Unchained - The Stablecoin Competition Is On. Who Will Be the Winners and Losers? - Ep. 920

Episode Date: October 10, 2025

The stablecoin race is heating up. With the passage of the U.S. stablecoin law the floodgates have opened. Tether still dominates globally, but Circle, Stripe, and a wave of new “stablechains” are making their move. In this episode, Dragonfly partner Rob Hadick and Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz join Laura Shin to map out how this battle could reshape crypto and payments. Will ecosystem apps like Phantom and Jupiter keep their own stablecoins? Can Circle’s new Layer 1, Arc, compete with Tether’s network effect?  Don’t miss it! Thank you to our sponsors! Binance Aptos  Guests: Rob Hadick, General Partner at Dragonfly Mert Mumtaz, CEO of Helius Timestamps: 🎬 0:00 Intro 🔥 2:50 What Rob and Mert expect from the coming flood of stablecoins and stablechains 🌐 12:06 How network effects could decide the winners in the stablecoin wars 💵 14:09 Whether Tether’s dominance is here to stay 💱 22:45 Why Forex matters—and why everyone still wants dollars 😎 27:15 Whether Tether even cares about its new competitors ⚠️ 33:18 What Rob calls the biggest existential threat to Tether 🏦 36:00 Can Circle’s new payments chain, Arc, really compete in this environment 🧩 40:42 Why Mert says Circle is in a difficult strategic position 🤝 45:17 How new Layer 1s risk pleasing no one by trying to please everyone 💣 52:55 Whether banks are doomed—and why employees might want to start exiting now Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Whoever the application is, whoever the company is that is owning that distribution, they're going to want to have their own stable coin. Because that is the easiest way for them to potentially own how economics are distributed. Circle seems like the easiest short here over a long time horizon. I bet you Palo cares more about Bitcoin than he does tether itself. Hi everyone, welcome to Unchete, your no hype resource for all things crypto. I'm your host, Laura Shin. Today's episode is brought to you by finance and Aptos. Finance is the world's number one crypto exchange.

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Hey, everyone. I'm here with Rob Haddock, General Partner Dragonfly, and Mert Murtaz, CEO Phelius. Welcome, Rob and Mert. Oh, ho. Today's topic is all these stable coins and stable chains. And we're just, you know, at the start of what looks like it's going to be some great stable coin race. Obviously, Tether, Circle, and Athena have been sort of like the winners of the preliminaries, you could say. But after the passage of the Genius Act, the U.S. Stablecoin law, it's pretty clear that now the real race is getting underway. We just saw Plasma just had its TGE to much fanfare. Stripe is getting a lot of buzz with its acquisitions plus also its upcoming tempo blockchain.

Circle also just launched its own L1 arc. And there's so many others in the works. I mean, I could list so many and multiple of them have been mentioned already on the show before. But on top of that, we are seeing now these ecosystem stable coins. Obviously, USDAH got a lot of media attention. And then, of course, we have had news like, you know, apps like Phantom are also rolling their own. Jupiter just launch one using Athena's stable coin as a service dock. So there was just so much news.

We probably want to synthesize a lot of things. synthesize a lot of this. And Nick Carter started to do that with a great piece on X in which he talked about how he had long thought there would be a small number of dominant chains or stable coins, but now he thinks there will actually be many. And that will be driven by the fact that intermediaries will want that yield for themselves. So Rob, why don't we start with you? When you look at all this activity, how do you think the competition will play out in the stable coin space? Yeah, I mean, I think I've long been a believer in a lot of what Nick put out in that piece, which is that just if you follow the incentives, right?

So I always think about the world based on what are people's incentives. And the incentives have been for a long period of time that people want to do a couple of things. They want to own the customer and they all want to own how economics are distributed, right? And in both of those cases, that means that whoever the application is, whoever the company is that is owning that distribution, they're going to want to have their own stable coin. Because that is the easiest way for them to potentially own how economics are distributed. There's ways for them to do that with service providers, which is, you know, Athena specifically, circles did a lot more rep share now than they used to. They obviously are a little bit more hampered because of that deal.

They have with the Coinbase, they have 50% of the revenue to Coinbase. But, you know, there's also, you know, things like, you know, the consortial model with USDG or then there's like white labeling with people like Agora or Paxos also does it. But, you know, Britt does it as well. And you start to look around and you say, okay, well, there's like this infrastructure in place that allows me to own more of the user experience, to own more of the end customer experience to keep the economics for myself, to distribute the economics the way I want to. And then to create a product that is, you know, is that tailor made for what I think is the best for that person. And so I think like reality is, is the vast majority of, you know, call it consumer applications, tech companies, you know, even people like a Walmart. who has been trying to do financial services for years are likely to want to issue their own stable coins. That's probably the next, you know, year or two at a minimum. Like, we're probably

in this, call it, period of like unbundling. So I think about it a lot as like the, you know, the fintech, like mid-2010s market where you took like a, you know, a bank and then all of a sudden you had a fintech that did each part of what the bank does a little bit better. And so people started using them. And then I expect sometime in the future. there will be what I would call like a re-bundling, which is that everyone realizes that this actually kind of sucks to have like all of these different tokens, even if they share liquidity. And I don't want to have to think about, you know, what those, you know, different integrations should be, like how I think about, you know, putting, connecting to different APIs.

Like, I don't want to have to think about all of the tickers alone. Like, that's just a bad user experience. Like, like, USD, like, we were literally debating on a dragonfly call yesterday, like, the difference between like a USTB versus USDTB versus like some other USTB, right? And then it was a portfolio company of ours to an issued one of them, right? Like these like, it's just not a good user experience. So I think it's going to continue to continue to follow the rate of change here, where, you know, everyone wants to own those economics and they don't believe they should be giving them to the stable coin issuers themselves, at least in mass.

And how that evolves over time is probably, you know, not that, but it's the current meta. Well, wait, and I'm sorry. So when when people reach that point of being like there are too many, You're saying it's not going to switch back to what it is now, but like, do you have a sense of what that will look like at that point? What you'll probably end up having is either one or two things. You'll end up having some sort of like, you know, call it like clearinghouse the way we see, you know, what happens in like traditional asset classes, right? Where fully shared liquidity across not just the, you know, everything issued by Paxos, but everything issued by Paxos plus Agora plus MZ plus, you know, X, XYZ, right? Where somebody's share is sort of a middle error.

