My €100 is now worth 60 cents. The warning was free, public, and took 90 seconds to read.
The US-Europe investment gap is growing as AI drives American venture capital. Discover why Europe is falling behind and what tech leaders must do.
The post US-Europe Investment Gap Widens Due to AI Surge appeared first on TechRepublic.
The US-Europe investment gap is growing as AI drives American venture capital. Discover why Europe is falling behind and what tech leaders must do.
The post US-Europe Investment Gap Widens Due to AI Surge appeared first on TechRepublic.
Buy at $1.
Wait until it reaches $10.
Sell.
Easy.
At least, that was how it looked from the outside.
Everywhere I looked, people were talking about Bitcoin, Ethereum, new tokens, meme coins, overnight millionaires, and the next “100x opportunity.” Crypto seemed less like a financial system and more like a giant global race where everyone was trying to find the next winning ticket.
But something changed the way I looked at crypto.
I started asking a much simpler question:
What happens when we stop asking how much a coin is worth and start asking what it is actually useful for?
That question led me down a very different path.
Imagine someone gives you a beautiful key.
It looks expensive. It is made of gold. Everyone around you is impressed by it.
But there is one problem.
You don’t know what door it opens.
That’s how I started thinking about many crypto coins.
The market can give a token a price, a community can give it attention, and social media can give it momentum. But none of those things automatically make the underlying asset useful.
A coin becomes interesting when it solves a real problem.
Maybe it makes international payments faster.
Maybe it allows people to move value without depending entirely on traditional banking infrastructure.
Maybe it provides access to a decentralized application.
Maybe it represents an asset.
Or maybe it simply creates a new way for people to participate in a financial network.
The technology matters.
The use case matters.
And increasingly, the infrastructure around the coin matters just as much.
Sending money across borders has never been as simple as sending a message.
If you’ve ever dealt with international payments, you probably know the experience.
There are banks involved.
There are intermediaries.
There are compliance checks.
There are different currencies.
There are settlement times.
And sometimes, there are fees that make you wonder where half your money went.
Crypto introduced a completely different idea:
What if value could move globally in almost the same way information moves?
Send a message to someone on the other side of the world, and it can arrive almost instantly.
Why shouldn’t value work similarly?
Of course, reality is more complicated.
Crypto doesn’t magically eliminate compliance, fraud, volatility, regulation, or operational risk.
But the idea itself is powerful.
And that idea is probably more important than whether a particular coin is trading at $500 or $5,000.
There’s another reason crypto fascinates me.
It’s psychological.
People don’t just buy coins.
They buy stories.
One person buys Bitcoin because they believe in decentralized money.
Another buys Ethereum because they believe in decentralized applications.
Someone else buys a meme coin because their friends are making money from it.
And another person buys a token because they genuinely believe they are getting in early on a technology that could change an industry.
Same market.
Completely different reasons.
That’s why crypto can be so difficult to understand from price charts alone.
A chart tells you what people are doing.
It doesn’t always tell you why they’re doing it.
And when emotions become stronger than fundamentals, things can get very interesting — and sometimes very dangerous.
This is probably the biggest lesson I’ve taken from the crypto world.
A coin can be the visible part of a much larger ecosystem.
Think about a city.
You see buildings, roads, shops and people.
But underneath all of that is infrastructure: electricity, water, transportation, communication networks and systems that most people never think about.
Crypto works in a similar way.
The token might be what people see.
Behind it, there can be wallets, exchanges, payment processors, blockchain networks, custody systems, compliance infrastructure, liquidity providers and financial rails.
Without that infrastructure, even a brilliant token can struggle to become genuinely useful.
That’s why I think the next chapter of crypto won’t be defined only by which coin goes up the most.
It may be defined by which ecosystems become easiest to use.
Imagine a future where you don’t really care whether a payment is “crypto” or “traditional.”
You simply open an application, send money internationally, and the technology handles what happens in the background.
Maybe your money starts as fiat.
Maybe it moves through a digital asset.
Maybe it is converted into another currency before reaching the recipient.
You don’t necessarily need to understand every step.
You just need the experience to be fast, reliable and transparent.
That’s when crypto could become much more interesting.
Not when everyone is talking about it.
But when people start using it without thinking about it.
The best technology often disappears into the background.
We don’t think about the servers every time we send an email.
We don’t think about the underlying network every time we make a card payment.
Perhaps one day, we won’t think about blockchain every time we move digital value either.
We’ll just call it a payment.
Honestly, I wouldn’t start with that question anymore.
I’d start with:
What problem does this coin solve?
Who actually needs it?
What happens if the hype disappears?
Does the ecosystem have real users?
Is there genuine activity?
How does the project handle security and compliance?
What makes the token necessary?
And perhaps most importantly:
Would anyone still use this project if the price stopped going up?
That last question can reveal a lot.
Because speculation can create attention.
But utility creates staying power.
And strangely, I think that’s a good thing.
The future of crypto may not look like the dramatic revolution many people imagined.
There may not be a single coin that replaces everything.
There may not be one blockchain that wins.
Instead, crypto may quietly become another layer of the global financial system.
Payments may become more connected.
Businesses may move money across borders more efficiently.
Digital assets may become easier to access.
Financial services may become increasingly programmable.
And users may eventually stop caring about the technology underneath.
Maybe that’s the real sign that crypto has succeeded.
Not when everyone knows the name of the coin.
But when nobody needs to.
Because at that point, the coin has stopped being the story.
The utility has become the story.
The Coin Everyone Wanted to Own — Until They Had to Use It was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
XRP’s exchange reserves are hitting levels not seen since early 2024, but the short-term market is telling a very different story.
Something interesting is happening with XRP.
While traders are focused on the recent price pullback, Binance’s XRP reserves have been quietly shrinking.
The monthly average of XRP held on Binance has fallen from roughly 3.1 billion XRP in November 2025 to 2.6 billion XRP today.
That’s a decline of approximately 500 million XRP.
Even more interesting: Binance’s average XRP reserves are now at levels last seen around February 2024.
And this happened while XRP went through a brutal correction.
From its peak near $3.66, XRP has fallen to around $1.30–$1.35, putting the token roughly 63% below its high.
So why are XRP reserves falling while the price remains under pressure?
And more importantly, does this actually mean investors are accumulating?
The simplest way to look at the data is this:
Less XRP is sitting on Binance than it was a year ago.
That matters because exchange balances represent XRP that is readily available for trading.
When coins move away from exchanges, one possible explanation is that investors are transferring them into private wallets for longer-term holding.
But there is an important distinction:
Exchange outflows do not automatically equal accumulation.
Coins can move for several reasons, so the reserve decline should be treated as a potentially bullish signal rather than definitive proof that investors are buying.
Still, the size and persistence of the decline make it difficult to ignore.
There are three potential explanations worth watching.
The first possibility is straightforward: some XRP investors may simply be choosing to hold their coins away from exchanges.
If investors have a longer-term outlook, there is less reason to keep their XRP on a trading platform.
The continued decline in Binance reserves — even during a major price drawdown — makes this possibility particularly interesting.
It suggests that at least some market participants aren’t responding to falling prices by moving more XRP onto exchanges.
The second possibility is the emergence of spot XRP ETFs, which launched around November–December 2025.
ETF demand can require XRP exposure to be acquired and held through custody arrangements.
If some of that demand is being sourced through the market, it could contribute to declining exchange balances.
However, the available reserve data cannot tell us exactly how much of the 500 million XRP decline is connected to ETFs.
So this should be viewed as a possible driver, not a confirmed explanation.
The third possibility is less exciting but still important.
Binance can move XRP between wallets as it manages liquidity and responds to customer demand.
Because we’re looking at a monthly-average metric rather than individual wallet movements, operational transfers are unlikely to explain the entire long-term decline on their own.
But they remain part of the equation.
Here’s where the story gets interesting.
While XRP’s exchange reserves continue to decline, short-term traders are getting hit.
At the time of writing, XRP was down:
4-hour: –1.76%
24-hour: –4.54%
7-day: –7.73%
Yet XRP was still up 21.93% over 30 days, showing just how strong the August rebound had been before the recent pullback.
Then leverage started getting flushed.
Over the previous 24 hours, XRP recorded approximately $11.21 million in liquidations.
Of that total:
Longs: $10.63M
Shorts: $583K
That’s a huge imbalance.
The market wasn’t primarily liquidating traders betting on XRP falling.
It was liquidating traders betting on XRP going higher.
At first glance, the two signals appear contradictory.
One says XRP supply on Binance is shrinking.
The other says XRP traders are being forced out of bullish positions.
But they’re actually measuring two very different things.
Exchange reserves measure supply behavior over a longer timeframe.
Liquidations measure leveraged positioning over a much shorter timeframe.
That’s why XRP can simultaneously have a potentially constructive supply trend and a bearish short-term price structure.
A trader who bought XRP with leverage during the August rally doesn’t necessarily care that Binance reserves have fallen over the past year.
If XRP falls far enough, their position gets liquidated anyway.
And once those leveraged positions are forced to close, the resulting selling can push the price even lower.
Potentially — but not necessarily immediately.
The 500 million XRP decline is the more interesting signal for investors with a multi-month horizon.
If XRP continues leaving exchanges while price stabilizes, it would strengthen the argument that investors are moving coins toward longer-term custody.
But if exchange reserves begin rising again alongside renewed selling pressure, the accumulation thesis becomes much weaker.
For now, the data tells a more nuanced story.
XRP’s long-term supply picture is becoming tighter, while its short-term market structure remains vulnerable.
That’s an important distinction.
The falling Binance reserves don’t guarantee a price breakout.
And the recent liquidations don’t necessarily invalidate the longer-term supply trend.
They simply show that XRP’s short-term price is still being driven heavily by leverage and market sentiment.
For investors, that’s probably the most important takeaway.
The 500 million XRP leaving Binance is a signal worth watching. The liquidation cascade is a reminder not to confuse a long-term accumulation trend with an immediate price catalyst.
Sometimes the most bullish-looking on-chain data and the ugliest short-term price action can exist at the same time.
500M XRP Just Left Binance. Something Interesting Is Happening was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Malware is any malicious software designed to infiltrate and harm a system, and crypto-stealing malware specifically targets digital assets. These threats come in many forms, tricking users into installing them through fake apps, phishing links, or compromised software. Once inside a device, they can steal private keys, modify transactions, or deceive victims into approving fraudulent transfers, leading to significant financial losses.
In 2024 alone, wallet drainer malware stole nearly $500 million from over 332,000 victims, marking a sharp rise from the previous year. The largest single theft reached $55.48 million, with the first quarter seeing the highest activity. Hackers and scammers are pretty active, as we can see. That’s why we’ll explore here five relatively new andcunning malware types, from deceptive trojans to sneaky transaction-altering clippers.
