Tether and Circle's combined 85% market share is slipping as new issuers, regulatory clarity under the GENIUS Act, and yield-sharing models reshape the landscape. Fintechs, exchanges, DeFi protocols, and wallets now have incentives to launch their own stables or strike revenue share deals, capturing float revenue that USDT and USDC traditionally hoarded. Emerging contenders like Ethena's USDe, Ondo's USDY, PayPal's PYUSD, and bank-issued consortium stables point to a more fragmented market, where frictionless swaps and homogenized regulation erode network effects. Banks' eventual entry could dwarf today's $300B market, making the next phase of stablecoins far more competitive than the Tether/Circle era.
2025.10.02·links.tldrnewsletter.com·6 min read·TLDR Crypto Coinbase is integrating 1inch's Swap API to power non-custodial token swaps, marking 1inch's largest US client to date.
2025.10.02·links.tldrnewsletter.com·2 min read·TLDR Crypto Many projects choose to launch as Layer 1s instead of Layer 2s because of the “L1 Premium” (inflated valuations given simply for being an L1).
Coinbase rolled out DeFi lending with up to 7.4% yields on USDC, listed new stablecoins ($AUDD, $XSGD), and partnered with Google to power AI agent payments via x402.
Aerodrome generated over $250M in Chain GDP over the past year, making up more than 30% of Base's total economy and outpacing protocols like Uniswap, Aave, and Virtuals.
Chainlink and Swift have launched a UBS Tokenize pilot that uses Swift messages and Chainlink's Runtime Environment to trigger onchain subscription and redemption workflows for tokenized funds without requiring banks to replace legacy infrastructure. The system builds on prior Project Guardian work and uses Chainlink's Digital Transfer Agent standard, with Swift handling ISO 20022-compliant messaging. Coming days after Chainlink's AI-driven pilot for corporate actions, the collaboration positions Swift's global network and Chainlink's smart contracts as a plug-and-play gateway for the $100T+ fund industry to adopt tokenization at scale.
2025.10.01·links.tldrnewsletter.com·3 min read·TLDR Crypto SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said the regulator is willing to engage with industry participants on tokenizing products, urging them to proactively communicate with the agency while emphasizing the complexity of how tokenized assets interact with traditional forms of the same security. Speaking at the Digital Assets Summit in Singapore, Peirce highlighted that depending on how assets are tokenized, they could represent "one of many different things," requiring a nuanced regulatory approach to handle scenarios where the same security exists simultaneously in paper, electronic, and blockchain-based token forms. The tokenization market currently stands at $31 billion with $714 million in tokenized stocks, and McKinsey projects the market could reach $2 trillion by 2030 as financial institutions increasingly adopt tokenization to enhance liquidity and operational efficiency.
Bridge's Open Issuance is a platform that allows any business to create and manage custom stablecoins in just days while handling reserve management, security, liquidity, and GENIUS-ready compliance. It addresses the limitation of building on external stablecoin providers, where businesses face unpredictable fees and lack control over economics or product roadmaps. The platform enables full customization, including blockchain support, smart contract functionality, and reserve mix allocations balanced between cash and treasuries through partnerships with BlackRock, Fidelity, and Superstate, while providing tools for adoption. Open Issuance solves the liquidity challenge through a unified network where businesses can enable one-for-one interoperability swaps between Open Issuance stablecoins, expanding overall liquidity as new coins launch and allowing instant, permissionless onchain transactions without intermediaries. Existing Bridge-issued coins will migrate to the new platform.
Visa has launched a pilot allowing businesses to pre-fund Visa Direct with USDC and EURC, treating them as available balances for instant cross-border payouts instead of locking up fiat days in advance. The initiative aims to cut settlement times from days to minutes, improve liquidity access, and support programmable payments, with limited availability planned by April 2026. While Visa is not ruling out issuing its own stablecoin, the focus is on scaling existing assets, extending its broader stablecoin strategy that includes card-linked spending, African payments with Yellow Card, and developer integrations via Stripe-owned Bridge.