I don't think that is the optimal outcome, frankly. But I think it is people tend to, that's kind of how the legacy payment system got built, which is that you put a lot of like stop gaps on top of each other. Or I think what we'll also see is we'll see like a coalescing around like a few major brands, a few major stable coins, a few major, you know, contact service providers. And there'll be like five or seven that will like be of any real scale. And then everything else will maybe like more closed loop in the future. That's probably more of the optimal outcome.

than like some sort of clearinghouse because frankly like blockchains themselves should be a clearinghouse, not some sort of like intermediary. Okay. And Mert, go ahead and give your vision for how this whole stable coin competition will play out. Well, for the last question of how this plays out, I do have a tweet on this actually. There was about a two-week period where I felt inspired to make a bunch of shit posts around stables. and one of them was that I was using backpack the exchange and I sent some tables on there to to on ramp some fiat and it then turned into USD. I believe I sent it USDT but it turned to USD. I did the same thing with USC and then it turned to USDA again.

And so that is to say they actually started abstracting all the tickers away and just said they got rid of all the last letters and it was just USD. And then if I want to take it out, they would give me the option or give me like a default setting. And I think that's, if I'm an app and I don't have my own issued stable, let's say, then probably what I want to do is I want to let these stable issuers compete to give me the best yield. And the way I'm going to do that is to make them commodities. And the way I make them commodities is to abstract them away so that I can just fungibly swap them out. And like I'm getting some insight here from being an RPC provider where it's sort of a similar business where people can swap you out in some cases for another RPC.

And when you have, so I think like the most interesting part of the Genius Act and the new regulation is that, you know, there was four or five years ago, or really even two years ago, you would only use USC or I would at least because I trusted it the most. And I was like, okay, well, Coinbase is not going to rug me. But I don't know about these other ones. But now if these guys are all regulated the same, I don't really care about that too much as long as I'm in the States at least or I'm using one of these apps that I trust. And so I think the end game looks like the trick is just being abstracted. And the technical work for that is actually not super difficult depending on, you know, the architecture you're using. But you should be able to swap them out with between liquidity pools, like even today on Solana.

I do think like, but the problem that I've heard a little bit is like people have. tried to do that. Like there are there, you know, backpacks not the first one doing that. Managing the liquidity is annoying and costly and there, it really depends on like what you, how far you want to go, right? Like, okay, you do USDT versus USDC. Like, you know, that's probably fine, right? Nobody really wants to mint redeem directly with USDT, but you're like willing to take that, you're willing to keep enough USD liquidity. But as we go down like,

you know, if we get 50 of these like they're not actually fungible, right, the US dollars. They're like maybe the collateral is, but they're essentially like liabilities against, you know, some other, you know, kind of company or bank that exists, right? And like they shouldn't act because of that, they shouldn't actually trade one to one. Right. So you get end up getting like a lot more slippage or a lot more like theoretical like, you know, value like leakage, which is sort of why I think people just end up trying to try to create their own and then having somebody else, you like in somebody else incentivizes or like a, a, a, a, an infrastructure provider incentivizes them to take their own and do some sort of

rev share versus actually like managing like liquidity pools for a bunch of like a long tail of tokens. Yeah, I think, I mean, I agree with that. The way I think of it is, I mean, and you can basically predict everything that I will say based on one concept, which is just a preto principle, which is to say there's probably going to be three or four of them that are just the biggest and win. And then of those, I think they will be interchangeable to some extent. or I'm completely wrong. I mean, I'm honestly not necessarily.

I obviously got jealous of what was happening on hyperliquid, and I was like, how come these guys are getting all everything back, and then we're just getting like wrecked here on Solanoland. So we'll, I'm really curious to see how like Jupiter and the Phantom ones play out. Because like the thesis is like if you own a distribution, then you, in theory, own, you have more bargaining power. So I want to see within the next few months if that actually makes a huge difference or if like

Perp sexes where like US the stable coins are actually a huge differentiator or a very important part are actually like a special kind of a special case. And wait, Mark, just to ask you a little bit more about that initial vision that you painted about how the end could because like, so another way that we could think about this by the way is just like there's going to be some B-to-B sector and then there's going to be like the retail side. So in the vision that you painted, it felt like you were just looking at it more from the retail side. But I wonder, you know, on the back end, like, what did you think it looked like? Was it that more like headachey version that Rob was talking about? Or did you have, you know, a vision of like,

there's just going to be a few. And like basically, you know, the companies that are abstracting this away will gravitate towards certain ones that, you know, do X, Y, or Z. Or like, what were you thinking on the back end? On the back end, well, I mean, I think you need just to accept a few things as truths and then reason up from them. One is that money is generally a network business. So network effects are going to win out for the larger players. This is why you see USCT raising an insane amount. I think what was the valuation?

Like, 500 billion? Like, I don't even. It was crazy, right? That's what they're saying. Yeah. And like the bigger you are, the you don't get linearly more power. You get exponentially more, right? It's the network effects.

And so I think that probably plays out for about three of them, four of them, max. And maybe there's like geospecific ones. For example, in Dubai, I went to try to pay for nicotine with USDC on Solana. And the guy was like, no, brother, no, no, no. I only take USDT on like Tron. And I was like, what? Like, why? It's like inferior in my view.

But anyway, and so when you work up to there over being a network business, then there's really going to be a prior distribution. And if that's the case, then you should be able to swap out the big ones, right? Like USCD to the USDT today is not a hard conversion. And then maybe you add two more. And then, you know, the principle of like, well, if it's the ideal U.S. for the user, that's probably where it iterates towards in the, eventual endgame anyway.

But like, you know, the counter is that if you look at the financial system today, the amount of hops you need, for example, I used to work at a fintech in Canada and to send money to Australia from Canada, we had to use like air wallachs, APIs and a bunch of other things. And the amount of hops the money took to get from Toronto to Australia was like insane and super nonsensical. It was just bounced towards all these different jurisdictions. And so there is a world in which actually the back end still sucks because the, you incentives of some of these middlemen are different in B2B.

So I'm not an expert there. Rob would know much better than me. Okay. Well, let's also talk about just the fact that we are looking at a playing field already where there are certain chains or coins that have gotten in the arena and already have become dominant. So, you know, just when you look at like where the various, you know, like what features different chains are going for.

What are some of the different advantages or disadvantages that you think will make or break the competition? Like, you know, you talked about the network effect. So do you think that like tether out of the gate is just going to, you know, continue to dominate? Or like what are some of the other things that you think, you know, could change just the current rankings? In terms of rankings, okay, well, I'll come at this from a left curve retail user. Which is to say, today I have a good amount of cash and I'm much more comfortable with USC. However, I find myself keep swapping that into P-Y-USD. And the only reason is because Camino gives 12% on and PayPal is paying me money to win this race.

