With President Trump signing the GENIUS Act into law, many are celebrating a new era for crypto. But here's the real question: what kind of digital assets are truly mainstream today? Here is a powerful signal. Block (formerly Square) is added to the S&P 500, replacing Hess Corp, an oil & gas giant.   That is a metaphor for our time: the world used to run on physical oil. Now it runs on digital rails. And Block is in the business of digital asset exchange facilitation and Bitc

According to projections from Standard Chartered, BCG, and others, the stablecoin market is on track to reach $1T–$3T  in the next five years. That’s $750B–$2.75T  in fresh USD inflow waiting to be onboarded from fiat into stablecoins.  Now ask yourself: What’s a great business to be in when that much money wants to move onchain? One that takes a 2% fee  on every transaction across that flow. Welcome to the onramp game. It’s no surprise then that fiat onramps have already bir

Tokenized stocks exploded onto the scene with a mix of fanfare and controversy this week, as global neobrokers and crypto exchanges, including Robinhood, Kraken, ByBit, and Gemini, rolled out tokenized versions of household names like Nvidia, Apple, and flagship ETFs such as iShares S&P 500 and SPDR S&P 500. Suddenly, over 100 million crypto users and retail traders  worldwide can now gain exposure to assets once confined to traditional brokerages. A new tokenization category

“Faster and cheaper than SWIFT” - that’s the tagline often used to champion stablecoins in cross-border payments. But it's the wrong comparison. Nearly 55% of SWIFT’s volume  comes from high-value interbank settlements , not the kind of low-value, high-frequency transactions that power global commerce for SMEs and consumers. SWIFT was built in the post-WWII era to connect banks across major trade corridors, such as the US, UK, Europe, and Asia, facilitating booming cross-bord

Four major economies have passed or are in the process of passing stablecoin legislations, including: US - GENIUS Act EU - MiCAR UK - FCA framework Hong Kong - Stablecoin Ordinance At first glance, these regimes share common pillars: full reserve backing, high-quality liquidity requirements, and redemption guarantees. But dig deeper, and differences emerge, especially in how they treat foreign issuers  and non-local currency stablecoins . These differences carry major implica

Stablecoin news is non-stop, from corporate experiments to regulatory debates. But if you're building a real business  around stablecoins, how do you cut through the noise and zero in on signals that drive customers and revenue ? In a previous piece, I wrote that stablecoin  payment use cases are concentrated in cross border money movement . But that’s still a broad category. So here’s the real question: How do you narrow it down to addressable customers  with urgent problems

Stablecoins are the hottest trend in fintech and for good reason. The headline numbers are staggering: Market size exploded from <$10B to $239B in just five years 30M+ monthly active wallets are now sending or receiving stablecoins Transaction volume ranges from $5T to $26T annually, depending on methodology But here’s the key question I’ve always asked: How much of that volume actually comes from real payments use cases (B2B, B2C, P2P, Card) instead of trading and exchange a

As more asset managers, financial institutions, and payment firms launch their digital asset products, speed to market is a vital competitive advantage. Being able to find and reach customers becomes the single most important factor in determining a product’s success or failure. I wrote about how to think about this challenge from a geographic perspective  before. But it is increasingly clear to me that many teams don’t actually know where their users or capital pools are; le

“The future is multichain” is now a well-worn axiom in digital assets. Yet it is also accepted that the bulk of the onchain activities will take place on a very few number of chains. These chains will form the economic hubs of the new financial system.   And whoever controls the operation of these chains? They’re positioned to capture massive revenue and strategic control. So if you're a financial institution or major corporate shaping your tokenization strategy, the question