Hello everyone! I hope you’re all doing well and holding on to your sanity in this accelerated news flow.

📽 “Press Publish” is back! This Friday, June 19th, come join me for a live chat with Izabella Kaminska, author of The Peg and The Blind Spot, about newslettering, media, too much information and more. More details below! 📽

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Gold’s centre of gravity

• Term of the day: OTC

• Markets: easing doubts

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you so much!! ❤

✨Press Publish with Izabella Kaminska✨

Come and join me and long-time journalist, finance expert and independent thinker Izabella Kaminska on Friday June 19th, at 3pm UK time/10am ET for a live chat about why and how she does what she does: how she manages to produce not one but two excellent newsletters (The Peg and The Blind Spot) while also writing for mainstream media, speaking at events, and juggling a ton of other stuff besides. We’ll touch on her long media career, where she thinks the industry is heading, how she handles the firehose of information, what works for her and what doesn’t, what advice she’d give her younger self, and more.

Again, Friday June 19th, at 3pm UK time/10am ET: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/239917?utm_source=live-stream-scheduled-upsell

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

Gold’s centre of gravity

Things are shifting in the gold market. I mean, of course the gold market is always shifting, it’s what markets do – I’m referring to what feels like a centre of gravity drift, that could have significant consequences on the development of “money”.

It’s a massive topic so these are just my “top-of-mind” thoughts for a Tuesday morning – but I will be doing more digging as this fits squarely into my “monetary interregnum” project (which is basically just me doing lots of nerdy reading, connecting headlines and scratching at hunches as I try to map out what the global monetary regime will look like once the new technologies and geopolitics have been absorbed). If you have any other factors to throw into the pot as I do my stirring, do please let me know.

Right, where was I… Oh yes – over the past few days, four distinct signals caught my attention, that bundled together project a much louder message than any one of them taken individually:

✨

1) Last Friday, the World Gold Council published a report showing that China’s official gold purchases are accelerating. Last month it added to reserves for the 19^th consecutive month, with the largest buy since December 2024.

Read more

Hello everyone, I hope you all had a good weekend!

📽 “Press Publish” is back! On Friday, June 19th, come join me for a live chat with Izabella Kaminska, author of The Peg and The Blind Spot, about newslettering, media, too much information and more. More details below! 📽

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Coming up this week: central banks, geopolitics

• Monday mood: What de Tocqueville had to say about crypto

• Markets: could it be real this time?

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you so much!! ❤

✨Press Publish with Izabella Kaminska✨

Come and join me and long-time journalist, finance expert and independent thinker Izabella Kaminska on Friday June 19th, at 3pm UK time/10am ET for a live chat about why and how she does what she does: how she manages to produce not one but two excellent newsletters (The Peg and The Blind Spot) while also writing for mainstream media, speaking at events, and juggling a ton of other stuff besides. We’ll touch on her long media career, where she thinks the industry is heading, how she handles the firehose of information, what works for her and what doesn’t, what advice she’d give her younger self, and more.

Again, Friday June 19th, at 3pm UK time/10am ET: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/239917?utm_source=live-stream-scheduled-upsell

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

Coming up this week:

It’s central bank week! More than 20 central banks accounting for more than 40% of global output will hold rate setting meetings this week – only Japan is expected to hike, and we could get cuts from Russia and Brazil, but coming so soon on the heels of last week’s ECB rate increase, the momentum is for now to the upside.

Today sees the kickoff of the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains, on the French shore of Lake Geneva, where for the next three days developed economy leaders – including President Trump, fresh from his birthday celebrations – will debate global imbalances. As usual, the G7 (US, Japan, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy and the EU) has invited other countries to attend the talks: apparently, the leaders of India, Brazil, South Korea, UAE, Egypt, Qatar, Syria (!?), Kenya and, notably, Ukraine will also be present. Saudi Arabia was invited but will not be attending.

On Tuesday, the Bank of Japan holds its rate-setting meeting, widely expected to deliver a hike – although Governor Kazuo Ueda is in hospital, so it’s not clear how much meaning we’ll be able to read into the official statement.

Also on Tuesday, we get a deck of economic data from China, including retail sales (expected to be flat), industrial production (the consensus forecast is for a modest uptick) and unemployment (expected to hold steady at 5.2%).

And we get the US import and export price indices which take on even more significance than usual given the current focus on inflation.