So I'm basically just trying to extract from whoever is going to give me the most money because I'm okay with that risk of depositing in a lending pool. So I think USDT So I think there's like a few different user Classifications here One is that the person who just doesn't care They're not going to really Do borrow lend

They're not going to have any real size They will just do whatever is the default It seems to me, right? Like if Phantom is making you use Their cash token I'm probably just going to use that I don't really care Even within cast

I don't necessarily care which is like the card company. I don't really care which one I'm using. They're all fungible to me. In Defi, I use the one that gives me the most yields, provided it's not like a super sketchy one. It seems to me that the new wave is going to be, as Rob said, the people with the distribution, the phantoms,

Jupiter's of the world, releasing their own, but then working with one of these people, issuer types behind the scenes. So like Phantom is working with Bridge and Stripe and Jupiter's working with Athena, right? And so the apps combining with these infrastructure stable companies and then whoever has the most distribution kind of dictates the rules. So for Tether specifically, like if you were to go ask Pallo today, like, you know, why do people choose Tether? Right.

And why don't you share any yield? Like you like people ask them this every, every panel he's ever on. And what will tell you is like he doesn't need to, right? He has brand recognition. To Mertz point earlier, you know, he went to go buy nicotine and the guy said, no, I only take Tether on Tron. Well, it's kind of a similar story across the global south. Like, if you go to a corner store in, you know, Argentina, they don't say, hey, listen, I want, you know, a U.S. dollar or I want stablecoin. They like, I want Tether, right?

Or I want Tetra, right? Like, that's what people say all the time. So there's this brand recognition that exists in a lot of the world in the same way that, like, every time I call a lift, I still say I call an Uber, right? Because like just, I just think of, you know, cars coming to me as Ubers, right? That's what's happened. Does that have to persist forever? Like, absolutely not. But it certainly is very hard to break that monopoly for a lot of these users in the

global south, at least in the peer-to-peer transactions, right? The way it gets broken is if, you know, New Bank all of a sudden decides to only use Circle, USC, and New Bank has 40 million customers, and they start, you know, just using USC on the back end, right? And so that is kind of the story that, you know, Merr's selling, and I think we all agree, which is that if you own distribution, you can theoretically swap people into something else. But a lot of the transactions today have either been for remittance, they've either been for, you know, peer to peer on the retail side, right?

And so that happens. There is a brand that matters there. There's trust. You know, I think you talk to people in the global south and you talked about Circle. And like there is a perspective that like, you know, Circle is like, you know, Fed chain, right? or the Fed token, right? And they're like, you know, maybe it's more risky because like, you know, it actually did DPEG, you know, when there was the banking crisis, right?

And, you know, in the U.S., we have people like MERT who are sophisticated users, right? Like, he's like, okay, I'm going to Camino. I get 12%. Like, that's really interesting for me for PYUSD. Nobody holding tether in Argentina, I mean, maybe not nobody, but vast majority of them don't care about 12% on PYUSD. They may have never heard of Camino. They will probably never interact with Camino.

Like, that is not like the thing that they are doing with their stable coins. And so what we've seen right now is there's this group of sophisticated users like Merr, who do care about these incentives. And we've seen a lot of growth for things like PYUSD and Solana because the power users like Merr or care about those incentives. But when we think about like what is the opportunity for stable coins to go from 300 billion to trillion, like, it's not the merits of the world. It's, you know, people who like, we'll maybe never interact with Camino, right? And so I think it's really hard to break

that monopoly right now. I do expect, though, that there is a world where we, we see, I mean, you know, the applications like the phantoms, et cetera, you know, where they're trying to put you into cash. I do expect there's a world where we see a lot more, um, just, U.S.D balances on these on these fintechs to the getting all the way back to the backpack example that Merck gave where everybody is saying, actually, this is just a dollar. And what's happening on the back end is that these people are mostly swapping to a token that shares economics with them. Right. And they are in that's how the liquidity is managed. And the person who is actually managed on that liquidity is a, you know, a Paxos or an Athena or Nacora or like, you know, one of these like white level fires a bridge, etc. That's the world where I see tether losing market share. If we're in a world where we continue to say, you know, I want USDC, I want USDT, I want USDA, that world is one where I think tether just like it can't be displaced, right? And so I think it really depends on how the, how the end, you know, kind of consumer apps decide to decide to operate.

I mean, there's that's, and that's really the consumer side. So we've talked a lot about consumer, right? And because consumers have been driving a lot of these prices. But if you think about B2B, you know, it's a $200 trillion market. It's 10 times bigger than the consumer market, right? Right now, most of what we see in the B2B market is very much, you know, like quote unquote, like a stable coin sandwich or it's, you know, there's fiat on the end. There's a lot of friction. You know, Merritt talked about Air Wallachs, but, you know, Jack Chong, the founder of Air Wallachs, he's been, you know, publicly very bearish on stable coins because he'll continue to say, like, listen, like, you know, you have to go into fiat at the end.

And that actually has a lot of friction and it's high cost, et cetera. But what if there's a world in which, like, you no longer have to do that? You can actually do treasury management at scale globally with stable coins. You can actually do, you know, maybe merchant settlement itself with stable coins. I mean, there's already a card company, Rain, which is underneath caste, which which merchant uses that settles with Visa and stable coins, right? And then they settle through the acquired to the merchant. If the merchant wants stable coins, they can also take it, right?

And so in that world, there is, I think, more value put on trust at and like counterparty risk and just name brand recognition for like institutions that is different than the retail user, right? And the retail user definitely has more trust for Tether today than the institution does. The institutions, especially the large conglomerates, definitely are looking at things like, oh, access to public markets, you know, circle being publicly traded, you know, maybe like size of the balance sheet, how transparent the balance sheet is, like how, what, or do they have audits that, you know, are verifiable? And in that world, you know, circle is probably winning today with

that group of people. And it could theoretically, you know, you could see displacement there, or maybe there would even be like a JP Morgan token or, you know, somebody like that, that, you know, those are like large conglomans who care about. So I think those are the ways that Tether gets, you know, displaced. But, you know, it's, it had, the body has to evolve from where it is today. You know, I have a one, this just came to me. I don't know if it makes sense, but I think one thing that's interesting for the future is like Forex. I don't really see anybody talk about this. Like convert. So like the context is I think yesterday or two days ago, I saw a graph of the Rubel, the Russian rubble, being up 40% against US dollar. And then I was

