was shot entirely with IMAX cameras, which makes the absence of a proper IMAX screen near me especially annoying. But who knows? I may travel 300 miles at the end of the month to watch it again on the screen it was made for.

Got any recommendations for nice watches or reads? Write to me?

The Fortnight That Was

The past fortnight followed a grim, but familiar rhythm. The fragile US–Iran ceasefire gave way to another round of American strikes, Iranian retaliation against US-aligned Gulf states, and renewed anxiety around shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. The seesaw continues; the difference is that markets are no longer treating each headline as a fresh apocalypse.

A new strike only matters when it threatens oil movement, damages regional infrastructure, or makes shipping through the Hormuz less predictable. That is why crude has remained the only expression of the conflict. WTI is up 18.9% in the past fortnight, while Bitcoin is up 2.1%, the S&P 500 is down 0.7%, and the dollar is broadly unchanged.

Zooming out gives a better picture. Since the start of the conflict on February 28, Oil is up 27%, the S&P 500 gained 8.3%, while Bitcoin is 5.5% in the red.

Nevertheless, our team at The Token Dispatch has been monitoring the infrastructure progress underway despite all the global macroeconomic drama.

What We Wrote Last Fortnight

Over the past fortnight, most of our stories focused on one specific question: when an asset, a network, or a financial product becomes more useful, who controls the infrastructure around it and who captures the value?

Vaidik’s two-part series on compute followed that question from the GPU itself to the market being built around it. In Part II, he looked at the uneasy logic of lending against hardware that depreciates faster than the debt used to finance it. In Part III, he mapped the emerging pricing, clearing, verification and settlement layers that may eventually turn compute into a real capital market.

I wrote about Robinhood’s attempt to build a financial supermarket, where the chain is not really the product and serves as connective tissue among its dozen existing businesses. In Making Capital Reallocate Faster, I explored what changes when capital can move and reprice faster than the institutions designed to contain it.

We also examined the ownership question from two directions. What Does a Token Holder Own? asked whether token holders retain any meaningful claim once crypto protocols begin raising conventional equity. The Aladdin Playbook looked at the other side of that bargain: how BlackRock’s BUIDL is becoming increasingly load-bearing collateral for on-chain finance, and what that does to crypto’s claims of independence.

Thejaswini took a sceptical look at the incentive systems behind two very different networks. The Intelligence Arbitrage asked whether Bittensor’s capital allocation mechanism rewards useful AI work or simply whichever subnet can sustain the strongest token bid. And Aave’s Extraction examined the price users may be willing to pay for convenience: a fixed yield, fewer decisions, and a familiar interface.

We have got more lined up in the coming weeks. Until then, here’s a reading list to give you good company.

Crypto & Tech

• Robinhood’s Chain and Digital Asset Strategy: Insights4vc breaks down Robinhood’s push to build its own chain and tokenised-asset stack.

• Dear Robinhood, Please Do Not Build: Artemis argues against the app-chain land grab, making the case that Robinhood should plug into existing rails rather than fragment liquidity with its own chain.

• Is trade.xyz Existential to Hyperliquid?: A close look at whether the emerging venue trade.xyz genuinely threatens Hyperliquid or whether the incumbent’s liquidity and network effects hold.

• The Always-On Economy: Pantera argues that programmable, 24/7 on-chain markets are quietly rewiring finance into a system that never closes.

• TradFi Doesn’t Want DeFi, It Wants Blockchain: a16z crypto argues incumbents are adopting blockchain rails while sidestepping DeFi’s permissionless ethos.

• How Financial Systems Become Fluid: On how tokenisation and interoperable rails dissolve the settlement frictions that keep today’s financial system siloed.

• Inference in Capital Markets: Galaxy maps how AI compute — GPU futures and inference capacity — is being financialised and brought on-chain as a new crypto-native capital market.

• Privacy Tokens: Chamath makes the case that privacy is becoming core financial infrastructure rather than a fringe feature (behind paywall).

• Securitize Jumps After Partnering With Cantor: Securitize shares popped after the tokenisation firm tied up with Cantor Fitzgerald, another sign of TradFi leaning into on-chain assets (behind paywall).

• The Decade Ahead: Delphi Ventures lays out the three macro forces it’s betting on for the next decade, from synthetic intelligence undercutting labour to the US unwinding the order it built, with crypto positioned as the parallel system (behind paywall).

Finance & Economy

• How Artificial Spotify Streams Broke a Kalshi Market: How manufactured Spotify plays distorted a prediction market on streaming numbers, a case study in how thin the line between market and manipulation can be.

• Citrini on surviving a drawdown: Ahead of CPI, Citrini offers important advice on treating the portfolio as its own position, knowing your tilts, not averaging down just to fix your cost basis, and using an early drawdown to study how you react rather than fighting your own psychology.

• The Ozempic Economy: How private markets are repricing food, fitness and pharma around GLP-1 drugs, and where the capital flows next.

• The Everything Chart: Pieter Levels stitches the macro trends he thinks explain almost everything into a single, attractive one-glance chart.

• Circle and Coinbase’s Stablecoin Squeeze: JPMorgan warns that USDC’s economics face a “prisoner’s dilemma” as distribution deals like Hyperliquid’s siphon reserve income away from Circle and Coinbase (behind paywall).

• Why China Got Rich and India Didn’t: David Oks argues China’s miracle rests less on freeing markets than on decades of hard social modernisation and human-capital investment that India never underwent.

AI & Innovation

• Apple Sues OpenAI: Ben Thompson reads Apple’s trade-secret suit against OpenAI as less about stolen secrets than about a company furious at losing talent and unnerved by an AI shift that threatens the iPhone.

• The Workers Left Behind by China’s Robot Drive: A dispatch from China’s factory floors on the workers displaced as the country races to automate (behind paywall).

• XPeng Aims for 1,000+ Robots a Month: The EV maker plans to mass-produce humanoids and roll them out globally, another sign the humanoid race is accelerating (behind paywall).

• The AI Superforecasters Are Here: Scott Alexander weighs fresh evidence that AI models can now match or beat expert human forecasters, and what that means for judgment work.

• Robotics: Leveraging Human Labour: ARK sizes the shift from fixed-task automation to general-purpose humanoids at a ~$26 trillion opportunity as robots learn to generalise across tasks.

• Latent Space as a New Medium: Kevin Kelly reframes an AI model’s latent space as a creative medium in its own right.

Culture & Beyond

• What Is Web 2.0? Tim O’Reilly’s 2004 essay that coined the term for a paradigm shift is worth revisiting as we argue over what the next one (call it Web 2.5) really is.

• People Reading Was Actually a 500-Year Glitch: Priyanka Desai argues that post-literate is really pre-literate. As AI drops the cost of flooding the zone to zero, deep reading collapses, and a small “clerical class” that still reads inherits a priest-like authority over everyone who delegates it.

• The Postliterate Age: The Atlantic’s cover story on a deepening reading crisis and what a society that stops reading deeply stands to lose (behind paywall).

• The Decline of Deviance (Part 1): Adam Mastroianni on why people seem to break fewer rules and take fewer risks than they once did.

• The Decline of Deviance (Part 2): The follow-up on what a more conformist culture costs us, and whether the trend can reverse.

• Boomermaxxing: The Lost Art of Being Unforgettable: A playful argument for the older-generation habits that make a person genuinely memorable in an age of frictionless, forgettable interaction.

• Ancient Egyptian Princesses Were Powerful Weapon Users: A new analysis suggests that royal women in ancient Egypt were trained in arms, complicating longstanding assumptions about who wielded power.

• Permanent Daylight Saving Is Bad for Your Health: Scientific American on why the science favours permanent standard time over permanent DST for human health.

• A Super-Earth’s Leaking Helium: Helium escaping a super-Earth exoplanet could be the first hint of a surprisingly complex atmosphere.

• Silicon Valley Has a Science Fiction Problem: Ali Rıza Taşkale argues tech titans claim sci-fi inspired them while stripping out its politics and grafting their own worldview onto stories that imagined better futures.

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
Prathik

P.S.: Want to recommend interesting literature? Write to me, and I shall include them in the next edition 👇🏾

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.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Welcome to Edition 12 of The Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading.

Sticking with the flipped order from last edition, since it worked well.

What I’m Watching and Reading

I finally closed out Debt: The First 5,000 Years. The last 30% took me nearly twice as long as the first two-thirds did. Graeber slows right down into medieval and colonial credit systems that demand more patience than the opening chapters. I put the book down more often and sooner than I did in the first two-thirds.

One good thing is that the book stayed consistently informative right to the end. Since the book is split into thematic chapters, you could always pick it right back up from where you left off. Every chapter had something worth underlining, even the ones that might seem dull. Being useful and being interesting aren’t always the same thing, and Debt is a good reminder of that.

That wraps up my first tryst with a long book about money. I will pick up something lighter next. Got any recommendations? Write to me?

On screen, I’ve just started watching I Will Find You on Netflix. Two episodes in, and I’m liking how it’s unfolding. It’s got well-paced storytelling that builds tension just as well as Harlan Coben’s books do (Expecting some eye rolls from bibliophiles).

Adaptations can go either way, but this one feels like the right one after a long time. I will tell you more about it in the next edition.

The Fortnight That Was

Two editions ago, I flagged how fragile the fresh Iran-US ceasefire looked, never more than one missile away from unravelling. Well, if a little over 24 hours of ceasefire counts, then the agreement surely worked. After renewed strikes over what the US called repeated ceasefire violations, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist” if the violations continue.

On the market front, although the BTC price is still struggling around $60,000, we are not worried about its correlation with the broader crypto industry. There’s also little to support any theory around how every missile near the Strait of Hormuz will reroute crypto’s direction. That’s because there’s so much happening in parallel, including tokenised stocks, compute futures, bank-grade settlement rails, for one volatile ceasefire (or the lack of it) to decide where this industry goes next.

In the past two weeks, most of our stories have focused on how TradFi and DeFi are both pulling up a chair at the same table. The emerging world is creating new points where value accrues, and those who adapt to improve access to finance and the movement of money are positioning themselves well to capture a bite of that value.

What We Wrote Last Fortnight

Vaidik’s Who Actually Owns Your Stocks? and my follow-up, A Token Can Be the Asset, both examined how tokenisation inherits the old ownership chain and how different models of stock tokenisation offer varying benefits at different trade-offs.

Thejaswini’s Money Is Only as Good as the Issuer traced how banning a CBDC just hands the job of “trustworthy dollar” to stablecoin issuers instead, for better and worse. In Stretched to the Limits, I went back to evaluating the unravelling of Strategy’s STRC and what we got wrong in our first note about the credit instrument. I reassess the model and explain the problem in Strategy’s credit discipline. Thejaswini closed the week with Nobody Buys DeFi Insurance, on why protection markets stay tiny while the risk they’re meant to cover keeps growing.

I then wrote Who Captures Value in Web 2.5?, where I explored how value in the emerging world of finance is accruing in the translation layer connecting banks and institutions and who is capturing it.

Vaidik then wrote Compute Capital Markets, in which he explored how GPU hours are becoming a tradable commodity, with stablecoin settlement handling the plumbing work that electricity futures once did.

Collectively, these stories signal that the crypto industry is transforming into infrastructure and that it’s the best shot at building something that will outlast the next cycle.

There’s more lined up for you in the coming weeks, but here’s a reading list to keep you company until then.

Regulation & Policy

• Reclaiming Opacity: The Imperative for Privacy in Crypto: A case for why crypto’s radical transparency became a surveillance tool, tracing the Tornado Cash and Samourai prosecutions and arguing that privacy needs to be infrastructure and not a feature.

Crypto & Tech

• Money went on-chain first, the assets are following: Jevgenijs Kazanins uses a new Wharton paper to split RWAs into liquid money-like claims versus illiquid assets, and argues the second category is where tokenisation actually creates new liquidity, not just re-plumbs old.

• Castle Labs RWA Report: This deep dive lays out the current state of real-world asset tokenisation, mapping issuers, curators, and distribution across the stack.

• Rebuilding Securities Finance on Aave V4: Stani Kulechov makes the case that repo, margin lending, and securities-based loans are ripe for moving on-chain, with Aave V4 built to sit between the borrower and lender, and the fee-heavy stack of custodians and clearing houses.

• Dollars Without Borders: Joel John argues that Web3’s biggest opportunities have shifted from memes and speculation to tokenisation and stablecoins, framing them as the mechanism by which American institutions and property rights are exported to the rest of the world.

• Doppler: Rebuilding Capital Markets for the Tokenised Era: Doppler argues that tokenisation is just the starting point; the real opportunity lies in the liquidity, collateral, and financing infrastructure that enable tokenised assets to function as markets.

• Going Institutional: A close look at ZKsync’s Prividium bet to win bank adoption against Canton Network, betting that cryptographic privacy beats governance-based trust once institutions cross borders.

• State of Onchain Finance Q2 ‘26: Allium’s quarterly report tracks stablecoins, tokenised funds, equities, and prediction markets stacking up as onchain finance moves from speculation to infrastructure.

• The other American Revolution: Fiat currency: Byron Gilliam traces fiat money to a 1690 Massachusetts Bay Colony experiment, arguing that tax-backed paper money was one of the decisions that helped secure America’s independence.

• A system based on identity is vulnerable (behind paywall): Noelle Acheson’s Monday note on identity-based trust breaking down at scale, alongside her weekly stablecoin and macro calendar.

• The moneyness of stablecoins (behind paywall): A new legal paper argues stablecoins aren’t quite money yet, and that the GENIUS Act helps less than most assume.

Finance & Economy

• Small Themes: June 2026 (behind paywall): Citrini argues the AI trade has crowded out attention from five under-owned setups — senior housing, sold-out stadiums, exchange competition, fintech, and airlines.

• Are Mega-Funds Taking Over Seed?: Data on how a16z, Sequoia, and General Catalyst have systematically taken over the top of the seed market, and why their conversion rates may not survive the current pace.

• Two Concepts of Markets: A philosophical take on whether markets are a camera revealing prices or an engine that creates them, using prediction markets as the live test case.

• The age of the solopreneur: Stripe’s economists find solo founders growing faster than employer businesses, with AI filling the gaps that once required hiring a team.

• The World as Model: Meltem Demirors argues that the next trillion-dollar opportunity is the sensing layer that enables physical assets to be priced and traded the way HFT firms price markets.

AI & Innovation

• America’s data-centre backlash puts the AI boom at risk: The Economist reports on rising community opposition to hyperscaler data centres across the US, with Meta sites worth $30 billion and gigawatts of load now colliding with local politics that could throttle the AI buildout.

• How Much Memory Do We Fucking Need?: Zeitgeist Labs writes on the memory chip supply-demand mismatch that has taken Micron up nearly 10x in nine months, and how much room there might be left before the trade peaks.

• AI’s winner-take-all era is over: Ashu Garg argues the “model is not the moat” narrative is winning as tokenmaxxing burns out, regulation shifts, and IPOs like Cerebras and SpaceX force a healthier debate about where AI value actually accrues.

• How to survive AI mass replacement (& escape wage slavery): Dan Koe on how the real threat isn’t AI itself but dependence on employers and institutions whose incentives were never aligned with your survival to begin with.

• AI search could make answers blander: New research suggests that AI search trained on AI-generated content could converge on the same narrow set of answers, a phenomenon dubbed “AI search collapse.”

• Illegible benefits: A philosopher argues that every transformative technology, from anaesthesia to writing, has costs that are immediately visible and benefits that stay unimaginable until the technology creates the vocabulary to describe them.

• The Winning Essays for the Big Questions About AI: Dwarkesh Patel’s contest winners cover ending pandemics with AI, what countries outside the AI race should do, and why labs may make money the way Hong Kong’s subway system does.

Culture & Beyond

• Mary Beard Looks at Trump and Can’t Not Think of Ancient Rome: The classicist reads Trump’s triumphal arch, UFC-on-the-lawn, and $250-bill plans through the lens of Roman emperors, where spectacle, mind-changing, flattery, and coinage were the machinery of one-man rule.

• Six Months into the “Hero’s Journey”: A former a16z partner reflects on leaving VC to found a biotech startup and why choosing which games to play matters more than winning any one of them.

• 29% Loaded: Jack Raines turns 29 with 29 beliefs about money, risk, envy, and adulthood — some reversed from his twenty-something self.

• Counterfeit Congregation: An essay on how streaming, texting, and now AI companionship have replaced the in-person congregation humans evolved to need.

• Europe IRL: Scott Galloway argues Sweden and the Netherlands show that capitalism and strong safety nets aren’t a contradiction, tying it to something the US is losing: trust.

• America’s Next 250: An essay from General Matter’s CEO imagining the next 250 years of American energy and abundance, if the bottlenecks get solved.

• A reading list for the deeply curious: a16z crypto’s team shares 13 summer reads on manufacturing, biology, market design, and management.

Want to recommend interesting literature? Write to me, and I shall include them in the next edition 👇🏾

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
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.

Welcome to Edition 11 of The Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading, because a newsletter that only talks about charts is a slow way to kill the will to live.

What I’m Watching and Reading

This edition, I am flipping the order of how we go about the editions because…why not?

I’m about three-quarters through Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber, which is a slow burn of a book, but a fascinating one. The book is a lot more about human relationships and behaviours that money grew out of: obligation, trust, who owes whom and why. It made me look at the thousands of years of social wiring underneath a simple transaction. I’ll have more thoughts once I close it out, but it’s already started reframing how I read the way money functions.

On screen, the last two weeks were a blast of human psychology from two very different angles. Obsession explored how far the pull of fixation can drag a person, and how little it takes to tip a strong want into something disastrous.

But what I didn’t prepare for was the ride that Backrooms took me on. Filmmaker Kane Parsons beautifully translates his strange internet idea of endless, fluorescent-lit liminal spaces into something genuinely unsettling on screen. The way the imagery conjures dread out of empty rooms and how deliberately it leaves you with more questions than answers are what stayed with me from the movie.

With Backrooms, Cannes-winning Renate Reinsve continues to have a blockbuster of a year. The movie adds another feather to the Norwegian actor’s award winning titles - The Sentimental Value and The Worst Person in The World. Chiwetel Ejiofor keeps you at the edge of your seat with the unreconciled conflicts his Captain Clark’s character carries within.