On Wednesday, Fed Chair Kevin Warsh hosts his first press conference in his new role. It will probably end up being one of the most viewed ever, as not only are we eager to compare his engagement style with that of his predecessor, we really want to gauge his tone on the interest rate outlook: can he keep President Trump happy while retaining credibility?

We also get the updated economic projections from the Fed, which shares the committee’s expectations of interest rates going forward as well as inflation, unemployment and GDP growth. Chair Warsh has said that he would like to see less of this guesswork, so this vibe-setting tool may soon be withdrawn. I’m guessing the committee members themselves wouldn’t mind.

Also on Wednesday: US retail sales growth, expected to hold steady at 0.5% month-on-month.

And the two-day Lujiazui Forum kicks off in Shanghai – this is China’s most influential financial conference organized by the country’s main financial regulators and the Shanghai municipal government. The opening speech will be delivered by Ding Xiangqun, minister of the National Financial Regulatory Administration. Also attending this year are representatives from the central banks of Singapore and Hungary (interesting…) as well as financial regulators from the UK and elsewhere. The agenda reportedly includes sessions on cross-border financial regulatory cooperation, and new technologies.

This sure is the week for high-level get-togethers – also on Wednesday, the two-day Russian-ASEAN Commemorative Summit gets going in Kazan, Russia. According to reports, attendance is expected from Vladimir Putin as well as the leaders of the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei and probably some others not yet listed.

Thursday brings a key UK by-election in the district of Makerfield, where Manchester’s mayor Andy Burnham is hoping to win a Parliament seat so he can challenge Keir Starmer for leadership of the Labour Party.

On Friday, all attention will be on Geneva, Switzerland, as delegations from the US (led by Vice President Vance) and Iran (led by Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf) meet to hopefully sign the agreement to start peace negotiations.

US markets are closed for the Juneteenth holiday, and China-Hong Kong are closed for the Dragon Boat Festival.

Monday mood: What De Tocqueville had to say about crypto

(what’s on my mind as we head into the week)

Over the weekend, I started listening to a new podcast series from The Economist, on Alexis de Tocqueville’s mighty tome “Democracy in America” and on how America is faring on the criteria that back then – according to the French aristocrat commenter – made it great.

Back then, Andrew Jackson was president, and de Tocqueville fretted that the man’s abrasive personality and aggressive disregard for diplomatic norms would hurt America’s standing in the world. The parallels with today of course write themselves and, well, America survived. But I’m not going to follow the publication’s chief editor for the Americas down the path of wondering whether this time is different – rather, I want to draw on the magic that de Tocqueville saw in what at the time was still a new continent.

You’ll see where I’m heading with this in a second.

Read more

📽 After a break, I’m picking up “Press Publish” again! Next Friday, June 19th, come join me for a live chat with Izabella Kaminska, author of The Peg and The Blind Spot, about newslettering, media, too much information and more. More details below! 📽

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

In this newsletter:

• Stablecoins and sanctions evasion

• No, Bitcoin has not “failed” as a safe haven

• Assorted links: The World Cup, economic development, top living US musicians, the value of attitude, the search for self.

• Weekend: bring-bring and yip-yip

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you!! ❤

✨Press Publish with Izabella Kaminska✨

Come and join me and long-time journalist, finance expert and independent thinker Izabella Kaminska next Friday June 19th, at 3pm UK time/10am ET for a live chat about why and how she does what she does: how she manages to produce not one but two excellent newsletters (The Peg and The Blind Spot) while also writing for mainstream media, speaking at events, and juggling a ton of other stuff besides. We’ll touch on her long media career, where she thinks the industry is heading, how she handles the firehose of information, what works for her and what doesn’t, what advice she’d give her younger self, and more.

Again, Friday June 19th, at 3pm UK time/10am ET: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/239917?utm_source=live-stream-scheduled-upsell

Some of the topics discussed in this week’s premium dailies:

Monday, June 8

• Coming up this week: inflation, politics, geopolitics

• Monday mood: No, Bitcoin has not “failed” as a safe haven

• Macro: job perks

• Markets: nerves up

Tuesday, June 9

• Nigeria’s CBDC: next steps and lessons learned

• Term of the day: PAPSS

• Macro: the consumer expectations question

Wednesday, June 10

• Stablecoins and sanctions evasion

• Term of the day: Neomercantilism

Thursday, June 11

• Market convergence: What’s in a price?