thinking, because okay, my girlfriend's Russian. And I'm like, maybe she should be buying me stuff here. Right. Like, I mean, this is pretty. egregious 40% difference. And then I was like, there's actually no real way for me to convert between these two today. There's like a euro coin by circle in USC. But like, what if, and I was just in Singapore, for example, and I was always trying to do the math between like, what is this conversion? How much am I going to get wrecked by the card people, et cetera? And I feel like there is an interesting as like, you know, if you make the assumption that the dollar keeps, it's relatively,

decline. I wonder if there's like a player that's more of a foreign currency that's not tether that actually really ends up getting bigger as well. I think there's like an interesting arbitrage there. I mean, there are a lot of there's a lot of startups. I mean, I'm sure you probably invest in something that are trying to do, call it like ingrained FX and stable coins, right? The problem has been that nobody actually even today with a US dollar performing as poorly as it is, nobody seems to actually want to hold these other currencies, right? Like so what do we say? see like happening in the euro stable coin the people who are actually holding under people who

otherwise are like denominating their business or denominating their income in euros and who don't want to take the effectors right but like when we think about like the global south for most of them their perspective is still like US dollars matter more there's more acceptance there's you know continue to be there's just like better risk it's better counterparty risk there's more places that they can use it the, I mean, most of like e-commerce today globally still takes U.S. dollars even and doesn't take, you know, and then takes like some local currency, right? And so at the, I mean, this goes into more like a geopolitical point, but like we're kind of in a currency Cold War at the moment between China and the U.S. And I think the U.S. despite the devaluing of the dollar, which is you can talk about a lot of things when it comes to like, you know, the U.S. debt, load, etc. but it still continues to be considered, I think the strongest currency globally. And until that goes away,

and I think that's like a generational thing and that takes time, I don't know why people will want to hold, you know, whatever, the ruble, even when the rubble is up, because the rubble is a really tough example, obviously considering,

but, you know, even, you know, whatever, the R&B or like, you know, something else. But I actually, this again goes back to like the consumer versus business point, the more business that is done in blockchain rails, the more business that is done in stable coins, the more people will want to hold a, you know, call it a different, you know, currency because like they don't want to take

FX risk in their local business, right? And so 68% of global FX is done in US dollars and fiat, right? Today it's like 98% in stable coins. Stable coins is not going to be 98% in the future, but I also don't think it's going to be 68%. Right. So the question is like where does it fall in the middle of those two things? Yeah, I almost feel like the answer to, to Mertz question is not like another currency, but frankly, more like Bitcoin or gold. Because there's no like basically like when you're looking like just from a geopolitical lens, like nobody's going to want to put their their savings and like something related to that that the Chinese government can, you know, influence, right?

Or like the Russian government. They like people would be more willing to do that with the US government than like pretty much any other country. Maybe, maybe you guys disagree, but that's just my perception. And, but it is true. Yeah. Okay. Like the U.S. has its own issues. You know, I say this as somebody who lives here and is like watching the dollar fall and just being like, oh my God. But the point is that, yeah, that's why I feel like it would be something that's like maybe just non-fiat related, more like a Bitcoin or gold, which is probably why we are seeing goals going to, you know, new Altai Hong is same with Bitcoin. But, okay, we're straying a little bit from the stable coin thing. So I actually want to, um, just move us through. Like, you know, and so we have actually talked about Tether already, but I do want to just hone in a little bit more on that point about how they're not sharing the yield, at least so far, because it sort of feels like they can only do that so long.

It feels like as long as soon as like consumers realize, oh, we can get a similar product and everybody's offering yield. Like I feel like they're not going to be able to keep that up. Like maybe they could do it for another, you know, like three years. to five is shears or something, but at a certain point, I feel like they won't be able to do. And, you know, like their USDT is kind of like, you know, I don't even know what to call it, but it has like, you know, a special place in plasma, which just launched. And that one, you know, has this little neo-bank attached to a plasma one, which is offering, you know, 10% plus yield. It's advertising on, on its website, 4%

cashback when they use the plasma one card, stuff like that. So it almost feels like a GBTC, BTC ETF situation with Grayscale where they kind of like have one product where they've got like consumer lock in and they're, they know that they can sort of milk it for all it's worth, but they're getting like another horse in the race. I don't know. This is my perception, but I'd be interested to hear, you know, just how you think Tether will try to compete now that there's just going to be so many new competitors. I don't know if they like, I don't know if they care that much, to be honest. You kind of look at like what, what, what, what, what, what, what, what, the other's doing, right? And, um, you know, they're very focused on

owning the end distribution, right? So like plasma one is part of that, right? But they've also invested in like three or four other chains, right? They invested in rumble. I think, you know, in, um, in Singapore, in the panel that I was on with palo, he specifically said they were going to distribute, um, USAT through rumble in the US, I believe. They, you know, I've invested in a lot of other like types of companies, whether it's, um, like, compute or AI or, you know, other things where they're, I think, that I'd try to denominate things in stables. I think they, like, strongly, strongly believe that, like, distribution is all that matters

and, like, yield itself on three, four percent doesn't matter. I mean, the yield you're talking about Laura, like, you know, 10-ish percent on plasma and, you know, this cashback. Like, that isn't tether that is providing that yield. Like, that is XPL tokens that are, you know, essentially incentivizing with emissions, people to go and use plasma specifically, right? And then the next, you know, tether chain, stable will probably do the same thing. And then the next, you know, USDZ chain will probably do the same thing.

And so that's a, it's good for tether in so much as like, you know, they can increase their distribution. But the fight that is happening there is actually for the end user from a plasma specific root point, right? So, like, for tether, like, theoretically, they don't care. plasma beats stable or plasma beats botanics or plasma beats any of these other chains, as long as somebody who's using Tether actually wins, right? And for their perspective, I think they would believe that, you know, distribution is what

matters most. I actually think, and I don't know, maybe Pallo will send me like an Ingram message after this, but I think he like mostly cares about like long term. I bet you Pallo cares more about Bitcoin than he does tether itself, right? Like I think that he would rather denominate have Bitcoin win more than he would like to have Tetherwood. And so like if there is a world in which he can incentivize that, I actually think that's where, where Tether would move, less around like, you know, U.S. dollar hegemony and like, you know, I don't know, things that are, are that you hear other people in the U.S. talk about, you know,

it's a, and Tether's not a U.S. company, right? It's a, it's a U.S. dollar denominated company, but it's not, I don't know if they have, you know, the goals of, you know, the U.S. government and a lot of what we talk about here in the U.S. in terms of stable coins. in mind when they think about going to market. Merit, any thoughts? On like, what's this specific question? Well, basically, you know, as we discussed, Heather is not sharing yield. And now there's going to be a lot of competitors that are.