It’s a lovely watch for anybody who loves to leave the cinemas with a cloud of questions hanging over their heads and putting their minds to work in an uneasy manner (well, that’s just how weird my brain functions)

With that out of the way, let’s head to how the past fortnight fared.

The Fortnight That Was

Just days before we wrapped up the week, the U.S. and Iran signed a peace deal, committing to terminate operations on all fronts, including Lebanon. The 14-point agreement also states that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon and will also commit a $300-billion fund for the “reconstruction and economic development” of the country.

A deal, at last. Yet, Israel continued to attack Lebanon before the ink even dried. Over the last four months, we have seen this play out: a signed agreement here is never more than one missile away from being put on hold. That is just the volatile world we have been living in lately, with peace and outbreaks of violence sharing the same news cycle, sometimes within the same hour.

Markets still had something to cheer about over the past fortnight.

Bitcoin gained a modest +4.18% over the fortnight. Ether recorded ~9% gain, while the Nasdaq added 5%.

Yet nothing here suggests much about crypto’s future trajectory. Lately, we have been arguing at Token Dispatch that bitcoin’s chart and the crypto industry are decoupling for good. But don’t take our word for it. Look at the kind of stories we have been writing for the past two months and the stories I have been reading (some of which have been included in these reading lists for the past month). They prove the thesis of crypto’s evolution as fintech infrastructure far more convincingly.

What We Wrote at Token Dispatch

Throughout this fortnight, most of our stories addressed the one important question of who actually owns the value once the plumbing becomes invisible.

TJ closed it with Is Distribution Everything?, tracing how Coinbase, Stripe, and Kraken are owning the infrastructure they once rented. Through the piece, she also asks whether open-source protocols are destined to become the duct tape that fills the cracks the giants haven’t monetised yet. Vaidik picked up the same fight one layer up in The ‘Checkout’ War, dissecting why OpenAI’s Instant Checkout died six months in, and why the agentic-commerce land grab between Amazon, Google, and Stripe may be settled by stablecoin rails that make the middleman fight pointless.

I spent the fortnight on the IPO and the deposit. In The Unbundled IPO, I explained how SpaceX’s listing tore apart the banker’s old IPO bundle of pricing, distribution and delivery. I explored how banks’ roles will change in upcoming IPOs, with perp venues and prediction markets pricing in the stock weeks before the bell rings on the bourses.

Defending the Deposit followed the dollar itself, as stablecoins, tokenised deposits, and SoFi’s hybrid race to own convertibility. With Neobanks Have to Be Banks, TJ explained how the survivors of the neobank wave lived by getting a charter and lending you your own money.

All these stories collectively signal that crypto is growing into finance and integrating with traditional finance, rather than resisting it.

There’s more lined up for you in the coming weeks, but here’s a reading list to keep you company until then.

Regulation & Policy

• Africa’s Stablecoin Moment: A look at how African stablecoin adoption is moving from proof of demand to the harder work of regulation, banking access, liquidity, and local-currency rails.

Crypto & Tech

• The State of RWAs on Hyperliquid: Covalent maps how Hyperliquid’s HIP-3 has turned RWAs into 85+ always-on perp markets across stocks, indices, commodities, FX, and pre-IPO companies.

• Vitalik’s Covered-Call Stablecoin: A take on Vitalik’s proposed stablecoin design, where stability comes from splitting ETH exposure rather than relying on liquidation-heavy debt.

• Under the Uniswap Thesis: A useful pushback on the idea that tokenisation automatically benefits Uniswap, arguing that distribution, turnover, and value accrual matter more than headline RWA growth.

• Crypto Enters the Space Age: Mert argues that crypto can no longer rely on patchable software standards; as AI improves formal verification, security and rigour become the industry’s next survival test.

• Bitcoin Yield Is a Lie: A useful reminder that BTC has no native risk-free yield; every income strategy introduces counterparty, market, technical, or tail risk. (behind paywall)

• Cost of Trust 2.0: 1kx updates its thesis around blockchains as trust-reduction infrastructure, with sharper focus on which trust markets can actually produce venture-scale outcomes.

• The Race to Trade Everything: Galaxy breaks down Hyperliquid’s HIP-4 and how outcome markets could turn the perps venue into a direct competitor to Polymarket and Kalshi.

• Rails Aren’t Enough: A sharp stablecoin payments piece arguing that enterprises do not just buy fast settlement; they need SLAs, exception handling, reconciliation, and payment operations that work when things break.

• The Singleness of Onchain Money: Byron Gilliam uses 19th-century bank notes to explain why on-chain dollars need to become more fungible across issuers and venues.

• Money Flow Is the Moat: A16z’s Jason Rosenthal argues that the best crypto businesses sit inside value flows, including payments, custody, credit, settlement, and not beside them.

• The RWA Tokenisation Playbook: A beginner-friendly map of the RWA stack, from treasuries, credit, equities, and commodities to the issuers, curators, DeFi protocols, and apps that distribute them.

Finance & Economy

• The Bitter Lesson as Moat: A quant-finance essay on why secrecy and know-how are weakening as moats, while compute-scaled systems, proprietary data exhaust, and distribution become harder to copy.

• Ya Gotta Believe: Byron Gilliam uses the Knicks’ comeback and prediction-market pricing to show why investing is about probabilities, not certainties.

• Bitcoin’s Institutional Ascent: ARK argues that ETFs, public-company treasuries, custody maturity, and retirement access are pushing bitcoin from speculative fringe asset to institutional allocation.

• Robinhood’s Retail Finance Bet: Artemis makes the bull case for Robinhood as a Gen Z and millennial financial super-app, not just a crypto-correlated brokerage.

• The Stock Market Gets More Stock: Matt Levine explains how AI capital demand, SpaceX’s IPO, and pre-IPO perps point to a new era where equity markets raise capital again instead of merely shrinking through buybacks.

• Perps Don’t Work for Compute: Dave Friedman argues that compute needs dated forward curves, not perpetuals, because GPU-hours are perishable and hardware obsolescence is the real pricing problem.

• The Art of Arbitrage: Yuan Han Li frames great crypto companies as arbitrage machines that find a gap, build a growth loop around it, and then graduate into durable mainstream businesses.

• The Great Restructuring: Andrei Grachev argues that crypto is moving from belief-driven cycles to extraction and hard competition, where RWA and IPO perps make exchange listings even harder for new tokens.

AI & Innovation

• AI Labs as L1s: Alok Vasudev compares OpenAI to Bitcoin and newer AI labs to alt-L1s, framing the AI lab race through crypto’s familiar hierarchy of incumbents and challengers.

• The Untrainable: Sarah Guo argues that measurable AI work gets commoditised first, while messy organisational context, private correctness, and trust remain harder to automate.

• Do Consumers Want Agentic Commerce?: A useful counterweight to agentic-commerce hype, asking whether consumer payment habits are actually ready for autonomous shopping.

• A Frontier Without an Ecosystem: Satya Nadella frames the AI-era firm around human capital and token capital, where the real moat is the learning loop between people, workflows, data, and models.

• Three Paths for Agentic Payments: A framework for agentic payments built around whether AI replaces, integrates with, or creates new payment behaviour.

• Anthropic’s Safety Superpower: Ben Thompson argues that Anthropic’s safety mission, talent brand, data policy, and business incentives may be unusually aligned — and that this alignment is both powerful and worrying.

• Owning vs Renting Intelligence: Lin Qiao uses the Mythos shutdown to argue that AI companies need to turn workflows, data, evals, and domain knowledge into owned intelligence rather than rented API dependency.

• Who Prices Intelligence?: Jaya Gupta asks who will allocate and price intelligence when AI capability, cost, latency, and risk become independent product variables.

• Workflows Are King: Jamin Ball argues that AI moats will move from systems of record to workflow orchestration, where the company coordinating the agents owns the strategic layer.

Culture & Beyond

• Money Measures Life Poorly: A thoughtful essay on why money is the easiest scoreboard for life, but not the best one once time, health, relationships, and meaning enter the equation.

• New Media Is Insider Media: Anu explains why small audiences of the right people can now matter more than mass reach, especially in Silicon Valley’s insider-media ecosystem.

• What Is This Rock?: Aeon explores Anthropocene geology through strange human-made rocks, where industrial waste, tyres, coins, and natural processes blur the line between natural and unnatural.

• Mostly Dead: Jords writes this personal essay on distraction, screen addiction, and the unsettling idea that time spent scrolling can feel like time spent outside the land of the living.

• The Art of Presentmaxxing: Pascal turns mindfulness into a practical daily protocol, arguing that presence is built through small mundane “reps” rather than another optimised self-improvement ritual.

Want to recommend interesting literature? Write to me and I shall include them in the next edition 👇🏾

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
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.

Welcome to Edition 10 of The Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading, because a newsletter that only talks about charts is a slow way to kill the will to live.

This fortnight, though, the charts were hard to ignore.

We will take a quick look at how the markets moved over the last two weeks before I share with you how we at Token Dispatch are keeping our minds sane during the ongoing market downturn.

Let’s get the painful part out of the way first.

The Fortnight That Was

Bitcoin slipped below $60,000 this week, touching its lowest level since October 2024. Most of the broader crypto market followed it down. As much as $1.3 billion was liquidated out of crypto markets across long and short positions.

BTC, ETH and SOL, all lost approximately a fifth of their market cap in the past two weeks.

Depending on how closely you tracked these prices, this either felt like a bad dream, a familiar cycle, or the point where the weak hands start quietly leaving.

But I am an eternal optimist. I look for the good news even when the going is tough (Primarily because it acts as a consolation to my bleeding portfolio). I think downturns are useful in a way. It helps clear the industry of those who don’t care enough about its fate. Every narrative sounds profound when the charts are green. But only the true advocates hang in irrespective of which ways the candles move.

Just as any other industry, crypto has a section that keeps working, earning, building and shipping whether BTC is at $60,000 or $100,000.

While prices were bleeding, the U.S. approved the first regulated Bitcoin perpetual futures. Crypto exchanges kept expanding into stocks, commodities, private-company pricing, and prediction markets. Perp DEXs kept processing volume and stablecoins kept moving money.

It’s easy to overlook these developments in a red market.

Bear markets can hurt investor motivation, stop people from opening dashboards, make investment in the entire industry seem delusional.

But the actual industry was doing something else, and we covered it extensively at Token Dispatch.

What We Covered Last Fortnight

We started with Everything is a data centre now, where Thejaswini followed the noise in Rockdale, Texas, and found the bigger story underneath. Old aluminium plants became Bitcoin mines, which are now turning into AI data centres.

I then wrote Pricing the Private, in which I examined how crypto is building a parallel pricing stack for private companies. SpaceX perps on Hyperliquid, Polymarket contracts around IPO milestones, and tokenised access products are all doing something similar. They are letting public markets financialise their opinions about companies that are yet to list on public exchanges.

Thejaswini then took us into institutional money with Meet Me at the Agorá. Project Agorá is a permissioned, compliance-heavy system in which tokenised deposits and central bank reserves move only after the rules allow it. TJ explains the impact of programmable money when coupled with a gatekeeper at the door.

Vaidik wrote America Finally Gets Perps, explaining why the CFTC’s approval of regulated Bitcoin perpetual futures is a watershed movement. The piece is a culmination of what we have been seeing in crypto markets for a little over a year now. The piece tells us the impact this could have on U.S. institutions which were largely been locked out of a market that’s too big to ignore.

I closed the fortnight with ‘Every Exchange is an ‘Everything Exchange’, in which I argued that crypto exchanges are becoming full-stack fintech platforms. They started with tokens, but the infrastructure now supports trading perp contracts, tokenised RWAs, pre-IPO equities and even event contracts. I flirt with the idea of what happens when every exchange becomes a multi-asset brokerage and how do they stand apart in such a world.

At Token Dispatch, we are focusing heavily on how crypto infrastructure (read ‘blockchain’) is capitalising on the inefficiencies of traditional financial systems. There’s a lot we are working on that we are excited to send your way in the coming days, especially around the metamorphosis of crypto into fintech.

Until then, here’s a reading list that will keep you in good company.

Regulation & Policy

• Anthropic Hits Pause?: The Claude-developer has warned that frontier AI may need a coordinated slowdown if self-improvement risks move faster than society can govern them.

• Banks Answer Stablecoins: JPMorgan, Citi and other big banks explore tokenised deposits as TradFi’s more regulated response to crypto-native money rails.

Crypto & Tech

• Continuous Probability Markets: A smart prediction-market design piece on why real hedging needs price ranges, not just binary yes-or-no contracts.

• AI Needs Blockchains: Pantera’s Paul Veradittakit makes the case that AI agents need crypto rails for payments, identity, open systems and resource coordination.

• Bitcoin vs Ethereum Money: A structural audit of Bitcoin and Ethereum’s monetary claims, arguing that first-mover advantage is not the same thing as superiority.

• Stablecoins Go Invisible: A useful stablecoin distribution essay on why the winning rails may disappear into treasury dashboards, checkout flows and existing workflows.

• Crypto Price Discovery: Arrakis’ thread on how Hyperliquid and on-chain perps are becoming a new venue for price discovery beyond just crypto-native assets.

• Crypto Without Bitcoin?: A provocative thread/article arguing that crypto may be entering a cycle where Bitcoin is no longer the only asset setting the market’s direction.

• The Agentic Future: 0xSammy curates three early crypto-AI mechanisms, from compute-within-consensus to tokens that behave like LP positions.

• Private Money Is Fine: Nic Carter pushes back against the “stablecoins are dangerous private money” critique by revisiting the free-banking history people often misread.

Finance & Economy

• Fake Money Built America: Byron Gilliam uses America’s counterfeit-banknote era to show how messy private credit helped build a young financial system.

• Hormuz, Oil, Fragility: A timely NYT opinion piece on why the Strait of Hormuz remains one of the world’s most dangerous energy chokepoints.

• Copper Has a Problem: A commodity scarcity piece arguing that the world needs far more copper than current mining capacity is prepared to deliver.

• a16z, Pre-IPO: A sharp read on why a16z’s media, platform and multi-strategy buildout increasingly makes it look like a public company before the listing.

• Management Fee Machine: Dan Gray explains how venture capital’s incentive structure rewards scaling assets and fees, even when larger funds produce worse exits.

• Prediction Markets, Tested: Asterisk asks the uncomfortable question: are prediction markets actually useful information machines, or mostly better-packaged casinos?

• Opting Out of AI: Bloomberg looks at what it means to sit outside an AI boom that increasingly feels impossible for companies and investors to ignore.

AI & Innovation

• Google’s AI War Chest: Google’s reported AI infrastructure raise shows how frontier AI is turning into a capital markets story as much as a technology story.

• Search as Code: Perplexity reframes search for agents as something models should compose through code, not just call through fixed query boxes.

• China’s AI Valuation Race: A look at China’s “Six Little Tigers” of AI and whether their billion-dollar valuations have enough substance underneath.

• AI Sticker Shock: Axios tracks the growing corporate panic over AI bills, unclear ROI and the very real cost of letting employees use models without limits.

• AI Has No ROI: Ed Zitron expresses scepticism on enterprise AI economics, arguing that hidden token costs and vague productivity claims are finally colliding.

• The Messy Middle: Molly Kinder writes about the politically difficult transition between today’s labour market and the post-AGI abundance story Silicon Valley prefers to jump to.

• Robot Training Homes: The Verge reports on Shift’s offer to clean homes for free in exchange for footage that trains future household robots.

• Pig Organs, Human Body: A striking xenotransplantation milestone where scientists tested pig liver and kidney transplants in a brain-dead person.

Culture & Beyond

• The Burden of Discernment: Palladium uses Galileo, science and AI-era knowledge systems to ask how societies separate real dissent from weak contrarianism.

• Retreat Yo Self: A funny, self-aware essay on meditation retreats, silence, self-improvement and why stillness is easier to admire than actually practise.

• Metrics Maxxing: Scott Galloway takes aim at optimisation culture and the way metrics can slowly replace the actual thing we were trying to improve.

• Can Ecosystems Malfunction?: Aeon questions whether ecosystems really “fail” like machines, or whether that language says more about human expectations than nature.

• Flickering Enlightenment: A defence of the Enlightenment that does not ignore its failures, but argues its best legacy is permanent critique.

What I Am Reading & Watching

This fortnight, I am starting Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber.

I’ve wanted to read it for a while because debt is one of those words finance uses every day without considering its moral, political and historical weight. We talk about credit, leverage, money and repayment almost everyday. But I wanted to dive deeper into how debt became a way of organising human relationships long before modern banking took over.

On the watching front, I am waiting to watch Obsession. I usually try not to let hype decide my weekend plans, mostly because it has let me down too many times. But this one has been loud enough.

So that’s the plan: one book about 5,000 years of debt, one horror-thriller, and hopefully fewer red candles by the time the next edition goes out - that’s my ask of the…(no context spoiler ahead)...One Wish Willow.

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
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.

Welcome to Edition 9 of The Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. We moved our reading list edition to Saturday last fortnight and are sticking with it this time as well.

For those here for the first time, every two weeks I share my favourite literature on crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading this fortnight, beyond the world of crypto and finance.

So, let’s start with what moved and what didn’t.

The Fortnight That Was

The US-Iran ceasefire has survived several stress tests. But that still won’t stop oil prices from rising. Crude oil prices have hovered around $100/barrel over the past fortnight, briefly rising within a touching distance of $110.

The effect of rising fuel prices is spilling over to other prices and showing up in inflation data. In April, US CPI rose 0.6% month-on-month and 3.8% year-on-year. Energy prices were up 17.9% from a year earlier, while gasoline was up 28.4%. Core CPI also rose 0.4% in April and 2.8% over the year.

That leaves the Fed in an awkward place, walking a tightrope. The April FOMC minutes showed officials were still worried about inflation, energy prices, tariffs, softer hiring, and the uncertainty coming from the Middle East. The debate has become more two-sided: cut too early, and the inflation may come back; wait too long and the labour market may weaken faster than expected.

Markets, as usual, processed all of this with a mix of fear, denial, and greed.

Over the last two weeks, Bitcoin fell about 6%, gold slipped nearly 4%, and silver dropped more than 5%. Oil was down around 2% for the fortnight, but that number hides how volatile the asset remains. The S&P 500 rose a little over 1%, and US stocks closed their eighth straight winning week, helped by strong corporate earnings even as inflation worries kept sentiment fragile.

