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 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.
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'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 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, which allows online communities to generate value, has passed $43 million in revenue to builders and captured $4 million in protocol fees.
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.
Trump Media and Technology Group has partnered with Crypto.com and a SPAC to launch a crypto treasury firm focused on stockpiling Crypto.com's native CRO token, following the MicroStrategy playbook of using public companies as digital asset investment vehicles. The deal involves Crypto.com transferring 684 million CRO tokens worth approximately $105 million, representing roughly 20% of CRO's total outstanding supply, to Trump Media in exchange for equity and cash. Markets responded positively with CRO surging 35% and Trump Media stock rising 10% on the announcement, reflecting investor appetite for crypto treasury strategies amid the Trump administration's crypto-friendly stance.
Despite Ethereum reaching a new all-time high of $4,946, DeFi total value locked (TVL) remains at $91 billion, significantly below the $108 billion peak from November 2021, with only 21 million ETH locked compared to 29.2 million ETH during the previous cycle. The current ETH rally is primarily driven by institutional inflows through ETFs rather than retail DeFi activity that fueled previous cycles. Structural changes, including Layer 2 migration, more capital-efficient protocols like liquid staking, and increased competition from other chains, have fundamentally altered Ethereum's TVL dynamics.
Nous Research, a frontier AI lab using crypto for the coordination of compute resources, has launched Hermes 4, a new line of hybrid reasoning models designed to be uncensored and user-aligned while maintaining state-of-the-art performance in mathematics, coding, and reasoning. The company also introduced RefusalBench, a new benchmark testing models' willingness to be helpful across scenarios typically restricted by other AI systems. Hermes 4 achieves superior performance against both open and closed models in operating without censorship. Nous Research is offering free inference access through its revamped chat interface for the first week, along with a comprehensive technical report that sets new transparency standards for AI model benchmarking. Hermes 4 supports the crypto community's need for unconstrained analytical and development tools.
A new class of stablecoin-native blockchains (Plasma, Arc, 1Money, Stable, Codex, and Monad) is emerging to capture global payments as stablecoins head toward a projected $3.7T market cap by 2030. These chains are built for real-world needs like instant finality, gas-free or stablecoin-denominated fees, compliant confidential transactions, and cross-chain interoperability. Rankings from Stablewatch and Castle Labs place Plasma (USDT-backed Bitcoin bridge) at the top, followed by Arc (Circle's USDC chain). Monad and Codex target performance and compliance niches. The race could determine the core infrastructure for onchain money movement in the digital age.
Irys is a programmable datachain that stores data affordably onchain while allowing smart contracts to interact directly with that stored information, differentiating it from traditional blockchains that use expensive storage or rely on pointers to offchain data. Unlike other datachains that simply store data permanently, Irys offers both temporary and permanent storage options with programmable rules attached directly to the data, enabling use cases like event tickets with embedded logic for single-use scanning or IP protection. The platform addresses the high cost of onchain data storage on general-purpose blockchains while maintaining the verifiability and permanence that offchain storage solutions cannot guarantee.
Ethereum is emerging as the foundation for real-world asset tokenization, now a $26.5B market, with Ethereum holding 72% of onchain treasuries. Programmability enables daily dividend payouts and other investor-friendly features, with institutions like BlackRock, Apollo, and VanEck already launching products on Ethereum. With $20T+ of assets potentially tokenized and equities as the next frontier, Ethereum's secure, composable infrastructure positions it as the backbone for the coming wave of institutional adoption.
Pendle's yield token mechanism on Kinetiq offers leveraged exposure to kPoints farming, with YT kHYPE providing 44x multiplier effects where a $25k position gains points equivalent to holding $1.1M worth of the underlying token. The strategy involves "sacrificing" HYPE tokens at maturity in exchange for multiplicative yield and points during the holding period, with conservative calculations showing potential 186% ROI based on projected token valuations of $7.81 per point. Smaller wallets receive significantly better points-to-YT ratios than large holders, and the average wallet size of $123k on Kinetiq indicates sophisticated money is already exploiting this opportunity while retail investors overlook it due to complexity.