You know you should take care of your private keys, preferably outside the digital world. But have you ever felt lazy enough to just take a screenshot of them, and save it inside your gallery? Who will ever know, right? Well, this malware type is the very reason why you should stop doing that. Cybercriminals will know and snatch all your coins.
They’re now using optical character recognition (OCR) technology to scan images stored on your device for sensitive information. OCR-based malware can detect and extract text from screenshots, putting your cryptocurrency recovery phrases, passwords, and other private data at risk. If you’ve ever taken a screenshot of a wallet seed phrase, login credentials, or personal messages, this malware can find it and send it to attackers — giving them full control over your accounts.
Kaspersky identified SparkCat, which has been active on both Google Play and the App Store, while McAfee discovered SpyAgent, mainly spreading through Android APKs outside official stores. The two malware strains are suspiciously similar, so they might as well be the same under different names. SparkCat has been found in popular apps like messengers and food delivery services, with over 242,000 downloads, targeting users in the UAE, Europe, and Asia. Meanwhile, SpyAgent has focused on South Korea, with signs of expansion to the UK.
To protect yourself, besides avoiding storing sensitive information in screenshots, only download well-ranked apps from official stores, and be cautious about granting unnecessary permissions. If you suspect an infection, remove the app immediately and use security tools to scan your device.
Are you looking for a job in the crypto industry right now? You may be at risk of being scammed by the criminals behind this type of malware. They create fake job postings on trusted platforms like LinkedIn, CryptoJobsList, and WellFound, luring victims into fake interviews. The process seems professional at first, with initial exchanges happening over email or messaging apps like Telegram and Discord.
However, at some point, the recruiter asks the applicant to download special video conferencing software to complete the interview. This software, often presented as a tool like “Willo,” “Meeten,” or “GrassCall,” is actually a trojan designed to steal personal data and cryptocurrency. Once installed, the malware activates and begins gathering sensitive information from the victim’s device.
Among these malicious programs, Meeten stands out for its ability to steal cryptocurrency directly from browser wallets. Researchers from Cado Security Labs uncovered that Meeten’s malware can collect banking details, browser cookies, and even passwords stored in popular crypto wallets like Ledger and Trezor. GrassCall follows a similar pattern but is linked to a Russian cybercriminal group called Crazy Evil. This group specializes in social engineering attacks, using fake job interviews to gain victims’ trust.
Victims who download the GrassCall software unknowingly install a remote access trojan (RAT) alongside an infostealer. These programs allow attackers to log keystrokes, extract passwords, and drain crypto wallets. Security experts tracking this campaign found that the criminals even rewarded their affiliates with a share of the stolen assets, making it a highly organized operation.
To stay safe from such scams, always be cautious when asked to download software from unfamiliar sources, verify recruiters’ identities through official company websites, and use security tools to detect suspicious activity on your devices.
Clippers are a type of malware that specifically targets cryptocurrency transactions by monitoring the clipboard of an infected device. When you copy a wallet address, clippers silently replace it with one controlled by attackers. Since cryptocurrency transactions are irreversible, if you don’t double-check the address before sending funds, your money could be gone for good. Clippers are simple yet highly effective, as they don’t require sophisticated attacks — just an unnoticed swap in your copied text.
MassJacker is a large-scale clipper campaign recently discovered to be using at least 778,531 fraudulent wallet addresses. At the time of analysis by CyberArk, only 423 of the wallets contained any funds, totaling about $95,300, but historical data suggests much larger sums have been stolen. The malware operators seem to rely on a central Solana wallet, which has received over $300,000 so far. MassJacker spreads through pirated software downloads, particularly from a site called pesktop[.]com.
When you run an infected installer (for a movie, a game, a tool, etc.), a hidden script executes a complex chain of malware loaders, eventually injecting MassJacker into a legitimate Windows process to evade detection. To avoid MassJacker and similar threats, be cautious when downloading software, especially pirated programs, as they are a common delivery method for malware. Always verify wallet addresses manually before confirming any transaction to ensure they haven’t been altered.
If you’re an open-source developer using GitHub, you should be extra cautious about the repositories you download. As discovered by Kaspersky, hackers have been spreading malware called GitVenom by creating fake projects that look legitimate. These projects often claim to be useful tools, such as Telegram bots for managing Bitcoin wallets or automation scripts for Instagram. They even come with well-written documentation, AI-generated README files, and artificially inflated commit histories to appear authentic.
However, once you download and run the code, GitVenom silently infects your system, stealing sensitive data, including your browsing history, passwords, and — most importantly — your cryptocurrency wallet information. Once active, GitVenom installs additional malware, including clipboard hijackers (clippers) that replace copied wallet addresses, redirecting transactions to attacker-controlled wallets. So far, cybercriminals have stolen at least 5 BTC, worth around $485,000, with most infections detected in Russia, Brazil, and Turkey.
Don’t just trust a GitHub project because it looks popular — inspect the code, check for unusual activity in commit histories, and be wary of newly created repositories with polished documentation. Running unverified code from GitHub without proper review could compromise your entire development environment and crypto assets.
Described by Cleafy, this malware targets banking and cryptocurrency apps to steal user credentials — and their funds. It has been active since June 2024, mainly in the UK, Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal, with signs of expansion into Latin America. The malware impersonates apps like Google Chrome, Google Play Store, and Android Security to trick users into installation.
Once on a device, it abuses Android’s Accessibility Services to record keystrokes, display fake login screens, intercept SMS messages, and even remotely control infected devices. Some of the affected platforms include Binance, KuCoin, BBVA, Santander, Kraken, and MetaMask. Over 77 targets have been identified, though.
A key characteristic of DroidBot is its operation as a Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS), allowing cybercriminals to rent the malware for $3,000 per month. At least 17 affiliate groups use the malware, each customizing it to attack specific targets. Researchers believe the malware’s creators are Turkish, as suggested by language settings in leaked screenshots. So far, 776 infections have been confirmed, mostly in Europe.
DroidBot’s infection vectors primarily rely on social engineering tactics, tricking users into downloading the malicious app through fake security updates or cloned applications. Once installed, it can remotely control the device, execute commands, and even darken the screen to hide its activity. Always be careful with the software you’re installing!
It’s necessary to stay vigilant in the online world. Likewise, you can take some preventive measures against potential attacks.
Featured Vector Image by Freepik
Originally Published on Hackernoon
5 New Crypto-Stealing Malware Threats You Didn’t See Coming was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Stellar, and the strange, humble bet that the world will never agree on one money, so someone should build the switchboard between all of them.
Send a text to the other side of the planet and it arrives before you lower your phone. Free. Now send that same person twenty dollars. It takes three days and shows up as seventeen. Same phone. Same second. Why does the message fly and the money crawl?
Theres a coin thats spent eleven years trying to answer exactly that. Almost nobody talks about it the way they talk about Bitcoin. Its called Stellar, the coin ticker is XLM, and its whole reason for existing is to make money move like a message.
This is issue two of The Teardown, where we take one coin at a time and crack it open like the back of a watch, to see the actual machine inside, not the price. Because when a friend asks why you own something, I want you to have a real answer, not a chart. And Stellar might be the most important machine in this whole series to understand, for a reason that only shows up once you look inside. So lets look. Ill go slow, like always. Not investment advice, promise. I just went down the rabbit hole and I want to show you what I found.
Start with a person, because thats who this is really about.
Somewhere right now, a nurse in one country is sending money to her family in another. A builder is wiring his wages home. A daughter is paying for her mother’s medicine across a border. Around eight hundred million people on Earth live, in part, on money that someone far away mails back to them. It is one of the largest flows of money in the world, and almost all of it belongs to people who dont have much to spare.
And on average, roughly six of every hundred dollars they send simply vanishes on the way. Fees. For the poorest corridors it can be ten dollars in every hundred, or more. A quiet tax, taken from the people least able to pay it, every single time they try to help someone they love.
Where does that cut go? This is the part that made me angry once I understood it.
When you send money abroad the old way, it does not zip across in a straight line. It runs a relay race.
Your bank hands the money to a bank it has a relationship with. That bank hands it to another. That one to another, each in a different country, each speaking to the next through decades-old messaging systems, each holding the money for a while, each taking a small cut and adding a little delay. This chain has a name, correspondent banking, and it is basically how cross-border money has worked since the 1970s. A baton, passed from runner to runner, and every runner gets paid.
Its slow and expensive not because anyone is evil, but because there is no single shared road. Every bank keeps its own private book (remember, weve talked about how everything in money is really just a ledger), and getting those separate books to agree across borders is genuinely hard. So the world built a relay of middlemen to bridge the gap, and the middlemen, quite reasonably, charge for the trouble.
Now hold that picture, the relay of banks, because Stellar’s entire idea is to replace it with something that looks completely different.
Here is where Stellar is genuinely interesting, and where it quietly breaks from almost every other coin.
Most of crypto is trying to build a new money. A coin to replace the dollar. The one currency to rule them all. Stellar, from its start in 2014, made a stranger and humbler bet. It said: the world is never going to agree on one money. There will always be dollars and naira and pesos and rupees. So dont try to replace them. Instead, build the one thing the world is actually missing, an open network that connects all of them.
Not a new currency. A switchboard between the currencies we already have. One shared road, so money can travel like a packet of information instead of a baton in a relay.
And when you build that road, something almost magical becomes possible. Its called a path payment, and its the most beautiful trick in the whole system.
Imagine you want to send dollars, but your mother wants pesos.
On Stellar, you dont have to find a currency exchange, or hold pesos, or care how it works. You just say, in effect, take these dollars from me and make sure exactly this many pesos land with her. In the couple of seconds that follow, the network itself goes hunting across all its open marketplaces for the cheapest chain of trades that turns your dollars into her pesos, maybe dollars to euros to pesos, maybe straight across, maybe hopping through Stellar’s own coin in the middle. It does the whole conversion automatically, and, this part matters, it either completes the entire path or none of it. Your money can never get stranded halfway, converted into something useless.
You send one kind of money. Someone receives another. The road translates in real time, in seconds, for a fraction of a cent. That is the thing the relay of banks could never do, and it is Stellar in one idea.
But that raises an obvious question, the one that gets to the real machine. If theres no relay of banks, no miners like Bitcoin, no central company stamping each payment, then who actually agrees that a payment happened? Who keeps this shared road honest?
Quick pause, friend to friend. The next bit is the real engine, and its a genuinely different idea from anything else in crypto. If it takes a second read, thats not you struggling, thats you learning something most people who own this coin have never understood. Stay with me. Ill build it up slowly, and if you ever want the groundwork, earlier issues like how blockchain actually works lay the floor. Im not here to keep you at the same level as everyone else, nodding along. I want you to walk away actually knowing this. Okay. Onward.
