Settlement made stablecoins useful. Spend will decide whether they become ordinary. The layer I'd want to own sits between the wallet and the card network. It has to answer an authorization in a fraction of a second, handle disputes and FX, and reconcile three ledgers every night. Wrote it up in Interop Markets.
ZeroHash's Katie Perry on why a fintech would issue its own stablecoin. Her answer is flexibility, a programmable store of value that moves around inside the platform. Writing the code is the easy part. Staying GENIUS compliant is the work, and that's what ZeroHash sells. Stablecoin issuance looks like it's going the way card issuing went, a service most apps rent and very few build.
Booking Holdings says large language models send it under one percent of its traffic. Goldman Sachs has a basket built on the opposite worry, that agents make switching cheap. Both can be true, because there are two kinds of slow. Some friction protects someone, like capital rules, controls and custody. Some just makes leaving tedious, like sitting on hold to cancel. Most companies book both as the same retention revenue. Agents only dissolve the second kind. The holiday quarter is the first real test of how much of it there is. Wrote it up in this week's Bridge, link below.
Ondo's Kunal Patel at TOKEN2049: after US stocks, the next step is Japanese, Korean and Southeast Asian stocks on-chain, through partners like Mirae Asset and SBI, for investors outside those countries. That's the version of tokenized equities that does something a US broker can't: reach markets most foreign retail can't get into.
Alpaca's Yoshi Yokokawa: about $3.5bn of US equities are tokenized in SPV-wrapper form, against roughly $86tn of US market cap. Under a basis point. His more useful point is redemption. A token is worth what the route back to the underlying share is worth, and instant redemption is what makes it a stock rather than a claim on a wrapper.
Bloomberg's Nina Trentmann on how CFOs budget AI tokens: an annual envelope, engineers get the most, ask for more if you need it. Match Group started the year at $5m and doubled it. Token spend is becoming a line item the way cloud did. The companies that meter it per task will know their unit economics. The rest find out at budget time.
CoreWeave $CRWV has paid $1.3bn in nine months for hedges on its own convertibles. The filings put that cost in equity, as a reduction of paid-in capital, never remeasured. So it never reaches interest expense, and the quoted coupon understates the cost. https://t.co/zPyWLSJRBS
Hyperliquid's Jeff Yan told Bloomberg that US regulators should police the firms building on the network, not the blockchain itself. That's roughly how card networks already work: the network sets the rules, the acquiring banks carry the licence and the liability. The open question is who plays acquirer on a chain.
Solana Foundation's Lily Liu with the cleanest case for tokenized US stocks I've heard: about $150tn of global equity market cap, roughly half of it American, and 160 countries sharing 5%. The pitch isn't faster settlement. It's American assets for global demand. Which regulator lets that demand in is the whole question.