And I wonder, you know, if you feel like they're going to change course or just generally what would be the best avenues for them to compete going forward. If I were them, I would not care too much. I don't think. And one of the reasons is like, What Rob said about, you know, the random clerk in Argentina saying tether instead of USDT or, you know, USD, whatever, is actually a very vivid and correct example. And I just know this from my own dad. Like I just because I'm from Turkey and people there are like this too.

It's like the familiarity aspect matters much more than earning yield on your money. Like earning yield on your money is a very crypto native or like New York, New York. kind of thing in my experience, which sounds ridiculous, but like it's relatively true. And so like if you can just be one of these companies that is the category defining name, so like Kleenex for tissue, for example, is another one, that's an extremely difficult network effect or, yeah, network effect to beat. It's one of like the four monopolistic advantages that like Teal talks about in his writing, right?

There's like actual technological secret. it, there is distribution, there is, you know, economies of scale. And then there's like branding, which is like the most elusive one. But once you have it, it's like it doesn't really go away. It takes many, many years. Or it requires an own goal. Like if Paulo does something absolutely absurd, like an FTX or like SBF style, that's the only real shot that I can see of USCT not competing.

Yeah, they don't need to do that. Go ahead. Yeah, just to add one. thing, though. I do think, like, the one existential risk for Tether is that they, like, like, well, how has Tether gotten so big, right? It's mostly gotten big on the back of the exchanges, right? Like the, it's like, you know, everybody uses Tether for like peer to peer, but also Tether is used for like all basically centralized trading. And that's how, really how it's proliferated, right? So, USDC dominates DFI. USDD dominates CFI. And I guess there's a world which, I mean, we had, you know,

finance USDA for some period of time until the regulators killed it. But I guess there's a world in which those end points, which like the exchanges themselves decided that, hey, listen, they looked at what happened on hyperliquid and they got mad like Mert did as well and decide that like they need, they don't yield or they need something else. And they decide to, you know, change the way that they think about, you know, utilizing USDT. That's probably the biggest existential risk for them right now. All right. So in a moment, we're going to talk about the other incumbents plus also the upstarts and the banks. But first, we're going to take a quick word from the sponsors to make the show possible. Finance is the world's number one crypto exchange,

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So the other big incumbent that we need to talk about is Circle. I have a feeling you guys aren't going to say the same things about Circle that you said about Tether. But I would be interested to hear, you know, especially now that they have launched their new blockchain arc, how you think they can compete in this new world. So, well, I have a lot of thoughts on the payments chains. But, yeah, certainly I don't have the same views as Circle as I do, Tether. Or I would say, by the way, that chain is not live yet as far as I know. Oh, I thought I had a lot. No, okay.

Sorry. Yeah. Thanks for perfect. You want. You want. You want. I'll let Rob go first here because I get pretty ficey when it comes to chains. Well, I mean, she was asked more about circle specifically.

And then we can talk about the chains. Listen, I think on circle specifically, like their position is definitely more tenuous, right? So the, you know, being the first publicly traded, you know, kind of call it stablecoin company, you know, kind of positioning themselves as the regulated stable coin company here in the U.S., you know, something that's more fit for businesses. I mean, even Mert said that he trusted Circlemore, which actually surprised me. Like, that is a been an advantage for them to date. But I also think it's probably an area of attack for them going forward because they're obviously going to lose that, you know, that battle if like JPM Morgan decides to issue their own, right? And like that's, they're going after a market where they are, you know, they're the second biggest player globally. They don't have the economies of scale that Tether has.

They have an advantage based on, you know, trust based on the way that Tether has, has, you know, directed, you know, previously and how they thought about some of their, you know, their, their audits and their collateral usage, et cetera, with certain types of players. But they're going after a market that, like, kind of everybody else is going after, right? You know, when, when I see new deals for, like, new stable coin issuers, they're either going after, like, really niche, like, affinity groups, or they're going today after what everyone sees us, you know, the really big prize, which is, like, you know, B2B payments and, like, regulated payments and like, you know, call it like very big, you know, addressable markets.

And that's the one that circles play in them. And so I, you know, they need to scale as quick as possible. I think they know they need to scale as quick as possible. But I also think they know that they need to like not just be a stable coin issuer, right? That's why they launched Arc. That's why they launched Circle Payment Network. You know, that's why they continue to hear. I think when you listen to Heath and Jeremy talk about, you know, they talk about internet money.

But a lot of what they talk about it right now is related to like how they can think about about specifically money movement, right? So what can we build around money movement? How can we build? I think they see themselves as, you know, at someday competitive against bridge and stripe, not just competitive against, you know, whether tether, right?

I think that's where the North Star is. And so, listen, I think for them, it's, and that's part of the reason we've seen them decide pretty, pretty recently to not only, well, they're sharing the 50% of yield with Coinbase that they've had since the beginning, But now they're kind of sharing yield with everybody, right? Like they paid finance to put USDC in there.

They're paying like a lot of startups to the yield on the USDC. And, you know, over time, you know, I don't know exactly where it ends up, but based on what I'm seeing, like, my guess is that their gross revenue to net revenue, you know, margin ends up being only like 20%, right? Like they share 80% plus of that yield, which is an entirely different model from, from Tether. And I think, you know, belies how they're thinking about, you know, what the future of the business is going to be,

and especially as they continue to talk about payments. And so that's why they launch Arc, right? As I think they see Arc as a way to figure out ways to monetize and own the end customer better, you know, whether or not that's going to work and, you know, whether or not they're, their best positioned to be launching their own blockchain, I think is a story that maybe I'll let Mark comment on first. But that's a, I do think, like it's very clear that's a lot more of a tenuous position for them than it is for somebody like,

a tether. Yeah, just one comment before Merr speaks, which is that watching kind of their strategy and just like the positioning, it makes me feel like it's sort of similar to the ETF world where just like everything kind of gets compressed down because it's so competitive. Yeah, so that it feels like their strategy is in that world. But anyway, go ahead, Merr. Well, I have nothing too interesting to add. I believe I agree with basically everything Rob said there. I was going to put it a bit more aggressive. And that I think they know they're in trouble, which is why they need to launch this chain. I do think there's many ways to get out of being in trouble, by the way.

I think they're competent. They've obviously shown they can execute and all these things. But I think they are, I was talking to one of my trader friends who was a pretty big cryptosura personality. And we were talking about like the next trades and stuff. And I was like, you know, circle seems like the easiest short here over a long time horizon. And not that I was shorted. I'm not going to short. I don't really short anything.

