💸 The price of wisdom

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We’re celebrating one whole year of the Empire newsletter. Can you believe it? 

In perhaps not-so-exciting news, the celebration comes right after President Donald Trump announced a slew of tariffs. 

“It’s frustrating to see gold thrive in this environment while BTC tags along with any other risk asset,” K33’s Vetle Lunde noted earlier this week. But, alas, we’re just slightly early on this front. 

If you need a dose of optimism, federal agencies were handed an April 5 deadline to submit reports and finalize evaluations, which means we might see some movement on the strategic bitcoin reserve this week. 

Meanwhile:

• Bitcoin has fallen 2.3% to $82,000. ETH is down 3.8% to $1,700. 

• Total RWAs on chain, excluding stablecoins, sit at $19B per rwa. xyz.

• Crypto’s market cap sank to $2.65 trillion, a 3.6% decrease over the past day according to Blockworks Research.

🌳 A bit of wisdom

WisdomTree’s giving institutions access to their tokenized funds across Arbitrum, Base, Avalanche, Ethereum and Optimism with its WisdomTree Connect, the team exclusively told Blockworks. 

“Historically, WisdomTree Connect was only on Ethereum, and we think it's really important for availability” to allow users to get access to other EVM chains, especially given that WisdomTree prides itself in being “chain agnostic.” Its more retail-focused Prime app, for example, is built on Stellar, WisdomTree’s Maredith Hannon told me.

It also means that its clientele can use the various chains without ever leaving their own ecosystem.

The team had a “lot of interest” from institutional clients for tokenized funds, which led to it launching 13 tokenized funds on its institutional RWA platform.

“We, on purpose, built a suite that really allows any investor to build a diversified portfolio on chain. A lot of the input that we've received from the market is, ‘there's plenty of money market funds. What else do you have?”

The suite includes equity index funds, fixed income funds, asset allocation funds and, of course, their signature money market fund, WTGXX. 

Hannon added that their institutional clients have been looking for alternatives as yields come down. Specifically, investors have been aiming for higher-yield option alternatives to fixed-income products. 

“This just gives them more optionality and more availability, where they can build out a diversified portfolio that they would do in the traditional world for asset management, in a way that's still on chain and still also being able to be held native in their own wallets,” Hannon explained. 

The Connect platform itself is what Hannon called “tech first,” allowing the clients to own the wallet infrastructure. Instead of a whitelist, they use soulbound NFTs that “essentially tag the wallets as WisdomTree wallets,” allowing peer-to-peer transfers between flagged Connect wallets. 

“This is really the starting point for us to be able to say clients [can] […] create a network of networks. So let's say that [a] […] financial institution developed its own type of identity solution. We could start to create a network of networks of identity to bring more and more investors on chain organically,” Hannon said.

Outside of the newest rollout, the team has been busy applying its Government Money Market Digital Fund as a reserve asset for Frax USD. They also applied for an investment from Arbitrum’s RWA ecosystem.

The market cap of WisdomTree’s WTGXX sits at $108 million, according to rwa. xyz. That puts it below the offerings from both Franklin and BlackRock.

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• Lawmakers advanced the stablecoin bill to the House of Representatives.

• The US Treasury sanctioned Tron wallets that used Tether to support the Houthis. 

• Fidelity’s opening the door to let investors directly invest in crypto through their new IRA plan.

🧱 Building loyalty

AI and crypto sitting in a tree…

Maybe not, but the two have such a crossover. I feel like the narrative isn’t as pronounced anymore, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still important. 

I reported yesterday about the Peter Thiel-backed Sentient Labs launching Open Deep Search — basically, its answer to Perplexity. 

Admittedly, Sentient co-founder Himanshu Tyagi taught me more about AI in a nearly forty-minute interview than I’ve learned in all of my own research about model building. 

Tyagi, at the same time, explained why decentralization is so important for AI — and, of course, Sentient. 

“Open-sourcing a framework that outperforms industry leaders like Perplexity throws down the gauntlet to closed-source AI developers, while giving developers access to a powerful primitive that frees them to create the applications they’ve always dreamed of,” he said.

His push for decentralization comes partially because it’s hard to know what centralized entities are missing in terms of data. 

“I am very bullish on decentralizing data sources itself” to solve that problem, he added. 

The team is also focused on building “loyal” AI models. It has a flagship model, Dobby, that has roughly 700,000 users. 

Its Sentient Chat — the platform that allows users to “experience not only our models, but all the applications built on model collecting” — has a waitlist sitting at nearly 2 million.

Tyagi told me that the team is fully focused on model building, especially given that he thinks AI is in the “age of abundance” currently, and that could continue for the next few years.

He added that he couldn’t have even imagined that China would be one of the leaders in open source development for AI. 

“Crazy stuff,” he told me, laughing. 

But that sets up the next year to be especially important when looking at the billions of dollars flowing into the AI space. It’s why Tyagi and his team are focused on building models that are loyal to their communities.

It’s a builders market. It will always be a builders market. 

Permissionless IV is for the ones deep in the code — building infra, launching new systems, and reshaping how this space runs.

🎤 Speaker apps are open — got something that matters? Say it on stage.

💻 Hackathon is live — $100K+ in bounties. Builders get in free.

June 22–26 | Brooklyn

On our minds: One year of the Empire newsletter