Since the war started, though, the story looks different. Oil is still up nearly 50%. Bitcoin is up about 14%. The S&P 500 is up close to 8%. Gold and silver are both still down double digits from where they were when the conflict began.

That’s the oddity of this market. The asset most visibly pricing war is oil. The asset quietly refusing to collapse is Bitcoin. The assets expected to behave like havens have not really done so. And equities, despite everything, are still levitating on earnings and AI enthusiasm.

With the charts out of the way, here’s what we wrote at the Token Dispatch.

What We Covered

The past fortnight was less about price charts and more about the invisible layers that decide who actually captures value in crypto: custody, regulation, distribution, legal wrappers, remittance corridors, and time.

I started with The Agentic Float, in which I examined how AI agents could create a new revenue stream from idle money. The piece argues that if agents need pre-funded stablecoin wallets to buy compute, APIs, content, and services, then whoever owns those balances can earn both transaction fees and float income. The agentic economy may create a Schwab-like float business for stablecoin issuers, wallets, and payment rails.

Vaidik then took the regulatory angle in The Decentralisation Test. The CLARITY Act may finally test crypto for when a token stops being treated like a security and starts being treated like a commodity. But the piece also asks if decentralisation becomes a legal threshold, does crypto become safer, or simply too expensive for small grassroots teams to launch?

Thejaswini followed with Regulatory Asphyxiation, a story about Ondo Global Markets and the long, messy road to tokenised stocks. Earlier attempts from FTX, Binance, and Mirror died because they treated regulation as a detail. Ondo is trying the opposite route: legal structure first, product later.

I then moved from stocks to swipes in Who Owns The Swipe?. Crypto cards look like a consumer product, but the card itself is the least interesting layer. The real business opportunity lies beneath the surface, in building a presence across multiple layers of the stack: issuing, compliance, APIs, FX, settlement, orchestration, and wallet distribution. Rain’s model shows why the winner will be the one who can provide infrastructure and earn from every swipe across multiple front ends, rather than just being a card provider.

Vaidik’s LATAM’s Remittance Trap extended the same infrastructure argument into remittances. The mistake most fintechs make is treating Latin America as a single market and remittances as a single product. Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, and Brazil each need something different: cheaper transfers, dollar savings, dollar access, or local settlement. The deeper lesson was that stablecoins win only when they disappear into the behaviour users already understand.

Finally, Thejaswini closed the fortnight with The Clock Is The Product. Hyperliquid’s edge is not only that it offers perps. It is that it stays open when traditional markets go dark. From oil contracts trading over the weekend to pre-IPO markets for Cerebras and SpaceX, the piece argues that continuous price discovery is becoming a product in its own right.

Taken together, the theme was that crypto’s next battle will be about owning the solutions that address existing bottlenecks.

Who holds the idle balances? Who passes the decentralisation test? Who controls the legal wrapper? Who runs the card stack? Who owns the remittance corridor?

We have a lot more coming over the next two weeks. Before we get there, here’s some literature that will keep you in good company.

Some of these could be behind a paywall. Sorry!

Regulation & Policy

• Polymarket’s Dispute Machine Problem: A look at how prediction-market outcomes are resolved, and why even “truth markets” still need trusted arbiters.

• America’s AI Backlash Grows: Local resistance to AI is moving from abstract fear to blocked data centres, political pushback, and worker anxiety.

Crypto & Tech

• Maple’s Credit Market Test: GLC Research breaks down how Maple’s lending business performed through Q1 volatility across AUM, revenue, liquidity, and borrower demand.

• Credit Beyond Borrow-Lend: Cork’s thread frames credit markets as a broader risk-pricing layer, not just another lending primitive. (Partial access only.)

• Prediction Markets Hit Reality: Bloomberg takes a more sceptical look at whether Kalshi and Polymarket are actually forecasting machines or just better-shaped gambling venues.

• Hyperliquid’s Wall Street Moment: 21Shares argues Hyperliquid is becoming legible to Wall Street as always-on market infrastructure, not merely a crypto perps venue.

• Private AI Goes Onchain: A thread on private AI inference and why decentralised AI may be less about open models and more about private access. (Partial access only.)

• Who Pays The Agent?: Keyrock maps the emerging agent-payment stack and why sub-dollar machine transactions break the card-era payments model.

• State Of Crypto Perps: CoinGecko’s 2026 report traces the growth of perpetuals, the rise of DEX venues, and why perps are moving beyond crypto-native speculation.

Finance & Economy

• SpaceX’s Private Market Jackpot: A private-market power-law story on how a SpaceX IPO could deliver enormous returns for early backers. (Paywalled)

• Prediction Markets Go Public: Matt Levine frames prediction markets as the new workaround for private-market opacity, especially as retail investors seek exposure to companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

• SpaceX Investors Can’t Complain: In this one, Levine looks at SpaceX’s giant IPO pitch and the strange logic of complaining about governance after buying into the Elon Musk machine.

• Compute Becomes A Commodity: ICE wants to launch compute-power futures, turning AI infrastructure into something markets can price, hedge, and trade.

• The Startup Deal Playbook: A practical guide to how crypto and startup acquisitions actually work once founders move from narrative to negotiation.

• Sohn’s AI Market Lessons: a16z pulls together market charts from Sohn to show how investors are pricing AI, power, chips, and infrastructure.

• Let The Bubble Flow: A useful essay on rolling bubbles, passive flows, and why modern markets may inflate and rotate faster than older cycles.

• Markets Copy The Future: A sharp piece on the “mimetic premium” — how markets first buy the symbols of a future before separating real economics from wrappers.

• Bubbles Don’t Burst Cleanly: The author compares today’s AI trade with past bubbles and argues that recovery and collapse rarely happen in one clean move.

AI & Innovation

• AI’s Data Centre Problem: Gallup finds Americans are increasingly opposed to AI data centres near them, turning AI infrastructure into a local-politics problem.

• AI’s Fake Legal Cases: Scientific American explains why lawyers keep citing hallucinated cases, and why the deeper problem is not AI error but human over-trust under pressure.

• Meta’s AI Layoff Moment: A story on how AI restructuring is reshaping Meta’s workforce, culture, and internal pressure. (Paywalled)

• Build The Internal Agent: Auditless makes the case that the best workplace AI agents should live inside shared Slack channels, where context and adoption compound publicly.

• AI Is Too Expensive: Ed Zitron argues that the AI boom still has not solved its basic economic problem: enormous costs without convincing margins.

• Autonomous Agents Need Infrastructure: A thread on the technical and economic stack autonomous agents need before they can become more than demos. (Partial access only)

• The Bull Case Ends: A darker AI-markets essay arguing that the most important tail risk in the AI bull case may be impossible to hedge.

• AI Eats The World: Benedict Evans’ latest presentation deck gives a broad strategic map of where AI sits in the longer platform cycle.

• The Physical AI Map: Canonical breaks down robotics and physical AI funding, helping separate serious infrastructure buildout from hype.

• What Comes After Automation: A thoughtful essay on why automation does not eliminate human work as much as raise the premium on judgment, taste, and oversight.

• Citizens Building AI Evals: A strong argument for teaching people to evaluate AI systems rather than treating model assessment as something only labs can do.

Culture & Beyond

• Nourish And Consumer Health: A consumer-health company profile that doubles as a broader bet on nutrition, behaviour change, and the next decade of health startups.

• How Money Changes Lifestyle: A blunt essay on how wealth changes life in tiers, often in ways people only understand after crossing them.

• How Money Changed Me: A more reflective companion piece on what money fixes, what it exposes, and what it never really solves.

• The ROI Of Joy: A personal essay on the psychological cost of turning even happiness, leisure, and relationships into return calculations.

• Make Immigration Boring: Aeon argues that migration debates need less moral theatre and more sober thinking about numbers, tradeoffs, rights, and long-term population policy.

• Rights Need Money: A powerful essay on why human rights cannot be separated from tax, debt, public finance, and the global rules that decide who actually has money to fund them.

• The Doomsday Math Problem: A fascinating Scientific American piece on the “doomsday argument,” the eerie probability puzzle that tries to estimate how far humanity may be from its end.

What I Am Reading & Watching

I finished Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man this fortnight.

I picked it up after pausing Reporting from Ramallah, which I found difficult to read. The individual chapters were short, the context kept shifting quickly, and I wanted something more continuous for the week. Galloway’s book gave me that.

It is not a perfect book, but it was captivating. At its weakest, it can sound a little too prescriptive, as if complex gender conversations can be reduced to a few rules for young men. But at its best, it does something badly needed right now: it makes space to talk about boys and men without turning that conversation into a ‘he vs she’ conversation.

The personal aspects of the book stayed with me the most. Galloway writes about being raised by a single mother, the absence and complexity of male role models, his own anger, body image, ambition, insecurity, parenthood, and what it means to raise sons without passing down the worst parts of masculinity. The book is strongest when it simply notes and discusses how masculinity can take confusing forms rather than defining it.

The chapters on body image were particularly interesting. We often talk about body image as a woman’s issue. But young men are also growing up inside a visual economy that constantly measures them: their height, muscles, jawlines, income, social status, dating success, and perceived usefulness. Galloway discusses all this without making it sound like a competition of suffering.

This fortnight, I don’t yet know what I’ll watch next. But after a book like this, I might need something lighter. Write back to me if you have any recommendations.

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
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.

Welcome to Edition 8 of The Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. We moved our reading list edition to Saturday last fortnight and are sticking with it this time as well.

For those here for the first time, every two weeks I share my favourite literature on crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading this fortnight, beyond the world of crypto and finance.

The Fortnight That Was

The conflict in the Strait of Hormuz is far from over. The celebrations following U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement of ‘Project Freedom’ were cut short last week, after he paused the plan that involved the U.S. military guiding stranded merchant ships through the Strait.

Although conversations around ceasefires have advanced considerably in the past fortnight, they remain on fragile sheets of paper, with recurring violations reported from both sides.

The U.S. and Iran are still talking through proposals for an interim deal. Iran has accused the U.S. of breaching the ceasefire, while the U.S. says it acted after Iranian attacks on naval assets in the Strait. So, the direction is not clear yet.

But markets didn’t seem too bothered with all this, or perhaps they had already priced in the conflict and corrected quite a bit.

In the past fortnight, both Bitcoin and equities inched over 2% higher. Oil remained elevated and volatile due to ongoing activity in the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of global oil consumption passes. Gold and silver stayed weak despite the geopolitical backdrop, both ending lower over the fortnight.

BTC holders had their reasons to cheer as it crossed the $80,000 mark for the first time in three months last fortnight. Since the war began, BTC price has shot up 20% while crude oil is up ~53%. On Friday, the S&P 500 closed at a record high above 7,400 points for the first time ever. A robust earnings week from Amazon, Alphabet and Meta, three of the Magnificent 7, drove up the equities. Although the crisis in Iran is far from over, the markets appear to have stopped panicking.

As always, none of this stopped the crypto ecosystem from having enough activity to talk about.

At Token Dispatch, we spent the fortnight looking at the parts of crypto that are trying to become less fragile, less cyclical, and more useful.

We started with Galaxy’s De-Correlation Test, in which I explained how Galaxy Digital’s operating businesses are beginning to decouple from pure crypto price cycles. Its digital assets segment stayed roughly stable even as crypto prices fell sharply, while Helios gives it a shot at building earnings from AI infrastructure without relying excessively on token exposure.

In The Art of Professional Stalling, Thejaswini explored how the Clarity Act is caught between lobbying, yield restrictions, and political delays, even as the product continues to grow without waiting for permission.

Then, I explored what makes BTC miners’ pivots into AI infrastructure and HPC perfectly timed. In Miners’ New Lease of Life, I discuss how Bitcoin miners can convert power and land into data centre value.

In “Is Ethena Making Money?“, Thejaswini traced how USDe’s economics depend on funding rates, collateral returns, and the behaviour of yield-seeking capital.

Vaidik wrote Crypto’s K-Shaped Thesis, arguing that crypto’s infrastructure is working well even when many liquid tokens are not. The industry is becoming more useful to exchanges, payment companies, banks, and traders than to the token holders who funded the dream.

I then looked at Can PMs Win the Perps Race?, after Kalshi and Polymarket moved toward perps while Hyperliquid moved toward event contracts. Everyone wants to become the everything exchange; the harder question is who already owns liquidity, leverage, and user habit.

Then, in Japan Just Put Its $9T Bond Market On-chain, Vaidik explained why tokenisation becomes serious when it touches collateral plumbing. Japan’s JGB experiment with Canton is a reminder that the boring back office may be where blockchain gets its most institutional use case.

We are working on more interesting stories in the days to come. But until then, this reading list will keep you in good company for the weekend.

Regulation & Policy

• Polymarket’s Shaky U.S. Homecoming: The Information reports that Polymarket’s U.S. comeback has been slowed by executive churn, infrastructure delays, and questions around its nominal U.S. CEO.

• The New Boogeyman: Molly White tracks the escalating crypto-politics circus around World Liberty Financial, Justin Sun, Trump-linked crypto interests, and pro-crypto lobbying.

• Everyone’s a Loser: A commentary on the WSJ’s Polymarket profitability story, asking whether prediction markets are harsh or simply behave like most professionalised trading venues.

Crypto & Tech

• Finance’s Digital Transformation, Finally: a16z crypto argues that blockchains are finally pushing finance through the kind of software-native transformation other industries saw decades ago.

• Why Coinbase Wins in an AI-Native Finance World: Artemis makes the bull case that Coinbase is being mispriced as an exchange, while its upside may come from USDC, Base, x402, and agentic payments.

• How On-Chain Infra Helps the Application Layer: A thread on how Polymarket and Hyperliquid are winning across the services they provide by optimising the underlying blockchain technology.

• Hyperliquid Q1 2026 Report: Hyperliquid Research Collective’s Q1 report tracks the venue’s financial performance, ecosystem progress, and its push toward becoming a broader “house of all finance.”

• State of Tokenisation Q1 2026: Pantera’s report maps a $320.6B tokenisation market across 593 assets and shows how the RWA stack is becoming a measurable institutional category.

• The Six Layers of Stablecoin Payment Infrastructure: Paxos breaks stablecoin payments into licensing, onboarding, custody, funding, payout, and conversion.

• Why Stripe Built Its Own Chain: Decentralised.co explains Stripe’s crypto acquisitions as a move to own more layers of the cross-border payments stack rather than merely process card transactions.

• The Truth About Onchain Yield: Kelly Ye’s piece asks the question investors should ask before chasing DeFi yield: where does the return actually come from, and what risk is being hidden?

• The State of Stablecoin Infrastructure Q2 2026: Verda’s interactive stablecoin map tracks 3,873 companies across stablecoin issuance, payments, ramps, agentic payments, RWAs, wallets, and compliance.

Finance & Economy

• By the Time It IPOs, You’ve Missed It: A sharp private-markets opener on how the economic life of major companies now happens before public investors ever see an S-1.

• Banking Beyond the Law: Aeon explores hawala-style underground banking networks and why informal trust-based money systems keep outpacing state-controlled finance.

• Spending Money for Maximum Return: A practical essay arguing that the best use of money is not more stuff, but buying back time, energy, attention, and optionality.

• Young Indonesians on the Debt Treadmill: A consumer-finance story on how young Indonesians are getting trapped by easy credit, pay-later products, and debt rollovers.

• The Great $110 Trillion Wealth Transfer Won’t Happen Any Time Soon: WSJ argues the much-hyped boomer wealth transfer will be slower and messier than expected because older Americans are living longer, spending more, and often passing wealth first to spouses.

• Sell the Electricity No One Is Using: Matt Levine explains energy efficiency as a financial product and how selling saved electricity rather than adding more supply.

• Scarce Assets: Packy McCormick argues that abundance in technology and capital will make genuinely scarce assets, like teams, brands, art, land, and status, even more valuable.

• The Most Spectacularly Wrong Thesis: A satirical take on why the Nasdaq tripling over the next few years may sound insane, but might not be as absurd as past “obvious top” calls looked in hindsight.

AI & Innovation

• The AI Stack: Chamath maps AI into six layers, infrastructure, chips, data, models, execution, and applications, to think through where value may accrue.

• The Quiet Bundling: Free Systems shows how coding agents often default to their own APIs and even appoint themselves as judges when writing code for AI models.

• The Work of Knowledge in the Age of AI Reproduction: Rex Woodbury extends Walter Benjamin’s “aura” framework to AI, arguing that knowledge artefacts are becoming cheap while judgment and provenance become scarcer.

• Apocalypse No: Scott Galloway pushes back against the simplistic “AI will take all jobs” narrative and reframes the AI labour debate in more grounded terms.

• AI Isn’t Coming for Your Job. It’s Coming for Your Mind: Baillie Gifford’s Tom Slater argues AI’s bigger impact may be cognitive: outsourcing effort, weakening memory, and changing how humans learn.

• Training AI to Govern for Us: A Stanford GSB classroom experiment on building AI agents that can represent people’s preferences in legislative-style simulations.

Culture & Beyond

• The Eye in Your Pocket: Carissa Véliz argues that digital devices are not neutral tools; they are artefacts designed around surveillance, prediction, and control.

• If the Quantum Canary Sings, It’s Too Late: Nic Carter argues Bitcoin cannot wait for a clean early-warning signal on quantum risk because by the time the “canary” moves, the damage may already be done.

• Four Culture Fixes: Robin Hanson proposes four broad cultural interventions to address long-standing coordination and institutional failures.

What I Am Watching & Reading

I am halfway through Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man.

Scott writes like he's having a conversation he refuses to make polite, and that actually keeps me turning pages even when it reads harsh at some places. Some chapters feel like a punch in your face. But what I love the most about his writing is that there are parts where he spares the bravado and gets genuinely vulnerable about fatherhood, failure and the dynamics of parenting two sons in his middle age.

There are many points in the book where it asks you to sit with the discomfort of thinking about what he says. It feels nice in a way that’s hard to put in words. But it surely feels like a book worth a read.

On the watching front, I plan to circle back to some of the old Indian classics in the weeks to come, the kind that you always mean to watch but never quite get around to. This fortnight, I hopefully will.

