Welcome back!
Here’s what I’ve got for you this week:
Idle Cash: How Uber leverages Canton for round-the-clock yield.
Crypto Security: Google brings multi-party key security to crypto.
Stablecoin Rails: Meta’s fintech chief on stablecoins & agentic commerce.
The GOAT and ICE just went long crypto, so the priciest trade in finance is now being the last Patagonia vest calling blockchain a fad.
Now, let’s jump right into this week’s newsletter!
Click on any underlined heading/hyperlink to learn more.
Spotlight
Pyongyang’s Piggybank
Last week TraderTraitor, North Korea’s elite state hacking unit, drained roughly $6.3bn from Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.
It is the largest crypto heist on record and by Bloomberg Economics’ reckoning, the haul equals about three-quarters of Pyongyang’s foreign earnings in 2025.
This is not an isolated case. Just weeks earlier, hackers believed to be North Korean took ~$400mn from Bitget. And last year, the same unit lifted $1.5bn from Bybit, a record at the time. Investigators have since found proceeds from the Bitget raid mingled with funds taken from Binance. The pattern is hard to miss: the world’s most prolific hackers are working their way through the industry’s largest vaults.
The conclusion is equally hard to avoid. For conventional and digital assets alike, self custody is now the safer course. That means owning assets directly, not as a claim on someone else’s pooled account. In traditional finance, that means registering securities in your own name or holding physical assets yourself. Onchain, it means holding the private keys to your own wallet.
Here’s why that matters:
Control is ownership. Whether it is shares held in a broker’s pooled account or coins on an exchange, what you own is merely a claim on someone else’s books. Keep the keys, or the shares registered in your own name, and you hold property; hand them over and you hold a promise.
Concentration creates the target. No state hacking unit stages a months-long operation to empty one person’s account or self-custodial wallet. It will gladly do so for a pooled balance worth billions, which is precisely what custodians assemble.
Banks are no safe harbour. Much of global banking still runs on decades-old software and hardware, maintained by a dwindling pool of engineers who understand it. Frontier AI, which can find and exploit flaws at machine speed, turns that legacy system into a threat to the entire banking edifice.
None of this makes self custody risk-free: shares registered in your name must be moved back to a broker before you can sell, physical assets can be lost or stolen, and lose your crypto recovery phrase and there is no help desk to call. But at least those risks are yours to manage, which is more than a custodian can offer. Because in an age of machine-speed theft, a custodian is simply a queue for the next heist.
So step out of the queue and into self custody before you become part of the next haul.
Chart Of The Week
News Bites
Idle Cash: Uber has completed a pilot on the Canton blockchain that lets it move spare cash into a tokenised money market fund and back again around the clock, weekends included. This allows the company to earn a return on idle balances without sacrificing ready access to funds.
Perpetual Futures: NYSE owner ICE struck a deal with Trade[XYZ] to bring Hyperliquid perpetual futures to US regulated markets, taking a stake in the company along the way. ICE joins billionaire investor Stanley Druckenmiller, who recently revealed his own investment in the platform as well.
Crypto Security: Google is previewing Google Multi-Party Compute, a custody system that lets financial institutions hold and move crypto and tokenised assets without any single machine ever holding a complete private key. Alphabet is already using the technology to secure its own digital assets on Ethereum and Solana.
Tokenization Service: DTCC’s Tokenization Service just went live with 34 securities drawn from select large-cap Russell 1000 stocks, ETFs, and US Treasuries, each token backed 1:1 by a security held at DTC and carrying the same legal rights. Tokens can move 24/7 between DTC-registered wallets on Canton and DTCC’s private Besu network, with Stellar and Circle’s Arc expected to follow in 2027.
Tokenised Metals: The London Metal Exchange is exploring whether to turn metal held in its Hong Kong warehouses into digital tokens. The focus would be on off-warrant industrial metals (such as copper and aluminium) that are stored in LME-approved facilities but lack standard exchange-issued title documents (warrants).
Working Paper: BIS Working Paper 1385 compares banks, fintechs, and stablecoins as cross-border payment rails and finds that blockchain transaction fees are generally negligible. However, the fiat conversions on either end, handled by crypto exchanges and other intermediaries, add trading, conversion, and withdrawal fees that can substantially raise the total cost, so fintech money transfer operators remain the cheaper option for now.
Euro Stablecoin: Qivalis, a consortium of 37 European banks across 15 countries including ING, BNP Paribas, and BBVA, has secured an e-money license from the Dutch central bank and says it will begin issuing a euro stablecoin within the next month. That would make it the largest bank-led euro stablecoin to date and a direct challenge to e.g. Circle’s EURC.
Stablecoin Rails: Ginger Baker, Meta’s vice president of fintech and payments, discussed what the company is learning as it explores stablecoin rails at Meridian 2026, the annual conference hosted by the Stellar Development Foundation. She also argued that agentic commerce is closing the last mile between discovery and purchase.
Caught In 4K
Weekly Take
Keks & Giggles
And that's a wrap!
You can reach me anytime over on 𝕏 or drop me a line.
Talk soon!
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.
