Hello,
Over two years ago, in the first week of September 2024, I published my first piece for the Token Dispatch. Bitcoin was trading just under $60,000, and the only question our readers wanted answered was whether it would cross the $100,000-mark and how much further above the mark it could go. I spent my first few months answering such questions: technical analysis, charts, and expected price action for the upcoming weeks. In the following 12 months, BTC would go on to cross the 6-figure mark, and some more, to record an all-time high above $126,000. Today, funnily, we are still ~15% below the 6-figure mark.
Over two years after my first piece for the Token Dispatch, I can’t remember the last time I wrote an entire edition around where a cryptocurrency was headed. In the last 90 days, our top three most-read pieces are either about the agentic economy or how tokenisation will eat every asset in the world. Our most-read piece in the last three months was about how GPUs get financed. When it wasn’t about computing power, then tokenisation and the agentic economy kept our readers busy.
Today, all the stories we write are far removed from the idea of crypto being a niche industry. They instead reinforce our view of how it’s becoming fintech and the underlying rails for building a more efficient financial system.
In today’s piece, I take a step back and write this commentary to highlight some of our best pieces in the last three months to give you an overview of the spaces that we find most exciting and why we feel so.
On to the story,
Prathik
Frontrun: Early Bird Holds the Edge
Most people hear about a promising startup the day it announces its funding. By then, the investors who backed it have known about it for months. How did they get there first?
Hours of digging, who started the company, what they’ve built before, how to reach them, and understanding what to write to them so that you can join them early in their journey.
Frontrun does this digging for you. When top investors start following a young company on X, Frontrun flags it, finds the founder, and writes your opening message. You can read the draft, tweak it, and hit send without leaving the platform.
Frontrun gives you a ready brief on every company it flags.
You can also automate a daily morning report with the list of startups to track based on what your favourite accounts are following. Served hot, along with your breakfast.
If I were to distill the ideas from our last three months of writing to one idea, it would be that blockchains are becoming commodity infrastructure and that value is migrating to various other layers that are emerging out of the evolving financial stack. Businesses can make barely any money by moving a dollar or a share. In Making Capital Reallocate Faster, I wrote how the legacy financial industry has come under attack layer after layer from cheaper, modular alternatives, and value has kept migrating to the layer that stays scarce.
My colleagues and I kept asking this one question across all three themes we covered the most. Once the infrastructure becomes cheap, what stays scarce? Good assets, good underwriting, and trust.
Tokenisation Will Eat Everything
I find tokenisation exciting because it changes fundamentally what an asset can do. I don’t think the moat of tokenisation is in its decentralised ethos.
In Everyone Wants to Be a Neobank, I wrote on how the containerisation of cargo cut shipping costs by 97%. After the containerisation, goods moved across ships, trains and trucks without anyone touching them. A token does the same for capital. A share, a gold bar or a loan becomes a standard unit that can settle at any hour, be held in any wallet, or can serve as collateral anywhere. Tokenised stocks grew from $620 million to $3.15 billion in a year.
But there’s a lesson in the container story. When the container got commoditised, the value got captured by those who controlled volumes at the ports, shipping lines and retailers who rebuilt the supply chains around cheap freight. Tokenisation is heading the same way. Minting a token is trivial and creates little value to capture. The moat is held by those who can distribute them to capital that couldn’t reach them before.
Vaidik, my colleague, wrote Private Credit for a Dollar, our second most-read piece this quarter. The piece dives into one of the subsets of tokenised assets. For a decade, private credit’s 8% to 12% yields went to pension funds and insurers. Nobody wanted to manage thousands of $500 cheques. Vaidik likens yield-bearing stablecoins to the moment Bent and Brown opened Treasury access to ordinary savers in the 1970s. Apollo still underwrites and manages risk at an institutional scale. A tokenised fund lets deposits of any size flow into that strategy. The underwriter holds the edge here for providing something for a tokenised fund that an expert in the domain alone can.
In What Does a Token Holder Own?, our third most-read piece, I looked at Venice AI’s $65 million raise, which gave investors 8.98% equity plus a token grant. The equity holders got contracts, board rights, and a legal claim on growth. The token holders got a buyback programme that the company can stop whenever it wants.
As protocols start behaving like companies, value flows to whichever instrument carries enforceable rights. Tokens that want a share of it will have to earn one.
Stablecoins as the Enabling Layer
Moving digital dollars is close to free, and the market is worth over $300 billion. Tether cleared roughly $10 billion in profit in 2025 with about 100 employees. USDC issuer Circle’s reserve income made up 99% of its 2024 revenue.
On June 30, a consortium of 140 firms announced a rival stablecoin that promised to hand nearly all that yield back to its partners. Circle’s stock fell 16% that day, even though USDC had settled a record $1.21 trillion that month.
The biggest lesson from the instance was that investors didn’t wait for an earnings call to price the information because the revenue at stake was visible on public dashboards. Crypto maturing into fintech helps both information and capital move faster.
The Rise of the Agentic Economy
The third theme is the one I would have laughed at in 2024, and it produced our most-read piece of the quarter.
Vaidik’s Compute Capital Markets starts with a financing problem hiding inside the AI boom. Building a GPU cluster means borrowing millions of dollars against revenue you cannot lock in, because no instrument exists to hedge it. The buyers and sellers of compute are spread across the globe and most of them cannot open a US commodities account with CFTC approval. Any wallet, though, can settle a stablecoin payment and hold a tokenised compute credit. More than $120 billion in data-centre credit now sits against labs earning roughly $105 billion. Whoever makes that collateral verifiable and hedgeable will own the settlement layer for a new commodity.
Then come the agents doing the spending. What agents lack is judgment and trust. I explored this gap in The Business of Trust. Every commerce era widens the circle of strangers who transact with each other, and each produces a new middleman to vouch for them. We saw credit bureaus build the trust layer for borrowers, Visa did it for card swipes, and Amazon and Flipkart did it for anonymous sellers. Agents need the same. ERC-8004 gives every agent a permanent on-chain identity and work record, but that identity is a transferable NFT, so a clean reputation can be sold to a bad actor. Agents will need trust that gets repriced with every transaction, the way merchants’ standing is today. Payments will be cheap. Whoever becomes the Visa of agents will not be.
Across all three themes, the infrastructure is getting cheaper and the value is moving to the scarce layers. This could mean those who decide which assets are worth owning, if credit is worth extending, and whether counterparties are worth trusting. None of this depends on bitcoin setting a new high.
There are risks and caveats, though. The CLARITY Act still leaves token holders in a grey zone. The GPU debt stack may not hold if it turns out to be a bubble. And, so, we will keep writing about those too.
Stay tuned and keep reading us.
Until next time, stay curious,
Prathik
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