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Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️

“The next cycle is gonna be defined by on-chain asset management and what does it mean to be a fiduciary for your customers on chain.”

My guest this week is Anthony Bassili, who runs Coinbase Asset Management. He spent a decade at BlackRock selling institutions the most traditional products in finance, the iShares pension business. Now he sells the same institutions Bitcoin and digital asset strategies. We recorded this deep in the bear market, with Bitcoin down roughly 50% from its November 2025 peak of $126,000.

His big idea is simple. The last cycle settled whether a token is a security. The next one settles a harder question: what does it mean to manage other people’s money on-chain? Whoever answers that first gets to manage the money.

About Anthony Bassili: Anthony Bassili runs Coinbase Asset Management, the institutional asset management arm of Coinbase. He spent ten years at BlackRock in the iShares pension business before joining Coinbase in 2021 with a simple pitch: pensions should hold Bitcoin. He led Coinbase’s institutional business before moving over to run the asset manager, where his team’s backgrounds span BlackRock, Millennium, AQR, and Bridgewater. He is the author of “Get Off Zero,” a paper urging every investor to hold at least a small Bitcoin allocation. He is active on X at @smartestbeta.

“You’re not gonna catch the low. You just need to start allocating and do it consistently over time.”

Why this matters: Bitcoin peaked at $126,000 in November 2025 and is down about 50%. The October 10 leverage wipeout took out $25+ billion and started this bear market. Meanwhile, the incumbents aren’t waiting for the recovery: JPMorgan announced vaults on Kinexys, Grayscale announced on-chain asset management, Bitwise is in, and Anthony expects Fidelity and everyone else to follow. The fight over who gets to be a fiduciary on-chain is starting now, in the bear market, exactly when nobody is watching. This is the map.

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🎯 Jump to the best parts

00:00 The Next Big Crypto Opportunity01:00 Anthony B.'s Journey from BlackRock to Coinbase02:11 Is This a Good Time to Buy Bitcoin?07:16 The Fat Protocol Thesis Is Dead?08:36 Where Does Crypto Value Actually Accrue?12:00 How Bitcoin Yield Works18:07 Coinbase's Stablecoin Credit Strategy23:08 Managing Onchain Credit Risk26:21 The Future of Onchain Asset Management32:56 What Regulators Need to Fix35:08 When Bitcoin Became a Real Asset Class39:23 Lightning Round40:03 What Anthony B. Is Excited About for 202740:15 Stablecoin Credit vs Tokenized Treasuries40:19 Crypto's Most Underrated Narrative41:51 Where to Learn More

Important Links

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonybassili/

* Coinbase Asset Management: https://www.coinbase.com/institutional/asset-management

* X: https://x.com/smartestbeta

Watch or listen now: YouTube • Apple Podcasts

🔒 The full breakdown is for subscribers

Our biggest takeaways from this conversation

1. The next cycle is on-chain asset management

The last four years were spent arguing whether a token is a security. The Clarity Act is codifying the answer. Anthony says the next fight is bigger: what does it mean to be a fiduciary on-chain?

“The next cycle is gonna be defined by on-chain asset management and what does it mean to be a fiduciary for your customers on chain.”

* The test case is DeFi vaults. Lenders park stablecoins permissionlessly, and the dollars get allocated against collateral through smart-contract rules written by engineers. Is that discretionary asset management, with fiduciary duties and custody rules? Or just technology, user beware? Nobody knows yet.

* Hester Peirce’s recent comments on vaults opened the dialogue without settling it. Anthony’s read: that alone is progress. “We did not think that we’d get that kind of treatment back in the Gensler era.”

* The incumbents aren’t waiting: JPMorgan announced vaults on Kinexys, Grayscale announced on-chain asset management, Bitwise is in. “Everyone recognizes in the asset management community from BlackRock down that we need vault infrastructure.”

* Expect the old fight to reignite: “not your keys, not your coins” collides directly with “if you want risk management, I need discretion over some of your assets.”

What to do with this: vaults are a settled technology and an unsettled legal category. Watch the fiduciary framework, not the tech. That’s where the next cycle’s winners get decided.

Related reads:→ Banks went onchain

2. Coinbase’s stablecoin fund is 80% off-chain

In April 2026, CBAM launched CUSHY, its stablecoin high-yield credit strategy. Investors subscribe with stablecoins, and the fund shares are tokenized by Superstate on Base, Solana, and Ethereum mainnet. The crypto-native wrapper hides a very traditional core, and that’s the point.

“Everything in crypto is floating rate.”

* On-chain and off-chain credit are two parallel worlds that haven’t intersected. On-chain: floating rate, transparent, crypto-backed (staking, lending pools, basis-trade products). Off-chain: fixed rate, longer duration, wrapped in funds that don’t work on-chain.

* There isn’t enough high-quality credit on-chain to fill a fund that wants to be billions. So the portfolio is 80% traditional structured credit (CLOs, trade finance, asset-backed securities, receivables) and 20% tokenized, diversified across hundreds of names with 90 to 100 day liquidity.

* The core tenet: only work with originators, like Apollo, that are on a tokenization pathway. When the two worlds connect, CBAM can hold the tokenized or the traditional version of the same asset and arb the spread between them.

* And on-chain leverage cuts both ways. Looped positions in tokenized credit can unwind and force selling: “I may choose to just wait for the unwind to happen in the on-chain market and then go in and buy everything at a discount.”

What to do with this: treat the 80/20 as a live gauge of tokenization’s real progress. When that ratio flips, the two credit worlds have actually merged. Until then, the alpha is in straddling both.

Related reads:→ Same loans, better rails: the tokenized private credit opportunity

3. Tokens are cheap equity, and that’s why protocols don’t earn

Two weeks before this episode we published our case that the fat protocol thesis is dead: ten years on, value hasn’t accrued to the base layers. Ethereum earned about $1,500 from Robinhood’s launch on $600 to 700 million of daily volume. I put the thesis to a man whose employer is the strongest counterargument, the biggest distribution platform in crypto.

“It’s very cheap equity. It’s probably the lowest cost of capital financing you could utilize.”

* His explanation of why protocols don’t earn is the sharpest I’ve heard: tokens aren’t a business model, they’re financing. Protocols pay customer acquisition costs with tokens created out of thin air, granting distribution platforms hundreds of millions in tokens for priority access to customers.

* TVL grows, usage grows, customers grow. But “where does the revenue switch turn on?” The moment it does, a competitor with a fresh token undercuts you.

* And the thesis eats itself: crypto was supposed to be a public good, nearly free. A protocol that captures enormous value stops being the thing it claimed to be.

* The direction of travel: “it’s the distribution platforms who have the customer relationship” that accrue value. His honest caveat: jury’s still out. Some once crypto-native protocols are now integrating into fintechs and brokerages serving hundreds of millions of customers.

What to do with this: when you underwrite a token, ask who pays the revenue and who owns the customer. If the answer to both is “someone else,” you’re holding the financing, not the business.

Related reads:→ There Won’t Be Another Cycle: the fat protocol thesis is dead

4. How Bitcoin pays you without being sold

Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️

“Now my balance sheet as an originator drops from a week’s worth of production to one loan’s worth of production.”

Mike Manning, Head of Institutional Finance, Ava Labs

That is the most useful way I have heard someone explain the promise of onchain private credit.

Private credit has grown to roughly $2 trillion. Yet many facilities still run on spreadsheets, monthly reports, emailed PDFs, and weekly funding cycles. An originator may make a loan today and wait days for the money that funds it.

I sat down with Juan Montero, co-founder and CEO of Fence, Anant Matai, Investments & Product at Grove, and Mike Manning, Head of Institutional Finance at Ava Labs. We talked about what changes when the loan and the money move on the same rails, why most tokenization still stops at the wrapper, and what code should never be trusted to decide.

This is a playbook for building working private-credit rails, not a podcast about putting old assets inside new tokens.

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Why this matters now

The first wave of tokenization changed the ownership wrapper. A fund share or bond became a token, but the underlying loans, servicing, covenants, and cash movements often stayed in the old system.

The second wave is trying to change the operating model. A loan is created digitally. Its legal documents point to an authoritative record. Eligibility and covenant rules can be checked continuously. Repayment can arrive in digital cash and map back to that exact loan.

That distinction separates a faster transfer rail from a faster credit business. Our 51 Insights report estimates that working rails can compress funding from 5 to 15 days to 1 to 3 days, distributions from T+5 to T+30 to near real time, and refinancing from 4 to 8 weeks to 1 to 2 weeks. The loan does not become safer because it is onchain. The capital around it can move with less waiting and less clerical work.