Binance has integrated Token Terminal data, allowing users to view Aave's onchain financials, such as deposits, loans, fees, and revenue, directly on asset pages.
Non-BTC/ETH (and maybe SOL) digital asset treasuries are “dead on arrival” if their only pitch is speed to market and premium trading.
Onchain fantasy football app Football.fun, which blends fantasy sports with prediction markets, has seen $34M in trading volume and 12K unique depositors in under two weeks.
Without higher standards, crypto will never reach mass global use.
Global financial regulators, including ESMA, IOSCO, and the World Federation of Exchanges, are urging the SEC to strengthen oversight of tokenized stocks, arguing these products misleadingly mimic traditional equities without providing equivalent investor protections. The organizations have expressed alarm at the growing number of brokers and crypto platforms offering tokenized stocks, claiming they are marketed as equivalent to actual stocks when they fundamentally are not, potentially exposing investors to significant risks. This regulatory pushback comes as tokenized assets reach $26 billion in value and major platforms like Coinbase, Kraken, and Robinhood expand into the space, mirroring previous successful lobbying efforts by traditional financial institutions to limit blockchain-based competition. Despite these concerns, SEC leadership has indicated openness to tokenization innovation while emphasizing that tokenized securities must still comply with existing securities laws.
Galaxy Digital, Multicoin Capital, and Jump Crypto are in talks with backers to raise $1B for a dedicated Solana treasury in what would be the largest accumulation vehicle for the token. Cantor Fitzgerald is acting as lead banker, with plans to structure the effort as a digital asset treasury company via the takeover of a publicly traded entity. The Solana Foundation has reportedly endorsed the effort.
An updated map of the Latin American stablecoin ecosystem highlights surging adoption, with USDT and USDC accounting for over 90% of July 2025 exchange volume. Local stablecoins are also booming, with BRL-pegged tokens up 660% year-on-year and MXN-pegged volumes growing 1,000x. Version 2 expands coverage across wallets, exchanges, issuers, and on/off ramps, reflecting the rapid buildout of stablecoin infrastructure across the region.
Blind is a new token launchpad launching on Base that enables users to leverage their social capital while maintaining privacy control over their identity data. The platform pulls social statistics from connected X accounts and various data sources, including Ethos Network and Kaito, allowing users to selectively reveal metrics like follower counts, reputation scores, and mutual connections when deploying tokens. A key differentiator is a social gating functionality that restricts token launch participation to users meeting specific criteria, such as follower thresholds or mutual connections with particular accounts, implemented through Uniswap V4 custom hooks.
There are eleven non-leveraged stablecoin strategies offering >10% APR, ranging from simple fixed-rate options like Pendle's 18% APR locks to more complex multi-step approaches yielding up to 30%. Highlights include Gearbox's lending campaigns (14-30% across different chains), InfiniFi's flexible-duration Pendle PT ETF (9-17% APY), and Gauntlet's fee-free alpha vault at 11.7% APY with USDC liquidity. There are upcoming launches for Solstice (19%) and Neutrl (29%), plus a complex basis trade strategy combining syrupUSDC margin, HYPE shorts, and Pendle PT positions for 24% total APR.
Zora's "content coins" thesis aims to tokenize individual pieces of content to capture both subjective and commercial value, challenging the current creator economy where platforms retain 65% of the $320B market through extractive revenue splits. The model faces criticism over whether ordinary users' content has sufficient value beyond speculative collecting, with Base's messaging emphasizing subjective value while avoiding concrete commercial value capture mechanisms. Critics argue that "buying posts" behavior won't scale for normie content, though similar patterns already exist through tipping culture, Reddit gold, and creator collectibles across platforms. Zora's success depends on developing programmable revenue sharing, onchain sponsorship routing, and creator investment tools that could transform social platforms from synthetic attention derivatives into spot markets for granular content ownership.
