TLDR CRYPTO 2025-08-28

Invest in Pacaso before this opportunity ends on 9/18

BITCOIN UNDERPERFORMS ETHER, BROADER MARKET

Bitcoin held above $111,000 but gained less than 1% over 24 hours, underperforming the broader cryptocurrency market as the CoinDesk 20 Index rose 3.2% and smaller tokens in the CoinDesk 80 gained 4%. With over $14.6 billion in Bitcoin and Ether options set to expire Friday at a "max pain" level of $116,000, options sellers have incentives to push BTC higher toward that strike price to minimize their costs. The standout performer was Cronos (CRO), which surged over 56% after Crypto.com and Trump Media announced plans to create a $6.4 billion CRO treasury company that will integrate the token into Truth Social's rewards system. Despite Bitcoin's recent sideways action, its 200-day moving average crossing above $100,000 signals the continuation of a strong long-term uptrend that has been in place since late April.

CIRCLE PUSHES DEEPER INTO PAYMENTS WITH MASTERCARD, FINASTRA DEALS

Circle announced partnerships with Mastercard and Finastra to embed USDC settlement into traditional financial infrastructure, with Mastercard enabling stablecoin settlements for merchants across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Finastra will integrate USDC into its Global PAYplus platform, which processes over $5 trillion in daily cross-border transactions, allowing banks in 50 countries to settle international payments in USDC while maintaining fiat-denominated payment instructions. These deals showcase Circle's accelerated push for global USDC adoption against tough competition in the stablecoin space abroad. The partnerships complement Circle's recent expansion efforts in Asia, including collaborations with major South Korean banks and a joint venture in Japan with SBI Group, Ripple, and Startale.

AAVE LAUNCHES HORIZON, AN RWA-BACKED LENDING MARKET

Aave Labs' Horizon is a new Ethereum-based lending market where institutions can borrow stablecoins against tokenized real-world assets (RWAs). Backed by partners including Circle, Superstate, Centrifuge, Ripple, VanEck, and WisdomTree, Horizon allows qualified investors to post RWA collateral and borrow GHO, USDC, or RLUSD, while retail users can supply stablecoins to earn yield. Horizon bridges compliant institutional finance with DeFi by integrating NAVLink from Chainlink for accurate valuations and Llama Risk for oversight, turning RWAs into productive onchain assets.

GOOGLE CLOUD REVEALS UNIVERSAL LEDGER L1

Google's blockchain, the Google Cloud Universal Ledger (GCUL), is now in private testnet. Designed as neutral infrastructure for finance, GCUL features Python-based smart contracts, native commercial bank money onchain, 24/7 capital markets infrastructure, and “agentic” payment capabilities. Backed by Google-scale distribution and institutional partners, CME Group is already piloting tokenized assets on the network. More technical details are expected in the coming months.

IF YOU LIKE PREDICTION MARKETS YOU SHOULD LEARN ABOUT FUTARCHY

Futarchy is a governance model that combines democratic voting on desired outcomes with prediction markets to determine which policies are most likely to achieve those goals, following the principle "vote on values, bet on beliefs." Traditional democracy aggregates preferences but not knowledge since being wrong carries no cost and policies are chosen by popularity rather than accuracy, while prediction markets require participants to risk capital and reward correct predictions. Citizens would vote on outcomes they care about, like GDP growth or employment levels, then prediction markets would compete to identify which specific policies are most likely to deliver those results, creating real-time probabilities based on collective intelligence rather than ideology. Crypto infrastructure now enables futarchy to be tested at scale through open participation, transparent settlement, and programmable incentives, with DAOs already experimenting with prediction market governance for resource allocation and policy evaluation.

THE THREE-LAYER BANK SCAM

Saving in banks is a “three-layer scam.” First, banks pocket risk-free treasury yields instead of passing them to savers, while lobbying to block stablecoin yields. Second, “real” yield disappears once inflation and taxes are factored in, leaving depositors worse off. Third, the dollar itself is an inflationary asset, eroding long-term value relative to scarce assets like BTC, ETH, and gold. Keep dollars for short-term needs, treasuries for medium-term, and scarce assets for long-term wealth preservation.

SOLANA'S PROPRIETARY AMM REVOLUTION

Solana has witnessed the emergence of proprietary AMMs, a new market-making primitive that embeds trading strategies directly onchain rather than relying on off-chain execution, with daily volumes consistently exceeding $1 billion and capturing over 60% of SOL/USDC trading volume. These venues, operated by professional market makers like SolFi, Tessera, and HumidiFi, provide "active liquidity" through continuously adjusted pricing strategies anchored to oracle feeds, fundamentally differing from traditional "passive liquidity" models of constant-product DEXs. The model is uniquely enabled by Solana's structural advantages, including high retail participation, low-cost oracle updates, and Jupiter's aggregator dominance, which provides single-integration access to non-toxic retail order flow.

RETHINKING TOKEN SUPPLY

Outstanding Supply is a new token supply metric that mirrors Outstanding Shares on the stock market to fix inconsistencies in crypto valuations. It offers a clearer picture of true market cap versus FDV (overstated) or Circulating Supply (inconsistent). The framework also refines Circulating Supply into a smarter version that excludes locked or insider tokens, giving investors apples-to-apples comparability, transparency, and more accurate valuation multiples. Outstanding Supply equals Total Supply minus Protocol Holdings.

AERODROME SEES 30% VOLUME JUMP AFTER COINBASE DEX INTEGRATION

Aerodrome's integration with Coinbase DEX on August 8 boosted trading volume from $8.7B in the prior two weeks to $11.3B after a 30% increase.

RAIN BRINGS YIELD-BEARING STABLECOIN SPENDING TO LATAM

Rain has added support for Dinari's USD+, a U.S. Treasury–backed stablecoin yielding ~5% APY, enabling users to both earn yield and spend via Rain-issued Visa cards.

TOWNS PROTOCOL VALUE CREATION

Towns Protocol, which allows online communities to generate value, has passed $43 million in revenue to builders and captured $4 million in protocol fees.

THE SANDBOX FACES TROUBLE

Metaverse project The Sandbox has laid off over half its employees, swapped its executive board, and is starting to work on a memecoin launchpad amid a lack of adoption and a collapse of the metaverse concept.