About the guests

* Juan Montero is co-founder and CEO of Fence. The company builds operating infrastructure for asset-backed finance, from loan onboarding and borrowing-base calculations to covenants, cash flows, and reporting. Fence says it administers about $1.5 billion across live facilities.

* Anant Matai works across investments and product at Grove, an institutional credit protocol backed by Sky. Grove allocates onchain capital to tokenized credit and provides financing against eligible digital assets.

“The lenders are here ... what we’re really looking for is that end to end originators to originate assets that are on chain and borrow against them on chain.”

* Mike Manning is Head of Institutional Finance at Ava Labs, which develops the Avalanche network. He previously led blockchain and digital-currency work at Amazon and held roles at Provenance and Symbiont.

“This is a settlement and operational technology. It’s not a judgment technology.”

The discussion was part of Same Loans, Better Rails: The Institutional Rebuild of Private Credit, presented by 51 Insights and Avalanche.

Chapters

00:00 The $2 Trillion Private Credit Problem00:56 Meet the Panel02:38 Why Private Credit Still Runs on Spreadsheets06:38 Blockchain Without the Hype09:44 Bringing Institutional Credit Onchain12:41 Tokenization vs Onchain Lifecycle Management15:04 The Money Rail Meets the Asset Rail17:28 How Banks Save 80% in Operational Costs19:06 Can Blockchain Prevent Double Pledging?21:59 Is Regulation Holding Blockchain Back?25:01 Why Banks Will Adopt This26:50 Which Blockchain Should Institutions Use?29:00 What Really Needs to Go Onchain?31:56 The Future of Onchain Credit34:13 Final Thoughts

Important links

* Event page and guest details

* 51 Insights report: The tokenized private credit opportunity

* Fence case study: BBVA and Payflow

* Grove Allocator

* Grove’s $250 million Avalanche deployment target

* Avalanche for institutions

1. The wrapper is not the product

Thesis: A tokenized claim is useful. A digitally native loan lifecycle changes the economics.

Mike drew a clean line between putting an ownership wrapper onchain and moving issuance, servicing, covenants, repayment, and settlement onto the same system.

“Asset-backed finance and securitization is composable finance without a composable stack.”

A wrapper gives investors a new way to hold an asset. It does not automatically change how the loan is originated, checked, funded, serviced, or enforced.

* The underlying loan needs a durable digital identity.

* The credit agreement needs machine-readable eligibility, covenant, and waterfall rules.

* Cash movements need to reconcile to the same loan record.

* The legal documents need to say which record controls ownership.

What to do with this: When someone pitches a tokenized credit product, ask where the underlying loan, covenants, servicing events, and repayments live. If the answer is still email, PDF, and spreadsheet, the token changed the wrapper, not the operating model.

Related read: The tokenized private credit opportunity

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2. Capital velocity is the business case

Thesis: The most valuable output is not a token. It is less time between creating an eligible loan and receiving the capital that funds it.

In a weekly borrowing-base process, an originator may carry days of new loans on its own balance sheet. If each loan enters the facility as soon as it passes the agreed rules, that inventory can fall sharply.

“Now my balance sheet as an originator drops from a week’s worth of production to one loan’s worth of production.”

“It turns a capital intensive model into a capital light model.”

Juan used a Fence facility with BBVA as the proof point. Fence’s published case study says the system handles 100,000 transactions a month, reduced interest expense by about 30%, and increased the advance rate by more than 10%. Fence separately reports up to 80% lower operating overhead and up to 40% lower cost of capital across clients. These are company-reported outcomes and should be read that way.

What to do with this: Measure idle funding days, reconciliation hours, advance rates, and the cost of carrying unfunded loans. Those numbers tell you whether new rails changed the business.

Related read: Inside JPMorgan’s $3T tokenization machine

3. One ledger does not stop every double pledge

Thesis: A ledger can prevent two claims against one digital asset only when that asset is the authoritative legal record from origination.

The panel discussed the alleged double and triple pledging in the collapses of First Brands and Tricolor. A shared record can make duplicate claims visible, but only inside the system that everyone recognizes.

“You can prevent double pledging of an asset once that it is on chain, but then the question is, well, how do I know the asset that’s on chain is the original one?”

A digital twin can still be pledged on one chain, another chain, and a traditional facility. A signature can prove who submitted a record. It cannot prove that the offchain asset exists or that no competing claim sits elsewhere.

* Origination must create the first authoritative asset record.

* Legal documents must define control and priority.

* All relevant lenders need access to the same ownership state.

* Servicing data and cash need to reconcile to the asset continuously.

What to do with this: Ask which record has legal priority, whether the same receivable can still exist offchain, and what happens when a servicer or borrower disputes the data.

Related read: DTCC’s $20T October debut

4. Lenders are ready. Originators are the bottleneck

Thesis: Capital is already willing to move onchain. The missing piece is a deeper supply of loans that are created, funded, and serviced onchain from the start.

“The lenders are here ... what we’re really looking for is that end to end originators to originate assets that are on chain and borrow against them on chain.”

Grove shows the allocator side of the market. As of August 2026, its site shows $2.80 billion in TVL and 16 active allocations. Its first Sky mandate put more than $1 billion into Janus Henderson’s JAAA strategy. On Avalanche, Grove announced a $250 million deployment target, which is different from saying the full amount has already been deployed.

The harder step is moving beneath the fund token. Originators need loan data, documents, controls, servicing events, and payment rails that lenders can rely on without rebuilding the deal by hand.

What to do with this: Build the allocator roadmap around originators who can create a legally native loan record and keep it current. Separate capital allocated to tokenized wrappers from capital funding digitally native loans.

Related read: Same loans, better rails

5. Code should run operations, not judge credit

Thesis: Smart contracts can execute the agreed rules. They should not decide whether a borrower deserves capital.

“Code should do ninety nine percent, we should flag that one percent.”

“This is a settlement and operational technology. It’s not a judgment technology.”

There is plenty to automate: eligibility checks, concentration limits, payment status, waterfalls, borrowing bases, and defined covenants. Future-receivables facilities are especially clean examples. A missed payment can remove a receivable from the borrowing base, while a digital-cash repayment maps to that loan and releases capital for the next one.

Underwriting, audited accounts, change-of-control analysis, bespoke waivers, and enforcement remain human work. The system also needs a controlled way to handle exceptions. A rigid smart contract that cannot process a sensible waiver creates a new operating problem.

What to do with this: Draw a line through the workflow. Put deterministic checks and cash movements below it. Keep credit judgment, legal interpretation, and exception approval above it, with a clear audit trail between the two.

Related read: Where automation ends in tokenized private credit

6. Serious counterparties beat endless chain choice

Thesis: Institutions choose a market, not a feature list.

Mike argued that optionality can become fragmentation. A bank does not care that a product can move across 100 networks if the counterparties, cash rails, legal arrangements, and liquidity it needs are scattered across all of them.

“What opportunity through optionality does is it ... institutionalizes fragmentation.”

Juan and Anant added the practical tests: resilience, uptime, security, observable infrastructure, builders who can support the product, and reliable on- and off-ramps. Distribution comes from depth in a room that serious participants already want to enter.

What to do with this: Choose infrastructure by the counterparties it can convene, the legal and cash workflows it can support, and the reliability it has proved. Maximum portability is a poor substitute for one market that works.

Related read: Banks went onchain

The bottom line

The skeptic has a strong case. A bad loan does not become a good loan because its data is onchain. Enforcement still happens in courts. Bespoke credit still needs judgment. And one important question from the discussion went unanswered after the connection dropped: how does an allocator offer fast withdrawals when the underlying loans may take weeks to sell? Better records do not remove the liquidity mismatch.

But that is not the main claim these systems need to prove. They need to show that a good loan can be funded, monitored, paid, and transferred with less idle cash and less clerical work. Fence’s live facilities suggest that operating gain can be large. Grove shows that institutional capital is already willing to use the rails. Avalanche is betting that the market will gather around a small number of networks with enough depth to support it.

Underwriting decides whether the loan deserves capital. The rails decide how long that capital sits still.

That’s all for now, folks.

– Marc & Team

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Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️

“We did over $1.2 trillion of onchain trading volume across spot and perps.”

One app on Solana processed $1.2 trillion in trading volume. Not an exchange with servers and order books. An app that runs entirely on a blockchain. Its president spent years at KKR, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, before he switched sides.

His name is Xiao-Xiao J. Zhu, President of Jupiter, the biggest DeFi platform on Solana.