The current wave of "prediction market for X" projects mirrors failed "Uber for Y" concepts and will largely collapse due to fundamental misunderstandings of market microstructure and liquidity sourcing. Successful prediction markets require exogenous information flow, perpetual variance, and natural hedgers bringing differentiated views – elements that most verticalized applications lack since they attempt to manufacture variance internally rather than sourcing it from real-world needs. Tokens and memecoins already function as effective prediction markets for attention and narrative momentum, demonstrating that markets succeed through mimetic behavior where participants want to be "right together" rather than through novel application skins. The space needs innovation in market architecture and perpetualization mechanisms rather than more specialized verticals, as episodic binary bets naturally decay while continuous structures compound liquidity and variance forward.
Aave's $71.15B in assets would rank it as the 37th-largest U.S. bank, just behind UMB and ahead of Old National Bank. Unlike banks, Aave is an open DeFi protocol with no branches, offering non-Fed–correlated yield that any financial institution can plug into.
Chainlink is rapidly becoming the de facto standard for serious TradFi integrations.
Strategy bought 3,081 BTC for $356.9M at an average price of $115,829, raising its treasury to 632,457 BTC worth ~$70B.
2025.08.26·links.tldrnewsletter.com·3 min read·TLDR Crypto USDC usage on Ethereum has hit all-time highs, with July transfer volume reaching $748.3B across 8.3M transactions.
USDT recorded $1.24T in onchain transfer volume in July, with Tron and Ethereum remaining the largest transport layers.
The EU is fast-tracking its digital euro initiative in response to the U.S. GENIUS Act, which set strict rules for stablecoin issuers and reinforced the dollar's dominance in cross-border payments. Officials are now debating whether to issue the digital euro on public blockchains like Ethereum or Solana to boost efficiency and adoption, though concerns remain over privacy risks versus a closed ECB-led system. The decision could shape Europe's competitiveness in the global digital payments race.
Philippines Congressman Miguel Luis Villafuerte has introduced a bill calling for the central bank to buy 2,000 BTC annually over five years, creating a 10,000 BTC reserve locked for 20 years. The bitcoin would only be used to retire government debt, with strict limits on sales even after the lockup period. If passed, the Philippines would join El Salvador and Bhutan in treating bitcoin as a strategic national asset.
2025.08.25·links.tldrnewsletter.com·2 min read·TLDR Crypto The Dual Flow Batch Auction (DFBA) is a novel market structure that addresses critical flaws in blockchain-based Continuous Limit Order Books, including MEV exploitation, latency arbitrage, and adverse flow that drive up trading costs. The system separates orders into maker and taker groups, conducting two independent auctions every ~100ms where makers compete purely on price rather than speed, eliminating time-priority advantages and allowing market makers to quote tighter spreads with reduced exposure to toxic flow. DFBA provides uniform pricing within each auction (all participants fill at the same clearing price) while maintaining efficient liquidity provision, with analysis suggesting auction intervals of 100ms-1s are optimal for natural flow traders who see negligible benefit from lower latencies. This design represents a fundamental shift away from speed-based competition toward fair pricing mechanisms that better serve actual trading needs rather than optimizing for bots and block producers.
Researchers Luca Zanolini and Roberto Saltini explore integrating Ethereum's proposed Three-Slot Finality protocol with three other major upgrades: enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS), Fork-Choice Inclusion Lists (FOCIL), and PeerDAS, aiming to achieve finality in just three slots while maintaining censorship resistance and data availability. The integration requires restructuring slot timelines to accommodate builder-proposer separation, introducing an Availability Committee to verify payload release, and modifying the RLMD-GHOST fork-choice algorithm to handle different payload availability states. While the authors believe the combination preserves 3SF's core security properties under assumptions of synchrony and reduced adversarial resilience, they identify a critical challenge around low validator participation scenarios where builders may struggle to reach the 60% threshold needed for safe payload release.