Bitcoin agrees on its ledger through mining, burning enormous amounts of electricity so that cheating costs more than its worth. Most newer coins use staking, where you lock up money as a bond. Stellar does neither. No mining. No staking. No power plants. It uses something genuinely its own, and once it clicks, its lovely.
It works like human trust actually works.
Picture the network as a crowd of computers, called validators, run by banks, companies, universities, ordinary people. Instead of one master list of who counts, every single validator gets to choose, for itself, a small set of other validators it trusts. Just a handful. The ones it considers reputable enough that, if they all agree a payment is legit, thats good enough for me.
Now heres the magic. Your circle of trust overlaps with mine, and mine overlaps with someone else’s, and theirs with another, and so on. No one trusts everyone. But because the little circles overlap, agreement can ripple across the whole network anyway, until the entire system locks onto the same answer, in about five seconds, without anyone in charge. Its the same way the internet itself holds together: no king of the internet, just each network agreeing to connect to a few others, and out of all those small handshakes, one global thing emerges.
Theres one iron rule that keeps it safe: those circles of trust have to overlap enough. If the network ever split into two groups that shared no trusted members, they could disagree about reality, two versions of who owns what. So Stellar is designed so that, rather than risk splitting into two conflicting truths, it will simply stop and wait until agreement is possible again. It prefers to freeze rather than to lie. (It has, in fact, briefly halted before, and honestly, a payment network that would rather pause than double-spend your money is showing you its priorities.)
The payoff of all this: settlement in around five seconds, a fee of about one hundred-thousandth of a coin (fractions of a cent), and no wasteful mining rig anywhere in sight. A global money network that runs on a laptop’s worth of power instead of a nation’s.
Now let me show you a scratch, because this one matters and the cheerleaders skip it.
Stellar moves digital tokens beautifully. But most people dont want tokens, they want actual dollars or pesos in actual hands. So the network needs on-ramps and off-ramps, points where real cash becomes a digital token and back again. In Stellar’s world these are called anchors, and an anchor is usually a company, a money-transfer firm, a fintech, a bank, that holds the real money and issues a token that stands for it.
Which means the token in your wallet is only as trustworthy as the anchor behind it. If the anchor is honest and solvent, great, your token is as good as cash. If the anchor lies, or goes broke, or gets frozen by a regulator, your lovely digital token can turn into thin air.
Sit with what that means, because it connects to everything weve talked about. A few issues back we watched Bitcoin try to remove the trusted middleman entirely, and Zcash try to hide your business from everyone. Stellar goes almost the opposite way. It doesnt try to abolish the trusted institutions. It makes them cheap, fast, and able to talk to each other. It even builds in tools for issuers to freeze tokens, reverse transactions, and demand identity checks, the exact opposite of Bitcoin’s unstoppable, censor-proof money.
That sounds like a betrayal of the whole crypto dream, and to a Bitcoiner, it is. But its also exactly why serious institutions are willing to touch it, which brings us to the surprising part.
Heres what genuinely surprised me. While XLM sat ignored as a “dead coin” for years, the network quietly went and got real.
MoneyGram, one of the biggest names in sending money across borders, spent years building on Stellar and now issues its own digital dollar on it, letting people turn cash into digital money and back at physical locations around the world. PayPal put its dollar stablecoin on Stellar. Circle issues its widely-used digital dollar there. Franklin Templeton, a giant asset manager, put a real regulated money-market fund on Stellar, one of the first traditional funds to live on a public blockchain. And in late 2025 the Marshall Islands, an actual country, paid a basic income to tens of thousands of its residents directly on Stellar, swapping quarterly boat-shipped cash for instant payments to a phone.
These are not press-release pilots. This is real money, moving for real people, on these rails, today. By this framing Stellar has quietly become one of the largest homes for tokenized real-world assets in all of crypto, which ties straight into a shift we broke down in Tokenization, the 16 trillion dollar shift.
So the network works. Institutions use it. Money moves like a message. Which makes the last scratch the strangest, and the most important lesson in this entire issue.
For all that real-world success, XLM the coin has spent years going roughly nowhere, sitting far below where it traded back in 2018. A decade of genuine adoption, and the price barely reflects it. How?
Heres the uncomfortable answer, and its the thing I most want you to take from this issue. You can use Stellar the network without ever needing XLM the coin.
Because heres what XLM actually does, seen plainly. It has three small jobs. It pays that sliver-of-a-cent fee, which stops spammers flooding the network. It can act as a bridge in the middle of a path payment, when two currencies have no direct market between them. And every account must hold a tiny reserve of it, a few coins, to stop people bloating the ledger with junk. Thats the list. Notice whats not on it: be money. XLM was never really meant to be the thing you save or spend. Its the grease, the glue, and the occasional bridge.
When PayPal or MoneyGram move their digital dollars across Stellar, they mostly move stablecoins, tokens that stand for real dollars. Those ride the rails just fine, and the actual coin, XLM, is only strictly needed for that microscopic fee and, sometimes, as the bridge in a path payment. So the road can carry billions of dollars while the toll it collects stays almost nothing.
This is the single most useful idea in the whole series, so let me make it a tool you keep forever. When you look at any “utility coin”, any coin whose pitch is that it powers some network, dont ask whether the network is winning. Ask whether the coin is. Ask it like a toll booth.
Three questions. One: to use this network, must you actually hold this coin, or can people ride the same rails using a stablecoin and skip the coin entirely? Two: does the coin’s job grow as the network grows, or is it stuck doing one tiny fixed thing, like paying a sliver-of-a-cent fee, forever? Three: if the network succeeds beyond anyone’s dreams, is the coin mathematically forced to rise with it, or can the network win while the coin just sits there?
Run XLM through it honestly and you get a genuinely mixed answer, and thats the point. The network is a real, working, adopted piece of financial infrastructure. Whether the coin captures that success is a live, unresolved question. There are real reasons it might, its still the neutral bridge asset, and if enough odd currency pairs need connecting, that bridging job could grow. And there are real reasons it might not, if stablecoins simply route around it. A serious person can hold either view. What a serious person cannot do, after reading this, is confuse “the network is used by PayPal” with “therefore the coin goes up.” Those are two different sentences.
Let me lay the rest of the scratches on the table, quickly and plainly, because you deserve the whole picture.
Its more centralized than Bitcoin. A single foundation created the coins and still holds a large share, and once even destroyed half the total supply in a single decision. The validators are mostly known institutions, not a wild-open crowd, which is safer and faster but further from the trustless ideal. Its got fierce competition, most obviously from a near-twin called XRP, born from the same founder chasing the same cross-border prize, plus the whole stablecoin world and the looming possibility of central banks issuing their own digital money and cutting out any neutral middle-coin entirely. And like everything in this space, its ultimately software, and software has bugs and outages.
None of that makes it a scam, and none of it makes it a sure thing. It makes it what it actually is, a real, working, decade-old piece of financial plumbing with a genuinely open question hanging over its coin. Which is a far more interesting thing to understand than a number on a chart.
So, back to the thread this whole newsletter keeps pulling on.
For a long time Ive argued here that the world is drifting, slowly and unstoppably, toward shared financial rails, which we walked through in what “settlement layer” really means. Stellar is one of the earliest and most sincere attempts to actually pour that concrete. And it quietly reframes the dream in a way I find genuinely wise. The future was never going to be one money for the whole planet, handed down from on high. Nobody surrenders their currency. The realistic dream is subtler and better: not one money, but one network, where every money can move to every other, instantly, for almost nothing, like a message.
And if that road ever truly gets built, whether Stellar lays it or someone else does, the thing that dies is that quiet tax on the nurse wiring her wages home. The six dollars in every hundred, skimmed from the people who could least afford it, for the crime of loving someone across a border. That middle, that relay of runners each taking their cut, has stood for fifty years. The day it finally collapses and her family receives the whole two hundred instead of one eighty-eight, it wont make the news. It never does.
But it will quietly be one of the most important things that ever happened to money. And now, whatever the coin does next, youll actually understand why.
If you want to understand the machines quietly rewiring money, before the headlines catch up and without the hype, Naked Market goes this deep every week.
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Stellar: A Crypto That Moves Like a Message was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Almost a year after announcing one of the most ambitious corporate crypto tie-ups of 2025, Trump Media and Crypto.com are pulling back.
Together with Yorkville Acquisition, the companies have terminated plans to create Trump Media Group CRO Strategy — a publicly traded company designed primarily to accumulate and manage Crypto.com’s CRO token. They cited “prevailing market conditions” and shifting business priorities. Plans for several related digital-asset products have also been dropped, while the proposed integration of Crypto.com prediction markets directly into Truth Social is being reduced to a marketing arrangement.
The news is interesting beyond Trump Media itself because the deal emerged at the height of another major 2025 trend: digital asset treasury companies, or DATs.
The idea was largely inspired by 🟠 Strategy’s Bitcoin playbook: raise capital through public markets, use it to accumulate crypto and give investors equity-based exposure to the underlying asset.
In 2025, the model spread rapidly beyond Bitcoin. More than 200 companies had adopted DAT strategies by September, with their combined market capitalization reaching roughly $150 billion, up from around $40 billion a year earlier. Companies increasingly experimented with ETH, SOL and smaller ecosystem tokens as well.
Trump Media and Crypto.com took that logic particularly far:
Their proposed CRO treasury company was expected to launch with $1 billion in CRO, $200 million in cash, $220 million from warrants and access to an additional $5 billion equity line. At the time, the partners described it as the first and largest publicly traded CRO treasury company.
So this was not just another company adding some crypto to its balance sheet. Accumulating CRO was supposed to be the business model itself.
The relationship actually began before the treasury announcement.
In early 2025, Trump Media selected Crypto.com to support planned digital-asset ETFs under its Truth.Fi brand. By August, their cooperation had expanded considerably.
Trump Media and Crypto.com planned to:
Trump Media also directly acquired 684.4 million CRO worth about $105 million, while Crypto.com received $50 million in DJT shares. Trump Media planned to custody and stake its CRO through Crypto.com.
At the time, Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek called it “the first of many steps to driving utility and value for CRO.”
Then came Truth Predict, announced in October 2025, with plans to integrate Crypto.com-powered prediction markets directly into Truth Social.
In less than a year, one partnership had expanded across treasury management, ETFs, token utility, wallets and prediction markets.
The problem with a crypto treasury model is that its strongest advantage in a rising market can quickly become its weakness in a falling one. Trump Media’s latest results show how quickly that exposure can work in reverse:
the company posted a $238.1 million net loss in Q2 2026, more than 10 times its loss a year earlier, with much of the decline tied to unrealized losses on digital assets and securities.
CRO tells a similar story. Trump Media had acquired roughly $105 million worth of the token as part of the partnership, but by the end of Q1 that position was valued at only around $53 million. The decline doesn’t make $CRO itself a failed asset, but it does show how much additional volatility a treasury strategy can absorb when it is built around a single ecosystem token.
