Welcome back!

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

tradeXYZ is booming because it cracked open Wall Street's vault: pre-IPO and equities trading, built on perpetual futures.

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

Click on any underlined heading/hyperlink to learn more.

Dollars Diverging

The total value of stablecoins in circulation has barely budged for months, even as onchain settlement volumes keep breaking records. 

The paradox resolves once you look at what changed.

Since the GENIUS Act barred stablecoin issuers from paying interest to holders, the reflex of parking idle cash in a digital dollar has lost its logic. That money has not left the system; it has moved one step along, into tokenised Treasuries and money market funds that are allowed to pay a yield. What remains in stablecoins is increasingly working capital rather than savings: dollars held to be spent, settled, and posted as margin, not to be sat upon. The float is flat because the coins have stopped standing still.

Against this backdrop, one name is still growing. Paxos's Global Dollar, USDG, has added supply while larger rivals tread water, and the reason is instructive. Rather than keeping the interest earned on its reserves, USDG shares it with the networks, exchanges, and wallets that distribute the token. The logic is simple: give participants a direct cut of the economics and they will happily make your coin the default rail.

That is the shape of the next twelve months. The contest is shifting from brand and balance-sheet size to distribution economics, and the market is beginning to split in two. On one side sit the incumbent reserve coins, USDT and USDC, vast and trusted, the dollars people simply hold. On the other, a rising tier of distributor-aligned settlement coins engineered to move, embedding themselves wherever value needs to travel.

This matters well beyond trading. For any business weighing digital dollars for payments or treasury, the question is no longer which token is biggest, but which makes the underlying plumbing cheapest and most efficient, from a fintech settling supplier invoices to a treasurer sweeping cash across borders. A stablecoin that funds its own distribution lowers the cost of moving money for everyone downstream. In a market obsessed with size, the winners may be the dollars content to be infrastructure.

Stablecoin Acquisition: Mastercard has completed its acquisition of BVNK, a stablecoin infrastructure provider. The deal is intended to harness stablecoins to meet real-world demand across cross-border B2B payments, remittances, payouts, settlement, and treasury flows. The payments group is betting that programmable dollars can strip cost and delay from areas where correspondent banking remains slow and expensive.

Money Market: BlackRock has filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to launch the BlackRock Daily Reinvestment Stablecoin Reserve Vehicle, a tokenised money market fund. The product would operate across the Ethereum, Tempo, and Solana blockchains. The move deepens the world's largest asset manager's effort to bring conventional cash-management instruments onchain.

Bitcoin Hack: Mike Belshe, chief executive of BitGo, has challenged Anthropic to hack his Bitcoin wallet worth ~$6.3m. The dare came two days after reports that Anthropic's Claude models appeared to have escaped their sandbox environment and potentially breached other companies. Belshe doubts this really happened and suspects it is a marketing tactic by Anthropic, hence his challenge to test the company's hacking capabilities against a genuine real-world target.

Prediction Markets: Robinhood now earns more from prediction markets than from either equities or crypto, according to its second-quarter 2026 results. Event contracts now account for a fifth of Robinhood's total trading revenue, up from just 2 per cent a year earlier.

Crypto Payments: Emirates, the Gulf's largest airline, has begun accepting cryptocurrency for flight bookings. Customers holding a Crypto.com account can now select Crypto.com Pay at checkout on emirates.com and the Emirates app, with transactions processed in line with UAE regulatory standards.

Tokenised Dinosaurs: A wave of wealthy collectors has pushed prices for dinosaur skeletons and fossil fragments to record levels. Two years ago Citadel's Ken Griffin paid nearly $45m for a stegosaurus skeleton, the most expensive fossil ever sold at auction. In that vein, Jurassic Finance is now bringing Deaton, billed as the first ever tokenised dinosaur skeleton, to the Solana blockchain.

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.}