2025.10.01·links.tldrnewsletter.com·3 min read·TLDR Crypto The GENIUS Act establishes a federal framework for payment stablecoins, allowing banks and federally recognized nonbanks to issue stablecoins under strict reserve, custody, governance, and compliance rules. State issuers can participate if their regimes substantially mirror federal standards and issuance stays under $10 billion. Compliance requirements include face-value redemptions within defined timeframes, backing with safe liquid assets like cash and short-dated Treasuries with monthly reserve reports, capital buffers above reserves, full AML/BSA programs, lawful freeze capabilities, and prohibitions against coercive tying arrangements that force stablecoin usage for other services. The framework prohibits paying holders interest for simply using or holding stablecoins but allows rewards tied to usage, loyalty programs, whitelabeled issuance, and merchant involvement focused on service value rather than interest distributions. Only US-formed entities can issue domestically for full access. Foreign issuers face restrictions and second-tier status unless exceptional compliance is achieved. Key implementation dates include regulator rulemaking by July 2026, GENIUS taking effect by January 2027, and restricted status for non-compliant foreign stablecoins on US platforms by July 2028.
2025.10.01·links.tldrnewsletter.com·6 min read·TLDR Crypto Despite building MegaETH, a scaling protocol with "ETH" in its name, the Mega team hadn't spoken to the Ethereum Foundation until two weeks ago, when they joined a call with the foundation chair, research lead, and ecosystem head that felt more like a customer interview than a formal partnership discussion. Despite eight years in crypto and building at Consensys, the author had never interacted with the EF either, highlighting Ethereum's unique approach of "not grabbing power, but giving it up" as the most counterintuitive and inspiring ideology in crypto. Beyond ideological considerations, Ethereum represents the "Sleeping Beauty" test - if you had to park money for twenty years, you'd choose Bitcoin or Ethereum over newer chains because "your money is safu onchain for many years to come." Ethereum's authenticity and innocence shine through its community-oriented approach, with even Foundation alignment rituals feeling more like community theater than power grabs, though its real struggle lies in communicating its timeless story to a world that anchors feelings on price, experiences, and social proof rather than decentralization principles.
2025.10.01·links.tldrnewsletter.com·5 min read·TLDR Crypto While Plasma achieved record-breaking TVL in its first week, its path to decentralization reveals the downside of L1 architecture. Onboarding validators will cost $550M annually at a 5% inflation rate, despite users already deploying capital without this guarantee. With L2s, security costs scale with transaction volume instead of being a fixed burden, making rollup models more operationally efficient.
Agentic Commerce Protocol defines a common flow for agents to discover products, signal intent, render carts with taxes, and initiate payment instructions. Positioned alongside Cloudflare x402, AXTP, Google A2P, and Visa's Intelligent Commerce, these standards will coexist to solve different parts of agent-driven commerce.
The move strengthens Base's position as a hub for onchain adoption.
Data from Blockworks Research shows that digital asset treasuries (DATs) now hold a larger share of ETH supply than BTC, marking a significant shift in institutional and corporate accumulation trends.
BlackRock may confirm staking in its ETH ETF, withdrawing the 19b-4 filing at the SEC's request to proceed under the new generalized crypto ETF process.
Phantom is the first direct user of Bridge's Open Issuance platform for a new stablecoin called CASH.
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Swift announced plans to integrate a blockchain-based shared ledger into its infrastructure, starting with 24/7 cross-border payments. The system will be designed around a prototype developed with Consensys and aims to enable secure, real-time settlement of tokenized value via smart contracts while ensuring interoperability with existing systems. Over 30 global banks, including Santander, Bank of America, BNP Paribas, and HSBC, will participate in shaping and implementing the ledger, with Swift positioning it as a core part of the financial industry's digital transformation.
2025.09.30·links.tldrnewsletter.com·4 min read·TLDR Crypto Strive's all-stock acquisition of Semler Scientific marks the first merger of two publicly traded bitcoin treasuries, creating a company holding nearly 11,000 BTC and establishing "bitcoin per share" as the key performance metric while signaling the start of a massive DAT consolidation wave. A Wall Street banker outlined three evolution strategies for DATs: mergers to consolidate BTC holdings and boost bitcoin per share, cash-flow acquisitions to offset dilution and fund ongoing bitcoin purchases, as demonstrated by Metaplanet's "phase two" strategy, and direct business mergers instead of messy SPAC processes that require shareholder votes and often suffer investor redemptions. The Semler deal was particularly attractive because the company's shares traded below its bitcoin value, effectively assigning negative value to its medical device business, while the merger allows both companies to access capital markets more effectively than either could independently.