That makes the decision to abandon a separate CRO-focused public company much easier to understand.
However, none of this means Trump Media has abandoned crypto. It still holds a sizeable digital-asset portfolio. What has changed is how aggressively the company wants to keep expanding around it. Interim CEO Kevin McGurn summarized the new strategy simply:
We wanted to get focused.
The CRO vehicle is part of a broader reassessment of last year’s treasury boom.
These cases don’t mean DATs are finished, but rather show what happens when a strategy designed during a strong market finally meets a very different one. And the Trump Media case should not be read as proof that ecosystem tokens themselves do not belong in corporate strategies.
So the CRO lesson is narrower: there is a difference between a useful ecosystem token and building an entire public company around accumulating that token.
That may be the bigger signal behind the Trump Media–Crypto.com reset.
During strong markets, simply holding crypto can become a compelling corporate story. Higher asset prices increase treasury values, higher equity valuations can make fundraising easier, and new capital can finance further accumulation.
When the cycle turns, that mechanism becomes much harder to sustain.
At the same time, crypto partnerships built around something a business actually uses — payments, custody, settlement, trading infrastructure or tokenized services — have a different reason to exist. Their usefulness is not entirely dependent on whether one asset appreciates.
The market may simply be becoming more selective about what kind of adoption makes sense.
In 2025, one of the big questions was how much crypto a company could put on its balance sheet. And today, the more interesting question may be what crypto can actually help that company do.
Disclaimer: This is not financial or investment advice. DYOR before making any decisions. Use at your own risk.
Trump Media and Crypto.com Are Breaking Ties. What Happened to the 2025 Crypto Treasury Boom? was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Franklin Templeton is expanding its tokenized fund business in Asia through a new partnership with HashKey Exchange.
On August 25, 2026, HashKey added the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Liquidity Fund (grBENJI) to its Earn Channel for eligible professional investors in Hong Kong.
The launch gives investors access to a blockchain-based version of Franklin Templeton’s U.S. government money-market fund, as demand for tokenized Treasury products continues to grow.
grBENJI is linked to Franklin Templeton’s Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund (FOBXX), also known through the BENJI token ecosystem.
Franklin Templeton launched the fund on April 6, 2021. It was among the first U.S.-registered mutual funds to use a public blockchain for transaction processing and ownership records.
The underlying investment strategy remains traditional.
The fund invests primarily in U.S. government securities, cash and repurchase agreements backed by government securities or cash. It aims to provide income while maintaining liquidity and a stable $1 share price.
That makes BENJI different from a stablecoin such as USDT or USDC. BENJI represents an interest in a regulated money-market fund, while stablecoins are primarily designed to maintain a digital currency peg.
Franklin Templeton’s official fund data shows $753.24 million in total net assets as of June 30, 2026.
The fund’s recent yield has remained above 3%. As of August 2026, Franklin reported a 7-day current yield of 3.56%.
The figure can change as short-term interest rates and portfolio conditions change, so investors should treat the yield as a point-in-time figure rather than a fixed return.
The fund is part of a much larger asset-management business. Franklin Templeton reported $1.80 trillion in preliminary total assets under management as of July 31, 2026.
The HashKey launch is currently focused on eligible professional investors in Hong Kong.
Through HashKey’s Earn Channel, eligible investors can access the tokenized fund through a regulated digital-asset platform.
This is important because Franklin Templeton already has the fund and blockchain infrastructure. HashKey adds the distribution channel in Asia.
In other words, the partnership connects a traditional global asset manager’s tokenized investment product with a regulated digital-asset marketplace.
The timing is significant.
Tokenized Treasury and money-market products have become one of the fastest-growing areas of the real-world asset market. Investors can gain exposure to traditional short-term government assets while using blockchain-based infrastructure for ownership and transactions.
Franklin Templeton has also continued to engage with U.S. regulators over its blockchain-based fund infrastructure.
On August 12, 2026, SEC staff issued a no-action letter addressing certain custody arrangements involving Franklin Templeton’s OnChain Funds. While the letter does not represent blanket SEC approval for tokenized funds, it shows that regulators are increasingly examining how traditional funds can operate with blockchain-based infrastructure.
The HashKey launch comes as the tokenized U.S. Treasury market continues to expand.
According to the RWA.xyz data in the supplied research, the combined market for tokenized U.S. Treasury bills, notes, bonds and Treasury-focused money-market funds reached approximately $15.64 billion as of August 24, 2026.
The market included:
The market was around $6.51 billion in July 2025, meaning it has grown approximately 140% in one year.
This rapid expansion has attracted competition from major financial institutions and digital-asset firms.
Franklin Templeton is competing with several major tokenized Treasury products.
BlackRock’s BUIDL, Circle’s USYC, and Ondo Finance’s OUSG and USDY are among the better-known products in the market.
BlackRock’s BUIDL has an AUM of roughly $2.6 billion based on the supplied data, while Circle’s USYC is around $3 billion.
Franklin’s advantage is its early start. BENJI launched in 2021, giving the firm several years of experience with blockchain-based fund infrastructure before tokenized Treasuries became a major institutional trend.
The Franklin Templeton-HashKey launch is less about creating another crypto token and more about expanding access to tokenized traditional assets.
Franklin brings the regulated investment product and established tokenization infrastructure. HashKey brings a regulated digital-asset distribution platform in Hong Kong.
For investors, the proposition is simple:
U.S. government money-market exposure + dollar-denominated yield + blockchain infrastructure.
As the tokenized Treasury market moves beyond the experimental stage, partnerships like this could help determine whether tokenized funds become a mainstream part of institutional finance.
For Franklin Templeton, the HashKey launch marks another step in taking BENJI from an early blockchain-based fund experiment to a broader institutional financial product in Asia.
Why Franklin Templeton’s BENJI Expansion Could Matter More Than You Think was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
A market maker’s job looks simple from the outside: keep buy and sell orders in the book and update them as the market moves.
What is less visible is everything that has to happen before those orders can be updated correctly. The strategy needs to receive the latest market data, decide how its prices should change, send instructions to the exchange and learn what happened to its previous orders. All of that can happen through different connections with different speed, delivery and recovery characteristics.
So when a market maker evaluates an exchange, “Does it have an API?” — is only the starting point. The more useful question is whether the entire path from a market event to the next order is reliable enough to trade on.
A simplified market-making cycle looks like this:
market event → order-book update → pricing decision → order entry → execution → inventory update → next order
Every step depends on the one before it. If market data is late or incomplete, the pricing decision is based on the wrong market. If an order reaches the venue later than expected, the price may already be outdated. If a fill is not reflected quickly enough, the strategy can continue quoting without an accurate view of its inventory.
That is why connectivity is part of the trading system itself, not simply the technical work required to connect the system to an exchange.
The stack can be simplified into 3 main layers:
Different venues may expose these functions through WebSocket, FIX, REST, drop-copy feeds or other channels. What matters is not having the largest number of protocols, but using the right channel for each part of the trading cycle.
Raw latency gets most of the attention, but synchronization can be just as important.
Consider an incremental order-book feed. If one delta is dropped and the consumer misses the gap, later updates can continue arriving normally. The connection still looks healthy, but the local book is now being updated from the wrong state.
That creates one of the most dangerous situations for a market maker: the strategy keeps quoting, but the market it is quoting against is no longer the market the venue sees.
Recovery therefore has to be part of the design. The system needs to detect missing sequences, stop relying on corrupted state, retrieve a valid snapshot and rebuild the book before normal quoting resumes.
There is no single architecture used by every venue. Current institutional offerings show several ways to separate market data, order entry and account or execution events.
WhiteBIT Market Making Program
Bybit Market Maker Program
The comparison is therefore broader than the headline maker rebate. A market maker is also choosing the qualification model, available infrastructure and the operating conditions under which its strategy will have to maintain liquidity.
For a market maker choosing a venue, a basic API checklist does not go far enough. The better questions are:
How does market data reach us? What happens if an update is missed? How do we send and cancel orders? How do we learn that an order has been filled? How do sessions recover after a disconnect? How quickly can we rebuild a trustworthy state?
Those questions connect infrastructure directly to the job the market maker is trying to do: keep orders in the market while prices, executions and inventory are constantly changing.
A strong connectivity stack does not eliminate trading risk. It gives the market maker the information and execution channels needed to understand that risk fast enough to act on it.
Disclaimer: This is not financial or investment advice. DYOR before making any decisions. Use at your own risk.
From Market Data to Execution: How Market Making Works was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Zcash, the coin almost nobody knows, built to do the one thing Bitcoin cant.
Let me introduce you to a coin youve probably never really looked at. Not its price, its soul. Its called Zcash, and it can do one thing Bitcoin simply cannot. It can keep a secret.
You know Bitcoin. Everyone does. But heres what nobody mentions at the dinner table: Bitcoin keeps no secrets at all. Every payment you have ever made on it is painted on a glass wall the whole world can read, forever. Your salary. Your rent. The money you sent your brother. That donation youd rather keep quiet. All of it, legible from the street, to anyone who cares to look. Zcash was built to pull the curtains.
And that is what this new series is really about. Im calling it The Teardown. One coin at a time, well crack a single one open like the back of a watch, not to guess where its price is heading, but to see the actual machine inside. Because I dont want you holding anything just because a chart went up. I want you to be the person who, when a friend asks why you own it, doesnt shrug and mumble a number, but explains the idea, the tech, the reason the thing exists. Price is what you pay. Understanding is what you keep.
Friend to friend, quickly.
This issue goes deeper than usual. Were climbing inside actual cryptography today, the machinery, not just the headline. And Ive decided thats the whole point of Naked Market. As we grow, Im going to keep taking you further down than most newsletters dare, because Id rather teach you one genuinely hard thing and lose a few readers than keep you comfortable and teach you nothing you didnt already know.
So if a stretch of this feels difficult, good. Sit with it. That feeling is you learning something almost nobody around you understands. Reread the tricky bit. Or step back to the earlier issues where we poured the foundation, like how blockchain actually works and why a blockchain cant be secretly changed. Nothing here is beyond you. I promise to explain every hard idea the way a friend would over coffee, slowly.
Im not here to keep you nodding along at the same three things everyone repeats. Im here to grow with you. Take my hand. Were going somewhere most people never bother to go.
And one more thing, so its said plainly. This is not investment advice. I dont care if you never touch this coin. I fell down a rabbit hole of how this thing is actually built, it rewired how I think about money and privacy, and I just want to show you what I found. Okay. In we go.
Here is the thing most people get wrong about Bitcoin, and it took me years to really feel it. Bitcoin is not anonymous. It never was.