At KKR he led the firm’s digital assets and blockchain strategy. Now he runs a company with 20+ onchain products, $3 billion in TVL, and a plan to put US stocks, a stablecoin, a neobank, and AI agents on the same rails. His core argument is simple: the value in crypto has moved from blockchains to applications. He calls it the fat app thesis. And he thinks onchain finance is still 10x to 100x smaller than its real market.

This isn’t a recap. It’s the playbook: the six best ideas from the conversation, the exact quotes, and what to do with each one.

About Xiao-Xiao J. Zhu: Xiao-Xiao J. Zhu is President of Jupiter, Solana’s largest onchain finance platform. Before Jupiter, he was Digital Operating Partner at KKR, where he led technology value creation across the portfolio and ran the firm’s global digital assets and blockchain strategy, backing crypto funds and companies including Anchorage Digital. He has seen both sides: how value gets built in traditional private equity, and how it gets built onchain.

“The biggest companies in crypto are basically centralized exchanges or market makers who are extremely intransparent and are running on centralized databases.”

Why this matters: Jupiter is what the next generation of financial institutions might look like. It started as a DEX aggregator three or four years ago. Today it is the number one trading venue and the number one TVL protocol on Solana, it launched a stablecoin backed by BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, and in May it put regulated US equities onchain with Jump Trading and Securitize. Robinhood, Coinbase and OKX already route through its APIs. We recorded this live at Proof of Talk in Paris. Here it is in six ideas.

🎯 Jump to the best parts

[00:00] Cold open: $1.2 trillion and the road map[00:30] Live from Proof of Talk in Paris[01:05] From KKR to the biggest DeFi app on Solana[02:26] The inflection point: blockchains finally got fast[03:12] The fat app thesis[03:43] What Jupiter is: 20+ products, $1.2T in volume[04:44] Jupiter Lend, JLP, and their own stablecoin[05:52] Why “onchain finance,” not DeFi[07:56] The 100x gap: millions of users vs. Binance’s 300M[09:00] The two unlocks: RWAs and agentic finance[10:31] Agents don’t do KYC[11:39] The Jupiter agent kit is live[12:37] How institutions plug in today[14:29] Bitwise and up to $1B into Jupiter Lend[15:11] Jupiter Global: the onchain neobank[15:40] Tokenized US equities with Jump and Securitize[17:07] What tokenized stocks actually unlock[17:52] The road map: super app, neobank, JupNet[18:38] Wrap

Important Links

* Jupiter: https://jup.ag

* Securitize / Jump / Jupiter tokenized equities announcement: PR Newswire

* Jupiter Lend x Bitwise (Ethena market): PR Newswire

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xiao-xiao-j-zhu-12078730

Watch or listen now: YouTube • Apple Podcasts

🔒 The full breakdown is for subscribers

Our biggest takeaways from this conversation

1. The value moved from blockchains to apps.

For years the money in crypto was made at the protocol layer. You bought the chain, not the things built on it. Zhu says that flipped, and it flipped because blockchains finally got fast enough to build real products on.

“Value was initially in crypto created at the protocol level, at the blockchain level, to now really an era of the fat app thesis.”

The irony he points out: everyone came to crypto for decentralization, but the biggest crypto companies are centralized exchanges and market makers running on ordinary databases. Not because they were lazy. Five to seven years ago, chains simply couldn’t handle the volume.

* The inflection came in the last two to three years, when Solana and newer L1s and L2s solved most of the scalability problems.

* The result is a new generation of apps like Jupiter and Hyperliquid: permissionless, self-custodial, and built fully onchain, at global scale.

* The question he thinks matters now: what applications, brands and user experiences can you build at scale on top of blockchains? Not which chain wins.

What to do with this: if your digital asset exposure is all protocol-level, you own the last cycle’s thesis. Look at where usage and fees actually accrue now: the application layer.

Related reads:→ 184: Kraken is buying DeFi

This ad could belong to you. 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline and revenue. We position you among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers.

2. Jupiter is Robinhood, rebuilt fully onchain.

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Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️

“Waiting and seeing is not a strategy.”

A senior partner and global banking lead at BCG just put a number on the thing every bank CEO is nervous about: up to 15% of bank revenue and 30% of profits at risk by 2035. But the opportunity is bigger than the threat.

His name is Christian Schmid, Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG, where he leads the global banking business. He is the lead author of BCG’s biggest ever digital assets report, The Future of Digital Assets.

He calls the whole shift the iPhone of money, and he thinks the real fight is not stablecoins versus deposits. It is who owns the screen the customer taps.

About Christian Schmid: Christian Schmid is a Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG, based in Zurich, where he leads the firm’s global commercial banking, capital markets and investment banking business and chairs the board of BCG Expand. He trained as an engineer at ETH, came up through IBM, and has spent 27 years advising the CEOs of the world’s biggest banks. He is the lead author of The Future of Digital Assets.

“That’s probably the most interesting topic I have seen in my whole consulting career, which is twenty seven years almost by now.”

Why this matters: This is the year banks stopped watching from the sidelines. The GENIUS Act gave stablecoins a US rulebook, the market is now north of $300B, and the biggest US banks, JPMorgan, Citi and Bank of America, are building a shared tokenized-deposit network aimed at around 2027. BCG puts the tokenization prize near $88 trillion. So when the person who advises these CEOs tells you what he actually thinks, in plain language, it is worth 40 minutes. Here it is in six ideas.

🎯 Jump to the best parts

00:50 Introduction01:59 Why BCG Published Its Biggest Digital Assets Report04:13 How Banking Conversations Have Changed05:46 Is Tokenization Bigger Than Digital Banking?08:13 Why Banks Could Lose 30% of Their Profits13:08 Are Digital Assets Replacing Banks?16:15 The Three Types of Digital Assets20:08 Where Banks Should Invest23:20 The Biggest Real World Use Cases26:00 What Banks Are Actually Doing27:30 AI vs Digital Assets30:18 Why Waiting Is Not a Strategy32:03 Four Futures for Digital Assets35:14 Stablecoins vs Tokenized Deposits37:41 The Future of Programmable Money38:36 Lightning Round39:50 Where To Learn More

Important Links

* BCG profile: https://www.bcg.com/about/people/experts/christian-schmid

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/schmidchristianzuerich

🔒 The full breakdown is for PRO subscribers

Our biggest takeaways from this conversation

1. The threat is real, the opportunity is bigger

Most consultant reports are built to scare you into buying a project. Schmid’s does the opposite. He gives you the scary number, then tells you not to over-index on it.

“Whether this number is completely correct or not is actually a bit irrelevant, I would say. But there is a threat.”

The threat comes in two parts. Banks lose fee income and net interest margin as deposits and transactions drift toward stablecoins. Then they pay again to run two sets of rails at once.

“They also need to maintain the dual rails, which increases the cost base for those banks. And so it’s almost a bit a double whammy.”

* The model: up to 15% of revenue and 30% of profit at risk by 2035, versus a world where digital assets barely develop.

* The catch he keeps repeating: it is a simulation, not a forecast. The point is the size of the stake, not the decimal.

* The upside is the part banks miss. In BCG’s numbers the biggest wins are in asset management and trading. Tokenization makes it easier to wrap more assets, and trading could need less capital and liquidity, which lifts return on equity. BCG pegs the trading upside at up to a 4% RoE bump or $1B+ for an average G-SIB.

What to do with this: don’t argue about whether it’s 30% or 12%. Run the model on your own book. The industry number hides a huge spread from one bank to the next.

Related reads:→ BCG’s new digital asset playbook: The $88 Trillion Question

This ad could belong to you. 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline and revenue. We position you among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers.

2. Stop calling it crypto

The word “crypto” hides the most important distinction in the whole report. Schmid splits digital assets into three: tokenized securities, digital money, and cryptocurrency. They are not the same animal, and they don’t have the same future.

“Cryptocurrency per se is a very different thing because it’s not backed with any value, and that’s very different from digital money or digital real world assets.”

* Tokenized securities and digital money look a lot like what we already have, just in a new wrapper. In 20 years, he says, no one will care whether a security was tokenized or not.

* Cryptocurrency itself he barely grows in the model, roughly 2%. His line: “in today’s world that’s where the money is made,” but it “will not be so significant going forward.”

* The bigger point is to stop thinking in use cases and start seeing the technology as one general-purpose thing. That’s the “iPhone of money.”

“The iPhone of money, which combines all the technologies in one thing through the programmability, through DLT.”