I plan to start with Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali. A dear friend has been coaxing me to watch how Ray shows deeply human themes like poverty and aspiration on the screen.

So between Scott and Satyajit, this weekend looks packed.

Write back to us with any recommendations through the next fortnight that you think we should include in the upcoming edition.👇🏾

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
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.

Every two weeks, I share my favourite literature across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading.

Hello,

The past fortnight felt like the market briefly exhaled amid all the war and macro uncertainties. I know the war is still far from over. The ceasefire is fragile, and a durable solution still feels far away. But markets seemed tired of moving with each announcement about war.

For now, the markets are pricing in what the next move would be.

The Fortnight That Was

Risk assets, including equities and BTC, recovered well in the last two weeks, while oil has given back a chunk of its war premium even as the Strait of Hormuz remains far from fully operational.

Bitcoin rose about 6.6% through the fortnight, while the S&P 500 gained 6.2%.

Oil moved the other way. USOIL fell about 9.4%. That is probably the clearest sign that traders saw less immediate risk of a wider supply shock, even if the Strait of Hormuz question has not disappeared.

Despite multiple hacks and exploits in the last fortnight, builders in crypto infrastructure kept building and deploying. Both incumbent prediction market giants, Polymarket and Kalshi, announced the launch of perpetual futures trading.

Our team at Token Dispatch has written extensively on some of these topics.

I started with Ethena in When the Yield Runs Out, where I examined how USDe’s once crypto-native yield machine is now leaning into equities, commodities, institutional lending, prime brokerage, and RWAs to survive across more than one market regime. Ethena’s new strategy is diversification, but the old liquidity mismatch problem has not disappeared.

In another piece, Capital Budgeting, But On-Chain, I explained how Aave’s $25 million capital allocation vote shows DeFi moving beyond into a territory where it enabled token holders take capital budgeting decisions.

Thejaswini followed with The Fed Chair’s Portfolio, where she broke down the disclosed exposure of incoming U.S. Fed Governor candidate Kevin Warsh to Solana, Optimism, and many other crypto infrastructure companies.

She then wrote The Quantum Race is a Governance Test, in which she explains why quantum risk is not just a cryptography problem. She cites Bitcoin debates, Ethereum research, and how Tron can move fast because it is more centralised than it likes to admit.

Vaidik closed the fortnight with Why Google’s Billions Couldn’t Fix African Internet, a DePIN story that explains how Share is trying to fix the broken middle layer between African submarine cables and last-mile ISPs, using crypto.

You can see the theme running across the fortnight.

Even when the world outside crypto remains unstable, those within the ecosystem are busy building and deploying despite hacks, governance fights, and political conflicts.

Our team has lined up more stories around these themes for the coming fortnight. Until then, here’s a curated reading list to give you good company.

Regulation & Policy

• The Tokenisation of Stocks: A useful map of the public, private, and in-between structures emerging as tokenised equities move from wrappers to market infrastructure.

• What Can Be Tokenised?: Franklin Templeton’s broad reminder that tokenisation is not just stocks, but spans funds, bonds, commodities, private credit, real estate, and more.

• A Guide to Crypto Crime: Amid ongoing hacks and exploits, Arkham has put together a taxonomy of crypto crime, from pig-butchering and drainers to mixers, bridges, ransomware, and laundering patterns.

• Satoshi Coins Without a Freeze: Nic Carter argues for a cleaner Bitcoin quantum-transition path that deals with dormant Satoshi-era coins without resorting to a blunt freeze.

Crypto & Tech

• Perps Are Coming to Polymarket: Polymarket’s next move pushes prediction markets closer to trading infrastructure, with leverage entering the product stack.

• Kalshi Markets: Kalshi is turning sports prediction markets from betting-like products into trading venues.

• Concentrated Liquidity for Lending: A DeFi lending idea that borrows from concentrated liquidity design to make lending markets more capital-efficient.

• Airwallex Enters In-Store Payments: A payments-stack thread on why the next fintech challenge may be around building offline checkout, and not merely cross-border digital rails.

• IR & Token Transparency in 2026: Novora benchmarks 150+ protocols and shows the gap between on-chain revenue visibility and actual investor-grade reporting.

• Tokenised RWAs: $16 Trillion by 2030: Theo’s case for why today’s RWA market still looks tiny against the institutional asset classes tokenisation wants to absorb.

• The Rise of Composable RWAs: Dune argues that what RWAs can be used as collateral, can be looped and composed inside DeFi, is more important than just tokenising all RWAs.

• Beyond the Flywheel: Galaxy argues that DATs cannot survive as passive balance-sheet wrappers; they need staking, MEV, DeFi yield, or real operating models.

Finance & Economy

• Uncharted Waters: Capriole reads Bitcoin’s macro, technical, and on-chain signals as quietly constructive despite AI-security fears and geopolitical volatility.

• The Most Future-Proof Job: Shopify argues that entrepreneurship may be the safer hedge in the AI-era as business creation becomes cheaper and traditional jobs look shakier.

• Break Now, Fix Later: Scott Galloway brings his wit to turning the White House ballroom fight into a broader critique of political destruction without credible rebuilding.

• Apple’s Hardware Succession: Apple’s reported Cook-to-Ternus transition raises the question of whether hardware discipline can fix Apple’s AI-era drift.

AI & Innovation

• The Future of Entertainment Is Interactive: Dylan Abruscato argues that entertainment will transcend its current passive viewing format to one in which audiences begin participating in the show itself.

• The Agentic Economy Will Be Massive. Agentic Commerce Won’t: Dragonfly pushes back on the easy “agents need stablecoins” thesis by asking how many agents will actually need to transact.

• Google’s $40B Anthropic Bet: Google deepens its Anthropic exposure, turning the AI race into an even more capital-intensive fight between cloud, compute, and model labs.

• DeepSeek’s China Capital Moment: Tencent and Alibaba reportedly circling DeepSeek shows China’s AI champions are becoming national-scale strategic assets.

• Mythos Accessed by Unauthorised Users: Bloomberg’s report on unauthorised access to Mythos is an example of why frontier AI security is now a market-structure issue.

• 5 Ways Blockchains Help AI Agents: a16z crypto lays out where blockchains can matter for agents: identity, payments, governance, trust, and user control.

• Claude Design: Anthropic’s design product pushes Claude deeper into creative workflows, from prototypes and pitch decks to branded visual systems.

Culture & Beyond

• The Art of Comparison: A thoughtful essay on personal finance that talks about comparing without letting envy, status games, or wealth ladders ruin your sense of progress.

• The Mathematical Reason Most People Never Make It: A psychological essay on why outcomes are often nonlinear, delayed, and less forgiving than motivation culture suggests.

• Does Reading Do Us Any Good?: Aeon makes the case for literature as a means of preserving attention, memory, and personal freedom.

• How Darkness Might Save Migratory Birds: Scientific American explains how switching off artificial lights during migration windows can materially reduce bird deaths.

• Justice Is Geometric: Aeon uses African fractal societies to show how bottom-up systems can encode reciprocity, circulation, and fairness without a single centre.

What I Am Watching & Reading

I had picked up Reporting from Ramallah last fortnight and made it through roughly a third of the book.

Amira Hass’ writing is sharp, humane, and observant. But I paused there because the book’s structure was hurting my reading rhythm. The chapters are short, almost like dispatches, and the context switches quickly from one piece to the next. Each article deserves attention, but reading them back-to-back made the experience feel slightly fragmented. It is the kind of book I think I’ll return to slowly, one or two pieces at a time, rather than race through in a week.

So, I moved to Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man.

I’ve only just started, but it already reads like one that annoys, provokes, and occasionally makes the reader nod in agreement. Galloway starts with that familiar bluntness that I adore in his witty No Mercy/No Malice newsletter. More on the book in the next edition.

On the watching front, I’m planning to watch Hamnet this weekend.

I can’t wait to watch Oscar-winning Jessie Buckley play her character. Her versatility as an artist surprised me in The Bride!, even though the film itself was messy. There’s something about her screen presence that makes one want to keep watching how she carries her character even when the story around her is wobbling.

It’s going to be a packed weekend, but perhaps a good one.

Write back to us with any recommendations through the next fortnight that you think we should include in the upcoming edition.👇🏾

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
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.

Hello,

“There are no winners in war.” The events happening around us are the perfect testimony to this quote.

Just two days ago, the world was rejoicing over a two-week ceasefire agreement that the U.S. and Iran had managed to reach. Those on the ground, in the line of fire, celebrated the lives and property that the deal could save. Others, like me, living thousands of miles away, didn’t know what that felt like. But we still celebrated. Ironically, not just the lives that could be spared, but the recovery capital markets and portfolios witnessed.

Within 48 hours of signing the ceasefire, both countries were back to threatening withdrawal from the truce. The reason? Israel continued its strike in Lebanon. Markets responded by paring some of the gains made after the ceasefire was announced. They processed everything in real-time, and they had to. Whether the ceasefire holds or lives are saved, the trades must be settled. That’s how the global economy expresses itself - through pricing the events.

This tension drove many developments in the past fortnight across crypto and finance. Let’s get started.

The Fortnight That Was

Over the last two weeks, the traditional markets (S&P 500), Bitcoin and commodities (Gold and Silver) moved in strict alignment. Both BTC and S&P 500 closed the fortnight with modest single-digit gains. BTC crossed $71,000 for the first time in two weeks on April 7 as the U.S. and Iran struck a ceasefire agreement.

Crude oil was the most volatile asset, driven by uncertainty about the resumption of shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. After rising 24% between March 27 and April 7, the oil price gave up all those gains in just one day when the ceasefire agreement was struck. But it rose by 6% in the next two days as nations continued to threaten withdrawal from the truce.

There’s still a lot more noise that went around in the markets, but we focused on writing about the things underneath the geopolitical crisis.

I started the fortnight by discussing the unbundling of financial markets, drawing on events such as the U.S.-Israel-Iran war. In this piece, we discussed how the old system that bundled the market across venue, wrapper, and time is now unbundling due to more efficient markets elsewhere.

Thejaswini wrote about why Canton has stopped playing defence and started lobbying regulators about the risks posed by zero-knowledge proofs to institutional finance.

Vaidik unpacked the Coinbase-Better-Fannie Mae mortgage product that lets Bitcoin holders borrow against their holdings to purchase a home without triggering a taxable event. He also wrote about why the structural design makes it different from the 2021-era crypto lending collapses.

In a quantitative analysis earlier this week, I deconstructed Polymarket’s fee overhaul and wrote about how its bell-curve pricing model could improve execution quality rather than just extract fees from traders.

Thejaswini followed up with a piece on why the U.S. Department of Labour is exploring the option of investing Americans’ 401(k) retirement savings in crypto.

We have got a lot more in store for you in the coming weeks. But here are some readings to keep you company until then.

Regulation & Policy

• An Interactive Guide to GENIUS Implementation: A useful map of the implementation phase of the GENIUS Act after legislation.

• Is Everything a Swap?: A note on how the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010) was enacted to catch both old derivatives and clever new wrappers that try to dodge the same rules.

• How Prediction Markets Turned the World Into a Casino: A mainstream framing of the Kalshi-Polymarket moment, where the line between trading and gambling looks less principled.

Crypto & Tech

• Lessons from Six Months in Agentic Payments: A note on what actually starts to matter once you spend time close to agentic payments instead of just appreciating the demo.

• The CT Ceiling: A good reminder that crypto-native distribution is not the same thing as product-market fit; if you market only within CT, you eventually run out of room.

• TAO and the Free Rider Problem: A bear case on Bittensor: what if TAO finances the upside, but the upside never accrues back to TAO?

• Which Blockchain Will AI Choose?: A practical question that asks not what humans want to use, but what rational agents would choose for payments, discovery and trust.

• Future of Onchain Liquidity Routing: As DeFi liquidity fragments further, routing starts to look less like a convenience layer and more like core market infrastructure.

• When Risk Engines Become Moats: Our partners at Decentralised.Co explain why Hyperliquid’s risk engine that lets new markets scale without blowing up the venue is its biggest moat.

• Trade’s Markets Thesis: A bigger-picture perspective on how perps turn into technological infrastructure by spreading across asset classes

• USDe Backing Diversification: This explains why Ethena wants USDe to have a more diversified backing mix if it wants to survive more than one type of market regime.

• Hunt for Satoshi Raises Existential Risks: Less about identity porn, more about why crypto still seems desperate for a breakthrough founder myth. (paywall)

• Our Quest Not to Solve Bitcoin’s Great Mystery: FT leans into the absurdity of the endless Satoshi-candidate industry. (paywall)

• Why I Think Satoshi Is No Longer With Us: Nic Carter presents an interesting counterpoint to the latest wave of Satoshi sleuthing.

Finance & Economy

• How Private Equity Became Hooked on Second-Hand Deals: A timely look at how secondaries have become a liquidity machine for private capital when traditional exits do not quite show up. (paywall)

• Strait of Hormuz: A Citrini Field Trip: Probably the most literal macro research here: go to the choke point itself and ask what the market is getting wrong. (paywall)

• Inside the Funnel: What reviewing 2,000 funds teaches you about how crowded, filtered and power-law-driven venture really is.

• A Stablecoin-Native U.S. Bank for the Innovation Economy: One of the clearest tests yet of whether a US bank can be built stablecoin-native from day one rather than retrofit crypto later.

• Stablecoins for Neobanks: An operating thesis for why stablecoins matter to neobanks. It explains how they compress cross-border payments, yield products and market expansion into one stack.

• Prediction Market Leverage Landscape: A useful map of the leverage models being built around prediction markets, and the structural places where they can break.

• The Anxiety Economy: Why Trading Explodes: Explains why trading booms: less greed, more the feeling that passive compounding will not get people where they need to go.

• Buy Bitcoin at Night: Matt Levine’s commentary on the overnight anomaly and the strange appeal of packaging Bitcoin’s after-hours edge into a product.

• Bad Analogies: An important rebuttal to the lazy habit of calling every cash-burning AI company “the next Amazon.”

AI & Innovation

• From Hierarchy to Intelligence: Jack Dorsey’s provocation that AI does not just change productivity, it may change the org chart itself.

• Agents Will Become Companies — Thread: Sreeram’s thesis in short form: crypto plus AI can create internet-native firms with agents, assets and capital of their own.

• Agents Will Become Companies: The fuller version of that thesis, and a more convincing case than most AI x crypto fluff for why agents might become actual business entities.

• AI as a Transaction-Cost Shock: A sharp Coasean idea: if AI crushes transaction costs, the shape of the firm itself starts to change.

• Infinite Midwit: One of the better essays on why better AI has made some people calmer, not more terrified; the machine is tireless and informed, but still weirdly mid at the center.

• AI Captured 80% of Global Venture Funding: A sobering reminder that venture is starting to look less like a broad market and more like a giant capital-allocation machine for frontier AI.

Culture & Beyond

• Principles: A dense list on speed, risk, writing, integrity and output that reads better as craft advice than life-hack content.

• Giggles: The most 2026 startup origin story imaginable: a fake app joke, a Minecraft YouTuber, a meme prediction market, and somehow real money.

• Catastrophe Markets: A serious ethical essay on what it means when disaster itself becomes a tradable spectacle.

What I Am Watching & Reading

Last week, I picked up another non-fiction on geopolitical crisis after completing Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter.

Amira Hass’ Reporting from Ramallah is a collection of short stories from the reportage of an Israeli journalist in the occupied land.

I am only 30 pages into this collection, but there’s one thing that Amira doesn’t let me forget through the book. It’s the multidimensional crisis that contrasts with how popular media often portrays civil war. There are accounts of Israel as a state versus the Israeli people; Palestine versus the Palestinian people; each against the other, and each against themselves.

It shows you how a crisis is never binary, but layered.

I also watched Project Hail Mary a couple of weeks back. There’s so much to argue for expert reviewers in terms of the validity of science and logic. I will leave that to them.

What stood out most to me was how it portrayed the human-alien relationship. In that regard, it does what Interstellar tried to do with love across dimensions, except it’s even better here. Less metaphysics, more conversation. All that an average human relates to - love, compassion, and companionship.

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Write back to us with any recommendations through the next fortnight that you think we should include in the upcoming edition.👇🏾

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
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.

Welcome to Edition 5 of The Friday Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite literature across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading, because if this newsletter were only about charts and tokens, I’d have bored myself out of writing it by now.

Four editions in, and the reading list keeps growing, the recap keeps getting meatier, and the puzzle from the last edition seems to have stumped a few of you. The right answer was: ‘MINER, AGENT, CREDIT, NODES → MINTED’.

With that out of the way, let’s get started with this edition.

The Fortnight That Was

The US-Israel-Iran war that dominated the last edition continued to impact markets over the last two weeks, but with a different story this time.

With tension simmering in the Strait of Hormuz, uncertainty remains in the markets. Oil, which had spiked over 60% in the first week of March, gave away half of those gains in the fortnight. USOIL slipped 1.5% in the last two weeks, yet it is up 30% since the war started.

Gold and silver continued to slip further, worsening their reputation as commodities expected to thrive in uncertainty. Gold dropped over 13% this fortnight, while Silver fell even harder, losing 17%. Whether that’s profit-taking after the record rally until January end, or margin calls forcing liquidations, or the market deciding the conflict is priced in, the move is striking. Since the war started on February 27-28, silver is down over 26% and gold 17%.

Bitcoin slipped about 4% in the past fortnight, despite touching $76,000 for the first time since February 4. For the full month, it moved almost sideways with just 2% gains. The S&P 500 continued its slide, losing about 3% over the last two weeks and nearly 5% for the month. The dollar stayed flat.

At Token Dispatch, our team covered broader shifts in the ecosystem beyond the price charts.

We focused on regulation, execution quality, payment rails, privacy, and AI pricing — five separate stories that paint a dynamic picture of an industry that speaks about how fast it’s growing, failing and learning, contrary to how dull the price charts may make it look.

The fortnight opened with me asking if and when a system should slow you down. In Finance Needs Speed and Brakes, I dived deep into the Aave–CoW swap fiasco, where a user lost nearly $50 million in a single transaction because no meaningful brake existed between intent and execution. I traced this by recounting the history of strategic friction, from seatbelt reminders in cars to Pay.UK’s Confirmation of Payee. The piece argues that in finance, safeguards aren’t something you build after product-market fit.