Every payment you have ever made on it sits on a public ledger, tied to an address, visible to the whole planet, permanently. Yes, the address is a string of letters and numbers, not your name. But an address is a pen-name that writes everything on a public wall. The moment anyone links that pen-name to you, one exchange with your ID, one shop that knows your face, one careless post, your entire history unspools. Every payment before. Every payment after.
And un-masking those pen-names is now an industry. Whole companies exist for one job: sit on top of these transparent chains and connect wallets to humans, mapping the flow of money like a detective’s wall of red string. Governments buy the service. So do scammers. Your “anonymous” wallet is a diary written in a code a professional can crack in an afternoon.
Which leaves a genuinely hard question, the one thats haunted this field since day one.
Can a ledger be verifiable by everyone AND private from everyone, at the same time?
For most of crypto’s life, the honest answer was: pick one. The way you prove a payment is honest, on Bitcoin, is by showing everyone the amounts and addresses so they can add it up themselves. Proof required exposure. To let the world check your maths, you had to show the world your maths. That trade-off felt like a law of nature.
It isnt.
Here is the single most important idea in this whole issue, and if you take only one thing away, take this. It will change how you see far more than money.
For your entire life, two things have been welded together that were never actually the same thing. Proving that something is true. And revealing why it is true.
Think about how you prove youre old enough to buy a drink. You hand over an ID card. But look at what just happened. To prove one tiny fact, over 18, yes, you exposed a pile of unrelated ones: your exact birthday, your full name, your address, your ID number, your photo. You wanted to prove a single bit and you disclosed a dozen. Proof and disclosure, bundled.
We do this everywhere. To prove you can afford the flat, you show your whole bank balance. To prove youre a citizen, you hand over the entire passport. To prove you have the funds, you reveal exactly how much you have. Every time, to prove one thing, you reveal ten.
What if you could snip them apart? Prove the one fact, really, truly, unfakeably, while revealing nothing else at all?
That is not a fantasy. Its a real branch of mathematics, about forty years old, with a name that sounds like a contradiction: the zero-knowledge proof. It lets you convince someone a statement is true while handing over zero knowledge beyond the fact of its truth. They walk away certain youre over 18, and knowing nothing else. Not your birthday. Nothing.
How is that even possible? Heres the intuition, no equations.
Imagine I claim I can tell red apples from green ones, but youre colour-blind and cant check. So we play. You hold one apple behind your back, show it, hide it again, and ask, did I swap it? I say yes or no. If I really can see the colours, Ill be right every single time. If Im bluffing, chance will eventually catch me. Play twenty rounds and get it right every time, and youre overwhelmingly convinced I can tell them apart, yet you never learned which apple was which, or how I did it. You got the proof. You got none of the knowledge.
Real zero-knowledge proofs do this with numbers instead of apples, in a single shot instead of twenty rounds. But thats the soul of it. Convince, without disclose. Now imagine wrapping your money in that.
That is exactly what Zcash did, starting back in 2016.
Picture the glass house again, but now some walls are made of a strange, new frosted glass. From outside you cannot see who is in the room, or what they hold, or how much. But the glass glows a steady green, and that green means something precise: everything happening in here obeys every rule. No money was conjured from nothing. Nobody spent a coin they didnt own. Nobody spent the same coin twice. The books balance.
The world gets to verify the room is honest. The world does not get to see inside. Proof, unbundled from disclosure, poured into concrete.
That green glow has a real name, a zk-SNARK, which is a mouthful for “a tiny, quick-to-check proof that a hidden computation was done correctly.” Every private Zcash payment carries one. Now let me show you, gently, how the machine actually works, because this is the part I found genuinely beautiful.
Zcash gives you two kinds of address, and this is the first thing to hold onto.
One is transparent. It starts with a t, and it behaves exactly like Bitcoin, out in the open, readable by all. The glass wall.
The other is shielded. It starts with a z, and everything about it sits behind the frosted glass. Amounts, sender, receiver, all hidden.
You choose. You can hold your coins in the open, move them into the shielded pool, move them back out. Hold that thought, because the fact that its a choice turns out to be both Zcash’s cleverest feature and its biggest weakness. Well get there, honestly.
Inside the shielded pool, how do you even have a coin nobody can see?
Forget “accounts with balances.” In the shielded world your money exists as a note, think of it as a sealed envelope that says “this is worth 5 ZEC and belongs to whoever holds this secret key.” When a note is created, the network never sees inside it. Instead it publishes only a commitment, a cryptographic fingerprint of the sealed envelope. From the fingerprint you cannot rebuild whats inside, but the fingerprint is unique to that exact note.
Every commitment ever made gets added to one giant, ever-growing tree, a structure that lets anyone later prove “yes, this exact sealed note is in here” without flipping through every envelope. The tree only grows. Notes go in. Nothing is ever crossed out.
Which raises the problem that, when I finally understood how Zcash solves it, actually made me put my coffee down.
Heres the puzzle. In Bitcoin, when you spend a coin, the network marks it spent so you cant spend it again. It can do that because it can see the coin. In Zcash, the coin is sealed. Nobody, not even the network, knows which note youre spending. So how on earth do you stop someone spending the same invisible coin twice?
If you cant see the coin, you cant mark it spent. And if you cant mark it spent, whats to stop me copying my 5-ZEC envelope a thousand times?
Zcash’s answer is one of the most elegant tricks Ive seen in any system, anywhere.
When you spend a note, you dont reveal the note. You reveal a single number derived from it, call it a serial number, with two magical properties. First, it can only be computed by the secret owner of that note, using their private key. Second, each note produces exactly one possible serial number, and that number tells you nothing about which note it came from. Its a fingerprint that points to no face.
The network keeps a list of every serial number it has ever seen. When your payment arrives, it does one dumb, simple check. Is this serial number already on the list?
If no, the coin has never been spent. Accept it, and add the serial to the list. If yes, someone already spent this exact coin. Reject.
Thats it. Double-spending is stopped completely, and the network never learns which coin was spent, who owns it, or what it was worth. It only ever learns “this unique-but-faceless serial number is now used up.”
Read that twice if you need to, because it is genuinely one of the cleverest ideas in modern computing. You prove a coin is being spent for the first time, without ever revealing the coin. (Cryptographers call this serial number a nullifier. Now you know why it matters.)
So how does the network trust any of this if it cant see anything? This is where the green glow does its work.
Every shielded spend carries a zk-SNARK, a compact proof that quietly guarantees, all at once and all in zero knowledge: that the note youre spending genuinely exists in that great tree (its a real coin, not one you invented); that the serial number you revealed was correctly derived from it (no cheating the double-spend check); that you actually own it (you hold the secret key); and that your inputs and outputs balance to the cent (youre not quietly printing money).
Four crucial truths, proven together, with none of the underlying facts shown. And the beautiful part: the proof is tiny, and checking it is lightning fast. The network verifies it in milliseconds without redoing your computation. One small green light that can only glow if everything behind the glass is honest.
Sit with what just happened. We have a public ledger, anyone can download it, anyone can verify every payment is valid, no trusted keeper needed. And at the same time, every payment on it can be completely private. The two things everyone swore you had to choose between, living together. That is the whole miracle of Zcash, and it took some of the best cryptographers alive to build it.
But, and this is where the story turns human and a little dark, there was a catch. A big one.
To make its early proofs work, Zcash needed a set of public “starter numbers,” the master parameters the whole proof system is built on. And there was a terrifying quirk in how they had to be born.
To generate those public numbers, someone first had to generate a matching secret number. Once the public parameters existed, that secret was meant to be destroyed forever, because anyone who kept a copy could do something catastrophic: forge fake proofs. They could counterfeit Zcash out of thin air, make coins from nothing, and the green light would glow valid, and no one could ever tell.
Cryptographers gave this secret a wonderfully honest name. They call it toxic waste.
So in October 2016, before Zcash launched, six people scattered across the planet held what can only be called a ritual. Each one, on their own machine, generated a piece of the parameters and their own shard of toxic waste, then destroyed the toxic waste. The whole thing had one saving grace built in: only one of the six had to be honest. As long as a single participant truly destroyed their secret, the master key could never be reassembled, and the system was safe, even if the other five were crooks.
And the lengths these people went to are the best part. Terrified that a virus or a spy might snatch the toxic waste off a machine before it was destroyed, they got creative. They used computers with the networking hardware physically ripped out, so nothing could phone home. One participant ran the ceremony and then physically destroyed the computer afterward. Another drew part of his randomness from the radioactive decay of a tiny sample, literal physics as a source of un-hackable chance. Radiolab made a whole episode on it. It sounds like a spy film. It was real, and it was guarding a piece of math.
Now, full honesty, because you deserve it. That ceremony is a real asterisk on Zcash’s history. If somehow all six had secretly kept their toxic waste and conspired, they could have counterfeited coins invisibly. (Even in that nightmare they could not have broken anyone’s privacy, the worst case was fake money, not spying. Still, its a real thing to sit with.) For years sceptics pointed at the ceremony and said, how can I trust a system that had to be born in a room full of people I just have to hope were honest?
Fair. And the engineers clearly agreed, because they spent the next six years trying to kill the ceremony entirely.
In 2022, they did.
A cryptographer on the team named Sean Bowe cracked a long-standing problem and built a new proof system, poetically named Halo, that needs no starter secret at all. No master parameters born from toxic waste. No ceremony. Nobody you have to trust destroyed anything, because there was never a dangerous secret to destroy in the first place. The proofs, in a sense, stand on their own.
With that upgrade (the new shielded system is called Orchard), the original sin was gone. The frosted glass no longer leans on anyone’s promise. It works from the math alone.
This is the part I love about watching a real technology grow up. It began with a fragile, human, slightly terrifying ritual, and then, brick by brick, replaced the fragility with proof.
And now the thing that made me sit back.
The zero-knowledge machinery Zcash spent a decade forging in the name of privacy turned out to be the thing that would let the entire crypto industry scale.
Heres the link. That same “prove a whole pile of computation happened correctly, in one tiny quick-to-check proof” trick, the thing that lets Zcash hide a payment while proving its valid, is exactly what you need to squeeze thousands of transactions into a single proof and check them cheaply. Drop the privacy angle, keep the compression, and you get whats called a zk-rollup, the leading way Ethereum is being scaled to the world right now. The names racing to do it, zkSync, StarkNet, Scroll, Polygon, are all standing on foundations Zcash and its academic circle laid.
And it reaches further, right back to something we touched last time. Remember cities like Buenos Aires handing millions of residents an ID where you can prove youre over 18 without revealing your birthday? Same family of math. The bouncer trick, running a city.
So heres the real punchline about Zcash, and its a very Naked Market kind of punchline. Its most important product was never the coin. It was the math. Zcash was a ten-year, live-fire research lab that taught the whole world how to prove things without showing them, and that idea is now quietly wiring itself into payments, scaling, identity, and eventually, I think, almost everything.