What to do with this: when someone says “our crypto strategy,” ask which of the three they mean. If they can’t answer, they don’t have a strategy, they have a headline.

Related reads:→ 186: banks went on-chain

3. The real fight is who owns the screen, not the instrument

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Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️

“And they fail to see that sometimes the madness is actually the method.”

Germany is losing about 10,000 factory jobs a month. Most people call that an energy problem. My guest this week says that’s the wrong way to look at it. He thinks it’s the result of other countries’ trade policy, and Europe has no answer for it.

His name is Michael Every, Global Strategist at Rabobank. The day Trump won again, he wrote that the US would “go back a century or two” in how it runs its economy. Tariffs. The government acting like an investment bank. A new spheres-of-influence foreign policy he calls the “Donroe Doctrine.” He called all of it before it happened.

His big idea is simple. Stop asking what GDP will be next year. Start asking what GDP is for.

This isn’t a recap. It’s the playbook: the six best ideas from the conversation, the exact quotes, and what to do with each one.

POLL: When you look at US policy chaos, what do you see?

About Michael Every: Michael Every is Global Strategist at Rabobank, where he analyses major financial and geopolitical developments for RaboResearch. Based in Asia for much of his career, he is one of the few sell-side strategists who reads tariffs, chip bans, sanctions, and stablecoins as a single toolkit of national power rather than separate policy files. He publishes daily and is active on X at @TheMichaelEvery.

“Economic statecraft is when you look at every single tool that you have as part of a toolkit, which collectively can be used to gain national power in a zero sum international environment.”

Why this matters: Every says we now get “three or four headlines” a day that each would have been the whole story five years ago. Europe is heading into its own trade war with China, and this China is stronger than the one Trump first took on. The Iran talks run on 60-day clocks that he thinks lead back to war. And the US has written its goals straight into its national security strategy: biggest economy, strongest military, energy dominance, AI dominance, factories back home. If your models treat these as separate stories, you’re reading the wrong map. This is the fix.

🎯 Jump to the best parts

00:00 Why the U.S. Entered the Iran Conflict00:46 Introduction01:28 Economic Policy vs. Economic Statecraft03:36 America's Grand Strategy05:48 Why Tariffs Are Back06:57 America, China & Europe08:35 The Iran Conflict Explained14:57 Taiwan & Semiconductor Geopolitics16:45 Europe's Biggest Strategic Weakness21:47 What Is GDP Actually For?22:59 Do Tariffs Really Work?24:56 Europe's Structural Crisis29:41 Why Michael Is Optimistic32:33 Is Free Trade Broken?35:59 Why Inequality Keeps Growing37:24 Lightning Round42:22 Where To Learn More

Important Links

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-every-38983214

* RaboResearch: https://www.rabobank.com/knowledge/our-experts/011085368/michael-every

* X: https://x.com/TheMichaelEvery

Watch or listen now: YouTube • Apple Podcasts

This ad could belong to you. 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline and revenue. We position you among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers.

Our biggest takeaways from this conversation

1. Ask what GDP is for

This sounds academic. It isn’t. Economic policy is one person turning one dial for one goal. Statecraft is every dial at once, all pointed at national power. Miss the difference and a set of planned moves looks like chaos.

“The question that you ask if you are using economic statecraft is what is GDP for? Not what is GDP going to be to 2.1. What is GDP for? If you’re not asking that question, you’re not doing economic statecraft.”

* Policy is one tool for one job: tweak a tax, or raise rates to defend the currency. One dial.

* Statecraft turns every dial at once, tax, money, budgets, currency, energy, defense, transport, all aimed at beating other countries.

* His sharpest line: “confusion and bewilderment can actually be a deliberate policy.” Sometimes the market’s confusion is the goal, not an accident.

What to do with this: when a headline looks irrational, ask which national-power goal it could serve before pricing it as noise. If you can’t find one, then it’s noise.

Related reads:→ How the U.S. Weaponized the Dollar (And Stablecoins), with Eddie Fishman

This ad could belong to you. 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline and revenue. We position you among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers.

2. America is going back a century

Every wrote this the day Trump won again, and says he was the first on Wall Street to call it. The point isn’t that tariffs are new. It’s that the years without them were the odd ones out.

“Fasten your seatbelt because the US is going to go back a century or two in terms of how it does things going forward.”

* Tariffs are “as American as apple pie”: the only era without significant US tariffs was the last few decades.

“We are done with POCs, we’re done with experiments. This is about real world assets moving on real rails to make a real difference.” - Nadine Chakar

Last week, July 15, DTCC processed the first live tokenized stock, ETF, and Treasury trades in its history. Not a sandbox. Real shares, real cash, inside the depository that holds $115 trillion in assets and settles four quadrillion dollars of securities a year.

Weeks before that switch flipped, we sat down with the person who flipped it: Nadine Chakar, Global Head of DTCC Digital Assets.

Joining her: Christian Schmid and Roy Choudhury, the BCG senior partners behind “The Future of Digital Assets in Finance”, the firm’s biggest digital asset report yet. Its core claim: this is an infrastructure transition, not an innovation theme, and up to 30% of bank profits are exposed by 2035.

What follows isn’t a recap. It’s the operating picture: what actually went live, what scales first, and the moves BCG is telling bank boards to make now.

📊 Get the report we co-hosted this webinar around: BCG’s full 2026 flagship on digital assets, with the models behind the $88 trillion forecast.

About the guests: Nadine Chakar runs DTCC Digital Assets. Before that she was CEO of Securrency (acquired by DTCC in 2023) and built State Street Digital after running State Street Global Markets, close to 30 years in capital markets plumbing. Roy Choudhury leads BCG’s capital markets practice in North America and has worked with the CFTC on US digital asset policy. Christian Schmid leads BCG’s global banking business from Zurich and has advised banks for 27 years.

“It’s really like driving on the Autobahn and changing the wheels at the same time.” - Nadine Chakar

Why this matters: The three things Nadine calls the “Holy Trinity” converged in eight months.

* Infrastructure: DTCC, Nasdaq and NYSE all moved into tokenized securities.

* Digital cash: stablecoins passed $300B and a coalition of major banks is launching a shared tokenized deposit platform.

* Regulation: the SEC’s December no-action letter gave DTCC a three-year runway, on top of the GENIUS and Clarity Acts.

That’s why 50+ firms, from BlackRock to JPMorgan to Citadel Securities, are now testing live trades ahead of the October launch. The ambiguity phase is over.

🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline and revenue. We produce institutional-grade research that positions you as the authority in your category, then distribute it to 100,000+ decision-makers.

🎯 Jump to the best parts

00:00 Will DTCC Tokenize $50 Trillion?01:00 Introduction02:37 Why DTCC Is Building New Market Rails04:25 Live Tokenization Starts07:30 Why This Isn't Another Pilot11:24 How Banks View Tokenization17:15 The Digital Asset Landscape Explained20:32 Where The Biggest Opportunities Are25:26 What's Stopping Adoption?32:31 Why Banks And Crypto Must Work Together37:33 BCG's $88 Trillion Prediction42:11 Why The Future Is Multi Chain48:18 Risk, Compliance & Smart Contracts52:13 How Small Banks Should Respond57:42 Lightning Round58:59 Final Thoughts

Important Links

* 📊 The BCG report: The Future of Digital Assets in Finance

* Nadine Chakar: LinkedIn

* Roy Choudhury: LinkedIn

* Chris Schmid: LinkedIn

* DTCC Digital Assets: dtcc.com/digital-assets

* Our breakdown of the report: The $88 trillion question

Watch or listen now: YouTube • Apple Podcasts

🔒 The full breakdown is for PRO subscribers. This time, thanks to BCG, it’s free.

Our biggest takeaways from this conversation

1. This is an infrastructure transition, not a crypto bet.

Chris has advised banks for 27 years. His frame for what’s happening isn’t the dot-com boom, it’s telecoms moving from circuit-switched to packet-switched networks: a full rebuild of the rails that took twenty-plus years and quietly decided who captured the profit pool.

“There is no reason to get very nervous right now, but really a reason to do strategy and to think hard where to invest.” - Christian Schmid

* BCG’s model: up to 15% of bank revenues and 30% of profits exposed by 2035 as money, assets, and settlement become programmable.

* The pattern Chris has seen twice before (internet, neobanks): “we overestimate them in the short term, but we underestimate them in the long term.”

* The open question isn’t direction. It’s speed, and “who is gonna pay in the end.”

What to do with this: Stop asking “is tokenization real?” Ask: which of our revenue lines sit on rails that are being replaced?