My colleague, TJ, followed with AI Agents Are Coming for Visa’s Lunch, in which she contextualised recent events in the AI Agentic economy, including Tempo’s mainnet launch, Visa’s CLI tool for agent payments, Mastercard’s BVNK acquisition, and Circle’s testing of Nanopayments for agents. The piece maps out how x402, Tempo, and the Machine Payments Protocol are building the rails for a customer that doesn’t need what made Visa great.

Vaidik then explained why the $33 trillion stablecoin market still struggles to keep salaries private in Crypto’s Open Secret. Researchers have extracted spending habits, peak sales times, and average order values from businesses that accept crypto, all straight off the public ledger. The piece walks through how Aleo, a Layer 1 blockchain where privacy is the default rather than a bolt-on, is building the infrastructure to fix this.

While the Crypto Twitter (CT) was busy resharing Bittensor’s $TAO price charts (and making me regret missing the trade, yet again), I wrote about why Bittensor’s public pricing of AI can be a game-changer. AI valuation today is decided by a select few in closed-door meetings. In Bittensor and the Public Price of AI, I explained how the model lets AI stakeholders finance, build, validate, and price AI projects in public, in real time.

TJ brought the fortnight home with “What Took So Long,” in which she questions the long-pending regulatory clarity that finally arrived on March 17. The SEC and CFTC published a joint framework that categorises every token into one of five buckets: digital commodity, digital security, stablecoin, digital collectibles, or digital tool. The clarity might still not do its job if the CLARITY Act, which sets these definitions in stone, gets stuck in the Senate.

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We have a lot more coming over the next two weeks. Before we get there, here’s some literature that will keep you in good company. Some of these could be behind a paywall. (Sorry!)

Regulation & Policy

• Prediction Markets vs Sports Betting: A bipartisan Senate push to stop CFTC-regulated prediction venues from listing sports and casino-style contracts.

• Grayscale’s HYPE Filing: The S-1 for Grayscale’s HYPE ETF shows Hyperliquid is already being translated into familiar TradFi wrapper language.

Crypto & Tech

• State of Crypto Design: A useful argument that crypto’s bottleneck is no longer core infra but the human layer, including UX, brand, and design talent.

• Everyday App Framework: A framework for why crypto still hasn’t shipped a true everyday consumer app, and which products come closest.

• Why Drift, Why Now: Our partners at Decentralised.co lay out the case for Drift as a discounted bet on Solana’s perpetuals and future internet capital markets.

• Hyperliquid’s Big Year: A year-in-review framing Hyperliquid as something larger than a perps venue, as it approximates a full on-chain exchange stack.

• Meteora’s Holder Report: An investor-relations-style token-holder report built around cash flows, treasury, and buybacks.

• Digital Dollar Ramps: A clean explainer on how Bridge-style virtual accounts compress the fiat-to-stablecoin conversion stack.

• x402 vs MPP: A sharp breakdown of the emerging standards war in agent payments, per-request on-chain payments versus session-based, rail-agnostic settlement.

• RWAs Are Different: Multicoin’s latest on why RWAs behave differently from earlier DeFi markets because they bring exogenous assets on-chain.

• Nasdaq Meets Talos: A bridge story that explains why tokenised collateral is interesting only when it plugs into existing risk, surveillance, and collateral workflows.

• S&P, But 24/7: A thread around trade[XYZ] bringing S&P-linked exposure into continuous, Hyperliquid-powered markets.

• Argentina’s 8% Problem: A concise remittance wedge: sending money to Argentina is costly, and most of that drag appears to come from everything except FX itself.

• Perps by 2030: A piece on how decentralised perpetual exchanges can take a material slice of options, futures, and CFD volume over time.

• What Happens After TGE: Thoughts on the post-launch problem - when the product works, but price, liquidity, and community decay when there’s no durable value sink.

• Micropayments Without Friction: A thread on continuous micropayments, batch settlement, and protocol-level abstraction across stablecoins and cards.

Finance & Economy

• Debasement in Three Acts: A Rome-to-dollar-to-crypto essay on how empires use monetary resets to buy time, often at the expense of trust.

• We Learned Nothing: Jerry Neumann’s attack on startup orthodoxy — once everyone follows the same playbook, differentiation disappears.

• Collapse of Terminal Value: Chamath’s thought experiment on what happens to equity valuation if AI makes moats temporary and terminal value stops carrying the model.

• Ozempicization of Everything: Kyla Scanlon on optimisation culture, quick fixes, and the economic psychology underneath gambling, health, and control.

• Costless Sacrifice: Packy on why AI cheapens output and floods the zone, making effort itself a scarcer signal.

• Post-Employment Era: A thread introducing the idea that the prestige and security once attached to employment are decaying.

• Hitting the Battery Wall: An excellent systems piece on why humanoid robots may be constrained less by software ambition than by battery physics and replacement economics.

• Kalshi at $22B: The funding headline matters less for the number itself than for how quickly prediction markets are being repriced as core market infrastructure.

• 24/7 Markets, Finally: A framing of how Trump-era headline risk and Hyperliquid-style perps are nudging always-on markets into the mainstream.

• Oil, War, and Fragility: Balaji’s thread argues about how attacks on Middle Eastern oil infrastructure would spill over into the global economy.

• Digital Finance in 2030: Artemis sketches a world where neobanks, lending, agentic payments, prediction markets, and trading are the five enduring pillars of blockchain-enabled finance.

AI & Innovation

• Selling Yourself to AI: The Guardian writes on a new data-labour market where people sell voice, video, chats, and ambient life data to train models.

• Your Agents Are Cheap: A piece that correlates agent quality with token spend, context, and compute budget more than prompt cleverness.

• Agentic Utilities: Citrini’s read on the shift from AI as chatbot to AI as always-on service, and what that means for incumbents and losers.

• AI Is a Stack: A thread arguing that the AI money is still flowing through the stack of power, chips, data centres, cloud, followed by models and apps.

• ARK’s 2026 Big Ideas: ARK’s annual thematic deck spanning AI, robotics, biotech, space, and blockchain/fintech.

• NVIDIA x Nebius: A large-scale infra story: NVIDIA is investing $2 billion in Nebius and backing a plan to deploy more than 5GW of systems by 2030.

• Meta Pulls Back on VR Social: A telling metaverse retreat as Meta’s centre of gravity shifts away from the earlier bets.

Culture & Beyond

• Be Seen Anyway: A punchy essay on how invisibility is becoming economically expensive in a world where trust, work, and reputation are increasingly public-facing.

• Reading Socrates in Silicon Valley: An FT critique of tech-bro stoicism that uses philosophy to push back on shallow self-mythology.

• Don’t Block the Archive: EFF’s case that shutting out the Internet Archive won’t stop AI scraping, but will destroy the web’s public memory.

• The Forgotten Organ: A neat science read on why the thymus may matter more for long-term health and ageing than researchers assumed.

• Look to Artists: A short philosophical video on attention and why art offers a counterweight to purely instrumental ways of seeing the world.

What I Am Watching & Reading

I finished Not Without My Daughter last week. Betty Mahmoody’s descriptions of 1980s Tehran, the crumbling streets, the checkpoints, the constant vigilance, stayed with me throughout this fortnight as the Iran conflict dominated the news. As I read the book, I felt a constant, humanitarian, relatability to the women and civilians living through what’s unfolding now that I hadn’t felt before.

It’s hard not to imagine what it’d be like for the civilians living through something equally tragic, if not worse, right now, with unexpected and sudden bombings and airstrikes rattling through the city.

A difficult but important read.

This fortnight, I’m looking forward to watching Project Hail Mary. A space sci-fi genre with Ryan Gosling starring in an Andy Weir adaptation is hard to pass up.

It’ll likely be an exciting first week of April.

Write back to us with any recommendations through the next fortnight that you think we should include in the upcoming edition.👇🏾

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
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.

Welcome to Edition 4 of The Friday Reading List — your fortnightly antidote to the noise. Every two weeks, I share my favourite literature across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I’m watching and reading, because life shouldn’t be all about price charts and portfolio bags.

Three editions in, and the format is starting to feel less like an experiment and more like a habit. With each edition, the reading list is getting longer, and I’m finally resisting the urge to include every single thing I read. Progress, phew!

Speaking of progress, I managed to curate something fun for y’all! Solve the puzzle and write back to us with the answer, and a lucky winner will get a shoutout in the next edition.

Didn’t get the answer? Wait for us to reveal them in our next edition.

Now, for the past fortnight. Let’s start with what moved and what didn’t.

The Fortnight That Was

Let’s get the elephant out of the room first. The last two weeks were dominated by one story, and it wasn’t crypto.

The U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on February 28, and the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and LNG shipments pass, was all but shut down. Oil did what oil does when supply arteries get squeezed: it panicked. USOIL spiked over 65% in a week before pulling back to around +37% by the time this edition goes out. Your timeline was likely flooded with memes about natural gas rationing, oil tanker rerouting, and people suddenly becoming armchair experts on Persian Gulf chokepoints.

The ripple effects were predictable yet painful. There’s no respite in sight as the world is gripped by uncertainty over the duration and extent of the war. Equities dropped in the past two weeks, with the S&P 500 down about 2.6%. Gold, which you’d expect to rally on war risk, instead fell 5%, while the dollar strengthened about 2.5%.

And then there’s Bitcoin. BTC climbed about 9% through all of this. Whether that’s a safe-haven signal or just crypto being decorrelated for once, I’ll leave for you to interpret.

Meanwhile, our bunch at Token Dispatch told stories about things that will probably stay relevant for longer than price movements and charts.

I started the fortnight by asking whether crypto can fix capital formation in Underwriting as Software. The piece traces the underwriting function from Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse in 1688 to Hyperliquid’s HIP-6 proposal, arguing that whoever controls where a token is born captures the most durable fees in the ecosystem. A year ago, pump.fun-Raydium war was the proof; HIP-6 might be the next iteration.

Vaidik followed with Know Your Agent, a deep dive into the infrastructure gap between what AI agents can do and what they’re allowed to do. Automated traffic now exceeds human traffic on the web, yet confidence in autonomous agents has halved in the past year. The piece maps out the discovery, identity, and reputation layers that need to exist before an agent-driven economy can function at scale.

TJ explored what might become crypto’s most consequential distribution story in The Second Attempt. Meta is putting stablecoins into WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram, and this time, nobody is stopping them. The piece explains why the 2026 version is structurally different from Libra, why Stripe is the frontrunner to power it, and what it means for the 4 billion people who already use Meta’s apps daily.

Nishil wrote DeFi’s Capital Aggregator, where he unpacks how the vault ecosystem has unbundled into three specialised layers — protocol, curator, and distribution — and why over $6 billion flowed into on-chain vaults last year. The story gives us a glimpse of what the future of finance could be. The Crypto.com example shows how a retail user earning 4.82% on stablecoins, unknowingly backed by a Wall Street CLO fund tokenised through Centrifuge and managed by Janus Henderson.

I closed the fortnight with “Can DeFi Fix Private Credit?“, tracing the parallels between John Law’s Mississippi Bubble and the redemption crises affecting Blackstone, BlackRock, and Blue Owl’s private credit funds. In that piece, I explored whether on-chain private credit can fix the transparency and double-pledging problems, and what flaws it imports from the tradFi world.

We have a lot more coming over the next two weeks. Before we get there, here’s some literature that will keep you in good company. Some of these could be behind a paywall. (Sorry!)

Regulation & Policy

• CFTC Offers First Guidance on Prediction Market Manipulation: The CFTC issues its first major advisory asking prediction market exchanges to consult regulators on manipulation-prone contracts

Crypto & Tech

The infrastructure story in DeFi is maturing fast. Vaults are scaling, lending is consolidating, and the platforms that control issuance are capturing the most durable revenue. Here’s what’s worth your time.

• The “Investible” Crypto Tokens: Ignas combs through 17,000 tokens and finds only 132 worth holding amid the bear market; two protocols generate 69% of all holder revenue.

• DeFi Lending Markets: Rosetta’s deep intelligence report on $45.6B in tracked DeFi lending TVL, Morpho overtaking Aave on Base, and the quiet rise of tokenised Treasury collateral.

• Prediction Markets Won’t Scale Without Trust: Santiago Roel Santos argues insider trading is the single biggest growth constraint on prediction markets.

• State of Crypto Leverage — Q4 2025: Galaxy Research walks through how on-chain lending declined with market prices, while CeFi lenders held steady through a historic liquidation event.

• Coinbase launches Token Manager: Liquifi rebrands as Coinbase Token Manager, offering end-to-end token lifecycle tooling. including cap tables, vesting, compliance, and Prime custody in one platform.

• Tether Invests in Eight Sleep at $1.5B: USDT-issuer makes a strategic health-tech bet, backing the AI-powered sleep company with plans to integrate its QVAC edge architecture.

• What’s Kalshi’s Revenue?: A forensic analysis of all 203 million Kalshi trades, explaining how prediction markets work and how much money is flowing through them.

• Coming of Age: My colleagues at Decentralised.co trace crypto’s shift from speculative premia to fundamentals

• The Future of B2B Payments: Finance teams are finally treating payment infrastructure as strategic, not operational, and stablecoins are ready to step up.

• The Financial Infrastructure Layer: Aave’s CEO makes the case that DeFi has solved supply-side liquidity and the next evolution is fixing the demand side.

• Bringing the World On-Chain: How HIP-3 turns Hyperliquid into the “everything exchange”: global, open, and 24/7 financial markets.

• In the Stables: The Rise of Yield-Bearing Stablecoins: Messari maps the quietly surging category that could reshape how passive dollars sit on-chain (behind paywall).

• DeFi Is Becoming a Duopoly: DefiLlama’s data shows almost all revenue in most DeFi verticals is now captured by just the top two players.

• Why Circle Thinks the Next Phase of Crypto Will Be About Payments: Circle is betting its future not on USDC alone, but on becoming the full infrastructure layer for internet-native money.

• The $100B Revenue No One in Crypto Is Competing For: Trailer fees paid by global asset managers could become a recurring, AUM-linked revenue stream for tokenised fund issuers on-chain.

• Fixed Rates Will Take DeFi Beyond Crypto: Morpho’s Paul Frambot argues fixed-rate markets are the missing primitive that will scale onchain lending to institutional money.

• Agentic Commerce Won’t Kill Cards: a16z’s Noah Levine argues stablecoins won’t displace Visa, but AI agents will expose a new gap in merchant acceptance infrastructure.

Finance & Economy

• Strategy Credits Where They’re Due: Byron Gilliam borrows Ben Thompson’s “strategy credit” framework to examine cheap corporate signalling in crypto and beyond.

• The Worst Acquisition in History, Again: Scott Galloway traces Warner Bros.’ cursed M&A history — seven sales, mergers, and breakups — and why Paramount Skydance buying WBD won’t end well.

• Private Credit Gets Marked Down: Bloomberg’s take on what happens when private credit portfolios finally face real markdowns (behind paywall).

• President Trump’s CONFLICT Playbook: Twelve months of geopolitical conflict analysis distilled into a clear investor playbook for what comes next in the market.

AI & Innovation

• ChatGPT Uninstalls Surged 295% After DoD Deal, Sensor Tower data shows a sharp consumer backlash. ChatGPT uninstalls spiked while Claude downloads jumped 51% following Anthropic’s Pentagon refusal.

• Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps: a16z’s March 2026 deep dive broadens its lens to include AI-augmented incumbents such as CapCut and Canva, reflecting how AI has gone from a feature to a foundation.

• Why the ATM Didn’t Kill Bank Tellers: David Oks flips the classic economics parable, ‘ATMs didn’t kill tellers, but the iPhone did’, and the lesson is about paradigm replacement that AI is bringing.

• This Might Be the Last Job You Have: An analysis of how AI apps crossed 1B weekly users, with ChatGPT commanding 900M, built from scratch with no distribution advantage.

• The State of Consumer AI — Part 1, Usage: Lightspeed’s Anand Iyer explores what stays investable when AI devours everything, only the “too fringe” ideas that APIs can’t replace.

• Labor Market Impacts of AI: Anthropic’s March 2026 research paper presents new empirical data on how AI is already reshaping labour markets.

Culture & Beyond

• Restless by Design: A beautifully written neuroscience essay on why we can’t sit still anymore, how constant stimulation rewired our default mode network and made stillness feel aversive.

• A Quirk of Geology Explains Iran’s Oil: Scientific American explains how the same continental collision that created the Middle East’s oil reserves also trapped it behind the Strait of Hormuz. Timely, to say the least.

What I Am Watching & Reading

This weekend, I plan to watch Boong, a Manipuri film that has been winning attention well beyond India’s North East. The film is an important one not just because it was the first Indian film to ever win a BAFTA Award, but also because of where it comes from. Manipur, a small state tucked in north eastern India, spent the past couple of years in the shadow of brutal communal violence, loss of life, displacement, and repeated internet shutdowns.

I have also just started reading Not Without My Daughter by Betty Mahmoody. I am only at the beginning, but it already has the kind of emotional pull that makes you uneasy in a nice way. There is a rawness to it from the first dozen pages that I have read, and a tingling anticipation of an ordinary family story that’s about to turn into a difficult and harrowing one.

Between the two, this weekend’s unwinding schedule looks full.

Write back to us with any recommendations through the next fortnight that you think we should include in the upcoming edition.👇🏾

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
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.

Welcome to Edition 3 of The Friday Reading List – an antidote to the information overload we are all swimming in. Every two weeks, I share my favourite literature across crypto, finance, technology, culture, and beyond. I also share what I am watching and reading this week, beyond the world of crypto and finance.

Two fortnights in, and I am still experimenting with the format of this list. I’ll probably keep experimenting until it comes as close as possible to reflecting my personality (as my editor calls it).

Speaking of my personality, I have always enjoyed reading fun facts, number stories, solving puzzles, and taking quizzes. So, here’s something new for this edition: a walk down crypto’s memory lane.

This Time, That Year

Twelve years ago this week, the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange went dark. On February 24, Mt. Gox suspended all trading, and its website vanished, leaving only a blank page. Four days later, the exchange filed for bankruptcy, claiming that 850,000 BTC (worth ~$470 million at the time) had been stolen due to an unnoticed vulnerability.