Aave's Plasma deployment has seen rapid growth, reaching $6.5 billion in deposits in just three days. The increase comes as Aave leadership pushes to consolidate focus on high-performing networks, signaling a shift away from supporting dozens of L2s and alt-L1s with limited traction.
Jump Crypto's Firedancer team has proposed removing Solana's 60M compute unit (CU) block cap, allowing blocks to scale dynamically with validator hardware performance after the Alpenglow upgrade. The plan would let high-performance validators earn more by fitting more transactions into a block, while lower-tier validators would skip oversized blocks using Alpenglow's skip-vote mechanism. While Solana researchers support the direction, they also flagged risks around centralization and network stability from ultra-advanced validators.
2025.09.30·links.tldrnewsletter.com·5 min read·TLDR Crypto Spotting potential "insider" activity on Polymarket using only on-chain data involves scanning the Breaking tab for rapid market shifts, then analyzing the Holders and Activity tabs for large buys from fresh wallets or clusters of small buys backing one side. For example, the Eric Adams endorsement market saw suspicious "Yes" and "No" activity shortly before his mayoral race dropout. Tools like Polysights can help surface these anomalies faster.
Meme markets are suffering from a lack of external capital flows. The industry had previously been propped up by new capital entering the market and being captured by snipers and bots, though, without inflows, the average speculator is slowly bled out by 1-3% fees. Though the market can turn around if there's another massive Dogecoin or Dogwifhat moment, some are concerned that prediction markets provide a cleaner, more transparent form of onchain speculation that could indicate the beginning of the end of memecoin speculation.
Layer 2 solutions are arguably draining Ethereum's fee revenue and user base, with ETH fee revenue collapsing since EIP-4844 (Proto-Danksharding) as L2s capture transaction fees while ETH inflation rises above the fee burn rate. The analysis claims L2s fragment the ecosystem into competing camps, breaking liquidity and composability without realistic reunification possibilities, while pushing users toward centralized L2s where the top 20 solutions can steal funds and censor transactions despite the scaling roadmap being justified for decentralization. L2 financial dominance makes pivoting back to L1 scaling impossible since breakthrough L1 technology would crash L2 token and equity prices overnight by making them obsolete, creating a vampire attack scenario where L2s steal users and fees while pretending to be equivalent to Ethereum.
Ethereum's Devconnect in Buenos Aires represents a "mic drop moment" as the first major official Ethereum event in a country where roughly 10% of citizens use crypto daily, 20% own it, and 30% live completely bankless due to decades of inflation and capital controls driving adoption of peer-to-peer finance. Unlike Devcon's large centralized format, Devconnect operates as a bottom-up, emergent festival of the Ethereum community, with this year's theme being "Ethereum World's Fair," showcasing the technology's global impact through international exhibitions of industry, technology, art, and culture. Argentina offers an ideal backdrop where landing in Buenos Aires "feels like you time-traveled 5 years forward in Ethereum adoption," while the country provides incredible experiences from asado barbecue culture to wine trips in Mendoza and adventure travel in Patagonia.
2025.09.30·links.tldrnewsletter.com·4 min read·TLDR Crypto Aster has become the highest-fee-earning protocol on DefiLlama, pulling in over $25 million in daily fees and $42 billion in volume, far outpacing rivals like Hyperliquid.
2025.09.30·links.tldrnewsletter.com·4 min read·TLDR Crypto Crypto network revenue has shifted over the past decade, with Ethereum dominating post-2017, Tron rising after 2022, Solana increasing in 2024, and Hyperliquid gaining ground in 2025.
The SEC must decide if 16 crypto ETF applications will be approved this October, marking a massive moment for greater institutional exposure.
US spot Ethereum ETFs saw ~$796M in outflows last week, their worst since launch in July 2024, as ETH briefly dipped below $4,000 before rebounding. BlackRock's ETHA lost ~$200M, while Fidelity's FETH shed ~$362M, marking the steepest two-day span of redemptions since mid-August. Spot Bitcoin ETFs also posted ~$903M in outflows, with BlackRock's IBIT holding up better than Fidelity's FBTC.