• Term of the day: oracle

• Macro: US CPI grumbles and yawns

Friday, June 12

• From the Pacific to Wall Street: tokenized sovereign debt

• Term of the day: Brady bonds

• Macro: US wholesale inflation

Stablecoins and sanctions evasion

In 1966, psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote:

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

Tempting indeed, to the extent that it becomes instinctive, we don’t even recognize the situational bias at work.

It’s directly applicable to the construction of finance today. If you’ve ever wondered why regulators keep on adding layers to the Bank Secrecy Act – giving banks even more unproductive paperwork and sunk costs in the fruitless pursuit of proof of money laundering – well, Maslow has your answer: adding controls is the only thing regulators can do. So they do it, a lot. And if the action is not producing the desired result, it’s obviously because they’re not doing enough of it.

The same applies to sanctions. They have proven effective in the past, but targets find workarounds which makes sanctions less effective in the future. Yesterday, the EU presented its 21^st sanctions package against Russia. I’ll say that again, the 21^st. The first 20 didn’t achieve the objective of convincing Putin that he should withdraw his forces from Ukraine, but the 21^st should do the trick, right? And let’s remember that the loudly telegraphed threat of sanctions didn’t stop the invasion in the first place.

The futility becomes almost farcical when it comes to sanctioning crypto exchanges and even stablecoins. I’ve written about this before so I won’t repeat myself at length here, other than to say: sanctions on any activity carried out on a global, decentralized network will fail. The only reasonable explanation I can think of for going through the motions is: “it’s all that we can do, so it’s what we’ll do”. Our hammer hopes that the target will behave like a nail.

Given the flurry of related news items over the past week, it’s time for an update.

One example of futile sanctions I’ve written about before is those on the issuers and supporting platforms of the Russian A7A5 stablecoin, and from the EU on the stablecoin itself.

Last week, blockchain cybersecurity firm CertiK published its 2026 Stablecoin Threat Intelligence Report which devotes roughly half of its 22 pages to A7A5. Summarizing:

• In 2025, A7A5 processed more than $110 billion in onchain transactions.

• It accounts for almost half of the non-USD stablecoin market.

• This is despite an absence of independent reserve attestations.

• Its ecosystem has direct links to ransomware from known attacks, as well as significant amounts of North Korean hacking proceeds.

• The number of holders more than doubled between February 2025 and May 2026, to ~29,000, with no discernible dent from any sanctions event.

(chart via CertiK – roughly 99% of A7A5 addresses are on Tron)

• The Russian Central Bank has formally recognized A7A5 as a digital asset under the country’s legal framework.

• Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has invited all African nations to join A7, the stablecoin’s sanctioned network – it currently has offices in Nigeria and Zimbabwe, is recruiting for an office in Togo, and is reportedly in talks with Madagascar.

The story gets weirder: yesterday, UK high school student Alexander Browder – the son of investor and Putin antagonist Bill Browder – was put on a “no entry” list by Russia because of a report he published in March on A7A5’s use in illicit finance. This has been inflated in western media (fed by Alexander’s social media posts) as full “sanctions”, but whatever – he joins his father in being blocked from travelling to Russia.

One spin I’ve seen is that this is Russia’s way of getting back at his father, as if Alexander’s limited vacation options would impact their lifestyles that much. Oddly, it feels more like one big publicity stunt: the Browders get more attention on their anti-Putin cause, and Russia gets more potential users of A7A5. And the more western sanctions target a specific token while it keeps on growing, the more problematic regimes will think “hmm, we can do that too”.

But the ineffectual use of the hammer continues.

The sanctions package proposed by the EU yesterday includes 31 more Russian banks as well as 20 crypto platforms, banks and oil traders outside of Russia, for helping Russians evade sanctions. According to Reuters, 11 crypto platforms are named (the list has not yet been published).

There’s more: for the first time, the EU is considering a full third-country ban for digital asset services – if a country is suspected of harbouring a crypto exchange that works with sanctioned Russian entities, all crypto platforms in that country will be blocked from using EU services and rails. The UAE and Türkiye may have a thing or two to say about this.

Last week, the US Treasury sanctioned Iran’s largest crypto exchange Nobitex along with three others (Bitpin, Ramzinex and Wallex) operating in the country, as well as certain related and well-connected individuals – a Reuters report last month flagged that Nobitex was founded by two brothers belonging to one of the most influential dynasties in the Islamic Republic, a family with close ties to Iran’s Supreme Leader. Crypto is important in Iran. According to blockchain forensics firm Chainalysis, the Iranian crypto ecosystem processed roughly $7.8 billion in 2025, with IRGC-related address accounting for over 50% of total value received.