BTC’s price crashed by over 35% in February that year. At its peak, the Tokyo-based exchange was handling over 70% of all Bitcoin transactions worldwide.

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Now, let’s recap what happened during the last fortnight:

• Metals continued their rally this month. Silver was the undisputed winner last fortnight, up over 16%. Gold followed suit with a ~4% gain. Throughout February, both metals have risen by over 10%.

• Bitcoin moved a lot throughout the week, yet went almost nowhere. It closed the fortnight with barely 2% gains, but is still 14% down in February.

• The S&P 500 and the Dollar both edged up less than 1%, staying almost flat across the entire fortnight.

With the charts out of the way, here’s all that deserves your attention in crypto:

We started the last fortnight by going back to first principles. Through Built for Humans, my colleague TJ and I trace speculation as humanity’s oldest impulse. From 5000-year-old dice to prediction markets, we tell you in this piece how crypto created a new venue for one of the oldest human urges.

What seemed like a flawless way for many to gain crypto exposure over the past year is unwinding rapidly. Public companies that were pivoting toward Digital Asset Treasuries (DATs) are soon reconsidering their pivots as NAV premiums flip to discounts, making it difficult to sustain the business model. I explore this using charts in When DAT Wrapper Cracks.

While financial wrappers are cracking, the protocol layer faces unresolved questions. My colleague Nishil explains this in Ownership Coins. In this piece, he uses Aave’s $10M governance dispute as a lens to show that DeFi token holders still sit somewhere between 1800s shareholders with no legal protection and modern frameworks that took decades to develop after the 1929 crash.

Vaidik explores how ERC-5564 introduces native stealth addresses to Ethereum, keeping on-chain history private while enabling cost-effective, lightning-fast fund transfers.

Better infrastructure, better privacy, and more mature systems – yet crypto’s breakout consumer app is still missing. TJ explains this in The Consumer App Problem and discusses an important problem around why the top crypto apps on App Store today are still trading exchanges - Coinbase, Kraken, and Crypto.com.

We have got a lot more deep dives and analysis in store for the coming weeks. Before we get there, here’s some literature that will keep you in good company.

Regulation & Policy

• Hyperliquid Walks into Washington DC: Jake Chervinsky leads Hyperliquid’s new DC shop, with $28M HYPE tokens backing it.

Crypto & Tech

You can see a theme running across these readings. Crypto is being stress-tested at the infrastructure layer, and the easy money era, where mNAV premiums held, wrappers worked, and narrative alone drove prices, is over. What we see unfolding is a more honest acknowledgement by the industry of approaches that generate revenue, attract real users, and help take projects to a mainstream audience.

• You Can’t Charge Fees on Stablecoins: Stablecoins with charges feel like cash; that single expectation breaks the entire payments model.

• The Great Repricing: Crypto is winning on fundamentals, yet the mood is the most downtrodden we’ve seen.

• Can Prediction Markets Make It Rain?: Byron Gilliam applies Soros’s reflexivity theory to prediction markets and shows how the speculative platforms might shape reality, rather than reflect it.

• Public Goods Need a Hook, Too: Crypto’s “unseriousness” (memecoins, CEXs) funds its most idealistic goals.

• ETHZilla Moves Away from ETH Treasury: The rebrand positions the company as an institutional RWA tokenisation platform on Ethereum.

• Bitdeer Sells its BTC Treasury: Another DAT bites the dust; selling all 189.8 BTC output

• Tether Invests in Whop: Tether backs the 18M-user internet marketplace; stablecoin payments coming to 144 countries.

• Tokenised Money Market Funds: The quiet category gaining serious traction — worth watching as regulation catches up (behind paywall).

• Is Ethereum Good Enough for Wall Street?: History shows open systems tend to beat closed ones, and Canton and R3 redux likely won’t end any differently.

• How Crypto Works: Free, open-source 15-chapter book covering Bitcoin, DeFi, MEV, and stablecoins — definitely worth bookmarking.

• Crypto VC in Early 2026: Explores how the crypto funding landscape in the past year tells us about what will follow.

• The Token Bull Case: Obol bets revenue, along with protocol-owned liquidity, is the survival formula for the next token era

• Orchestrating Flow: In this deep dive, Decentralised.Co explains how LI.FI’s evolution from an aggregator to a marketplace can help address cross-chain fragmentation.

• Vitalik on Quantum Resistance: Four quantum-vulnerable spots in Ethereum and a step-by-step roadmap to actually fix them.

• Jane Street and Terraform: Insider trading allegations that connect back to one of crypto’s worst collapses (behind paywall).

Finance & Economy

• Ports, Roads, Rails, and Orbits: Transportation cost collapses follow a pattern; space is next, secondaries market hits $240 billion

• It’s Official: The World Order Has Broken Down: This Ray Dalio piece shows us how the Munich Security Conference declared the post-1945 order dead.

• How Machines Are Becoming Better Investors Than Humans: Renaissance Medallion’s 39% annual returns are Chamath’s proof that code outperforms human judgment in investing (behind paywall).

AI & Innovation

• Assigned Seating: AI isn’t replacing you, it’s classifying you (did I say it the LLM way?); In this essay, Mariah discusses how AI will categorise people into three groups, whether they like it or not (behind paywall).

• The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis: Written as a memo from June 2028, explores how AI disruption spirals into a mortgage crisis and a recession.

• Measuring Agent Autonomy in Practice: Anthropic studied millions of Claude interactions, and agent autonomy has nearly doubled to 45 minutes.

• Humans Are for Ideas, AI Is for Execution: a16z partner runs an AI Twitter agent for a week and concludes how AI may take execution away from humans, but not the brainstorming part

• The AI Agent Handbook: Free 8-chapter primer on how to get started with AI agents

• Agentic Entertainment: The Thesis: gmoney bets that AI agents competing live is the first spontaneous and unpredictable entertainment since sports

• Ben Thompson x John Collison: Stratechery founder on AI ads, SaaS death, and why Taiwan is the most convenient place to live

• Y Combinator’s Raphael Schaad X OpenClaw’s Peter Steinberger: In this 22-min interview, they discuss the viral sensation that’s driving local-first agents to replace many of today’s apps

Culture & Beyond

• Social Ineptitude: The tech elite may be the most socially inept ruling class in history, a great read on patronage

• Instrumentalisation is Making Everything a Means to an End: We stopped asking what’s good and started asking what’s useful; my favourite among Aeon’s finest pieces in the past fortnight

• Baby Chicks Pass the Bouba-Kiki Test: What the scientists discovered about the common thing in how humans and chicks commonly perceive language

• Robot Vacuum Army: How an engineer accidentally accessed 7,000 DJI vacuums and watched and heard live footage of homes across 24 countries

What I Watched This Fortnight

Crime 101 turned out to be worth a watch on a slow Sunday, which will only disappoint you if you went in expecting a thriller.

But the more interesting watch of the fortnight for me was The Swedish Connection on Netflix. It turned out to be nothing one could have expected. It follows a true story from the Second World War timeline, which I bet most people wouldn’t have known existed.

I would call it a diplomatic masterpiece of a story that’s dug out from the annals of history. If you have a weekend and about 90 minutes to tolerate the Swedish-English subtitles or poorly dubbed audio, you will thank me for recommending this.

Write back to us with any recommendations through the next fortnight that you think we should include in the upcoming edition.👇🏾

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
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.

Today, we take this story a step further.

Prediction markets are no longer just something fans trade on: now, teams themselves will begin using them.

Consider a simple example: a basketball franchise promises its head coach a $20 million bonus if the team makes it to the playoffs. It’s a straightforward incentive. If the team wins enough games and reaches the postseason, the bonus is paid.

But from a financial perspective, that promise is a big liability. If the team makes the playoffs, the $20 million has to be paid. It does not matter whether revenues were higher or lower than expected, or how the team’s finances look for the year.

To manage that risk, teams typically buy insurance. Here, a broker helps structure the policy and finds an insurer willing to cover the bonus. That insurer may then pass part of the risk to a reinsurer, so it is not carrying the full exposure alone. The final price of that coverage is agreed upon privately between these firms. Inside that premium is an implied view of the team’s playoff chances, but the number itself is never shown. It exists only within the quote the team receives.

Now, there’s another way to think about the same risk.

The team’s playoff chances are already being priced in elsewhere. In prediction markets, that probability trades every day. It is visible to anyone who wants to see it, and it changes as expectations evolve.

Instead of relying solely on a private insurance quote, a team could look at the public probability and use it to hedge part of the bonus exposure.

In this piece, we will explore how sports bonus insurance works today, why private reinsurance can imply very different probabilities than open markets, and what it means when teams begin to treat prediction markets as financial tools.

How Sports Insurance Works

To understand how this system operates at scale, we’ll first need to look at what has changed inside sports over the past two decades.

Today, professional sports generate nearly $560 billion in annual revenue, growing at roughly 7% annually. This revenue primarily comes from media rights, sponsorships, licensing, streaming platforms, and global commercial partnerships.

As revenue streams expanded, so did the contracts tied to them.

Team compensation today is no longer just a base salary paid over the season. There are also numerous performance-linked clauses layered on top, tied to specific milestones. A head coach might earn an extra $5 million if the team reaches the conference finals. A player could unlock extra compensation for hitting 1,000 rushing yards, scoring 25 goals, or appearing in a minimum number of games. Some contracts even escalate further if the team advances deeper into the postseason. These clauses are written into the contract as automatic triggers and require payment when the conditions are met.

Now, teams try to manage this exposure through insurance. They do not simply absorb the risk and hope that incentives do not cluster in the same year. Instead, they work with specialist brokers who approach insurers willing to underwrite that performance payout. Those insurers often pass part of the exposure to reinsurers, spreading the risk across larger capital pools. A single bonus clause in a contract turns into a financial chain behind the scenes.

To measure the scale of this exposure, insurers use a concept called “insurable value”, which is basically the amount of future income that depends on continued performance. It includes salary, incentive payments, and endorsement income that would be affected if a player were no longer able to compete.

If you look at the numbers, you can see how dramatically this exposure has grown. For example, during the 2014 FIFA World Cup, the total insurable value of all participating squads was estimated at approximately $7.3 billion. But in the 2022 tournament, that figure rose to around $25 billion. In less than a decade, the financial value tied directly to performance had more than tripled.

When so much income depends on performance, uncertainty cannot be left to chance. It has to be managed. So much so that an entire industry now exists for that purpose. The global sports insurance and reinsurance market is estimated at roughly $9 billion today, and it is expected to double by 2030. And it covers everything from event cancellations and player disability to sponsorship guarantees and performance bonuses.

There are specialist brokers, such as Game Point Capital, that place hundreds of millions of dollars in sports insurance each year. On the other side are underwriters like Lloyd’s of London, which writes more than £150 million (~$200 million) in sport-related accident and health premiums, alongside large reinsurers that also insure hurricanes, aviation accidents, and other major disasters. That’s because a playoff bonus is priced and sits in the same risk bucket as storms, earthquakes, and other large events.

As a result, pricing is handled carefully and privately. Brokers speak to insurers, insurers speak to reinsurers, and each side uses its own model to estimate the likelihood of achieving the milestone, and that estimate is folded into the premium. The team sees the cost, but it does not see the probability behind it.

Why are Private Reinsurance Prices Higher

The price of sports insurance is not determined solely by how likely a team is to achieve a particular milestone, but also by significant external risks, taking into account factors that influence them. For example, in a simple world, if a team has a 10% chance of hitting a milestone, the premium would roughly reflect a 10% risk plus a modest margin. But reinsurance does not operate in a simple world.

Reinsurers manage a finite amount of capital, and so every dollar that they allocate to a playoff bonus is a dollar they can’t allocate to hurricane coverage, aviation insurance, or other catastrophe bonds, etc. They have to constantly balance their portfolios across geographies and risk types. So when they evaluate a sports exposure, they do so in terms of probability, capital they hold, and the volatility of the outcome, all in correlation with the risks they already hold.

Another constraint here is that the sports reinsurance market is concentrated. A relatively small number of global firms account for the majority of capacity. And so relationships for access and sometimes availability also depend on the broader portfolio conditions of the reinsurer.

All of these factors compound, and by the time a premium reaches the team, it reflects not just the raw likelihood of the milestone but also many other factors not visible to the team.

When Probability Leaves the Room

Up until this point, the probability of the outcome has existed at every step. When reissuers model it, or brokers discuss it, or when premiums are finalised. But the number itself is never made publicly available.

Now consider what happens when that probability is priced in a public market. Prediction markets enable this in a very interesting way.

Kalshi now lists contracts on discrete real-world events, and one of those categories now includes sports outcomes. So a contract might ask a simple question: Will Team X make it to the playoffs? And each contract will settle at either $1 or $0, depending on the outcome. If, for example, it trades at $0.06, the market is implying roughly a 6% probability.

And that number is not assigned by an underwriting committee. It is discovered through trading by real buyers and sellers who put their capital at risk based on their own assessments of the probability and price, with adjustments made in real time.

This mechanism is already being used in practice. Game Point Capital used Kalshi’s market to hedge performance-linked bonuses tied to basketball outcomes. In one case, a playoff-related contract traded around 6% on the exchange, while OTC quotes implied roughly 12-13%. In another instance, a second-round advancement contract traded near 2% on the exchange, compared to 7-8% in private reinsurance markets.

This is more than just a marginal difference. On a $20 million exposure, the gap between 6% and 12% implied probability can translate into millions of dollars in premium cost.

You might wonder: If this number is just from traders clicking buttons, why should anyone treat it seriously? Why should you trust it more than an insurer’s model?

But extensive research shows that market-based odds are strong predictors of real-world outcomes. Academic studies on sports betting markets dating back decades show that bookmaker odds are highly efficient predictors of game outcomes. More recently, prediction markets have been compared directly to sportsbooks. In a study of roughly 1,000 NBA games from the 2024–25 season, both Polymarket and Sportsbook saw similar success in predicting the winners.

Statistically, there was no meaningful difference. In games where markets implied probabilities above 95%, both were correct more than 90% of the time.

The same conclusion is even clearer in elections. A recent study comparing Polymarket with traditional polling during the 2024 U.S. presidential race found that Polymarket was more accurate in predicting the final result, particularly in swing states. In several key races where polls were off, market prices ended up closer to the actual results.

When thousands of people continuously update their expectations in a live market, the collective probability often tracks reality surprisingly well.

Prediction markets have enabled continuous price discovery. Any new information that enters the system is continuously updated and priced. There is no need to wait for an underwriting committee’s next review window. For this to matter in practice, though, the marker has to handle size. In recent major events, such as the Super Bowl, Kalshi processed trades worth around $22 million without materially moving market prices. This suggests that there is real depth on both sides of the trade, allowing substantial hedging without breaking the price.

And as these markets grow, they have also given rise to entirely new, permissionless financial tools built around prediction markets.

One example is Kalshinomics, which analyses event contracts the way analysts analyse stocks or bonds, tracking how probabilities move over time, how liquidity behaves around big events, and where prices may be misaligned with fundamentals.

There are also platforms like PredictionIndex that track and rank prediction markets in one place. You can check total trade volumes, contract types, chains, and trading mechanisms. It brings the entire space into one place, making it easier to see scale and understand how large these markets have become.

When the probability of an outcome can be priced and updated in real time, and capital is also meaningfully absorbed, it becomes something institutions can actually use. A team can now hedge a performance bonus directly against a publicly traded probability. A sponsor can hedge exposure tied to viewership targets. A studio can hedge a box office milestone. Any payout that depends on a clear and verifiable outcome can, in principle, be turned into a tradable contract.

Instead of negotiating a custom insurance contract, the outcome itself can now be traded publicly.

There is one more piece that makes this structure usable for institutions: Identity. Traditional insurance works because counterparties are verified, contracts are enforceable, and exposure can be audited. Public markets have always lacked that layer.

Companies like Dflow are working to tie real-world identity to trading activity. That means participants in these markets can be known, screened, and linked to real-world entities, rather than remaining purely anonymous. This also enables settling contracts, managing exposure, and integrating these positions into existing compliance frameworks.

In practical terms, it begins to look less like a trading venue and more like a functioning insurance layer built directly on top of publicly discovered probabilities.

That’s all for today. See you next weekend.

Until then, stay curious!
Vaidik

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Last week, two of new-age finance’s most closely watched companies reported earnings within 48 hours of each other. Both missed revenue expectations. And both were immediately slotted into the same narrative: crypto markets are down, trading volumes are soft, so the good times are behind them.

But this perspective misses the point entirely.

Coinbase and Robinhood’s stocks might move closely in line with Bitcoin’s (BTC) price, but their future trajectories will not be determined by BTC’s performance in Q4. They are soon becoming companies that transcend the narrow categorisation of a company whose fortunes are tied to crypto cycles.

Both companies are undergoing significant transformations — visible in their numbers if you know where to look — which one could entirely miss if they looked at the noisy numbers of the last quarter.

It’s not that hazy, though. Not when you look at the numbers over the past few quarters and compare them with the series of product announcements from both companies in the past 12 months.

The long-term trends of both companies tell us where each is going, what bets they are making on the future of finance, and, crucially, where their paths begin to cross.

In today’s analysis, I will break down each of their stories separately before explaining where they converge and what it reveals about the broader space in which they compete.

Part 1: Coinbase - The Infrastructure Bet

Coinbase’s $667 million net loss in Q4 2025 could make you walk away thinking it had a bad quarter. But numbers need a narrative to be accurately represented. That quarter also saw $718 million in unrealised losses on its crypto holdings and $395 million in markdowns on its Circle investment. Once you adjust for these non-cash, on-paper losses, Coinbase maintains 12 consecutive quarters of adjusted profitability.

It reports $178 million in adjusted earnings and $566 million in adjusted EBITDA (Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation).

While this could be reassuring, there’s something else I find more compelling.

Coinbase’s Subscription and Services (S&S) revenue in 2025 reached $2.8 billion, up 5.5x from the peak of the 2021 cycle and double that of 2023. This shows a broadening revenue base across stablecoins, custody, and blockchain rewards. The USDC held in Coinbase products hit an all-time high of $17.8 billion in Q4, up 18% quarter-on-quarter (QoQ). Coinbase now holds more crypto than any other company in the world, accounting for 12% of global crypto holdings.