Stablecoins represent a fundamental platform shift comparable to historical infrastructure transformations like railroads and the internet, with the recent GENIUS Act passage marking just the beginning of mainstream adoption. Legacy financial rails like wire transfers and ACH are inadequate for modern needs requiring composability and machine-to-machine transactions, while stablecoins offer instant settlement, programmability, and borderless functionality that will unlock trillions in economic activity. AI agents will accelerate this transition by natively using stablecoins for automated commerce and treasury operations, creating an entirely new category of "AI-native" economic activity. Despite the current $280 billion stablecoin market cap, the industry is still underestimating the speed of adoption given the 100:1 gap with the $20 trillion US M2 money supply, positioning stablecoins as the foundational layer for the future digital economy.
Markets pulled back ahead of Jackson Hole amid macro headwinds, with the US Treasury rebuilding its General Account balance by $185B since early August, while Fed rate cut odds dropped from 96% to 70%, contributing to $756M and $867M in BTC and ETH ETF outflows, respectively. Circle launched Gateway, making USDC effectively chain-agnostic with sub-500ms cross-chain transfers that could save large exchanges up to $40M annually per $1B of float by eliminating rebalancing costs and reducing safety stock requirements. Despite spot weakness, ETH derivatives markets showed strength with 9% annualized funding rates and open interest hitting new all-time highs at $125.5B globally, suggesting crypto-native traders are buying the dip. Gateway's initial lack of Solana support may strategically benefit EVM chains in capturing multi-chain institutional flows until Circle expands coverage or prioritizes its upcoming Arc L1.
2025.08.25·links.tldrnewsletter.com·12 min read·TLDR Crypto Stargate DAO approved LayerZero Foundation's $120 million acquisition offer with nearly 95% of votes, despite last-minute competing bids from Wormhole, Axelar, and Across protocols. Under the modified deal terms, STG holders will swap tokens for ZRO at a 1:0.08634 ratio, with veSTG holders receiving 50% of Stargate's revenue for six months before all excess revenue goes toward ZRO buybacks. The competing protocols requested a vote pause to submit proper bids, but the DAO proceeded with the original timeline, completing what LayerZero claims is the first private DAO acquisition over $100 million. There is some controversy about the lack of consideration of the other protocols' proposals, though, given that Stargate is built using LayerZero's interoperability technology, this outcome was not unexpected.
2025.08.25·links.tldrnewsletter.com·7 min read·TLDR Crypto With revenue down 25% as digital-first rivals like Wise and Remitly take share, Western Union (WU) is piloting stablecoin settlement in South America and Africa. Its edge isn't the tech - others can adopt stablecoins too - but instead its 400K global cash agent network, which could make WU the key bridge from cash to stablecoins for individuals and fintechs. This pivot could buy time against the decline of cash while positioning WU as infrastructure for the digital economy.
Cap Money has launched cUSD, a stablecoin designed with CDO-style protections that shield lenders from borrower default risk.
Stablecoins collectively hold more U.S. Treasuries than major foreign holders, including Germany, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea.
Unlike Bitcoin and Solana, which rely almost entirely on a single client, Ethereum runs on a diverse mix of clients like Lighthouse, Geth, Prysm, and Nethermind.
Ethereum Layer 1 transactions and active addresses are at all-time highs, even as daily gas fees remain near historic lows.
Collective ETH holdings by 69 entities have passed 4.1M ETH ($17.6B), equal to 3.39% of supply, as corporate treasuries accelerate accumulation. BitMine Immersion leads with 1.5M ETH, followed by SharpLink Gaming's 740,800 ETH and the Ethereum Foundation's 231,600 ETH. Public companies alone now hold 2.6M ETH ($10.9B), while U.S. spot ETFs control 6.7M ETH, or 5.5% of circulating supply.
