Welcome back!

This is J264G and this week I’ve got these titbits for you:

Ondo is tokenising Wall Street piece by piece: 400+ tickers across 3 chains, now one crypto wallet can finally hold a real diversified portfolio.

Now, let’s jump right into this week’s newsletter!

Click on any underlined heading/hyperlink to learn more.

Frontier Futures

Just recently, Binance and Coinbase both launched pre-IPO perpetual futures for OpenAI and Anthropic. China's AI champions, Zhipu and MiniMax, sit on the other side of the ledger: already public, already liquid, and tradable both conventionally and through perpetuals. 

For the first time, exposure to the AI frontier is continuous, leveraged, global, and available to anyone. 

The strategic implications are sharper still. To trade Zhipu or MiniMax is, implicitly, to trade a state-aligned industrial strategy, a wager on Beijing's patient capital and its appetite for open-weight models. To trade OpenAI and Anthropic, on the other hand, is to back private capital's bet on a closed, winner-takes-most AI frontier. A contest once confined to think-tank essays is now expressible as a single relative-value pair. Simply put: your long-short book can now hold a new thesis about geopolitics.

Having said that, the deeper shift is on the short side. Until now, scepticism about a private AI laboratory was an opinion with nowhere to go: the cap tables were locked, the secondaries thin, the conviction unhedgeable. Now that traders can short OpenAI, Anthropic & Co. with size, the bull case has a counterparty.

A frontier priced only by its believers inflates until it breaks; a frontier priced by believers and sceptics together, however, discovers its worth in daylight. By letting conviction and doubt meet in a live market, these instruments give AI something the boom has lacked: an honest price, and with it, a more durable foundation on which to build.

Prediction Markets: Charles Schwab is entering the prediction markets space, partnering with Cboe Global Markets to offer customers binary, yes-or-no contracts on financial outcomes such as where the S&P 500 will settle. The brokerage is for now confining the products to index-linked events rather than the politics and sports markets that have drawn regulatory scrutiny to rivals Kalshi and Polymarket.

Perpetual Futures: Theodore Gillibrand, the son of Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, has raised $30mn in a round led by venture firm Lux Capital to build a perpetual futures exchange. The fundraising valued his start-up, American Perpetuals Exchange Corporation, at $300mn and the Stanford graduate intends to list contracts on equities and stock indices rather than cryptocurrencies.

AI Monetisation: Amazon Web Services has switched on AI-traffic monetisation inside AWS WAF, enabling any site built on Amazon CloudFront to charge AI agents per request in USDC, settled on Base or Solana via Coinbase's x402 protocol. It marks the first time a hyperscale cloud provider has wired onchain settlement directly into its content-delivery edge, handing publishers a means of billing AI agents that now account for much of their traffic. 

Blockchain Integration: MoneyGram has joined the Solana Developer Platform alongside Mastercard, Worldpay, and Western Union to build compliant financial products on the network. Simultaneously, the company has launched an active validator on Solana. As a validator, the remittance group stakes SOL, processes blocks, and helps secure the network, marking its shift from a user of blockchain rails to an operator.

Crypto PAC: A new cohort of donors is preparing to spend heavily in November's midterms, cutting across party lines in a way that could reshape both primary contests and the general election. Chief among them is Fairshake, the pro-crypto super PAC bankrolled principally by Coinbase and Ripple Labs, which has emerged as one of the most formidable single-issue forces in American politics. Counting its affiliated committees, the group's war chest currently stands at $136mn; firepower that lawmakers weighing digital-asset legislation can ill afford to ignore.

And that's a wrap!

You can reach me anytime over on 𝕏 or drop me a line.

Talk soon!

J264G

_{DISCLAIMER
None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research. Lastly, please be advised that we discuss products and services from our partners from which our team members may hold tokens/equity.}