2025.09.29·links.tldrnewsletter.com·3 min read·TLDR Crypto NYDIG's Global Head of Research, Greg Cipolaro, argues that the commonly used mNAV metric for valuing Digital Asset Treasury companies should be eliminated from industry reporting, calling it "misleading" at best and "disingenuous" at worst, following Strive's acquisition of Semler Scientific in the first-ever DAT merger. The firm criticizes mNAV for failing to account for operating businesses or other assets that DATs typically own, noting that most major bitcoin treasury firms operate value-adding businesses beyond their crypto holdings, while the metric often uses "assumed shares outstanding" that may include unconverted debt obligations. NYDIG warns that convertible debt holders would demand cash rather than shares for their debt, creating more onerous liabilities than simple share issuance, while convertible debt structures incentivize DATs to maximize equity volatility since converts function as debt plus call options.
Eliza Labs is migrating the ai16z token to elizaOS to support version 2's cross-chain operations through Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol and agent-native workflows that learn over time, evolving from the original ai16z proof-of-concept that demonstrated agents could capture attention and catalyze culture into a production framework. elizaOS v2 features 200+ plugins connecting to various interfaces and cross-chain cognition capabilities, allowing agents to observe signals on one chain, plan on another, and settle on a third while maintaining context through CCIP's secure token transfers and arbitrary data messaging. The framework enables "generative economies" where tokens behave like programs, treasuries function as adaptive engines, and strategies improve through experience, with agents capable of deploying liquidity, allocating reserves to productive strategies, and routing value efficiently while sharing learnings across the network.
Share combines three traditionally separate companies into one native iOS app: a social network where transactions become content and wallets become creators, a real-time block explorer indexing every transaction from onchain apps into human-readable events, and a wallet for research, trading, and portfolio tracking across Solana, Base, and Ethereum. Share addresses the observation that many users screenshot transactions to share on Twitter, Telegram, and Discord despite broken UX. The platform implements "Info Finance" principles by allowing wallets to contextualize onchain transactions with media in exchange for social capital and market influence, creating a real-time feed of financial market activity as every asset becomes tokenized from stocks to memes to predictions.
2025.09.29·links.tldrnewsletter.com·9 min read·TLDR Crypto a16z crypto's newsletter features a deep-dive on prediction markets with economics professors Alex Tabarrok and Scott Kominers, exploring how these markets work, their design principles, and intersection with AI and futarchy trends, while addressing what prediction markets are good for and where blockchain technology fits into the ecosystem. The edition also includes fundraising advice for founders to abandon the "not-raising-raise" playbook popular during 2020-2021's zero-interest-rate environment, instead returning to structured, intentional venture capital pitching processes rather than hoping for preemption from opportunistic VC meetings. Industry updates highlight Morgan Stanley's partnership with Zerohash to offer crypto trading on ETrade in 2026, Coinbase and CloudFlare's x402 protocol foundation for AI-driven payments enabling direct web transactions without accounts or API keys, and CloudFlare's new dollar-backed stablecoin for "instant and secure" agentic web transactions.
Stablecoin giants Tether and Circle are "printing money" by keeping yields from US Treasuries backing their tokens while holders receive no returns, with Tether reporting $4.9 billion in net profit in Q2 and reaching a $500 billion valuation in new funding. New platforms like M^0 and Agora are emerging to address this issue by allowing stablecoin infrastructure to route yield directly to applications or end users rather than issuers capturing all profits, as elevated interest rates create pressure for yield-sharing models. Tether defended its approach by stating USDT serves as "a digital dollar, not an investment product" for hundreds of millions in emerging markets facing dramatic inflation rates of 50-90% annually, arguing that yield-bearing stablecoins target different audiences and carry additional regulatory risks.
Payments aren't inherently “crypto”, they're just an action made possible by crypto's trustless settlement. The real breakthrough is trustware, programmable trust primitives where identity, commitments, and fairness inherit the same finality and neutrality as onchain settlement. This creates digital interactions that can't be faked, revoked, or manipulated by boardrooms or governments. However, if trustware is built on half-decentralized, corporate rails, it mutates into a dystopia of permanent surveillance and programmable coercion. To prevent capture, the rails must be credibly neutral, auditable, and decentralized from the start, aligning even with the incentives of those in power, since neutrality protects them from political capture.
Credible neutrality means anyone, Democrat, Republican, anarchist, EU bureaucrat, or even a dictator, can trust that their code executes and property rights are respected without censorship or control. It's the guarantee of a global, common platform secured by thousands of independent validators, where you can store a billion dollars digitally and know it won't be seized. In this framing, Ethereum is the only Turing-complete platform that won't interfere with your money, code, or life. That's why, in 20 years, the entire planet will run on Ethereum, not out of preference, but because it's the only neutral substrate left.