A piece that only sells you the shine isnt worth your trust. So, the hard parts.
First, the uncomfortable one everyone asks. Isnt private money just for criminals?
It deserves a real answer, not a dodge. Cash, plain paper cash, is private. Hand someone a note and no record is created, no company logs it, no one sees it. We have lived with private money for all of human history and civilisation did fine. The strange thing, the historically abnormal thing, is not privacy. Its the brand-new idea that every payment you ever make should be permanently recorded and readable by strangers. Transparency-by-default is the weird mutation here, not privacy. Yes, criminals use cash. They also use cars, phones, and the internet, and we didnt ban those. A right isnt void because a villain also enjoys it.
And Zcash has a genuinely clever answer to the part of this that is legitimate. Say you want privacy from the whole world but you still need to prove your income to a tax office, or show your books to an auditor. Zcash builds in a viewing key, a read-only key you can hand to your accountant or the authorities that lets them see your shielded transactions, and only see, never spend. So you can keep your financial life sealed from the street while proving exactly what you must to the people with a real right to check. Privacy, with a door you control. Thats a far more grown-up answer than “hide everything from everyone.”
Second scratch. For most of Zcash’s life, hardly anyone used the private part. Because privacy was optional, a z-address you had to choose, most ZEC just sat in transparent, Bitcoin-like addresses. And privacy has a strange group property: a shielded pool is only as private as it is crowded. If youre one of five people in the frosted room, hiding there isnt worth much. For years, that thin crowd was Zcash’s quiet failure. Its improving fast, by late 2025 roughly a quarter to a third of all ZEC was finally sitting shielded, a record, but the world took a long time to walk into the room.
Third. Regulation. Privacy coins live under a permanent legal cloud. Some exchanges in some countries have delisted them to stay onside with anti-money-laundering rules, in 2025 a couple of big platforms pulled ZEC for users in certain regions. Thats a real, ongoing risk that isnt going away, and pretending otherwise would be lying to you.
Fourth. Nothing here is magic, its engineering, and engineering has bugs. A serious flaw was found in the newer shielded system in 2026 and had to be patched. Normal for hard software, but a reminder that “mathematically private” still runs on human-written code.
I should mention the price, since its all anyone talked about. After years as a forgotten “dead coin” under forty dollars, ZEC caught fire in late 2025 and ran up many hundreds of percent, briefly overtaking its old rival Monero as the most valuable privacy coin, pulled along by a big-name investment vehicle, a Nasdaq-listed company that flipped its whole treasury into hoarding ZEC, and a chorus of loud voices predicting a thousand dollars, then ten thousand.
Heres my honest read, and its the only reason Im mentioning any of it. The price is the least interesting part of this whole story, and its the only part the crowd looks at. A lot of that move is reflexive noise, a treasury firm buys, the price rises, which lets it raise more to buy more. But under the noise sits one real signal worth hearing. After a decade, the world is suddenly remembering that financial privacy is not a criminal indulgence but a basic human need, and the people quietly moving their coins into that frosted room, in record numbers, are voting for it with more than words. That shift is real. The price target on some influencer’s screen is not the story. Forget it. Look at the machine.
Long after youve forgotten the words nullifier and SNARK, keep this.
Every day, someone asks you to hand over information. And almost every time, they dont actually need to see your information. They only need to check a fact about it. The bar doesnt need your birthday, only “over 18.” The landlord doesnt need your bank balance, only “can pay.” The website doesnt need your whole identity, only “is a real, unique human.” We hand over the entire envelope out of pure habit, because until very recently there was no other way.
Zero-knowledge is the other way. So Ive started running a little filter on every “give me your data” moment, and I want to give it to you. Call it Prove, Dont Show. Ask three things. Does this person need to see this, or only to check it? Could a plain yes-or-no replace the whole document? And if it leaked, who would get hurt, me or them? The more you ask, the more you notice how much of your life you disclose when all anyone needed was a proof.
Privacy, it turns out, was never really about hiding. It was about proving without showing. Once you see that, you cant unsee it.
Which brings us to the thread this whole newsletter is really about.
For a long time Ive been making a case here that the world is slowly, unstoppably converging onto shared financial rails, one connected settlement layer under everything, which we have walked through in pieces like what “settlement layer” really means. I still believe it. But tonight I want you to sit with the shadow side of that dream, because it matters more than the dream.
If the whole planet ends up transacting on one shared, transparent ledger, we will have accidentally built the most complete surveillance grid in the history of our species. Every human being’s entire financial life, every wage, every purchase, every donation, every quiet act of dissent, readable forever by whoever holds power. Not one government’s citizens. Everyone’s. That is not freedom. Thats a glass house the size of the Earth.
The convergence is coming either way. The only real question, the one Zcash has been quietly asking for ten years in mathematics while the market laughed at its dead-coin price, is whether that shared world is made of clear glass or frosted glass. Whether “one earth, one set of rails” also has to mean “one all-seeing eye.” It doesnt. The math to have both, a world that can verify everything and see nothing, already exists. Somebody built it. It works.
The people who spent a decade on this werent hiding something. They were trying to carry one quiet, ancient human right across the bridge into the digital age, the right to a sealed envelope. The right to prove youre honest without being forced to strip.
We are about to decide, as a species and mostly without noticing, whether that right survives the century.
I know which side Im on. Now, at least, you know the choice is even there.
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Zcash: The Crypto That Keeps a Secret was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
In the world of cryptocurrencies, a “blacklist” usually means a list of addresses, accounts, or smart contracts that are banned from sending, receiving, or using tokens in centralized platforms — sometimes, even in some “decentralized” platforms, too. Governments and regulators use these lists to enforce financial laws, but they also raise hard questions about privacy and freedom in crypto. With pressure growing, many are asking: can truly decentralized systems survive blacklists?
Some distributed ledgers, like Ethereum, have had to walk a careful line between legal compliance and maintaining their open nature. Meanwhile, alternative networks like Obyte offer a different approach that could make censorship much harder. Let’s explore what’s happening, what’s at risk, and where things could go from here.
Ethereum, the second-largest crypto network by market value, has faced several blacklist controversies. For example, after the U.S. sanctioned the privacy tool Tornado Cash in 2022, many Ethereum apps and services blocked addresses linked to it. Even stablecoins like USDC froze accounts that regulators flagged.
These moves show how central players in crypto ecosystems — like token issuers — can control access. Although distributed ledgers and smart contracts are supposed to run without middlemen, outside events can force changes that break this ideal. Developers are left caught between building open platforms and following real-world laws. For users, the consequences are even clearer: your assets could become unusable overnight if they land on a blacklist. For instance, if you, as a US citizen, mixed some funds on Tornado Cash and authorities found out.
Censorship in crypto doesn’t just block a few bad actors — it can reshape entire networks. After Ethereum switched to proof-of-stake (PoS), “validators” became the new gatekeepers (replacing mining pools), and some started filtering transactions to avoid dealing with blacklisted addresses. Tools like MEV-boost made it easier for them to choose which transactions to include.
This behavior weakens the original promise of crypto neutrality. Instead of treating every user equally, censored networks prioritize compliance over fairness. If enough “validators” cooperate with regulators, blockchains could lose their independence and start resembling traditional financial systems. Over time, this could drive away users who once turned to crypto for freedom.
Even though crypto itself is designed to resist censorship to a degree, centralized players like exchanges and custodians are more vulnerable. Besides token issuers in blockchains, many firms choose to comply with regulations to protect their reputation and continue operating legally.
Major exchanges like Coinbase and Binance have enhanced Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) practices, restricting transactions linked to sanctioned entities. Although this protects their legal standing, it limits cryptocurrencies even more and potentially threatens the core ethos of crypto freedom. On the other hand, governments wouldn’t allow them to operate at all without this compliance. It’s an inescapable conundrum.
The tension between maintaining decentralization and complying with regulations is a delicate balancing act. While some projects strive to uphold the original ideals of financial autonomy, many large-scale operations prioritize business sustainability over ideology.
At the very least, we can fix internal blockchain censorship by picking another network. Not all crypto platforms are built the same. Obyte, for example, uses a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) instead of a blockchain. There are no miners or “validators” deciding which transactions go through. Instead, transactions are added to the DAG directly by users themselves, removing centralized bottlenecks that can be targeted by regulators.
This structure makes censorship much harder. Since no single group controls transaction approval, it’s almost impossible to blacklist an account or address globally. In a world where blacklists are spreading, architectures like Obyte’s could offer real alternatives.
However, even the most censorship-resistant systems face practical limits. Crypto projects still need bridges, gateways, and exchanges to interact with the broader economy. In other words: you’ll need to turn your crypto into USD, EUR, or whatever fiat currency at some point. These points of contact, as we mentioned above, are often under legal pressure and can block users even if the underlying network resists.
Obyte is better protected at the protocol level, but users still risk exposure when cashing out or connecting to external services. No system is completely immune because people still live under legal systems. Designing censorship resistance is essential, but managing the risks outside the network matters just as much. But hey, good news? Crypto bans are rarely effective, even when exchanging for fiat.
Despite regulatory efforts, crypto use persists in countries with bans — and platforms with sanctions are still very much used. Chainalysis’ Global Crypto Adoption Index shows that 50% of the top 10 countries with the highest crypto adoption rates have either full or partial bans. China, for instance, maintains strict regulations, yet still ranks within the top 20 for crypto usage.
In nations like Bangladesh, Egypt, and Morocco, where crypto is officially forbidden, enforcement struggles to keep pace with user activity. Individuals continue to buy, sell, and trade cryptocurrencies, often using decentralized platforms or peer-to-peer (P2P) networks to evade restrictions.
This isn’t just a sense of rebellion. Economic instability plays a significant role. In places where local currencies are unstable, citizens turn to crypto to preserve their wealth. In Venezuela and Nigeria, for example, crypto provides an alternative to hyperinflation and tight government controls. The decentralized design of cryptocurrencies makes it nearly impossible for authorities to shut down networks entirely, even if individual users may face risks.
Bans often push crypto activity into underground markets, removing the protective layers that regulation could have provided. Instead of stopping usage, heavy-handed laws often make crypto ecosystems more opaque and harder to supervise.
Even as centralized players increasingly comply, decentralized systems remain resistant. Protocols without central authorities — like certain DeFi platforms and decentralized exchanges (DEXs) — cannot easily enforce blacklists or freeze funds. Without a governing body, these platforms continue operating globally, regardless of local bans.
Individual users have also been adapting creatively. Although Tornado Cash was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury (until November 2024) and its domains and website were taken down, users still accessed it through decentralized interfaces like IPFS. According to Dune Analytics, users deposited variable amounts after the sanctions, up to $22 million in September 2024, despite legal hurdles.