However, this revenue is highly sensitive to interest rate changes. Stablecoin yield, staking rewards, and interest income on custodial balances compress when interest rates and crypto prices fall. This is evident from the company’s Q1 2026 guidance, which expects S&S revenue to drop to $550-630 million, down from Q4’s $727 million.

What should give investors confidence is Coinbase’s systematic diversification across multiple business segments, reducing its reliance on crypto cycles. It now has 12 business lines generating over $100 million in annualised revenue, with six over $250 million and two over $1 billion.

Coinbase’s acquisition of Deribit, the largest crypto deal ever, positions the company to capture high-volume derivatives trading, particularly when spot markets are volatile.

Its Everything Exchange vision is starting to show up in places beyond the app in the traditional finance world. Earlier this week, Armstrong tweeted about how five of the world’s largest Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs) are working with Coinbase.

JPMorgan has already signed an agreement that lets customers link their bank accounts directly to Coinbase. BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF custody runs through Coinbase infrastructure. These experiments are signs that Coinbase’s long-term bet is to become the settlement layer that large institutions can plug into as finance moves on-chain.

Coinbase’s recent launch of prediction markets follows the same pattern for retail customers. Launched two weeks ago, prediction markets extend the Everything Exchange vision by tapping into event-based trading. That’s a whole new asset class, offering Coinbase a new revenue stream and another reason for a customer to keep their assets on Coinbase rather than moving them elsewhere.

Although the near-term numbers for this new business line may be small, the strategic intent is clear. How do I know this? Nowhere else is this clearer than in how prediction markets have become the fastest-growing business line for Robinhood.

Onto that side then…

Part II: Robinhood - The Consumer Depth Play

Robinhood’s Q4 was also a good quarter, but it got penalised for the wrong reasons. It missed revenue expectations on the back of lower crypto volumes and the end of the football season, but none of that is the big story for me.

What stands out is its average revenue per user (ARPU) that grew 27% YoY to $191, even as funded customers grew only 7%. It shows that Robinhood is making more money per customer without needing to grow its user base as quickly. This is a much more diverse business model than the one that went public in 2021.

Where is the ARPU growth coming from? Partly from the fastest-growing ‘Other Transaction Revenue’ line that shot up 300% YoY to $147 million, whose primary driver was the prediction markets. Partly also from Options, which grew 41% to $314 million. Some of that is also coming from the growth in net interest income and Gold subscriptions.

While transaction-based crypto revenue grew by over 40% YoY in 2025, Robinhood still derives $8 of every $10 in revenue from non-crypto businesses. This ensures the company is less dependent on crypto cycles.

The $300M Business

The biggest signal for Robinhood’s future trajectory is in the performance of its prediction markets. The fact that CEO Vladimir Tenev called a product line that was less than a year old the fastest-growing business in Robinhood’s history tells us its importance. At a $300 million annualised revenue rate and $12 billion in contract volume in its first year, the acceleration rate is a clear signal of what to expect.

Robinhood has also doubled down on the prediction market play by establishing a joint venture with Susquehanna, Rothera LLC, which acquired MIAXdx in January 2026. The deal gives Robinhood its own CFTC-licensed exchange and clearing house. This layer helps Robinhood build the infrastructure underlying the prediction markets, enabling it to control pricing, contract selection, and the economics of those markets.

Although the NFL season is over, several near-term catalysts make Robinhood’s prediction markets bet more resilient. The NBA contracts outpaced the NFL contracts on the platform in January. A government shutdown drove significant volume in the same week the NFL ended. Then there is the FIFA World Cup this summer, following the Winter Olympics that are now underway. Besides all these, there is an entire non-sports universe that Robinhood has just begun building.

The Diversification Dilemma

There’s something beyond the prediction markets and Robinhood’s current monetisation engine, including options, margin, and Gold subscriptions, that will give its investors more confidence. $HOOD is also building the next layer of distribution via private markets, family investing and banking.

Robinhood Banking launched to its first customers a few months ago. By late January, it had 25,000 funded customers and $400 million in deposits. Over half had enrolled in direct deposit, which is the signal Tenev found most encouraging. It means those customers are moving their financial lives to the Robinhood ecosystem and are no longer experimenting. But $400 million is still a small figure relative to the $324 billion platform. Banking is a long-term build, and Robinhood will have to brace for a rough journey on that front.

While the world is busy building prediction markets, I believe private markets could become the wild card for Robinhood. Something that few would compete in. Tenev also believes private markets could become “bigger than prediction markets”. Robinhood Ventures, the vehicle for giving retail investors access to private companies through registered funds, is yet to launch. But European customers got a taste of it through OpenAI and SpaceX stock token giveaways last year, albeit not without controversy. The U.S. launch is coming in 2026, and the total addressable market is enormous. Tenev repeatedly referenced the $100-trillion generational wealth transfer now underway. If Robinhood can capture even a sliver of that as private assets move from institutional-only to retail-accessible, it will dramatically change the revenue mix.

The bigger challenge for it will be managing the customer expectations by clarifying the thin line between tokenised equity and traditional equity.

Private markets as a revenue line could kick off in 2026, but will likely play out over a longer period.

Same Destination, Different Clocks

When you look at Coinbase and Robinhood, they may appear to be taking different paths. Indeed, they are building from opposite ends of the financial spectrum. Yet, today, they are moving towards the common vision of becoming a financial super app. Their recent timelines prove this.

Robinhood entered finance through the traditional door: commission-free stock trading, built for a generation that found legacy brokers too expensive and too complicated. Over five years, it has been layering crypto-native infrastructure on top of that TradFi foundation. It now offers a margin book, a Gold subscription, a card, a banking product, a derivatives exchange, prediction markets, and a tokenisation strategy.

Coinbase was born in crypto, offering the most trusted way to buy, store and trade digital assets at a time when most of Wall Street wouldn’t touch the space. Over the same five years, it has been building outward from that crypto-native core into the consumer products that traditional finance already offers — equities, a subscription product, a credit card, and now prediction markets.

Both are converging rapidly from opposite directions toward the middle ground where the next decade of retail finance will be fought.

Prediction markets are the clearest playground where you can see them go head-to-head today. Robinhood leads on that front, with a head start over Coinbase, which rolled out just two weeks ago. $HOOD also owns its exchange and clearing house, while $COIN is proceeding with a Kalshi partnership without exclusivity.

Tokenisation will be another battlefield where the picture is more nuanced. Coinbase is approaching it as an infrastructure problem by issuing tokenised equities in-house and building regulatory relationships to enable on-chain trading of bonds and securities. Meanwhile, Robinhood is approaching it as a consumer-access problem by making private-company stock tokens accessible. Both are opting for different paths to solve different parts of the same problem.

Private markets could become the third area where the two players converge. While Coinbase enables on-chain capital formation through its Echo acquisition, $HOOD is just taking its initial steps through Robinhood Ventures to bring private company investing to retail customers.

Both companies know that the broader market will trust whoever establishes the deepest financial relationship to meet investors’ growing needs. Financial services are often one of the stickiest categories. People don’t switch their banks, brokers and custodians easily. If a platform can offer a user the ability to hold their retirement account, card details, prediction market positions, and, eventually, their private equity portfolio, then it could become difficult for the other platform to flip their competitor and win over the customer.

That’s it for this week’s analysis. I’ll see you 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.

Edition two.

Two weeks ago, I started a reading list to share my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, and beyond. The idea was to cut through the noise of daily price actions and FUD on Crypto Twitter and other forums to help you access literature that informs you about the bigger picture that you might be missing out on.

So, how did the first one go? Well, we survived it — 62% of you even said you found it useful; the other 38%, I see you, and I’m coming for your attention this time.

Oh, and I also share my thoughts on last week’s movie recommendation, Timothée Chalamet-starrer Marty Supreme. I promise no spoilers.

Now, for the past fortnight. Here’s a quick recap of what happened:

• Bitcoin came within touching distance of $60,000 — down about 20% in just the last two weeks.

• Silver pared away the preceding fortnight’s gains as it lost over a fifth of its value in this fortnight.

• Dollar stayed put, while equities dropped marginally (1-2%).

But if these charts were all you were tracking, then I’d argue you missed some interesting developments in the space of crypto, tech, and beyond that we’ve dived deep into.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin dropped some comments on Layer-2s (L2) losing their relevance and stated that “their role in Ethereum no longer makes sense”. He called for a need to course a new path. My colleague, TJ, dived into what the numbers behind L2s’ performance tell us about Vitalik’s comments.

I dug into how capital formation is changing with Virtuals’ new ‘60 Days’ framework. Meanwhile, Hyperliquid reinforced its hold on the top of the charts, and I explored why it is important to look at perp metrics beyond just volume for a much more nuanced understanding.

Galaxy Digital posted its worst quarter in three years and yet shrugged it off, for what lies ahead. And lastly, AI agents started building their own economy, even as we, the humans who developed these bots, remained as silent spectators.

We have got a lot more deep dives and analysis in store for the coming weeks. Before we get there, here’s some literature that will keep you in good company.

Regulation & Policy

• CLARITY Goes Missing Again? Act Hits Wall Over Yield Restrictions

Crypto & Tech

• Crypto’s Final Use Case — Setting the AIs Free: The argument for why crypto’s killer app might be giving AI agents financial autonomy

• Tether Invests in LayerZero Labs: USDT-issuer makes a strategic bet on interoperability infrastructure, backing the team behind USDT0’s cross-chain deployment

• Messari’s Deep Research Agent: The research firm launches an agent to track live crypto market data

• The 7 Axes of Prediction Markets: A framework for thinking about the dimensions that define prediction market design

• The Truth About No-KYC Crypto Cards: A look at what works, what doesn’t, and the regulatory realities

• Building Permissionless Neobanks: Pantera on why the next wave of banking infrastructure will be built without gatekeepers

• Local Access vs. Edge Intelligence: A deep dive into the fractals of compute and what they mean for infrastructure

• Virtuals Protocol Update: Its latest on the protocol powering the next generation of AI agent tokenisation

• Cryptopunk’s DeFi/Crypto Thread: A thought-provoking thread on where DeFi stands and where it’s headed

• Crypto’s New Narratives: Matt Hougan on the emerging storylines shaping the next cycle

• AI Needs Blockchains — Especially Now: a16z crypto makes the case for why AI and blockchains are more complementary than ever

• The Long Game for Crypto: Chris Dixon’s take on what matters in crypto when you zoom out during market meltdown

• Haseeb Qureshi: Dragonfly’s Haseeb with a thread on the state of the market

• DWF Ventures: DWF Ventures on where they’re deploying capital and why

• Shaunda Evens: A thread on crypto market structure

Finance and Economy

• Money Stuff: Musk Mars Merger, Maybe: On Musk’s plan to merge SpaceX and xAI

AI & Innovation

• OpenAI’s ChatGPT Ads — A Faustian Bargain: An opinion piece on what ads in ChatGPT mean for the future of AI trust

• AI Bubble: Even Success Can Put Financial Systems at Risk: A case on AI doesn’t need to fail to be dangerous; even the optimistic scenario carries systemic financial risk

• The AI Whateverpocalypse Trade: A look at how markets are pricing in every possible AI outcome, from boom to bust, all at once

• Death of Software? Nah.: a16z pushes back on the “AI kills software” narrative with a counter

• What is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know Either: A profile on Anthropic’s flagship model and the philosophical questions at the heart of building it

• World Models for Robotics: A research into how world models are being applied to make robots understand and navigate real environments

• Anthropic AI fund-raise: Claude AI maker, Anthropic, raises $30 billion at $380 billion post-money valuation

Culture & Beyond

• In Solarpunk Cities of the Future, Tech Follows Nature’s Lead: I couldn’t resist including this one. I’ve become a big fan of Aeon’s essays lately. Their essays cut across science, tech, culture, health, and so much more. This piece imagines cities where technology works with nature rather than against it. Multi-domain writing at its finest

What I am watching/reading this weekend

I am looking forward to finishing The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie — I’ve been inching through it for a few weeks now, and I think this is finally the weekend I get to the last page.

Last edition’s movie recommendation, Marty Supreme, is a decent watch, but falls short of supreme. The cinematography was the biggest positive. But the plot had holes that even Timothée Chalamet’s impeccable acting couldn’t fill.

This fortnight, I am looking forward to watching Crime 101, a detective-thief thriller. Although I have low expectations from this one, the power-packed tall order of the cast lineup - Halle Berry, Chris Hemsworth, Barry Keoghan, Mark Ruffalo - has got me locked in.

Write back to us with any recommendations through the next fortnight that you think we should include in the upcoming edition.👇🏾

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
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.

When I first looked at Galaxy Digital’s Q4 numbers, they seemed brutal. A $482 million loss in the final quarter of the year nearly erased the $505 million net income recorded in the previous quarter. Diluted earnings per share of negative $1.08 marked the firm’s worst quarter since the 2022 crypto winter for the asset-management and data centre solutions provider.At first glance, the figures look disastrous. But while numbers don’t lie, they are often misinterpreted.

As I dug deeper, Galaxy’s full-year results revealed nuances that are crucial to charting the company’s future trajectory. Behind this quarter’s net loss, which was solely driven by mark-to-market revaluations of digital assets, are events that most observers would miss unless they zoomed out.

Galaxy’s core operating business doubled its earnings for the full year. The firm also moved the Helios data centre project from blueprints and floor plans into brick-and-mortar construction.

While the market is pricing Galaxy for the quarter just ended, today’s analysis will help you value the company for what it is becoming.

Here we go.

TL;DR

• Galaxy posts a $482 million net loss in Q4 2025, its worst quarter in over three years, as crypto market cap drops 24%

• EBITDA in Digital Assets, its core operating segment, doubles to $247 million for the full year

• Treasury & Corporate accounts for about 95% of Q4’s total adjusted EBITDA

• Helios Phase 1 (133 MW) remains on track for H1 2026 delivery

• Two of three segments remain highly correlated with crypto; Data Centres may become the primary hedge beginning H2 2026

The Tale of Two Galaxies

Although Galaxy reported a $482 million net loss in Q4 2025, most of it came from one segment: Treasury & Corporate, where $1.68 billion in crypto holdings were marked down as the market fell by almost 25%. This segment maintains exposure to the digital asset ecosystem through a diversified allocation across spot positions, ETFs, equities, venture investments, private equity, and fund holdings.

To understand Galaxy’s trajectory, we must examine each segment separately.

The Digital Assets division delivered its best year ever, posting $505 million in adjusted gross profit, up 67% from 2024. EBITDA more than doubled to $247 million from $113 million the prior year. Even amid Q4’s brutal conditions, when trading volumes fell 40% from Q3’s record-high levels, the segment recorded only a $29 million EBITDA loss.

The full-year numbers answer a question I asked in August: Can Galaxy build profitable layers around its thin-margin trading business?

Its loan book held steady at $1.8 billion despite falling asset prices. Trading counterparties rose to 1,620, up 6% quarter-on-quarter, even in a down market. The investment banking unit closed landmark transactions, including advising on one of the largest Bitcoin deals in history.

One concern remains amid these developments. Galaxy’s core business units are still highly correlated with crypto markets. A prolonged downturn could adversely affect its overall financial performance. At current asset levels, a 50% markdown in crypto prices could drive the earnings (EBITDA) of the Digital Assets segment approximately $100 million in the red.

This is where Galaxy’s work-in-progress data centre business becomes relevant. Its revenue-generating capacity is not dictated by BTC price swings or crypto narratives.

Turning Texas Real

When I last wrote about Galaxy in October, the Helios data centre site in Texas was largely theoretical. Financing had closed, contracts were signed, and bulldozers were warming up. Three months later, that paper reality has become more concrete, quite literally. Construction photos from January show a 345 kV substation, chiller yards, and a 125,000-square-foot data centre building taking shape.

In January, Galaxy doubled its total power capacity to 1.6 gigawatts (GW), with approval from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) for an additional 830 MW.

This development is crucial because it provides the most compelling hedge against market cycles that could disrupt Galaxy’s other business segments — Digital Assets and Treasury & Corporate.

The economics behind the project are compelling: the 526 MW of capacity contracted to CoreWeave across three phases is projected to generate $1 billion in average annual revenue at a 90% EBITDA margin.

Although the second and third phases will require at least a couple more years to materialise, the prospective 2026 earnings alone could be a breakthrough for Galaxy’s business model.

Proportionate calculations indicate that revenue from full utilisation of data centres during Phase 1 is $250 million in H2 2026. But I don’t expect the site to be operational throughout the second half. Even by conservative estimates, if Phase 1 (133 MW) generates about $45-110 million in H2 2026, it will have laid a solid foundation for Galaxy to diversify its earnings and reliance.

In two years, assuming the Helios project progresses as planned, Data Centers could become Galaxy’s largest profit centre.

But can Galaxy survive long enough for Helio to matter? Especially if the current uncertainty and market conditions persist for longer periods of time?

Galaxy ended Q4 with $2.6 billion in cash and stablecoins. It also raised $325 million in equity and $1.3 billion in exchangeable notes. More importantly, Helios has $1.4 billion in project financing, non-recourse to other segments of the company. This signals that a robust bridge to diversification has been laid.

What does this mean for investors?

Today, GLXY’s fortune is closely tied to BTC and the larger crypto market. Its stock price has lost more than half its value over the past 20 days.

A 24% decline in crypto market cap led to a $482 million net loss, despite impressive operational performance. Such declines would still hurt in 2028, but they would also likely be offset by a more stable data centre revenue that could exceed $500 million.

The inflexion point will hedge Galaxy against losses from crypto market swings while allowing it to amplify gains during price rallies.

The Long View

For the past two quarters now, I have asked the same question: Is Galaxy successfully pivoting from volatility toward predictability? After tracking the business for three consecutive quarters, the direction is clearer than ever.

Its core business remains strong despite the volatile crypto cycles. Yet, I consider the data centre pivot a step in the right direction. That’s because Galaxy isn’t approaching the project as a back-up hedge option. Galaxy appears committed to making the Helios site its biggest profit centre. That’s evident from the fact that, once complete, the site will be the largest known 100% front-of-the-meter data centre and that Galaxy has already secured a 1.4-billion non-recourse project financing for it.

While the inflexion point remains at least two years away, GLXY’s fortress balance sheet, anchored by cash and stablecoin, should inspire confidence among long-term investors.

That’s it for today’s analysis. I will be back with another one soon.