Related reads:→ BCG’s new digital asset playbook: the $88 trillion question

2. Atomic settlement is a downgrade.

The crypto-native dream is instant, trade-by-trade settlement. The woman who runs the actual depository says the math doesn’t work, and the numbers she uses to prove it are the most clarifying in the whole conversation.

“Just in the US market alone, there’s $115 trillion in assets, and we settle four quadrillion dollars worth of securities a year. I’ve had to Google how many zeros are in a quadrillion in order to wrap my head around that.” - Nadine Chakar

“We are so efficient that we net 98% of our trades. So there’s not enough money on the planet that would allow us to take all that money and settle it in real time gross settlement.” - Nadine Chakar

* Netting compresses 98% of gross obligations. Full atomic settlement would require pre-funding volumes that exceed available liquidity, globally.

* DTCC’s design choice: digital and traditional shares share one CUSIP, so liquidity never fragments between the old rail and the new one.

* The new rails supplement the old, they don’t replace them. “It took us fifty-five years to get to where we are today.”

What to do with this: When a tokenization pitch promises atomic settlement as the headline benefit, ask what happens to netting. If there’s no answer, it’s a demo, not infrastructure.

Related reads:→ Wall Street is tokenizing itself

3. Collateral is tokenization’s first super app.

Forget retail tokenized stocks. All three guests, independently, pointed at the same unglamorous corner of finance as the place tokenization pays off first: collateral and repo.

“The biggest super app right now for tokenization is around collateral. The ability of moving money at the speed of the network, to be able to pretty much mark to market in real time, that reduces a lot of capital, the cost of capital.” - Nadine Chakar

* Trillions of dollars in derivatives margin move between counterparties every day; the US Treasury repo market alone runs above $1 trillion.

* These are concentrated markets: “15 to 20 counterparties drive a huge amount of volume” (Roy). A handful of firms agreeing is enough to flip the whole market.

* 24/7 markets change risk itself: a weekend crisis no longer means waiting until Monday to cover exposure.

* Lightning-round verdict: asked what scales first, collateral/repo or fund distribution, Roy didn’t hesitate: collateral and repo.

What to do with this: Track intraday repo and tokenized collateral volumes, not tokenized equity headlines. That’s where the adoption flywheel actually starts.

Related reads:→ Inside JP Morgan’s $3T tokenization machine

📊 The full collateral and repo analysis is in the report. BCG breaks down the value case business line by business line. Download “The Future of Digital Assets in Finance” →

4. $88 trillion assumes just 16% penetration.

BCG’s forecast is the most bullish we’ve tracked from any major consultancy. So I asked Chris directly how they got there. His answer was refreshingly unguarded.

“You can truly debate whether this should be sixteen in ten years from now or whether it’s like eight percent. We don’t have a crystal ball. I would take it with a grain of salt. It’s not the absolute truth, but simply, 16%, it’s not unthinkable.” - Christian Schmid

* The mechanics: 16% of roughly $300 trillion in real-world assets tokenized by 2035, with exponential growth toward the end, and penetration differentiated by asset class (bonds and commodities high, native tokenized equities low).

* Today’s ladder runs a factor of ten per layer: crypto in the trillions, tokenized money around $300B, tokenized RWAs a rounding error against $300T.

* Nadine’s counter is telling: “I’d be happy with a trillion in the next couple of years... if it’s seven, it’s eighty, it’s a hundred, it really doesn’t matter.” Momentum matters, the point estimate doesn’t.

What to do with this: Don’t debate the number, use the scenario. If 16% happens, what does it do to your trading ROE, your NIM, your fund ops? That’s the exercise BCG is actually selling.

Related reads:→ The $400 trillion migration, with Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo

5. The winners will be structural orchestrators.

Every chain wants to be the standard. DTCC is refusing to pick one, and that refusal is the strategy.

“The clients don’t care. So in the end, those institutions that can shield all this complexity from clients will actually win.”

* DTCC is already live or building on Canton, Stellar, and Besu, with a harmonization layer on top so assets move between chains without fragmenting liquidity or data.

* The hard problem isn’t settlement, it’s data: every chain treats data differently, and someone still has to process dividends, interest, and corporate actions on an Apple share trading across multiple chains.

* Roy’s end state: a multi-chain world held together by shared standards, “not one chain that conquers it all.”

What to do with this: In any digital asset strategy, separate the bet on chains (unknowable) from the bet on orchestration (structural). The second is where durable margin lives.

Related reads:→ DTCC’s $20T October debut

6. Risk management is becoming code.

The least discussed chapter of the report may be the most consequential for how banks are actually run: AML checks, transfer limits, and freeze authority move from post-trade processes into the token itself.

“A lot of the risk processes that are done offline today can now be integrated within code... You could have risk by design integrated within the core of some of these infrastructures.” - Roy Choudhury

* DTCC’s tokens are “compliance aware”: whitelisting, blacklisting, and risk logic embedded in the smart contract, not bolted on afterward.

* New risk classes come with it: smart contract risk, cyber, and quantum, which BCG and DTCC/Euroclear have started codifying into a formal risk taxonomy.

* Chris’s honest caveat: code enforces rules strictly, but crises need discretion. “Here it’s put in code, and I think that’s something which is not completely solved yet.”

What to do with this: If you’re building or buying tokenization infrastructure, ask one question: where does human discretion re-enter the system in a crisis? Nobody has fully answered it yet.

Related reads:→ 12 signals the ambiguity is over

Bottom line

The skeptic’s case writes itself, and the guests made half of it for you: ten years of “innovation via press release,” tokenized RWAs still a factor of 10,000 smaller than the asset pool they’re supposed to absorb, client adoption admitted to be “early stages,” and BCG’s own author saying the headline number could plausibly be half. Banks also have a louder fire alarm ringing: AI ranks above digital assets on nearly every board agenda Roy sees.

But that case quietly conceded its central point this week. The debate was never really about whether tokenization works, it was about whether the core of the system would move. On July 15, the depository holding $115 trillion processed live tokenized trades with the largest firms on Wall Street, on a regulatory runway the SEC already granted. When the deepest, most conservative node in global finance switches rails, “wait and see” stops being the safe option and becomes the expensive one.

The infrastructure question is settled. The only thing left to price is the timeline.

📊 One more time, because it’s worth your weekend: the full BCG flagship report behind this conversation, including the risk taxonomy and the business-line impact models. Download “The Future of Digital Assets in Finance” →

That’s all for now, folks.

– Marc & Team

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 51insights.substack.com

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Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️

“Nobody really wants to talk about the hedge that all the buildup of data centers is.”

Stephen Messer thinks the trillion-dollar data center buildout makes sense even if the frontier labs never earn it back, because a stockpile of general-purpose GPUs is a strategic asset the day China moves on Taiwan. He puts it plainly: even at a 3% probability, those chips are “worth gold.” Nobody in the market is pricing the buildout that way.

Stephen is worth listening to on calls like this. Last time he sat in that chair, he told us large language models would end up like web browsers: free, everywhere, and worthless as a moat. That’s roughly what happened. He invented affiliate marketing, sold LinkShare for $425 million, and has spent 18 years building Collective[i], an AI company that predicts economic outcomes instead of next words. He wrote up the pricing side of his argument as “Peak Token” on his blog, and jokes he’s been in witness protection from frontier-lab investors ever since.

This one is a playbook, not a podcast: why token pricing power is collapsing, what the forward-deployed engineer push is really about, and the one question a CEO should ask before spending an AI budget.

About Stephen Messer: Stephen is co-founder and vice chairman of Collective[i], one of the earliest AI companies (founded 2008), which trains models on pooled, proprietary transaction data to predict economic outcomes: which deals close, which buyers are real, what demand does next. Before that he co-founded LinkShare, effectively inventing affiliate marketing, and sold it to Rakuten for $425 million. He publishes two posts a week at reloadnyc.com.

“If your gap and the premium you’re asking people to pay for a language model disappears in two weeks, but it took you a year to make, that is not the sign of a moat that is going to be defensible.”

Why this matters: The enterprise revolt against token pricing went public last week. Palantir’s Alex Karp told CNBC that CEOs are “livid,” paying for “tokens that create no value” while handing their proprietary data to the labs charging them. Uber reportedly burned its annual AI coding budget in four months. Meanwhile AI agents are getting credit cards and Stripe is building payment rails for them, which means token costs are about to become a line item in every P&L, not just engineering budgets. Stephen’s framework explains what’s underneath: the models are commodities, the data is the moat, and the market has put 90% of its money on the commodity.