Speaking of those legal hurdles, six users of Tornado Cash, backed financially by Coinbase, sued the U.S. Treasury Department after it sanctioned the mixer. In November 2024, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Treasury overstepped its authority because Tornado Cash’s decentralized smart contracts aren’t “property” that can be sanctioned under current law. The court sided with the users, overturning the sanctions. Individuals are fighting back and winning some battles, too.
On the other hand, data from the Atlantic Council shows that at least 27 countries have imposed full or partial crypto bans. Yet crypto adoption is still highest in regions under pressure. In Nigeria, even with restrictions, over 46% of the population reports owning or using cryptocurrencies. In China, underground networks and offshore exchanges allow continued participation in the global crypto economy.
Necessity drives innovation. In authoritarian regimes, citizens often use crypto to protect savings, send remittances abroad, or circumvent local banking restrictions. Bans, instead of halting crypto activity, push it further into decentralized, less traceable channels. Crypto’s foundational trait — censorship resistance — proves indispensable where freedom is under threat.
The rise of blacklists highlights a major tension in crypto: can these technologies stay open and neutral while fitting into the regulated world? Blockchains that allow easy censorship might survive in the short term, but they risk losing their core values — and users.
Systems like Obyte show that it’s possible to prioritize user freedom at the design level. Still, the bigger battle lies in how users, developers, and regulators shape the evolving crypto space. Whether people choose resilient platforms or prioritize convenience will define what crypto becomes in the next decade — and whether it stays true to its original vision.
As personal liberties continue to erode across the globe, users will likely, over time, gravitate toward more open and decentralized platforms. The future belongs to decentralization, as centralization has led to widespread surveillance, media manipulation, discrimination, financial censorship, data breaches, and countless other problems.
Featured Vector Image by pikisuperstar / Freepik
Originally Published on Binance Square
The Crypto Blacklist Problem: Sanctions and Restrictions was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Institutional crypto allocation stalls on due diligence, not conviction. Here is the checklist, with answers you can verify while you read.
Institutions have made peace with stablecoins. They have not made peace with putting them to work.
In the Coinbase and EY-Parthenon 2026 institutional survey, 85% of respondents said they use or want stablecoins for internal cash management. 88% flagged T+0 securities settlement. Then the same people were asked about DeFi yield.
30%.
That single gap explains most of what is happening in institutional crypto allocation right now. The dollar is already onchain. It is just sitting there.
Roughly 80% of stablecoin supply earns nothing at all. In any treasury department, idle cash at that scale would trigger a very short and very unpleasant meeting.
So the blocker is not conviction. It is an unfinished due-diligence list. Below is that list, in the order it actually gets asked.
Idle stablecoins are not a rounding error. Sky Frontier Foundation sized the addressable pool at more than $300 billion when it introduced Laniakea, its institutional capital deployment framework, in April 2026.
Meanwhile, allocation intent keeps climbing:
Read those together and the picture is obvious. Nobody is waiting for permission. They are waiting for answers.
What changed is not appetite. It is that the reporting finally caught up. Two years ago, an allocator asking for per-counterparty exposure on an onchain strategy got a blog post and a shrug. Today they get a live figure with a settlement date attached to it.
Four clusters, eleven questions. In practice a mandate dies at whichever one gets a vague answer, so treat vagueness itself as the signal.
The Sky Savings Rate is not a token emission or a growth subsidy. It is funded by the Sky Agent Network: independent capital allocators that borrow USDS from Sky Protocol and deploy it into yield strategies.
These are firms with balance sheets and disclosure obligations, not anonymous vaults.
Every month, agent revenue is calculated independently by two parties, reconciled by governance operations, opened to a five-day dispute window, then settled onchain. The rate is paid from verified revenue, not projected revenue.
That is the Monthly Settlement Cycle. It is also the reason the number is boring, which is the highest compliment a rate can receive.
By design, not much. Sky Agents are separate businesses running separate books across:
No single counterparty, market or strategy carries the rate. That is the practical difference between diversification on a pitch deck and diversification on a balance sheet.
A yield funded by one counterparty is a credit exposure wearing a yield costume.
SKY token holders, by onchain vote. Not a desk. Not a discretionary committee. Every parameter change carries a public record of who voted, what changed, and when.
Yes, and any answer that says otherwise should end the meeting. The Sky Savings Rate is variable and currently 4.00% APY.
Earlier in 2026, governance cut it from 4.75% to 3.60% to prioritise reserve building over attracting supply. That is a governance body choosing solvency over marketing, which is behaviour you want to observe before you allocate rather than after.
Allocators who need duration certainty should say so early. Fixed Yield positions widened through Morpho integrations in July 2026.
Nobody. sUSDS is non-custodial. You supply USDS, receive sUSDS, and retain control throughout. There is no account to freeze and no balance sheet it sits on.
Protocol Collateral, held above a one-to-one ratio and published continuously. It closed Q2 2026 at $12.32B against $8.47B a year earlier, growth of 45.2%.
Overcollateralisation is the boring part, and plenty of protocols can claim it. The part worth checking is the publishing cadence. You can inspect the composition before you commit, not in a letter three months later.
Two layers sit ahead of you:
Sky Protocol has run for close to a decade under continuous third-party review, including ChainSecurity, Cantina and ABDK, with the security program expanded to Sherlock in July 2026. The audit list is public, so you can check who signed what rather than taking the claim at face value.
A public Safe Harbor agreement also pre-authorises whitehats to rescue funds mid-exploit, with a 72-hour return window and a capped bounty. Agreeing legal cover before a crisis is unusual. It is also the entire point.
This is where onchain capital allocation quietly wins. A traditional manager reports quarterly, and by the time the report lands the data is months old. Sky Protocol publishes continuously:
It is also the first DeFi protocol ever rated by S&P Global Ratings, at B- with a stable outlook. The accompanying peg-stability assessment is public too, constraints included. Read both. A protocol that publishes its rating and its limitations is a different proposition from one that publishes neither.
That is precisely what Laniakea standardises, across four dimensions:
Bespoke integrations do not scale. Templates do.
Nobody allocates because of a headline rate. They allocate because eleven questions got answered without a pitch in between.
What is different here is not the yield number. It is that every answer above is checkable while you are still reading this sentence. Gross Protocol Revenue, Protocol Collateral, per-agent allocation, governance votes, audit history. All public. All current.
That is a strange thing to say about crypto. It is a stranger thing to say about traditional finance, where the same figures arrive on a quarterly lag and you take them largely on trust.
USDS supply reached $10.04B in June, up 41% year over year. sUSDS closed Q2 2026 at $5.52B, up 149%. The capital is arriving. The difference now is that the questions get asked first, which is how it should have worked all along.
So: which of the eleven is the one actually blocking your committee?
Drop the number in the comments, 1 through 11. I will answer what I can and tell you honestly where the answer is still being built. If it is a twelfth question I missed, that is more useful still.
Where to verify everything above:
Sky Agent Network: skyeco.com/agents | Protocol and audits: skyeco.com/protocol | Governance: skyeco.com/governance
USDS and sUSDS: skyeco.com/products | Reports and financials: insights.skyeco.com | Laniakea thread: forum.skyeco.com
Nothing here is financial, legal or tax advice. The Sky Savings Rate is variable and set by SKY token holder governance.
The 11 Questions Institutional Allocators Ask Before Their First Onchain Dollar was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
For years, blockchain has occupied the public imagination as a technology synonymous with cryptocurrency. Bitcoin, altcoins, decentralized finance, NFTs, and various experiments with digital assets became its most visible manifestations.
But developments in financial markets over the past few years point in a rather different direction.
Some of the assets seeing increasing on-chain activity now come from the most conventional corners of finance: U.S. Treasuries, money market funds, gold, and even equities. A report by CoinShares and Token Terminal published in August 2026 suggests that this development no longer stops at issuing digital representations of existing assets. Tokenized real-world assets are increasingly being used across lending, trading, derivatives, and collateral.
This changes the question surrounding tokenization.
The question is no longer simply, what assets can be put on a blockchain?
The more interesting question is:
what happens when traditional financial instruments begin using blockchain as part of their infrastructure?
One number captures this shift particularly well.
RWA deposits across lending platforms and decentralized exchanges reached approximately US$7.4 billion in the second quarter of 2026, more than tripling from around US$2.3 billion a year earlier. The movement becomes even more notable because it occurred while total DeFi deposits declined by approximately 15%. The contrast was even sharper in spot markets: crypto-native spot activity on decentralized exchanges fell by around 70%, while spot trading in tokenized RWAs increased by approximately 220%.
The US$7.4 billion figure, however, does not represent the entire RWA market. It measures assets deposited and used across lending platforms and decentralized exchanges. CoinShares had previously estimated the broader market capitalization of on-chain tokenized RWAs at more than US$40 billion, encompassing tokenized funds, equities, and commodities.
The distinction between these two measures matters.
Tokenization can grow first through issuance, but the next measure is usage. An asset can be issued on-chain without subsequently becoming an active part of financial activity taking place there.
Recent data suggest that this second stage is beginning to emerge.
Tokenized Treasuries and multi-strategy funds have become important components of RWA deposits, while tokenized gold, including PAXG and XAUT, contributes substantially to RWA spot trading activity. In other words, some of the activity developing on blockchain now revolves around instruments whose economic value originates in financial markets outside the blockchain itself.
Tokenization is entering a different phase.
In its simplest form, tokenization sounds relatively straightforward: a claim on an asset is represented through a digital token.
But representation is only the first layer.
A more consequential change occurs when that digital representation can be transferred, settled, used as collateral, or incorporated into other financial activities through blockchain infrastructure.
Money market funds offer a particularly interesting example because the underlying assets themselves do not necessarily change. Their portfolios can continue to hold conventional money market instruments. What changes is how ownership of those instruments can be represented and used.
BlackRock provides a particularly clear illustration of this architecture.
On August 4, 2026, BlackRock launched tokenized on-chain share classes for several money market funds within its European Institutional Cash Series (ICS). Twelve share classes across six funds denominated in sterling, euros, and U.S. dollars received tokenized functionality through J.P. Morgan’s Kinexys infrastructure, with the tokens issued on Ethereum.
This is where the US$311 billion figure needs to be read carefully.
BlackRock said the tokenized functionality was being extended across a money market fund platform with approximately US$311 billion in combined assets under management across 15 markets. This does not mean that US$311 billion in assets were moved onto blockchain all at once. The value actually represented by the tokenized share classes is not equivalent to the total AUM of the broader platform.
The structure of the product is more interesting than the headline figure.
A token represents a share in the underlying ICS fund. The official shareholder register continues to be maintained through transfer-agent infrastructure, while smart contracts allow ownership to move between approved investor wallets. Investors gain 24/7 peer-to-peer transfer capabilities and near-real-time visibility without abandoning the existing fund structure.
