🏛️ Too stable to fail

Brought to you by:

The US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency gave national banks the green light to buy and sell crypto assets on behalf of customers. 

Additionally, national banks are allowed to tap third parties to custody and handle trade executions for crypto, which allows them to be a bit more flexible in their offerings (the OCC wants to make sure risk management is still a priority, though).

The clarification is another small step in the right direction as the OCC loosens some of the restraints it had placed on banks around crypto. 

Meanwhile:

• Bitcoin’s sitting at $99,400, a 2.4% increase over the past day. ETH’s up 6.6% to $1,900.  

• Total stablecoin value is $230 billion, per rwa.xyz, an increase of 1.8% over the past month.

• The global crypto market cap is just under $3 trillion this morning, per Blockworks Research.

👯 Making moves

If spending $1.1 billion wasn’t enough of a sign that Stripe is serious about stablecoins and gaining market share there, its newest announcement shows that it is serious.

Stripe unveiled Stablecoin Financial Accounts, which — much like the name suggests — is a money-management feature. Businesses in over 100 countries can now use these “stablecoin-powered” accounts. 

Basically, a business can not only hold their balance in stablecoins, but they can also receive funds on both crypto and fiat rails. 

Oh, whoop, big deal. 

Let me explain: Empire subscribers like yourself are very in the weeds when it comes to crypto. Many of you are crypto-native and likely interact with crypto daily. 

We’re all aware that stablecoins have been the big winner for crypto, and the extent of their usefulness hasn’t even been realized yet by non-crypto folks. Announcements like this are the exact sort of moves you want to see when introducing stablecoins to businesses, entrepreneurs and executives who’ve probably heard about stablecoins through headlines, but don’t understand the usefulness. 

“Because stablecoins make it dramatically faster and cheaper to move money internationally, many of the world’s largest companies are turning to Stripe to help assemble their stablecoin strategies. But a challenge remains: making it possible to spend stablecoins at businesses that only accept fiat currencies,” Stripe said in a press release.

Announcements like Stripe’s have a chance to open the eyes of non-crypto folks to show them how stablecoin payments can make a difference when it comes to speed and cost. 

If we pair this with the one they made last week (partnering with Visa on a card-issuing product that allows folks to spend stablecoin balances as fiat), we really are cooking.

Normalizing stablecoins — and showing off how effective they are — is the first step to mass adoption, if we’re simplifying it. 

Patrick Collison, CEO, noted that stablecoins are a “gale-force” tailwind alongside AI, and are “dramatically reshaping the economic landscape around us.”

“Our job is to pull these technologies forward so businesses on Stripe can benefit from them right away,” he added.

Last year, businesses using Stripe processed roughly $1.4 trillion in total payment volume. Yes, with a T. 

Right now, these accounts will support USDC and USDB (Bridge’s stablecoin), but it plans to add more in the future. 

This is how crypto wins.

Brought to you by:

Stake Solana directly from your BitGo Wallet — now with Marinade Native!

Good news, BitGo users — you can now stake SOL directly from your BitGo wallet with Marinade Native, a non-custodial staking solution designed for both security and maximum rewards. No extra steps, no compromises, just seamless staking while keeping full control of your assets.

Secure, automated, and built for both individuals and institutional customers. Learn more about staking Solana with BitGo & Marinade.

• Galaxy Digital tapped Zodia Custody to expand its staking service in Europe. 

• Robinhood’s reportedly plotting a blockchain to trade US assets in Europe, according to Bloomberg. 

• Former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao confirmed that he requested a presidential pardon after serving a four-month sentence in the US.

From NFTs to prediction markets, loyalty engines to mobile-native wallets — Permissionless IV is where real users meet real products.

Crypto’s next big unlock isn’t technical — it’s usable. Come build it. 

June 24–26 in Brooklyn.

Last week, I wrote about the court case between Toku and Liquifi. If you remember, Toku was handed a defeat when the judge decided to deny its preliminary injunction. 

But now we have a better idea why, after the court transcript has come out. 

The judge said that Toku did an “excellent job presenting their application,” but “their skillful advocacy isn’t a substitute for the underlying facts.” 

Translation: The case has a lot of spicy language, but the facts are the facts, and the judge wasn’t convinced.

The case isn’t over, though. 

Some of the arguments presented by Toku look a bit weaker. Take, for example, their claim that their former lawyer, Benjamin Snipes, downloaded confidential business documents before leaving the firm. 

“It appears at this stage that [it] was not an act of Snipes' downloading that many documents. It was, instead, the result of an automatic syncing program that uploaded documents from Snipes's computer and downloaded documents from the cloud so that both the cloud versions and the local versions were the most recent,” the judge said. 

And the pursuit of a merger between Liquifi and Toku suggested to the judge that “Toku’s concerns were not as serious as they claim.”

A preliminary injunction is, to my knowledge, a pretty hefty claim, so it’s not shocking that the judge denied it. However, his comments about the merger and the documents suggest that this case is more complicated than it initially looked.