🎯 Jump to the best parts

00:00 Why Everyone Is Investing In The Wrong AI00:44 Introduction01:47 Why LLMs Are Becoming Commodities03:16 Why Bigger Models Won't Win05:48 Compute vs Software07:42 The Real AI Moat09:04 OpenAI's Business Challenge12:09 Economic Foundation Models Explained15:50 Building Collective[i]17:24 Why Proprietary Data Wins21:16 Predicting Business Outcomes With AI24:44 The Biggest Enterprise AI Mistake26:24 Why Most AI Wrappers Will Die28:13 Is AI In A Bubble?30:00 The Taiwan Chip Risk32:25 AI, Geopolitics & National Security34:38 Should Frontier Models Be Restricted?36:10 Where CEOs Should Actually Invest In AI37:46 The Most Mispriced AI Opportunity38:40 Advice For AI Founders40:58 Lightning Round42:07 Where To Learn More

Important Links

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenmesser/

* Collective[i]: https://www.collectivei.com

* Stephen’s blog: https://www.reloadnyc.com

* Last episode with Stephen: Beyond LLMs: How AI is set to reshape global business

Watch or listen now: YouTube • Apple Podcasts

See our last episode with Stephen:

Our biggest takeaways from this conversation

1. Peak Token is here.

Stephen’s core thesis: a language model’s training data is public, so the model is a commodity, and open-source distillation now closes any frontier lead in weeks. The question that kills the business model isn’t whether frontier models are better. It’s how much you can charge for the difference.

“If your gap and the premium you’re asking people to pay for a language model disappears in two weeks, but it took you a year to make, that is not the sign of a moat that is going to be defensible.”

“How much can you charge for that little incremental improvement? ... My question is, can that cover the cost of everything else?”

* The pattern: a frontier release looks untouchable for two or three weeks, then open-source models from China and Japan distill their way to an indistinguishable gap at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek was the preview, a year ago.

* New laptop-class hardware can run high-parameter models locally. Stephen’s estimate: 90% of workloads run local, and you pay frontier prices only for the rare job your machine can’t handle. That ratio breaks the labs’ economics.

* The labs’ escape route is narrow premium niches, security and biology, where one result is worth real money. Hence the talent fights over those teams.

What to do with this: Price every AI vendor as if their underlying model becomes free in 18 months. If the pitch still works, it’s a real business.

Related reads:→ Beyond LLMs, with Stephen Messer (his first appearance)

🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline. Win in digital assets. We produce institutional-grade research that positions you as the authority in your category, then distribute it to 100,000+ decision-makers. Let’s talk.

2. Forward-deployed engineers are a lock-in play.

The labs’ answer to commoditization is sending engineers into enterprises to build agents, positioned as a replacement for Accenture and McKinsey. Stephen’s read: those engineers have no incentive to build the one thing a token-cost-literate buyer would demand first, an abstraction layer:

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Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️

“If you gave people the choice between full reserve banking and fractional banking, they’d take full reserve banking in a minute.”

The person building it is Scott Shay, who has founded four banks the traditional way, including Signature Bank, and created Signet, the first 24/7 payment system inside a US bank. We sat down live at Proof of Talk in Paris.

His argument is simple: for years the industry has tried to make crypto behave more like a bank. The better trade is making a bank behave more like crypto.

Think about it: Almost every bank in the world works the same way. You deposit money, the bank lends most of it out, and your balance is a promise to pay, settled in batches, often a day later. N3XT does neither. Every deposited dollar sits in short-term Treasuries. Nothing gets lent. The core banking system is a blockchain, so when a client moves a dollar, they move the actual dollar, any hour, any day, in seconds. It’s the first full-reserve “narrow bank” in the US, and it raised $72 million from Paradigm, HACK VC, and Winklevoss Capital to prove the model works.

This one is a playbook, not a podcast: how a bank without lending makes money, why the number of stablecoins will be small, and how on-chain payments would have caught a $2.3 billion fraud.

About Scott Shay: Scott is founder and chairman of N3XT, a full-reserve, blockchain-native bank that launched in December 2025 under a Wyoming SPDI charter. Before that he co-founded Signature Bank in 2001 and chaired it for 22 years as it grew past $110 billion in assets, created Signet, co-founded Ranieri & Co. with Lew Ranieri, and helped found Bank United of Texas and Merrick Bank. He is also the author of In Good Faith: Questioning Religion and Atheism.

“Taking a system like Bitcoin and putting it into a bank was a lot like stapling paper to cardboard.”

Why this matters: The race to put dollars on-chain has two established camps. Stablecoins are a ~$311 billion market, and the GENIUS Act (July 2025) bars issuers from paying interest or lending. Banks are answering with tokenized deposits: JP Morgan’s JPMD is live on Base, and 17 banks including Citi, BofA, and Wells Fargo are building a shared tokenized-deposit network through The Clearing House for H1 2027. Scott’s model is a third option: not a token that represents a dollar, and not a claim on a fractional balance sheet, but a bank where the on-chain balance is the dollar itself.

🎯 Jump to the best parts

00:00 Why Signature Bank Was Shut Down00:24 Introduction01:13 Building Signature Bank02:58 Signet Explained05:00 What Really Happened During The Banking Crisis08:37 Why Scott Built NEXT09:16 Full Reserve Banking Explained11:20 Can This Banking Model Work?14:33 Why Traditional Banks Resist Change17:07 Why Choose NEXT Over JP Morgan?20:02 Building A Blockchain Native Bank21:35 Tokenized Dollars Explained23:01 DeFi Meets Banking24:27 Stablecoins vs Tokenized Deposits25:47 What's Next For NEXT?27:09 Lightning Round29:05 Why Scott Never Feared Blockchain29:41 Where To Learn More

🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline. Win in digital assets. We position you as the authority among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers who act on what we publish.

Important Links

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-shay/

* N3XT: https://n3xt.io

* Scott’s books: https://www.scottshay.com

Watch or listen now: YouTube • Apple Podcasts

🔒 The full breakdown is for PRO subscribers

Our biggest takeaways from this conversation

1. A deposit is a promise to pay. N3XT’s product is removing the promise.

The clearest way to understand N3XT is one distinction. When you hold a bank deposit, you hold an IOU that gets settled in overnight batches. When you hold a dollar at N3XT, the dollar is there, in short-term Treasuries, all of it, all the time. Scott’s point is that this isn’t a technical detail. It’s the actual product.

“Fractional banking started as a three-card Monte sleight of hand.”

“All banks at the bottom are debits and credits and batch processing. ... If you gave people the choice between full reserve banking and fractional banking, they’d take full reserve banking in a minute.”

* The design comes from the Bitcoin white paper: transfer the whole asset, not a claim on it. Signet, which Scott built at Signature, moved a promise to pay. N3XT moves the dollar.

* No lending means no FDIC, no lender of last resort, and no maturity mismatch, because there is nothing to mismatch. Short-term governments only: no interest rate risk, no credit risk.

* Where the revenue comes from: Treasury float and payment fees, B2B only. Clients who want yield lend explicitly, on the platform, knowing exactly what they’re funding, instead of the bank doing it silently with their balance.

What to do with this: For any “digital dollar” product, ask one question: am I holding the asset or a promise to pay? Your counterparty risk follows from the answer.

Related reads:→ How banks are beating stablecoins

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Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️

“Blockchain doesn’t solve all problems. It solves some problems really, really well.”

JP Morgan has quietly moved $3T in cumulative notional value through its private blockchain, settles roughly $5B every day, and just became the largest global systemically important bank (G-SIB) to launch a tokenized money market fund on public Ethereum, MONY.

We sat with Dennis Cristallo, the person responsible for digital asset wealth management at JPMorgan to unpack the recent rebrand to Kinexys, why they are moving beyond private networks to public chains like Ethereum and Base, and the "Fundflow" pilot that just proved tokenization can move capital 38 times faster than the legacy system. This was more of a playbook than a podcast.

In this conversation, we break down why the $400T tokenization opportunity lives or dies not in the boardroom or the legislature, but in the UX of a wallet app.

About Dennis: Dennis Cristallo is the Head of Wealth Management Engagement for Kinexis Digital Assets at J.P. Morgan. He designs and scales blockchain tokenization solutions for the private bank and its global clients. Prior to joining the Kinexis team three and a half years ago, Dennis spent a decade building portfolios of hedge funds, private credit, and co-investments. He co-authored the seminal Bain & Company paper on the $400T tokenization opportunity and is a key driver behind JPM’s "Fundflow" and "MONY" (tokenized money market fund) initiatives.