In other words, BlackRock is not turning a money market fund into a crypto product.
It is adding blockchain rails to an existing financial product.
The distinction may sound subtle, but conceptually it is significant.
Tokenization here does not replace the existing financial architecture. The fund structure, transfer agent, regulatory framework, and institutional risk management remain in place. Blockchain is added as a new layer for ownership and transfer. BlackRock itself has pointed to potential applications across corporate treasury management, liquidity optimization, digital collateral management, and integration with the wider tokenized financial ecosystem.
This may be a more realistic picture of how blockchain enters institutional finance: not by dismantling the old infrastructure, but through selective integration with infrastructure that institutions already trust.
If BlackRock illustrates how a traditional fund can acquire on-chain transferability, Franklin Templeton demonstrates the next stage: asset utility.
The Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund is a money market fund whose shares are represented by BENJI tokens through the Benji platform. One BENJI represents one share in the fund, while the platform enables capabilities such as peer-to-peer transfers and blockchain-based ownership records.
In February 2026, Franklin Templeton and Binance took the structure a step further.
Eligible institutional clients were able to use tokenized money market fund shares issued through Benji as off-exchange collateral for trading activity on Binance. The underlying assets remain in regulated custody through Ceffu, while their value is reflected within Binance’s trading environment for collateral purposes.
The functional shift is significant.
An asset that primarily served as an investment can now continue generating yield while simultaneously supporting another activity as collateral. Institutions do not need to move the underlying assets onto the exchange to obtain that functionality. Franklin Templeton describes the arrangement as a way to preserve regulated custody and yield while reducing exposure to exchange counterparty risk.
At this point, tokenization begins to mean something more than digitizing ownership.
The asset starts becoming a programmable financial building block.
And this is where the thesis around RWA rails becomes much more interesting.
Put them into the same picture and a fairly clear progression emerges.
The first stage is representation.
Traditional financial instruments acquire digital representations that can be recorded through blockchain infrastructure.
The second is transferability.
Those representations can move between eligible wallets without changing the underlying financial product.
The third is utility.
The tokenized asset can begin functioning as collateral, a yield-bearing asset, or a component of other financial activities. The growth in RWA deposits and trading documented by CoinShares suggests that these uses are no longer merely conceptual designs.
This is why RWA rails may ultimately be a more useful concept than simply RWA tokens.
The token is the instrument. The rails are the infrastructure that allows the instrument to move and be used.
Settlement, custody, transfer agents, wallets, smart contracts, collateral management, trading venues, and regulatory wrappers eventually become parts of the same problem.
What is being built is not simply a tokenized Treasury, tokenized gold, or a tokenized fund.
What is being built is a set of rails through which different forms of assets can interact within a blockchain-based financial environment.
There is a temptation to interpret the involvement of BlackRock, J.P. Morgan, Franklin Templeton, and other large financial institutions as evidence that traditional finance is finally:
“moving into crypto.”
I think that interpretation is too simplistic.
What is emerging instead is a hybrid architecture.
In BlackRock’s case, blockchain supports tokenized share classes, while the official record of ownership remains within transfer-agent infrastructure. Under the Franklin Templeton and Binance arrangement, tokenized collateral can support digital-asset trading while the underlying assets remain in regulated off-exchange custody.
The boundary between on-chain and off-chain, therefore, is not disappearing.
The two are beginning to connect.
CoinShares uses a useful term for this development: Hybrid Finance. Its thesis is not that traditional finance will disappear because of blockchain, but that financial infrastructure is beginning to be rewired through the convergence of blockchain, decentralized financial venues, and tokenized representations of traditional assets.
That is what makes the current phase of tokenization different from the earlier wave of digital assets.
The old question was whether blockchain could create entirely new types of assets.
The question now is shifting:
Can blockchain become part of the infrastructure used to move the assets that already form the foundation of the financial system?
The scale remains small relative to the global financial system.
CoinShares noted that only around US$2.2 billion of a global equity market worth more than US$100 trillion had been tokenized when its 2026 report was published. It is therefore far too early to suggest that tokenization is replacing existing capital-market infrastructure.
But scale may not be the most important signal at this stage.
The more revealing signal is the change in how tokenized assets are being used.
Over the past year, the development has moved beyond issuance toward lending, trading, collateral, treasury management, and settlement infrastructure. Emerging forms of institutional adoption also do not require institutions to abandon fund structures, regulated custody, transfer agents, or the legal frameworks underpinning traditional finance.
Blockchain is gradually being positioned between these components.
If this development continues, the most important part of the tokenization revolution may ultimately not be the token itself.
The part becoming increasingly invisible may matter most: the rails underneath it.
And like many forms of financial infrastructure, the clearest sign of success may eventually be that people stop noticing the rails are there.
Are we witnessing a gradual evolution of the existing financial system, or the beginning of a fundamentally different market structure?
Tokenization Is No Longer Just About Crypto: Wall Street Is Building New Financial Rails on… was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Jeff Bezos may never again “walk alone.”
The Amazon founder is reportedly part of a group interested in buying a 30% stake in Liverpool Football Club, the storied English Premier League soccer team whose legendary fans belt out the show tune “You’ll Never Walk Alone” before each home match.
Bezos would join a group that includes the former co-owner of soccer club Queens Park Rangers, Amit Bhatia, who is looking to pay £1.35 billion (about $1.8 billion) for the stake, reports The Guardian. The stake is being sold by current owner Fenway Sports Group, the firm that also owns The Boston Red Sox.
Bezos, who founded Amazon in Seattle in 1994, is considered the fourth richest person on the planet with a net worth estimated by Forbes at $224 billion.
The billionaire has long been rumored as a possible sports team owner, and his name was often tossed out as a possible buyer of the Seattle Seahawks and the Washington Commanders. Earlier this month, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and his family emerged as the lead bidder for the Super Bowl champion Seahawks at a reported purchase price of $9.6 billion.
In addition to his recent marriage to former journalist Lauren Sanchez, Bezos also is highly engaged with his space venture Blue Origin and a new AI company by the name of Prometheus, which just raised $12 billion and where he serves as co-CEO.
Owning a piece of a UK soccer club has become a status symbol of sorts for wealthy Americans, perhaps driven by the popularity of shows like Ted Lasso and Welcome to Wrexham. The latter is a documentary that tracks Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney and their exploits of owning the Welsh team Wrexham FC.
American owners currently own outright or a piece of some of the top clubs in the English Premier League, including Chelsea led by Todd Boehly; Arsenal owned by Stanley Kroenke; and Manchester United owned by the Glazer family. Liverpool also is considered one of the top soccer clubs on the planet, winning the Premier League trophy in the 2024-2025 season.
On a smaller scale, Remitly co-founder Shivaas Gulati joined an ownership consortium two years ago that purchased Southend United, a football club founded in 1906 and located in Southend-on-Sea, about an hour from London. They play in the National League, which is the fifth tier of English soccer.
The English Premier League season starts on Friday, Aug. 21 when defending Premier League champs Arsenal take on newly-promoted side Coventry City.
BitMine Immersion Technologies has added a major Ethereum position to its balance sheet, but the market reaction shows investors are not automatically rewarding every corporate crypto treasury move.
The company disclosed the purchase of 42,197 ETH, valued at roughly $73 million, in a July 16 SEC filing. The acquisition expands BitMine’s Ethereum treasury strategy at a time when public companies are still experimenting with how far they can push crypto exposure as part of corporate balance-sheet management.
The headline sounds bullish for Ethereum. A public company buying tens of thousands of ETH is not a small move. But BitMine’s stock slid in the following session, suggesting equity investors may be looking at the strategy with more caution than enthusiasm.
That contrast is the story. Crypto investors may see treasury accumulation as conviction. Stock investors may see concentration risk.
Reference: SEC
Corporate crypto treasury strategies are no longer limited to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin remains the cleanest and most established balance-sheet asset in the sector, largely because it is easier to explain as digital scarcity or a macro hedge. Ethereum is more complicated. ETH has a broader utility story, but that also means investors have to understand staking, smart contracts, DeFi, network fees, regulation, and ecosystem risk.
That makes BitMine’s move interesting.
A $73 million ETH purchase is not just a symbolic allocation. It is a serious commitment to Ethereum as a treasury asset. According to the available filing and market data, the filing details the acquisition of 42,197 ETH and places it inside a much larger Ethereum-focused balance sheet.
For crypto-native readers, that may look like an aggressive bet on Ethereum’s long-term role. For equity investors, it may raise a different question: is BitMine still being valued as an operating company, or is it becoming a leveraged public-market proxy for ETH?
That distinction is important because the stock market does not always treat crypto treasury exposure the way crypto traders expect.
When a company announces a large crypto purchase and the stock falls, the market is sending a message.
It does not necessarily mean investors think Ethereum is weak. It may mean they are unsure whether the company’s treasury strategy improves shareholder value. Public-market investors care about dilution, financing terms, execution risk, custody, accounting treatment, and whether management is using capital efficiently.
If a company’s core business is already tied to crypto, adding more ETH can intensify the same risk rather than diversify it.
That is why BitMine’s stock move matters. It suggests the equity market may be less impressed by headline accumulation than the crypto market might be. Investors could be asking whether the company has enough operating strength to support the strategy, or whether the stock is now mostly a bet on ETH price performance.
This is the challenge every public crypto treasury company faces.
A rising crypto market can make the strategy look brilliant. A drawdown can make it look reckless. The difference often depends on timing, leverage, investor expectations, and whether the company can explain why holding the asset strengthens the business.
For Ethereum itself, corporate buying remains a constructive signal.
The more entities that treat ETH as a treasury asset, the stronger the argument that Ethereum is maturing beyond a trading token. ETFs, staking infrastructure, tokenization, and DeFi already support the institutional case. Treasury accumulation adds another layer.
But the BitMine reaction also shows that Ethereum treasury demand is not a one-way narrative.
Investors may support ETH exposure in some structures and reject it in others. A spot ETF may be easier for institutions to understand than a company stock with operational risks attached. A clean fund product may be preferable to a public miner or infrastructure company using its balance sheet to accumulate tokens.
That does not make BitMine’s strategy wrong. It simply means the market will judge it through more than the ETH price.
The next thing to watch is whether BitMine can show a clear reason for holding such a large Ethereum treasury. If the strategy is backed by a coherent capital plan, custody framework, and operating model, investors may become more comfortable. If it looks like a pure price bet, the stock may remain volatile.
For crypto markets, the purchase still matters. It is another example of ETH moving into corporate treasury discussions. For equity markets, the message is more cautious: buying Ethereum is not enough by itself. Public companies still have to prove the allocation makes sense for shareholders.
This article is based on BitMine’s SEC filing and BMNR market data.
This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.
This report is based on information released by SEC. at SEC
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