🪙 Tokenize it

It’s a beautiful morning, depending on where you are in the world. 

Hopefully, the sun is shining, the air is fresh, and you’ve seen that Citi thinks stablecoins will soon be adopted in the wider economy. 

“Stablecoins could be the cash leg for tokenized financial assets,” Citi Institute’s Ronit Ghose told CoinDesk. 

Citi’s base case scenario for stablecoins is growth to $1.6 trillion by 2030. Right now, stablecoins hover around $230 billion. The more positive outlook has stablecoins going to $3.7 trillion in the same time period. 

In the race for crypto’s killer use case, stablecoins continue to hold the lead. Shall we just crown them the winner now?

Meanwhile:

• Ah, what a sight to behold: Bitcoin’s over $103,000 this morning, a slight decrease over the past day.

• Total RWA onchain, excluding stablecoins, sits at $22.6 billion, per rwa.xyz.

• The total crypto market cap is down 1.3% to $3.3 trillion over the past day, according to Blockworks Research.

📦 Bring it all onchain

If the first version of real-world assets was akin to NFTs, the second version’s more like memecoins (just because of liquidity), Gauntlet’s Tarun Chitra explained on this morning’s Empire podcast. 

 ”It's a lot easier to deal with composability-wise, and you don't have to build a whole separate stack. NFTs had to build their own total separate stack, and then once people stopped using them, that stack also kind of fell. And so I think being able to have this kind of liquidity aspect to RWAs was just not there,” Chitra said. 

The episode focuses — as you might be able to tell from the above quote and the recent announcements from these three — on the tokenization of private credit with Securitize’s Carlos Domingo and Apollo’s Christine Moy, 

For Securitize and Apollo, this represents another step in a partnership that began earlier this year. But to Chitra’s earlier point, RWAs have come a long way. 

“ The fact that we are making traditional assets interoperable with open architecture is the key point,” Moy explained. In the earlier versions, Moy’s work was focused on “bespoke systems that were behind walled gardens.”

We all know that one of the downsides of the so-called traditional way of doing things at big financial institutions is that everything innovative takes time to develop. Part of it is just the process. The other, compliance. 

But as Moy said,  ”the velocity of innovation in the crypto space is significant, because what you have is open source code, open architecture, that's well understood. You have smart contract libraries that have already been audited, and are composable.”

In the late April announcement, Domingo said its RWA strategy is an example of “institutional-grade DeFi we’ve been working to build: making tokenized securities not only accessible, but compelling to crypto-native investors seeking strategies that objectively outpace their traditional counterparts.”

To put it simply, the door is now open for institutional investors to earn some “enhanced yields” that were previously off the table. 

According to Domingo, the buyers right now are pretty crypto-native. 

“I think for today, we're focusing all the products. All the customers we have today for ACRED… for anything…are all crypto native people.” These native customers are accessing the “products as a better way, [a] safer way of generating returns, as opposed to some much higher-risk strategies that they can still do in crypto that involve dealing with other types of assets,” Domingo explained. 

It may not be wholly accurate to compare this market to memecoins. But, I think they do have something in common: They’re here to stay and could take even more market share as they mature (if memecoins even can mature).

Where the Macro Landscape Meets the Laws of Investing

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• The EU gave BitGo the green light to offer institutional crypto services under its new crypto rules.  

• Ledger had a rough weekend after a bot tried to steal users’ seed phrases in its Discord. Everything’s secured now, though.

• American Bitcoin, the Trump-linked bitcoin miner, plans to go public in a merger with Gryphon Digital.

We have another company focused on building up a bitcoin treasury. 

It was announced last week that David Bailey, who advised President Trump on crypto, was launching a bitcoin treasury company called Nakamoto. 

As of this morning, we now know that it raised over $700 million and plans to merge with a publicly-traded healthcare services company called KindlyMD.

Honestly, at this point, I’ve lost count of the companies switching to bitcoin treasury strategies. I’m mostly neutral on the smaller firms, though I — like many others — have concerns about potential ramifications of a treasury the size of Strategy’s. 

If anything, these types of announcements almost feel run-of-the-mill. And perhaps that’s the exciting part.

In order for crypto to be normalized, we have to accept its overall adoption. When that happens, announcements like KindlyMD’s and Nakamoto’s lose their specialness. 

That, if you ask me, will clear out companies that adopt certain strategies just to drum up attention and will create a path forward for sustainable adoption. 

Bring it on, I say.