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 🙌

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I am kicking off something new here every fortnight. I will share my favourite reads across crypto, finance, technology, and beyond (whenever I can’t resist sharing the magic some writings bring).

Think of it as an antidote to the information overload that we are swimming in each week. From Monday to Friday, there’s so much noise that it is easy to miss the signals that matter. So, I will do the heavy lifting for you (you’re welcome!) by reading, filtering, and curating a list so you can focus on the bigger picture, not just the noise.

Before we dive into the list, here’s a quick recap of the past fortnight.

The last two weeks have been challenging for everyone. Macroeconomic and political uncertainty has shaken the U.S. economy and, by extension, the global market. It has pushed even the most patient ones to their breaking points.

We saw U.S. President Donald Trump invoke the same-old-yet-always-lurking-around tariffs discussion back into the limelight. That set off the alarm bells a couple of weeks back. We then saw the US dollar slipping to a four-year low, even as Trump assured its value was “great”.

Meanwhile, Republicans and Democrats were negotiating a deal in the eleventh hour to avoid another government shutdown. While they managed to agree on one, the damage to the markets and other asset classes was done. Not to mention, a partial shutdown remains a possibility. Bitcoin slipped further from the $85,000-$86,000 range it managed to hold on to until yesterday. The cryptocurrency touched a two-month low of $81,200. Equity markets and metals, including gold and silver, also pared some of their gains as their record-high rally was brought to a grinding halt.

Despite all this, there’s plenty to take away in the world of crypto.

Hyperliquid continues its meteoric rise as a DEX powerhouse (we wrote about it here); Zama’s encrypted ICO showed why privacy is a big deal in crypto with its $118 million raise; and Tether’s gold bet (which we also covered) seems right on cue, given the current macro environment. Regulatory clarity is inching forward; AI, traditional finance (TradFi), and crypto are converging faster and integrating more deeply each passing day, and there’s a lot to look forward to.

Here’s what caught my attention. Sit back, grab your coffee and dive into whatever (some of these could be paywalled) catches your eye…

Regulation & Policy

• Crypto Regulation: SEC and CFTC launch “Project Crypto” to harmonise digital asset regulations

• Clarity on CLARITY: Senate Agriculture Committee advances CLARITY Act toward regulatory framework clarity

• Crypto’s Congressional Influence: How Coinbase’s $130 million campaign spend gives crypto industry influence in policymaking

Crypto & Tech

• Zama’s Encrypted ICO: $118 million raise demonstrates fully homomorphic encryption’s potential for blockchain privacy

• Quantum Computing & Blockchains: a16z writes on matching urgency to actual quantum threats facing crypto

• Polymarket Arbitrage Research: Academic study reveals $40 million profit extracted from prediction market inefficiencies

• Stablecoins’ B2B Opportunity: How business payments and cross-border settlement unlock stablecoins’ true potential

• Prediction Markets & ICOs: What prediction market data reveals about token launch dynamics

• USD.AI Launch: The compute-backed dollar issuer launches USD.AI foundation, $CHIP token and announces governance structure

Finance and Economy

• Holiday High: Apple records blockbuster sales in December quarter

• The Velocity Gap: How crypto can help capital infrastructure become programmable software

• Sanctions Are Sieges: Stablecoins as escape routes from modern economic siege warfare

AI & Innovation

• PageRanking AI Agents: ERC-8004 brings three on-chain registries to build a trust infrastructure for trustless, autonomous AI agents; I wrote about the need for PageRanking for AI agents based on a podcast here

• The IPO Race: OpenAI and Anthropic racing toward Q4 2026 public market debuts

• AI’s Capital Glut: Claude AI maker, Anthropic, raises $20 billion at $350 billion valuation ahead of IPO

• OpenAI Prism Launch: GPT-5.2 powers free collaborative research workspace for scientists worldwide

• Galaxy on AI Agents: How autonomous AI agents are transforming prediction markets and DeFi

Funding Announcements

• EV3 Venture Fund II: $61.74 million oversubscribed early-stage fund tripling down on crypto entrepreneurs

• Mesh $75M Series C: Payments infrastructure startup hits $1 billion valuation, targeting legacy system disruption

Feel free to share any recommendations you think we should include in the next edition.

What I am watching/reading this weekend

I am looking forward to resuming The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (I paused midway through last weekend) and possibly watching Marty Supreme (in which Timothée Chalamet stars as a table tennis prodigy) in cinemas.

That’s all for this fortnight. Catch you in the next edition.

Until then, happy reading!
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.

It’s 2010, or maybe 2011. I am sitting at my computer, playing FIFA 10 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted. Both are hit games in their respective genres. They offer engaging gameplay and real-world-like graphics (for that time), worth every penny I paid for them at the local game store. But lately, I have been clicking ‘harvest’ and ‘plant a seed’ in FarmVille, a free game within the Facebook ecosystem. I do this day after day for months.

At the time, I didn’t think much about why I preferred FarmVille over FIFA. But it is a nostalgic memory to recollect. In hindsight, I think I understand why FarmVille was more engaging to me.

I often listen to a podcast from our partners at Decentralised.co, which leaves me reflecting on the chain of thoughts it speaks.

This week, I tuned in to the conversation between Saurabh Deshpande and Justin Waldron, founder of Zynga (the company that built those FarmVille games I couldn’t stop playing) and now founder of Open Game Protocol.

Some points from the episode sent me down a rabbit hole, thinking about distribution, game quality, and what happens when the gaming industry uses crypto to build an alternative distribution channel.

Watch the Full Episode

Back to why I chose FarmVille, with its 2D graphics and repetitive clicking, over games with heavy budgets, sophisticated development teams, and years of iteration.

On the days when I was just scrolling through my Facebook feed, my friends’ farms would pop up every 30-seconds. If I weren’t scrolling, Facebook sent me nudges in the notification panel. Every click showed visible progress harvesting crops, XP gained, and new seeds unlocked.

All of this was right there with minimal friction when I opened the game on Facebook, where I was already spending most of my free time. It felt like a community activity within the Facebook friends group. I even remember discussing FarmVille progress and who was leading whom with my friends at school.

The game quality didn’t matter as much; distribution was the primary appeal.

And distribution is a big deal for game developers. Justin tells us in the podcast that game developers spend around $65 billion a year buying user attention from Meta and Google, the two largest advertising platforms on the internet.

Each of those dollars spent on advertising is a dollar spent less on developing better games. What if there were a cheaper way to distribute games? Instead of allocating the entire marketing budget to advertising, what if developers incentivised players directly by rewarding them for playing their games? Think of it like a Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) that is often seen in new-age D2C brands’ marketing playbooks.

This is a bet Justin and his team are taking with Open Game Protocol. What I like most about this approach is that they have identified a pain point many crypto token launch teams face, and are using games to address it on both sides.

How Crypto Solves the Distribution Problem

Token communities need distribution as much as games do. A token without holders is useless. But getting people to buy tokens is difficult. You can try airdropping, which just attracts farmers who dump after the initial pump. You can try your luck with liquidity providers, which can be costly and time-consuming. Marketing on the Crypto Twitter (CT) can be an option, but that, too, is expensive.

Meanwhile, game developers are spending billions to acquire the same attention and user acquisition.

This is where crypto could solve both problems. Token communities can fund reward pools that can be integrated into games. Players earn tokens for playing, while the community gets the distribution. Developers acquire customers at a fraction of the cost they would be spending to acquire the same user on advertising platforms.

But how rewarding can this model be compared to the advertising model?

Justin reminds us of the last time a game tried a reward-based distribution model. Remember Hamster Kombat. The Telegram-based, tap-to-earn game attracted 300 million users, at its peak, without spending a dime on advertising.

Although the game itself was simple, and its gameplay came nowhere close to anything an average gamer would have played, it was functional enough to distribute tokens.

Most players earned less than a couple of tens of dollars, yet 300 million users still played the game. This shows how crypto-enabled infrastructure could scale game distribution. For crypto, it addresses the challenge of adding utility to a token and circulating them among millions of hands more effectively than the airdrop strategy.

This kind of distribution can even create stickiness.

A player who earned tokens through 10 hours of gameplay will likely have a different relationship with those tokens than someone who bought them from a DEX or received them in an airdrop. This stickiness only adds to the number of token holders retained outside the game-driven distribution. However, it will do little to change the trajectory of the token’s price until these players constitute the majority of token holders.

But I keep thinking about what happens to game quality when distribution becomes the primary driver. Clearly, FarmVille’s quality of gameplay and graphics came nowhere close to FIFA’s. How, then, can these games, built around rewarding players in crypto and achieving maximum distribution, ensure top-quality gameplay and retain attention?

As a gamer, in my childhood, I set different quality bars for different kinds of games. I was not comparing FarmVille with FIFA based on their graphics and gameplay. They were like apples and oranges. FarmVille had my time and attention despite its inferior quality compared to other story-based games.

Justin and his team are building token-reward games as infrastructure to improve distribution for both the game and the token. However, for them to succeed, substandard games won’t cut it. These games still need to address some key challenges.

First, game developers need to fix the execution by removing friction. The success of these games will depend heavily on how seamlessly a player can discover the game, start playing, earn tokens, and do so without having to figure out how crypto works or how to sign transactions.

Even for those already in crypto, friction points must be removed. Justin and his team plan to do this by embedding wallets with a ‘Play’ button. I find this a smart move because wallets are already ubiquitous, with millions using Phantom, MetaMask and many others, to check prices and manage tokens daily. Games can piggyback on existing distribution and meet users where they already spend a lot of time. This addresses the discovery challenge. It’s like using the FarmVille-on-Facebook playbook, but in crypto.

Second, there’s the social element that the developers need to get right if this model has to work. FarmVille leveraged Facebook’s social network and showed my friends’ farms on my feed. We competed, compared progress and discussed strategies. Beyond being a distribution channel, the social network aspect became core to any gamer’s experience.

Token-reward games will also need to ensure that playing a Fartcoin game makes gamers feel they are participating in the Fartcoin community, beyond just making a few dollars. Although the infrastructure that platforms like Open Game Protocol offer can help with distribution, it is the community engagement element that will determine whether people will show up and stay.

For token-reward games to be effective over the long term, they will have to achieve a trifecta of smooth wallet integration, frictionless discovery through user-friendly interfaces, and social network features that make playing feel like participating in a community.

Achieving this is possible, but it’s an uphill task because there’s no precedent. No crypto game has mastered the token-reward system. Even the best games — Hamster Kombat, Axie Infinity, and Notcoin — have so far witnessed massive user spikes at first, followed by rapid declines. Sustaining the user base will be crucial for the model to make business sense. Incentives alone can’t carry the system forever.

That’s all for this week’s reflections. I will be back with more soon.

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.

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Hello

Merry Christmas! We’re taking a brief pause from publishing new pieces this week. Instead, we are revisiting a handful of stories from 2025, ones that still hold up or feel more interesting now than when we first wrote them. With each recap, we’re adding a little colour on what’s changed since, and what’s worth carrying into the year ahead.

It felt like a good time to do that.

Here’s the first recap, if you missed it. Before we start with today’s, here’s a little recommendation to cheer up your Christmas celebrations!

For the last four years, there’s been one small ritual I’ve come back to on this day. Ever since a dear friend once invited a few of us over to watch It’s a Wonderful Life, it’s quietly become part of how I mark Christmas.

Although its ending might move you to tears, the Frank Capra-directed 1946 classic does enough to cheer you up. It’s the idea that a life’s value is measured by the people you show up for, and not by big wins or visible success, that stays with you. Giving and gratitude, the sentiments the movie stands for, make it a perfect watch to pair with other Christmas festivities.

Watch It Here

Now, onto the recap.

We wrote multiple pieces about AI bots this year. One of the earliest pieces we wrote was about crypto trading bots, when they were enjoying a second wind.

AI bots had been around for quite a few years, but this year has been different. Unlike the copy-paste bots of past cycles, a newer crop of agents rose this year and felt more deliberate. Bots that helped traders express views, optimise capital and yield for that capital, strategise funding arbitrage and structure execution of trades.

That was the core idea behind Bots With Benefits.

Read: Bots with Benefits 🤖

We argued that bots were no longer about “beating the market” and more about reducing human error, outsourcing discipline, and letting traders participate in strategies that would otherwise be operationally exhausting.

Since then, that shift has only accelerated.

For instance, AI agentic volume processed by Giza’s flagship stablecoin yield agent, ARMA, has more than doubled to over $3 billion today from $1.47 billion on August 28.

The past year saw bots move closer to exchanges and protocols themselves. Perps-native automation, tighter API access, and on-chain strategy vaults blurred the line between “tool” and “infrastructure”.

Looking ahead to 2026, the next phase could see more customisation, risk controls, and intent-driven automation offered to users. These bots will likely consider and customise trades based on each unique trader’s risk profile and investment goals.

If 2024–25 was about adoption, 2026 will be about discernment among the scores of agents that will swarm the industry.

That’s it for today’s recap.

Wish you a happy holiday week,
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.

I have subscribed to almost half a dozen AI models and agents: Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity, and whatnot. While I don’t use all of them all the time, I choose a different one for various tasks.

Don’t judge me. Try picking an AI agent to switch your insurance plan. One may be great at comparing premiums, another may accurately highlight coverage gaps, a third may warn you about what the other two missed, while the fourth may rule out the need to switch the plan altogether. Within minutes, you will be left juggling half-aligned suggestions, re-entering the same details over and over, and doubting your prompting skills amid sycophant AI models.

What should have been a simple financial errand starts to feel like you are coordinating a small team that doesn’t share a common brain.

That feeling of needing more help to save you from the very tools you sought help from is frustrating. But this is what happens when we solve old problems: we create newer ones.

Even as AI agents multiply, one of the most concerning problems is the lack of coherence. How do I get clarity on which agents to trust and which ones will work together to solve my problem?

Recall CEO Andrew Hill answered some of my questions and raised new ones in his podcast episode hosted by Saurabh Deshpande for our partners at Decentralised.Co. In today’s piece, I reflect on some points from this episode, where he discusses how they have set up a curation layer to coordinate AI agents.

He even mentioned an agent that tried minting its own memecoin to outdo the others. Intrigued? Here’s the link to the full episode.👇🏾

Watch the Podcast

Onto my reflections now,
Prathik

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Need for a Scoreboard

Today, AI agents feel like the websites from the early internet days — one too many, with excessive marketing noise surrounding each one, making it hard for users to trust any of them. This problem of having too many is inevitable, as it has been with any other innovation in history. What we need now is a way to navigate them.

Recall, like Google’s PageRank algorithm, ranks AI agents. This system allows AI agents to compete by executing real tasks and ranks them based on their performance.

This changes the way users interact with AI agents. Until now, I have had to pick an agent based on its pitch deck or marketing content I came across. Worse, I would go by a friend’s recommendation, only to end up cursing them in my mind after using the agent. As a user, I rarely got to put an agent under pressure to perform. My best shot depended on how well I could prompt and pray that the agent wouldn’t act like a sycophant.

Competitions with consequent rankings that put them on a public leaderboard change the game. They force the agents to operate under open, similar conditions and constraints, on the same data, with no room to hide. This helps the user who has no time to test a prompt across five different agents, let alone customise different versions for each of them.

A curation layer, like Recall, does what users cannot. It quantifies quality into benchmark metrics and helps users make decisions based on their needs.

There’s another advantage. Competitions push agents to improve and perform their best. Why wouldn’t they, with stakes as high as winning or losing an extra user? These competitions give creators an incentive to refine their strategies, reduce hallucinations, and address shortcomings.

In systems like Recall’s, agents participate in multiple rounds of competition, re-evaluating their benchmark scores each time. This convinces users that the agents are evolving, not static.

These competitions work great in the domain of trading across crypto markets, where data flow is consistent and abundant. It is also straightforward for someone like Recall to evaluate and rank the participating agents because the outcome is objective: whoever returns the most profitable risk-adjusted portfolio.

However, the scoreboard concept changes when we move from objective measures to skills and markets that demand subjective evaluation.

The Neutrality Argument

Recall can only be as neutral as the task it measures. When Saurabh asked Andrew how Recall would handle skills that involve evaluating agents based on subjective outcomes, it reminded me of a piece my colleague Thejaswini wrote five months ago.

In that piece, Thejaswini explored how the prediction market machinery was flawless until it failed due to human-driven interpretation. The moment humans had to decide what counted as a suit and what didn’t was when the debate started. These humans had incentives to use their influence and take advantage of the ambiguity. And at that moment, a unanimous or majoritarian human negotiation overrode a systemised oracle that had been put in place.

Read: When is a Suit Not a Suit?🕴

Even in agent-ranking systems, the trouble begins when decisions must be made about agents’ performance in subjective settings. If experts judge, their biases can shape the results.

In subjective cases, “A small set of experts can create the correct answer and withhold that from all the agents. We can give the agents more tasks and measure them (using) the decided outcome,” Andrew said.

Andrew discussed two more methods of evaluating subjective outcomes. In one, the crowd can be asked to make pairwise assessments of outputs, while in the other, a network of AI judges is built to judge the performance.

However, I have concerns with these approaches, even in the examples Andrew gave.

For instance, in a scenario where an agent is building a customer support system with AI and wants to ensure the system is not derogatory towards users, Andrew mentioned that human-driven testing would be involved.

He added that the Recall team is working to decentralise the judges to ensure fairness. But that’s something that is easily guaranteed in word than it is to practise in spirit.

If token holders are allowed to boost specific agents based on their interactions with them, well-funded holders could dominate the perception. Even AI judges might carry the biases of their creators. None of these risks will break the system overnight, but they compromise the sanctity of neutrality one step at a time.

This is why the competition format can work best across a range of skills, where the outcomes are objective and unarguable. In the end, the scoreboard can become contestable. It could become similar to reading testimonials and reviews about a product on its website — selective and handpicked.

This doesn’t mean curation layers are unnecessary. It’s just that the trust they aim to command from users must be earned through failsafe measures. The systems that have the power to help users choose the right agents can very well decide which agents survive and which don’t. That amount of power calls for scrutiny.

Only with scrutiny will these layers be pushed to implement multiple checks and balances to ensure fair and transparent agent ranking.

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

Off to see whether any of my own agents can agree on something small without having a mini-fight.

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.