Dennis joined the Kinexis team, then called Onyx, about three and a half years ago, coming from a decade of building hedge fund and private credit portfolios.

“We came up with the Onyx name. It sounded cool, it sounded mysterious. People didn’t really know what was going on.”

The rebrand to Kinexys: It was a signal that JPMorgan is moving from internal blockchain lab to commercial business unit.

Why this matters: Tokenized real-world assets on public blockchains crossed $32B in May 2026, roughly tripling year-over-year. The GENIUS Act became law in July 2025, formally distinguishing payment stablecoins from tokenized bank deposits and creating the first US regulatory lane for both. Since then, JP Morgan has deployed JPMD on Base, announced expansion to Canton, launched the MONY fund on Ethereum, and completed the first transaction on Kinexys Fund Flow with Citco. The conversation is now shifting from infrastructure to adoption and distribution.

🎧 Jump to the best parts

00:00 Introduction01:00 Why JP Morgan Started Building On Chain03:39 The $400 Trillion Tokenization Opportunity06:17 From Onyx To Kinexys07:45 Blockchain vs Crypto Inside JP Morgan09:35 Public vs Private Blockchains12:53 Kinexys Fundflow Explained17:31 Why Tokenization Matters18:42 JP Morgan's MONY Fund22:10 Deposit Tokens vs Stablecoins24:15 The Stablecoin Endgame25:33 Tokenized Private Markets28:47 What Is Actually Holding Tokenization Back28:59 Multi Chain Strategy31:09 Wealth Management In Five Years32:55 Lessons From Building Blockchain At JP Morgan33:50 Lightning Round

Important Links

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dcristallo/

* Kinexys: https://www.jpmorgan.com/kinexys/index

* MONY: https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/adv/about-us/media/press-releases/jp-morgan-asset-management-launches-its-first-tokenized-money-market-fund/

* Morgan Money: https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/liq/resources/morgan-money/

Watch or listen now:YouTube • Apple Podcasts

Our biggest takeaways from this conversation:

1. Public chains are distribution networks, private chains are for operations

There is a constant debate about permissioned vs. permissionless blockchains. Dennis frames this not as a philosophical war, but as a product segmentation strategy.

“We look at them as distribution mechanisms. You have on Ethereum 60% of all stablecoins issued. You have a ton of users... we want to ultimately deploy tokens and assets where people are there to buy them.”

If the goal is to tap into crypto-native pools of capital, you deploy on Ethereum or Base (like JPM did with their “MONY” tokenized money market fund). But if a client wants to bring an asset on-chain strictly to eliminate back-office friction, without forcing their end-investors to manage crypto wallets, pay gas fees, or undergo redundant AML screening, the private permissioned network is the vastly superior choice.

Kinexys Digital Assets processes roughly $5B daily, primarily through an intraday repo application that allows wholesale lending with the borrowing leg and cash leg settling on the same infrastructure.

“If they borrow for an hour, they only pay an hour’s worth of interest, and there’s no overnight capital charge because it’s an intraday loan.”

The JPM team is explicit that private and public chains serve different purposes. It also established the pattern Dennis returns to throughout the conversation: tokenization earns its keep by solving a specific operational pain point precisely, not by being generically “on blockchain.”

Related reads:

🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline. Win in digital assets. We produce institutional-grade research that positions you as the authority in your category, then distribute it to 100,000+ decision-makers who act on what we publish. Let’s talk.

2. Blockchain is just a better database for broken plumbing

J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management and Citco completed the first live transaction using Kinexys Fund Flow in October 2025. [RELEASE]

The problem it solves is structural: in private equity and private credit, fund managers, fund administrators, and wealth management distributors run on incompatible systems with no common data standard. Capital calls are slow, manually intensive, and routinely underfunded.

“There’s no DTCC in the middle, there’s no standards around how data is shared, how capital calls are processed.”

Fund Flow addresses this in two stages:

* A discrepancy-surfacing data layer that doesn't require blockchain at all, just better-connected data management across the three parties.

* Tokenized settlement: when a capital call hits, cash moves from the investor's brokerage account, becomes tokenized, and settles against a fund token in near-real time.

“Honestly, you don’t need a blockchain for that. It’s helpful, but you don’t need a blockchain for that. You just need better data management.”

Result: Money moved from client accounts to the fund manager 38 times faster than the existing process, and labor associated with file processing, mapping and reconciliation dropped by approximately 93%. These numbers were verified by Citco, one of the largest fund administrators in the world.

3. MONY was launched on Ethereum for one reason

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Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️

“I’m not a fan of stablecoins being co-opted by the cards world. I’m not a fan of cards on the front end of stablecoins because then the stablecoin is just another account feeding the legacy beast. This is not the intended future.”

Tony McLaughlin spent two decades at Citigroup as managing director of emerging payments, where he authored the Regulated Liability Network whitepaper, the conceptual scaffolding the Fed prototyped in its RLN proof of concept and the BIS extended into Project Agora. He then founded Ubyx, where he raised $10M to build the the clearing system for tokenized money.

In this conversation, we unpack why the “Tether/Circle duopoly” is a temporary trend, why every bank on earth is about to become a wallet provider, and why the “general-purpose” technology of blockchains will inevitably subsume special-purpose rails like ACH and SWIFT.

“I disagree with anyone who believes there’s going to be an oligopoly in stablecoin issuance.”

About Tony: Tony McLaughlin spent 20+ years at Citigroup, most recently as Managing Director of Emerging Payments. Earlier in his career he worked on continuous linked settlement at ABN AMRO and travelers' checks at Barclays in 1993, three decades of building payment infrastructure across every form factor that has ever existed. In March 2025 he left Citi to found Ubyx, the first global clearing system for stablecoins and tokenized deposits, with backing from Galaxy, Founders Fund, Coinbase Ventures, VanEck, Paxos, LayerZero, Monerium and as of January 2026, Barclays, in what was the British bank's first-ever direct stablecoin infrastructure investment. He also convened the Tokenized Cash Management Advisory Group, a 20-corporate body that published its core principles for digital money in April.

Why is it important: The total stablecoin float crossed $323B in May 2026. Barclays just took its first stablecoin equity position in Ubyx. JPMorgan moved JPMD onto Canton in January and is now processing $5B in daily transactions through Kinexys. Citi’s tokenized deposit volumes went from millions to billions in a year. Genius Act issuers are queuing up in the US. Europeans banks are racing with Qivalis. And the Bank of England's proposed £20,000 retail holding cap on systemic stablecoins.

Proof of Talk is known as the Davos of Web3, bringing together the core 2500 decision-makers in Web3, happening on the 2nd and 3rd of June at the Louvre Palace in Paris.

​Major speakers include Jenny Johnson (CEO, Franklin Templeton), Tom Lee (Chairman, Fundstrat), Stani Kulechov (Founder & CEO, Aave), Tom Zschach (CIO, Swift), Adam Back, Elliot Hentov (State Street, Chief Macro Policy Strategist) and more.

🎧 Jump to the best parts

* 00:00 Tony McLaughlin Introduction

* 01:29 Why Tony Left Citi

* 03:38 Why Stablecoin Monopolies Will Fail

* 07:16 Why Tony Built Ubyx

* 09:20 Why Stablecoins Could Collapse Payment Rails

* 13:19 Why Banks Need Stablecoin Deposits

* 17:27 The Real Stablecoin Business Model

* 22:14 Consortium Stablecoins and CBDCs

* 25:32 Building Ubyx

* 29:14 AI Agents and Stablecoin Payments

* 31:38 What Could Kill the Stablecoin Thesis

* 34:00 TThe BlackBerry Comparison

* 38:00 Corporate Adoption of Tokenized Money

* 42:58 Lightning Round

Proof of Talk is known as the Davos of Web3, bringing together the core 2500 decision-makers in Web3, happening on the 2nd and 3rd of June at the Louvre Palace in Paris. 51 Insights will be the official research partner.

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Important Links

* LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/tony-mclaughlin-7b627a3

* X: https://x.com/stablemaximus

* Whitepaper: https://www.ubyx.xyz/whitepaper

* Website: https://ubyx.xyz/

Watch or listen now:YouTube • Apple Podcasts

Our biggest takeaways from this conversation:

1. The stablecoin duopoly is not the endgame

More than 82% of the stablecoin market sits with two issuers: Tether ($189B) and Circle ($76B). And, almost everyone is looking at them as the dominate players even in the future. Tony’s argument and it’s the most important reframe of the conversation, is that this is exactly what every adolescent payment network looks like before it pluralises. There was a point in time when there were only a few credit card issuers, all dollar-denominated, all US-based. Today, there are roughly 16,000 card issuers globally and the market shows no fragmentation. The acceptance layer absorbs all of them invisibly.