But that was like my sentiment, which is to say, like, that's just a very difficult position. And I really don't think these payments companies, especially Circle, understand the amount of disease you're going to get by building your own chain. Like, it is, it's way harder than you think it is, at least to win, right? You can obviously launch a chain and have it do nothing, which people have certainly exploited in the past a few years. but I think if they want to actually compete as the top two, top three, I think the chain is not going to cut it. And, you know, they need to, like, if I were them, I'm just thinking this through. It's interesting because, so I used to work at Coinbase,

and I trusted USCC much more than I did USDT, which does not seem to be a very common position. And I was much more familiar with it. So I do wonder if there's more of a like, this is more of an American coin or like There's the, you know, the trust from the Western types for USCC as opposed to the USCT. Now, of course, now they have bohines and everything. And USCT is also becoming more American, so to say. But I would say, like, that's probably an interesting edge that they can, that I would consider if I were them.

But other than that, I think they're in, I think Tether is doing roughly everything better. Like, just looking at it from like a CEO perspective, I am jealous of how Paulo is running his business. And if I were him, I'd be like, yeah, this is, this is going well. I just think I think on the chain side, maybe we should dive like a little bit more deeply in there. Because I think Mert said something that was important, which is that like, it's actually really easy to launch a chain today, like easier than it's ever been. It's, it's hard to win, right? And that's why I think it's so tempting for all of these people, right, to launch new blockchains. The, there's this kind of this weird middle ground that's happening right now, though, where people are like, okay, well, I'm going to launch.

a general purpose blockchain. And I want to, and I'm telling everyone that I want all of these developers to come and build whatever they want, and I'm not going to have permission validators. And I'm not going to, you know, require certain types of people to be on my chain or act a certain way. But also it's going to be purpose built for this like B2B, you know, use case, right? That is like, you know, going to be regulated, et cetera. And that doesn't really make any sense to me.

You kind of have to do one or the other, which is you need to either be more opinionated or just not opinionated, right? Like, Salonnas basically decided, hey, we're not going to be opinionated, and we're going to decide that we're, you know, a fast chain that, you know, has an ability to do kind of like all of like major financial use cases and we'll let you do whatever you want, right, essentially. Or you have, you know, something that's saying, like, I am very opinionated about the fact that my customers that I already own

should be doing this exact thing on this chain and I will do everything in my power to make this product in this chain allow for that type of transaction to proliferate, right? And if you're somewhere in between those two, I don't really know what advantage you have, right? And I sort of feel like the language out of arc and increasingly out of tempo as kind of stripe has kind of stepped back and tried to distance themselves from it a little bit is a little it's a little odd because it seems to be trying to appease the crypto natives who are like, we hate this like centralized, you know, like Fed chain or whatever at the same time while, you know,

trying to say that they're going to go and, you know, win some new market with a fully integrated product set that is, you know, enhanced by, you know, owning their own chain. So it's, it's, that's what I find, um, weird, to be honest. Like, being saying, you don't feel like they have a natural audience to let our market to go after at the moment. It's sort of like they've launched this chain. You just either need to be really opinionated or not opinionated. And being like a little bit opinionated is like the absolute worst space to be. And is a little by that you mean like it's a payments chain.

So it's not like a general purpose blockchain. But then like what do you mean by a little opinionated? Yeah. Like if you look at their docs now, right? Like they're like, okay. Or like we're not general purpose. purpose built for like financial use cases, right? Okay, great. So I'm purpose built for, for I own some end customer and I purpose built for, for payments and, you know, what does

that actually mean? I have enshrined, you know, FX. I have the ability to, you know, pay gas and my stable coin. I have, you know, kind of this ability to, you know, potentially do like opt in privacy, you know, I have, you know, et cetera, right? Like, and I'm going to build everything for my chain. And I'm the way, the same way I do my data indexing and the way, I'm allowing you to do reconciliation. Like, it is, everything I'm doing is going to be built for,

like, a payments company, right? Okay, that makes sense. Like, you're, you're building a payments company

that is enhanced by blockchain, and the blockchain that you are building is, enhancing the way that you align economics and you align your product, right? But then if you come out to the market and you say, I'm general purpose chain. This is crypto-native, but also,

like, I want you to know that, like, it's really good for payments, and you should use this for payments. But also you can build pump dot fun on my chain and you can launch a bunch of runners. Well, like, that doesn't really work, right? Like you have to either be like unopinionated and let, you know,

pumped up fun guys do whatever they want in your chain and everything else do what they want on your chain. I mean, Solana has X stocks and they also have Pump. And they also have like, you know, a decentralized version of only fans, right? Like nobody cares what happens on Solana. It does all of these things, right? Or you have like a payments company that uses a blockchain. If you're a general purpose chain that is like kind of in the middle, you sort of end up like stellar, to be honest, right?

And people forget that, but stellar was the first blockchain that Stripe invested in. Stripe was the seed investor in Stellar. Like it was supposed to be the payments chain, right? And so I don't know. That's what I find really odd about the current iteration of a lot of these, you know, these stable coin chains. And I find him, like I just find it to be that people are trying to. appease a lot of people. And any time you're trying to please a lot of people, you're probably under pleasing

none, to be honest. And so this may be is a stupid question, but in that sense, perhaps it's a good question. Obviously, you guys probably know right now there's like a civil war in, or maybe I shouldn't call it a civil war, but there's a disagreement in Bitcoin about, you know, the ordnals and mean coins, like all that activity. And, you know, some people like don't, they want to filter that out. And so like in this world, you know, how is it that they can restrict the usage to payments or like stable coins? Like is there is it, you know, I actually don't really know what the answer is to that.

Yeah. So I will post on this. There's really three ways. One is you do it. So Stellar is actually a good example. One is that you make the chain non-turing complete, meaning, you know, the reason Ethereum exists is because Battalix said, if you made this chain programmable, right? What if you could do more general things than just send and receive Bitcoin? And that's how you got smart contracts. And that's turn complete. So one

thing you can do is just actually make it like stellar, which is basically Bitcoin, but only for payments. I'm exaggerating a little bit. They have added functionality since then, but that was like a low resolution idea of how that works. Right. So basically make it such that you literally physically cannot do these things. Okay. That's one way. And we know that way is. probably not going to work. I mean, it could still, but like seller didn't do great, right? And that was strike back. Money Graham, for example, uses it, although I'm not sure if they will

going forward, right? So the second one is permissioning the block space, right? Like, where you literally have validators who you know, who signed certain agreements or whatnot, who say, well, we're only going to allow such and such activity. These are the only things you can deploy on here, right? So at that point, I still don't quite understand why you're using a blockchain, to be completely honest, perhaps more transparency reasons or something, because you can, I guess, verify it, but you can't necessarily do anything about it.