2025.08.22·links.tldrnewsletter.com·2 min read·TLDR Crypto Bitcoin treasury strategies could elevate credit risk profiles due to regulatory uncertainty, volatility, liquidity challenges, counterparty exposure, and custody issues. There is extreme concentration in the space, with MicroStrategy controlling over 629,000 BTC or 64% of all public company treasury holdings out of approximately 3.68 million BTC ($428 billion) held across various corporate and institutional entities. Heavy reliance on Bitcoin reserves could strain liquidity management, while price volatility adds additional risk. Different tokens carry distinct technological and governance challenges.
MetaMask's mUSD is a fully-backed stablecoin issued by Stripe-owned Bridge and powered by M0. It will be launched later this year on Ethereum and Linea. Billed as the first stablecoin native to a self-custodial wallet, mUSD will integrate across MetaMask's ecosystem for on-ramps, swaps, bridging, and spending, including with the MetaMask Card. Backed by cash and Treasuries that generate yield, mUSD aims to deepen liquidity on Linea and Ethereum while reducing onboarding friction for MetaMask's 100M+ users.
2025.08.22·links.tldrnewsletter.com·3 min read·TLDR Crypto Wyoming launched the Frontier Stable Token (FRNT) on mainnet across seven blockchains, making it the first US state-issued stablecoins with a statutorily mandated 102% reserve requirement backed by Treasury bills and USD. The stablecoin integrates with Visa's payment network, enabling use anywhere Visa is accepted, including Apple Pay, Google Pay, and physical cards, though public access remains limited due to ongoing regulatory hurdles. The move represents a significant precedent for state-level crypto innovation, with officials highlighting potential government efficiency improvements through programmable payments for tax refunds, vendor payments, and social benefits. It builds on Wyoming's position as a crypto-friendly jurisdiction with over 45 pieces of digital asset legislation since 2016, potentially setting a template for other states to issue their own stablecoins.
A debate is emerging over whether Bitcoin will follow its historical four-year cycle pattern with a 2025 top or extend into 2026 due to fundamental market structure changes. The traditional cycle case relies on pattern recognition and potential self-fulfilling prophecy effects, while the extended cycle thesis points to institutional participation creating smoother profit-taking behavior, regulatory clarity removing systematic risks, and Fed Chair transition dynamics, with Powell's term ending May 2026. Key differentiating factors include the absence of retail euphoria, continued stablecoin supply growth, and new demand sources like ETFs and pension funds, which didn't exist in previous cycles. The analysis suggests focusing on systematic exit strategies rather than attempting to time cycle tops perfectly, while monitoring stablecoin market cap growth and DAT leverage risks as leading indicators.
Memecoin activity has hit new lows, with only 124K daily active addresses on August 17, signaling a shift toward tokenized startups as the next major crypto narrative despite Ben Pasternak's failed execution with Launchcoin. The concept addresses a structural mismatch between the $13 trillion private equity market and crypto's need for substantial assets, creating perfect conditions for retail to access early-stage innovation with immediate liquidity. Tokenized startups offer advantages across all stakeholders: founders get capital and distribution, investors get liquid exposure to real businesses, and GenZ entrepreneurs can weaponize their attention-maximizing skills into tradable assets from day one. There will be a three-phase evolution from non-security tokenized startups to mid-cap pre-IPO tokenization to large private company tokenization, representing crypto's entry into the massive untapped private equity market.
Protocols are increasingly mimicking corporate share repurchase strategies, with nearly $40M in weekly token buybacks last week, led by Hyperliquid ($24M) and Pump.fun ($10M). Buybacks aim to reduce supply and signal long-term confidence, but their effectiveness is mixed—prices may benefit temporarily but often face pressure once programs slow. Sustainability depends on strong, recurring fee revenue, making high-revenue protocols better positioned to maintain consistent buybacks than those reliant on depleting treasuries.
2025.08.22·links.tldrnewsletter.com·3 min read·TLDR Crypto