Welcome back!

Here’s what I’ve got for you this week:

By turning forecasting into a liquid asset, prediction markets are showing the world why a live price beats a confident opinion.

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

Click on any underlined heading/hyperlink to learn more.

Brussels Muscles

Europe has become the internet's favourite punching bag. 

AI, Big Tech, privacy, crypto, whatever the frontier, Brussels gets cast as the bureaucrat who shows up to the party, confiscates the music, and hands everyone a 600-page form. The mockery isn't entirely unfair, as the EU can produce a rulebook thick enough to prop open a fire door, and it does so with the enthusiasm of someone that genuinely enjoys footnotes.

But here's the inconvenient truth: access to a market is a privilege, not a birthright.

Every sovereign jurisdiction gets to decide who plays in its sandbox and on what terms. Companies are free to hate the rules. They are not free to pretend the rules don't exist. That goes for white-shoe global banks, and it goes in equal measure for fintechs and crypto platforms.

Which brings us to Binance. The world's largest crypto exchange will have to suspend its regulated EU services from 1 July, having failed to secure the licences required under the bloc's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) framework.

This is an unprecedented loss for the crypto industry.

But whatever you think of MiCA, and there's plenty to argue about, the rules weren't sprung as an ambush. They were published years in advance. Binance didn't get caught out. It made a bet, the bet being that the rules were optional. They were not.

For years the crypto industry treated regulation as a thing to be lawyered around, lobbied against, or simply outrun. That era is over. The firms that invested in licensing, governance, and legal certainty, the unglamorous plumbing nobody live-tweets, are about to cash those boring investments in, inside one of the largest and wealthiest financial markets on earth. Patience, it turns out, was the alpha all along.

So Binance's retreat isn't really a story about one company. It's a story about a vacuum, and vacuums do not stay empty. Europe just became one of the most competitive crypto markets in the world overnight. Crypto-native challengers will spot the kind of opening that comes along maybe once a cycle and will scramble to hoover up displaced users. And the banks, brokers, and fintechs that have spent years cautiously building digital asset capabilities in Europe now have every reason to stop apologising and start shipping relentlessly.

As a result, the names that come to define the European market may look nothing like today's crypto royalty. Having said that, it does not matter which names break out. If they are not built on self custody, they are building on sand. Europe's next crypto champions can put the old lie to bed for good: that compliance and financial sovereignty pull in opposite directions. They do not. They never have. It just took this long for someone to ship the proof.

Regulatory Tailwind: Umar Farooq and Peter Muriungi of JPMorgan argue that digital finance is no longer a fringe technology but is moving steadily toward the core of the financial system, and that the United States has a genuine opportunity to lead, provided it builds the right regulatory framework. Regulation usually kills hype cycles, but in this case it may be the one force that finally lets good ideas flourish at scale.

Prediction Markets: Meta is said to be building a standalone prediction markets app, known internally as "Arena", that would operate separately from Facebook and Instagram. The experimental product is expected to launch with a video game-style points system rather than real money. The company has not, however, ruled out real-money trading at a later stage.

Crowded Field: Payward, the parent of crypto exchange Kraken, has led a $20mn funding round in Onyx Odds, a prediction markets app now pushing beyond sport into other trading products. With incumbents such as Kalshi and Polymarket facing an increasing number of competition, their long-term dominance increasingly looks far from assured.

Stablecoin Operations: American Express is recruiting a Vice President, Stablecoin and Blockchain Partnerships & Strategy. The appointment signals that one of the world's largest card networks now treats crypto infrastructure as a competitive front rather than a peripheral experiment. It also adds to mounting evidence that established payments incumbents intend to defend their turf as stablecoins edge closer to mainstream settlement.

Filipino Rise: Mynt, the operator of GCash (the Philippines' largest mobile wallet), is preparing what could become the country's biggest IPO on record, with proceeds targeted at as much as $1.5bn. The listing would also grant investors exposure to GCash's crypto business. Amongst other things, the mobile wallet enables users to convert pesos into stablecoins such as USDC, positioning it as the go-to remittance and digital-dollar rail for tens of millions of Filipinos.

Decentralisation Success: The US House of Representatives has passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which carries a provision barring the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency until 31 December 2030. Having cleared both the House and, earlier, the Senate, the bill now advances to President Donald Trump for his signature.

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.}