The past weeks have seen an unprecedented wave of stablecoin activity.
Wall Street giants are accelerating their crypto integrations.
Plasma has shown strong execution from launch to partnerships to mainnet to TGE (token generation event), while comps like Monad and MegaETH have arguably lost momentum.
Self Protocol allows users to prove information about their identity without revealing sensitive information.
The Senate Finance Committee has scheduled a hearing on October 1 to review how cryptocurrency should be taxed, reflecting the growing urgency around modernizing the US tax code for digital assets. The session comes as lawmakers debate exemptions for small, routine crypto purchases and broader reforms. Current IRS rules treat all crypto transactions as taxable events, even when no gains or losses occur.
2025.09.26·links.tldrnewsletter.com·2 min read·TLDR Crypto Nine major European banks, including ING, UniCredit, Danske Bank, and CaixaBank, have formed a consortium to launch a MiCA-compliant euro-denominated stablecoin expected to be issued in the second half of 2026. The initiative aims to provide a European alternative to the US-dominated stablecoin market and enhance Europe's strategic autonomy in digital payments, with the new company being established in the Netherlands and seeking e-money institution licensing from the Dutch Central Bank. The stablecoin will offer near-instant, low-cost transactions with 24/7 cross-border payment capabilities, programmable payments, and enhanced supply chain management features leveraging blockchain technology.
PolyGlobe has introduced a spatial way to browse prediction markets. Traders can now explore elections, conflicts, and macro events via a world map, with narratives clustered by region. An AI engine geotags markets by extracting entities, locations, and coordinates, then organizes them into regional storylines. Upcoming features include map-native search, OSINT overlays (integrating live tweets, flight tracking, and troop movements), and smarter filters, alerts, and watchlists. The goal is to make geopolitics trading more intuitive, visual, and context-rich, moving beyond lists of markets to a dynamic, intelligence-style interface.
World Liberty Financial will launch a debit card and retail application "very soon" to integrate its USD1 stablecoin into everyday payments, including Apple Pay integration, co-founder Zak Folkman announced at Korea Blockchain Week 2025. The retail app will merge peer-to-peer transfers with trading features, forming the core of World Liberty's consumer market expansion strategy beyond its current DeFi offerings. The Trump family-backed project has also signed a memorandum of understanding with South Korean exchange Bithumb to explore business opportunities, though specific details of the partnership remain unclear at this time.
Prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi have moved beyond speculation, processing $35B+ since inception and $17.5B in 2025 YTD. Kalshi is leaning heavily into sports (96% of recent volume), while Polymarket skews political and long-tail cultural events. Both face limits from full collateralization and oracle/review structures, yet their growth suggests prediction markets are maturing into one of finance's most speculative and democratizing frontiers.
2025.09.26·links.tldrnewsletter.com·10 min read·TLDR Crypto Solana ecosystem momentum accelerated with two major Digital Asset Treasury launches: Helius raising $500M backed by Pantera Capital and Solmate raising $300M from UAE-based investors with Ark Invest backing, coinciding with the SEC's approval of generic listing standards, clearing the path for more spot crypto ETFs. Infra milestones included $1 billion of Bitcoin issued on Solana for the first time ever, SP3ND launching to enable Amazon purchases with stablecoins, Orderly Network adding multi-collateral trading support for SOL and USDT, and Reflect Money launching USDC+, a yield-bearing stablecoin. The ecosystem's developer activity surged with the first Solana Mobile Hackathon attracting over 1,000 signups and 276 global submissions.
Fusaka's headline feature, PeerDAS, lets nodes verify block data by sampling chunks instead of storing full blobs, enabling safer, cheaper L2 data posting today and future L1 scaling. Blob usage just hit six per block for the first time. Counts will rise conservatively at first, then more aggressively as the network hardens. Longer term, even L1 execution data could migrate into blobs, opening more throughput without sacrificing decentralization.
2025.09.26·links.tldrnewsletter.com·1 min read·TLDR Crypto Base has doubled DeFi TVL to $5B since spring, with Aave and Morpho leading growth (Morpho's BTC-backed loans hit $720M). Tech upgrades like Flashblocks (200ms block times) and Stage 1 decentralization have drawn praise from Vitalik Buterin. A Solana bridge and the new Base App (chat, trade, post, and discover apps) push Base further into mainstream UX, already distributing $500K+ to creators.