Weekly research and commentary on digital finance. Lessons from doing, not theorizing.
Ethereum sketches 25-second rollup payments, Samsung and the Solana Foundation announce, and the XRP Ledger and Ledger's hardware wallets show what has already gone wrong.
Last week I set a rule for this column: follow measured fee revenue, not announcements The First Venue Picks a Public Chain, and Its Own Fuel/insight/2026-10-05-okxice-xlayer-okb. This week tested it. Nearly every piece of good news for the coins AlgoMint accumulates was a plan,
OKX and the NYSE's parent file to trade 63 tokenized stocks on an exchange-run Ethereum layer-two that burns OKB, Brazil's securities depository goes live on the XRP Ledger, and the SEC makes decentralization a structural test.
Last week I wrote that the SEC's exemption for tokenized stocks requires venues to run on a public, permissionless ledger, and that the requirement pointed the format war toward open chains The Regulator Builds the Rail, and Runs It/insight/2026-09-28-ecb-sec-tokenized-rail. This
The SEC's fine print requires public, permissionless ledgers, the ECB goes live as plumber and buyer, and a week of failures lands everywhere except on the chains themselves.
Last week I covered the SEC handing tokenized stocks a defined lane to trade on-chain, Nasdaq writing a nine-figure check into Kraken's parent, and Circle launching a chain where the gas is dollars The Regulator Opens the Lane/insight/2026-09-14-sec-nasdaq-kraken-tokenized-stocks
The SEC clears tokenized stocks for on-chain trading, Nasdaq puts $100 million into Kraken's parent, and Circle launches a chain where the gas is dollars.
Since the last report The Dollar Stops Keeping Banking Hours/insight/2026-09-07-dbs-citi-swift-weekend, the tokenization story cleared its biggest remaining obstacle: the regulator. The SEC gave tokenized stocks a defined lane to trade on-chain, Nasdaq wrote a nine-figure check i
DBS and Citi settle USD across the Pacific on a weekend, 21 banks commit to a joint stablecoin, and a $320 million exploit halts a Bitcoin sidechain.
Two weeks ago I covered the first live tokenized deposit transfer on Swift's blockchain ledger, between HSBC and Standard Chartered Coinbase Puts Its Brand on Tokenized Stocks/insight/2026-08-24-coinbase-base-tokenized-stocks. This week that same rail crossed an ocean and a weeke
Kraken's parent commits to 100 tokenized London stocks, NYSE's parent partners with tZERO, and a research post questions whether Ethereum can hold time-sensitive flow.
Last week I wrote that Coinbase attached its brand to equity tokens on a public chain Coinbase Puts Its Brand on Tokenized Stocks/insight/2026-08-24-coinbase-base-tokenized-stocks. This week the story moves off the crypto-native venues entirely. The exchange operators that own th
NVDA, AAPL, META, and GOOGL go live on Base, Swift routes tokenized deposits between banks, and Meow lets AI agents open bank accounts.
Five weeks ago I wrote that tokenized equities had found real volume and that decentralized finance DeFi, the set of financial applications that run on public blockchains, was bending its own protocols to hold regulated assets /insight/2026-07-20-robinhood-uniswap-ramp/insight/20
Fidelity files to stake its $900 million fund, the SEC clears Franklin's on-chain money fund for collateral, Coinbase lets AI agents pay businesses, and one hosting provider nearly stopped Solana.
Last week I walked through Solana's July scorecard and argued the fuel is measurably being used /insight/2026-08-03-bb90b466/insight/2026-08-03-bb90b466. This week the demand story moved up a weight class: the institutions are not just holding the fuel anymore, they are wiring it
Record real-world assets, 330,000 merchant locations, and 35 million agent transactions on Solana. Wintermute steps inside the SEC perimeter, and Cloudflare hands AI agents wallets.
Last week I covered one bank going live with commercial settlement on Solana /insight/2026-07-27-sofi-solana-settlement/insight/2026-07-27-sofi-solana-settlement. This week the ecosystem published its July scorecard, and the numbers say SoFi is not an outlier; it is one line in a
SoFi flips SOFIUSD into production, a sovereign-adjacent fund tokenizes across three chains, and a $70 million wallet drain proves the hard part of holding BTC is key generation.
Two weeks ago I wrote that tokenized equities had found a bid and that decentralized finance DeFi, the set of financial applications that run on public blockchains, was bending its own protocols to hold regulated assets /insight/2026-07-20-robinhood-uniswap-ramp/insight/2026-07-2
Robinhood Chain's real-world asset slice tripled in two weeks, and Uniswap v4 just made room for regulated assets at the protocol level.
Two weeks ago I wrote that tokenization had gone public through a regulated broker-dealer channel /insight/2026-07-13-settlement-volume/insight/2026-07-13-settlement-volume. This week the story stops being about who is allowed to list tokenized assets and becomes about where they
Visa plugs stablecoin settlement into 200 million merchants, and two fintech moves say the settlement layer is going on-chain whether banks like it or not.
Last week I wrote that settlement demand had stopped being a pilot narrative and started showing up as volume /insight/2026-07-13-settlement-volume/insight/2026-07-13-settlement-volume. This week the story moves one layer closer to the merchant. Visa is no longer observing stable
A 63% monthly volume jump, a sovereign plugging in USDT, tokenization goes public, and the SEC now answers to the White House.
This week is not one story. It is four items that all describe the same thing from different angles: settlement demand for stablecoins is now measurable, it is showing up in bank volume, sovereign payment rails, cross-border FX pricing, and public equity. Last week I wrote that s
PIX in Brazil, AWS at the edge, and tokenized equities through a regulated channel
This week the news that matters is not a token launch or a funding round. It is three separate moves that all point at the same thing: stablecoins are being wired into settlement infrastructure that already carries real volume. One of them happened on a national instant payment n