But that's another way. I think that way is certainly not going to work. It's like a slight iteration on Swift. So, like, it could work, I guess. I don't know how the European instinct, to be honest, but that's one way. And a third way is, I think, the much more interesting way, which is, you know, is what Temple is going to do. So Temple is going to launch permissions.

However, I was talking to Dan Robinson from Paradigm about this. And they are actually going to add specific sequencing rules to the block space. So one example today is hyperliquid, where in hyperliquid, one of the reasons why it works well for perps, not the only one, but one of the ones is because as a market maker, your cancels get prioritized over the takers. meaning if you have stale quotes, you have the priority in basically not losing money. And so that means more market makers come to the chain, better liquidity, such and such. With payments, you can do something similar, which is to say you can have specific block space rules to say, we're going to preserve 90% of the block space for these payments use cases.

There's like interesting MEV around that, I think, that is going to be quite difficult. And this is actually why I said, I think it makes much more sense. to do as an L2 instead of an L1, which people are like, oh, Merced at L2. But like it's the obvious solution, right? Because with an L1, an L1 is just an L2 where you have a bunch of different leaders. So every time there's a new block leader on the L1,

they have the option to not obey the sequencing rule, which is why on Salon, for example, we're adding something called multiple concurrent leaders so you can pick between the ones that actually produce to correct rules or something. thing. So now I think what's going to happen, though, with the third approach, which is the paradigm in Stripe 1, is people are going to game it such that, like, let's play this out, right? Imagine that Stripes change succeeds, tempo succeeds, and there's a lot of liquidity on it. Okay, so now that

there's a lot of money on it, you will attract the mercenary types, the traders, all these different things, and they'll want to start doing something with that money. And there's a lot of going to be ways to then game that block space similar to ordinals with Bitcoin such that it's not actually prioritizing payments, but like maybe the payments is actually like a weirdly encoded version of a trade, right? Like it's going to be a game of cat and mouse and MEP. And then you're going to deval a descend into the MEP chaotic world of crypto-native stuff. So that's why I think they're relatively futile unless there are now too, where you can actually have some consistent enforcement by a trusted party.

I don't know if there's any last words you guys just want to say about stable coins because one big topic we didn't touch on was banks. You know, there is some reporting that like they might kind of band together to launch a stable coin. But I don't know if you just want to leave us with anything about like how this competition will play out in the broader world. Listen, on the bank consortium side, a lot of good businesses have been launched out of bank consortiums, right? That's essentially what Visa MasterCard. are there's, you know, things like synchrony and symphony and other things that I've launched that way. I'm probably pretty bearish on it happening in Stablecoin specifically because there's like a bit of a, I think there's like misaligned incentives, right?

In terms of, you know, why they would want to have a like a shared stable coin. Because then essentially you're really just becoming like the central bank in that case. if you're doing so, like a bunch of G-sibs. And then we basically have a CBDC, and then, you know, I don't know if it really ends up working in a way that is what people are looking for. So all of that said, like, you know, we'll see. I don't know if the banks will be successful in trying to, you know, repeal this quote unquote, like, you know, yield loophole they keep talking about in the bank lobby

in terms of like, you know, sharing rewards. I would expect no, to be honest, because they, I mean, it wasn't like this is a new topic, right? Like, everyone knew that, you know, it was a loophole when Circle was paying Coinbase and Coinbase was paying its end users. But we'll see. That said, like, listen, I know a lot of the people at these banks that, you know, are working on stable coins. Basically, every single one of them is leaving the bank, right? Like, all of them have looked around.

They're like, holy, they're like, crap. Like, I can go make money and crypto. And, you know, I've had this job as like a mid-level manager doing, like, something that actually nobody really cares about it, this bank that makes no money, like they're all going to leave. And that'll slow them down. And so I, but my perspective is that any time that people tell me that a bank is going to win at something, they just haven't spent enough time working with banks. Okay.

And Mert, go ahead and leave your last thoughts. And then we'll wrap. Yeah. I mean, I worked at three of the large five banks in Canada, which is basically an oligopoly of the incompetence. And they are super antiquated. And I actually made a tweet two days ago, basically seeing exactly what Rob said, which is, if you're working on a bank, you should quit, like, ASAP and then come join the show. It's just, like, it's time for finance to enter the Internet era, right?

Like, it's taking this long. And then the one thing I'll say in terms of fearmongering to leave this off with is you should be very scared of stable coin stuff that doesn't consider privacy. in any way. I would really encourage people to be a little more cognizant of that. And I know that you're part of this like Zcash Renaissance, we can call it, is that, is that your veiled attempt to promote Zcash? Hey, I didn't say it. I just said privacy. Okay. Yeah, you can use, I mean, there's a bunch of other things. Even ARC, it seems like they have some privacy option. Just privacy over no privacies. I'll live with that. Yeah, well, I agree with that.

All right, you guys, this is super fun. Rob, thanks for hanging out a little bit of extra time. And yeah, we will catch you all later. Sayonara. Thanks for tuning in to the weekly news recap. Let's begin. ICE invests $2 billion in Polly Market, amid U.S. reentry plans.

Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, is investing up to $2 billion in Polymarket, valuing the crypto-based predict. the crypto-based prediction platform at $9 billion post-money. The agreement confirmed this week makes ICE a global distributor of Polymarkets' event-driven data and includes plans for future tokenization initiatives. Founded in 2020, Polymarket enables users to trade on binary outcomes tied to real-world events, such as elections, sports, and cultural trends.

The platform recorded over $2 billion in trading volume during the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The investment comes as Polymarket prepares to return to the U.S. market, following a 222 settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that restricted domestic access. Polymarket also disclosed previously unannounced funding rounds totaling $205 million, including a $150 million raise in early 2025, led by Founders Fund. Its earlier investors include Coinbase, 1789 capital, and blockchain capital. Also this week, Polymarket added Bitcoin deposits as a funding option, expanding beyond its existing support for Ethereum, Polygon, Base, Arbitrum, and Solana to attract more users to its event-betting platform. S&P unveils hybrid index-linking crypto and blockchain stocks. S&P Global has launched the Digital Markets 50 Index, a new benchmark combining 15 major cryptocurrencies with 35 publicly traded companies tied to blockchain and digital asset infrastructure. developed in partnership with blockchain firm Dinari,

the index marks S&P's first hybrid product bridging crypto assets and traditional equities. The index is designed to provide diversified exposure across the crypto ecosystem. Eligible assets must meet minimum market capitalization thresholds, $300 million for cryptocurrencies, and $100 million for equities. And no individual asset will account for more than 5% of the index.