“Hundreds, and then thousands, of issuers. Hundreds of thousands, and then millions, of accepting points. I’ll be judged by that prediction over time.”

Tony's analogy to AOL and CompuServe is sharp: walled-garden pioneers always look unassailable until the open network arrives and the moat turns out to have been the entire business.

“America Online was the pre-internet portal to the information superhighway as we used to call it. There was something called CompuServe … All I'm saying is that what you observe at a point of time at the early stages of a market, if you extrapolate forward, you're probably making a mistake. And I think what's a far more likely outcome is that we will have eventually, and in the not too distant future, hundreds and then thousands … then millions of accepting points for tokenized money.

Why do we agree with him: Currently, Stablecoin accounts for 0.02% of global payments volumes. We are just at the start.

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2. General-purpose technology always subsumes special-purpose technology

Tony uses the “iPhone vs. Walkman” analogy to explain the future of payment rails. ACH, SWIFT, and Card Networks are special-purpose devices, they only do one thing (carry low-value messages, high-value messages, or authorizations).

“In the same way that we don’t have physical alarm clocks and calculators and Walkmans anymore, I think the business case to build a special-purpose payments rail... will become difficult to justify.”

Blockchains are general-purpose. They can represent a dollar, a stock, a piece of real estate, or a contract on the same infrastructure. Tony’s bet is that the cost-efficiency of general-purpose rails will eventually make special-purpose rails (like the current banking stack) obsolete.

Related reads:

3. Banks are running the wrong playbook (Issue vs. Accept)

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Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️

Brent Johnson has spent roughly 25 years in financial markets, and he has one of the cleanest frameworks afor thinking about the dollar. Back in 2018, when the "de-dollarization" narrative was just starting to simmer, he stepped onto the global stage with a theory that sounded almost arrogant at the time. He called it the Dollar Milkshake Theory.

But one phrase that made me more curious was:

“Stablecoins are a stealth weapon of empire. They are quietly re-dollarizing the world from the bottom up. They do something no military base or trade agreement ever could.”

That is a strong phrase, but in this conversation, it was not used for effect. It was used as a description of what is already happening. The logic is straightforward. If people around the world want to hold dollars, but they want them in a form that is faster, cheaper, and easier to move than the legacy banking system allows, stablecoins become the obvious answer. And because dollar stablecoins have to be backed by dollar assets, that creates new demand for U.S. Treasury securities.

Dollar Milkshake Theory, a framework he first laid out in 2018 that argued, against almost universal consensus at the time, that the U.S. dollar would strengthen precisely as the rest of the world printed more money. It was controversial then. It looks prescient now. The DXY is hovering around 99.66 even as gold has already crossed $5,000, which is, strangely, exactly what Brent said would happen.

So I sat down with him to ask the next question. Now that the milkshake thesis has largely played out, what is the new chapter? And where do stablecoins, tariffs, a $39 trillion national debt, and a potential sovereign crisis all fit together?

His answer was one of the most coherent explanations I have heard of, where the dollar actually goes from here, and why the U.S. government’s decision to let private companies issue dollar-backed stablecoins may be the smartest geopolitical move of the decade.

About Brent: Brent Johnson is the founder and CEO of Santiago Capital, a San Francisco-based registered investment advisor founded in 2011. He holds an MBA in International Business from the Thunderbird School of Global Management and began his career as an auditor at Philip Morris before moving through Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette in New York City. He has spent roughly 25 years in global macro markets and is the creator of the Dollar Milkshake Theory, first articulated publicly in 2018. Alongside his RIA practice, he runs a standalone institutional research subscription at research.santiagocapital.com. In June 2025, he joined Monetary Metals' advisory board, advising on the distribution of gold-backed fixed-income products, including gold leases and bonds. He hosts a weekly show called Milkshakes, Markets and Madness on YouTube.

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🎧 Jump to the best parts

* 02:37 Understanding the Dollar Milkshake Theory

* 05:38 The Relationship Between Inflation and Dollar Strength

* 08:27 The Role of Gold in the Dollar Milkshake Theory

* 11:00 Stablecoins as a Stealth Weapon of Empire

* 16:16 The Global Demand for Stablecoins

* 21:51 Bitcoin’s Role in the Financial Landscape

* 27:10 Potential Sovereign Debt Crisis

* 32:29 Looking Ahead: Economic Outlook and Global Events

Important Links

* Website: https://santiagocapital.com/about/

* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brent-johnson-40a8461/

* YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChvlmVy6Q0a9uC1jRFRpp8Q

* Dollar Milkshake Theory

Watch or listen now:YouTube • Apple Podcasts

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Our biggest takeaways from this conversation:

1. The milkshake was never about the dollar being great, it was about everything else being worse

When Brent first presented the Dollar Milkshake Theory in 2018, most people in macro were calling for dollar decline. The argument against him was simple: the U.S. had too much debt, was printing too much money, and the world was moving toward alternatives. He was not arguing against any of that. He was arguing that none of it mattered if everyone else was in worse shape.

The name itself comes from the film There Will Be Blood, in which an oil executive tells a rival landowner that he does not need to buy the land to get the oil beneath it. He just puts his straw in from his side of the fence.

“The United States has the straw. And when the rest of the world prints money, the United States sucks up all that capital into their own markets.”

That is largely what happened over the following six years. The U.S. attracted more foreign capital than any other country in the world. The Fed raised rates from zero to five percent in under a year, something many observers said was impossible without breaking the economy. It did not break it, at least not in the way people expected. And through all of it, the dollar stayed stronger than almost anyone predicted.

The most common misreading of the theory, Brent says, is that people thought he was predicting dollar strength at the expense of everything else. He was not.

“I never said the dollar was going to go higher and everything else was going to collapse. I said the dollar would go higher, but gold would go higher, that U.S. equities would go higher, that U.S. dollar assets would go higher.”

His original price targets were a DXY of 150 and gold at $5,000. Gold hit $5,000. The dollar never reached 150, it peaked around 114 in 2022 and currently sits near 99.66. By his own accounting, the gold call was a 400% return from where he made it; the dollar call was a 50-60% move. He never claimed the dollar would outperform gold. Most of his critics did not notice that distinction.

The deeper point is the difference between relative strength and absolute purchasing power. The dollar can be losing value against real goods while simultaneously rising against every other currency. Both things are true at once.

“You can have a rising dollar on a relative basis, but still have it lose purchasing power versus real things. And this is something that people need to understand, when I talk about a strong dollar, I don’t mean your purchasing power. What I mean is versus foreign currencies.”

This matters enormously if you live outside the United States. When the dollar strengthens, every country that has to import goods or services dollar-denominated debt feels the squeeze, often violently. The U.S. middle class might feel richer on paper, while people in Turkey, Argentina, or Nigeria find that their savings have quietly been cut in half.

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2. Gold ultimately wins, but you still need dollars to operate right now

Brent is not against gold. He thinks gold is the ultimate beneficiary of the global monetary system’s dysfunction.

“The dollar doesn’t ultimately win. Gold ultimately wins. So for anybody who needs to hear me say that again, gold is the ultimate winner of the milkshake. But in the short term, you still need dollars to operate on the global stage.”

The proof of this showed up in real time during the recent escalation in the Middle East. As the Strait of Hormuz disruptions sent oil prices sharply higher, gold and silver pulled back. So did Bitcoin. The reason was: countries that needed to buy now-expensive energy had to sell whatever they held to get dollars first. The mechanism was visible, live, in the market.

“Those who needed to transact on the global stage had to sell their gold to get dollars to buy the oil that was now priced 50% higher than it was a month ago. And I think that’s a demonstration that to operate on the global stage, you still need dollars.”

Gold going to $10,000 is still possible in Brent’s view. But a voluntary return to the gold standard is not. Governments will not willingly put financial handcuffs on themselves, because a gold standard limits how much they can spend, and politicians do not win elections by saying no.

“If governments did go back to a gold standard, they would have to massively devalue their currencies against gold when they did it. A lot of people would lose all of their savings. And once they had that constraint, their gold holdings would put a restriction on how much money they could spend. But politicians get elected by saying yes.”

If a gold standard ever comes back, Brent believes it will be forced on governments from the outside, not chosen. A reset after a crisis, not a planned reform.

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3. Stablecoins are not an escape from the dollar system; they are the dollar system, upgraded