Constituents will be rebalanced quarterly under S and P's established governance framework. Denari will also issue a token version of the index, enabling investors to access it through on-chain instruments. BNY Mellon explores tokenized deposits for blockchain-based payments. BNY Mellon is assessing the use of tokenized deposits to support blockchain payment infrastructure, as part of its broader push toward modernizing real-time, cross-border, and instant settlement systems. would allow clients to conduct transactions using digital representations of bank-held deposits processed over decentralized ledgers. Carl Slabicki, executive platform owner for Treasury Services at BNY Mellon, said tokenized deposits could help, quote, overcome legacy technology constraints, end quote, initially within internal

systems and eventually across broader markets, as standards evolve. Tokenized deposits function as bank-issued digital coins backed by commercial bank money, offering near-instant settlement and 24-7 availability. BNY Mellon's Treasury Services process, approximately $2.5 trillion in payments daily, and oversee $55.8 trillion in assets under custody or administration. Gray scale becomes first in U.S. to offer staking in spot ether ETFs. Grayscale investments has introduced staking to its spot Ethereum ETFs,

marking a first for U.S. listed crypto-exterrater traded products. The feature has been added to the gray scale Ethereum Trust ETF, ETH, and Ethereum Mini Trust ETF, ETH, both trading on NYS-E ARCA, and will allow investors to earn staking rewards without managing validators or crypto wallets. Thanks to recent regulatory guidance, staking is now permissible within 1933 Act-compliant ETFs. Quote, thanks to new regulatory guidance, investors can now benefit from the value accrual of staking. No action needed, no change to exposure,

said Grayscale CEO Peter Mintzberg on X. Staking has also been enabled for the firm's Grayscale Salana Trust, G-S-O-L, which is pending SEC approval for E-TF conversion. For ETH, Rewards will be distributed directly. For E-T-H and G-S-O-L, rewards will be reflected in fund price growth. Grayscale will use institutional partners like Coinbase and a network of validator providers to manage the staking process. Coinbase seeks National Trust Charter. Coinbase has filed an application with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, OCC, to obtain a National Trust bank charter, aiming to expand its institutional custody services.

The license would allow the company to safeguard customer assets and manage payment-related activities, but unlike a full-service bank charter, it does not permit lending or deposit taking. Tushar, Coinbase's vice president of institutional product, said the move is intended to support innovation between crypto and traditional finance. Quote, an OCC charter will streamline oversight for new offerings and enable continued innovation to integrate digital assets into traditional finance, Tushar stated. He clarified that Coinbase has, quote, no intention of becoming a bank, end quote, emphasizing the company's focus on regulatory clarity and customer trust.

Coinbase joins several other crypto firms, including Circle, Ripple, Paxos, and BitGo. In applying for similar charters amid a favorable policy environment, shaped by recent federal stablecoin legislation signed in July, Trump MemeCoin issuer seeks $200 million to build digital asset treasury. Fight Fight Fight, Flight, L.C., the company behind the Trump Meme coin is working to raise at least $200 million to establish a digital asset treasury, DAT focused on accumulating the token, according to sources cited by Bloomberg. The effort, which could expand to as much as $1 billion, is still in development and has not been officially announced.

Launched days before President Donald Trump's second inauguration, the meme coin reached a high of $44 in January, but currently trades near $8. Around 35% of its supply is unlocked, with the rest primarily held by Trump-linked entities. The token has a circulating market value of approximately. approximately $1.5 billion, according to Masari. The DAT initiative is being led by Bill Zanker, a longtime Trump associate. It follows other promotional campaigns around the coin, including a May dinner with President Trump for top holders. The project joins a broader wave of digital treasury ventures emerging across the crypto sector.

Morgan Stanley recommends up to 4% crypto allocation for growth investors. Morgan Stanley's Global Investment Committee has advised Porteastern, portfolio managers to allocate up to 4% to cryptocurrency in, quote, opportunistic growth portfolios, according to its October guidance note. The recommendation is aimed at investors seeking higher risk, high return strategies. For portfolios with more moderate objectives, the bank suggested 2% for, quote, balanced growth, and 3% for, quote, market growth strategies, while advising a 0% allocation for income-focused or capital preservation portfolios. Describing crypto as, quote, a speculative and increasingly popular asset class, the GIC noted its primary focus remains on Bitcoin, which it likened to, quote, digital gold.

The report also highlighted the need for periodic rebalancing, given crypto's potential for volatility under macroeconomic stress. DeFi Lama, D-Lists, Aster volume data over trading pattern concerns. Cryptoanalytics platform, Defi Lama, has removed Astor's perpetual futures trading data from its platform, citing concerns over data reliability. According to Zero XNGMI, a pseudonymous co-founder of DeFi Lama, Astor's trading volume showed an almost perfect correlation with Binance's perpetual markets, raising suspicions of potential wash trading. Quote, Astor doesn't make it possible to get lower-level data such as who is making and filling orders. Zero XNGMI stated, adding that until verifiable transparency is available, the data will remain delisted. The move comes as Astor's daily perpetual volume had recently surged to $60 billion and briefly overtook competitors like Hyperliquid. The delisting triggered a 10% drop in Astor's native token, which is currently trading below its previous highs.

Investor pushes for major changes to Polygon's tokenomics. A proposal from pseudonymous investor venture founder, is gaining traction in the Polygon Governance Forum, calling for a significant revision to the POL tokens supply model. The plan includes eliminating the current 2% annual inflation rate and introducing a buyback and burn strategy funded by the Polygon Treasury or ecosystem revenues. The investor cited POL's prolonged underperformance as a key motivation, noting a 46% decline over the past year, and a drop of over 90% from its all-time high. Quote, despite significant, ecosystem development and innovation, token price has dropped,

underperforming virtually every comparable layer 2, or ecosystem token, venture founder wrote. The proposal suggests either immediately adopting a 0% inflation rate or gradually tapering inflation by 0.5% per quarter until it phases out. While the initiative has received support from community members and recognition from Polygon Labs' CEO Mark Boyron, concerns remain over how validator rewards would be maintained without inflationary funding. Unchained is produced by Laura Shin with help from Matt Pilchard, Juan Oranovich, Margaret Curia, and Pam Majumdar. The weekly

recap was written by Juan Aranovich and edited by Stephen Erlich. Thanks for listening.