The previous week, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the US has seized approximately $1 billion of Iran’s crypto assets. I’m not sure how that was done – Bessent went on to talk about how his team “just outright grabbed the wallets” which, yeah, it doesn’t work like that. And I don’t think he realizes how much statements like that push more people onto rails that are “out of reach”.

And the week before that, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Iranian regime was moving “billions” worth of crypto assets through Binance, which Binance’s CEO has vehemently denied – he insists that Binance does not work with sanctioned entities or individuals, and the transactions mentioned in the report happened before the relevant sanctions list was published. This highlights a fundamental problem: for individuals and entities to be blocked, they need to be named. And once they are named, activity can relatively easily move to a family member or a related entity. Compliance programs don’t usually check for company provenance, just that a company is not on any entity lists.

This effectively makes sanctions a game of whack-a-mole which, in the fast-moving world of blockchain applications and assets, hobbles the strategy from the outset. Forensics firms are performing valuable work in tracing flows and labelling addresses – but blockchain science is not exact (mis-labelling is a thing), and will always be a step or two behind.

But what is unfortunately often overlooked in the “stablecoins facilitate crime” whining is that the transactions are traceable. This can fuel future action, even if too late. More importantly, it can sketch out networks. Any law enforcement officer will tell you that information is the ultimate tool for combating crime, and that knowing who is doing business with who can direct attention to the source and the nodes of distribution. Maps matter, and when it comes to money laundering via traditional financial rails, complete ones adjusted in real time don’t exist. Onchain, they can.

A separate issue is to what extent sanctions evasion is bad. We can agree that crime is bad – but who gets to decide what gets included in that definition? A doctor in Isfahan who pays for penicillin shipped across the border from Azerbaijan with USDT via Nobitex, is she committing a crime? The EU has even gone as far as sanctioning European individuals for being too pro-Russia – whether you agree or not with what they say, were they committing a crime?

The moral question of what even is crime goes beyond the individual. In an interview with the Financial Times last December, ECB Chief Christine Lagarde presented a clear use case for the digital euro:

“You know, there is a very strange situation at the moment where people can be barred from access to any financing because of a decision made on the other side of the pond. There’s the case of the International Criminal Court judges at the moment who have no access to finance. If we had a digital euro in place, that person could use financing in whichever way he wants and should, because he would not be deprived of his financial sovereignty himself.” (my emphasis)

Essentially, she is saying that sanctioned individuals should be able to have access to alternative financial rails, unless of course it’s the EU doing the sanctioning. Reading between the lines, there’s a chance she’s wondering if the EU itself might ever be on the receiving end of the hammer. Would it necessarily be guilty of committing a crime?

I don’t want to get too far off topic here, but I did want to make the point that sanctions on blockchain applications won’t work. And that’s not necessarily always bad. But it is complex.

The repercussions of this are bigger than most realize. Over the years, the power of sanctions has meant fewer boots on the ground, fewer human lives at risk. Sanctions have been a tool of peace, even if innocent people get punished at times. Removing their efficacy makes the world a more dangerous place, not just because the funding of really bad things moves further out of reach, but also because a new hammer will be needed.

Then again, better information could make that new hammer more surgical and therefore less risky. Blockchains are transparent, movements can be traced, and while the data will never be perfect, it’s a lot more granular and harder to disguise than in today’s opaque, fragmented system.

See also:

• Russian stablecoins in Africa (Apr 2026)

• Sanctions on a stablecoin (Oct 2025)

• The dark side of crypto (Jun 2025)

No, Bitcoin has not “failed” as a safe haven

It’s to be expected, I guess. When Bitcoin’s price does not behave as people assume it should, the obvious conclusion is that Bitcoin has “failed”. Over the past week, when both crypto and stocks were going down, I had a couple of journalists reach out for comment on whether Bitcoin could still be considered a “safe haven”. And I’ve seen more than a few headlines stressing its failure as such.

Expected, but still frustrating. We’ve seen the same reaction to every other BTC price slump, going back to when it was around $3,000 and media started paying attention. The repetitive chorus has generally been along the lines of: Bitcoin has obviously failed as a safe haven, it’s not much of a store of value, it’s a terrible payments network and doesn’t even do well as a speculative asset now that there are so many others with actual fundamentals.

And I get it, I used to work for media back in the day (but not as a journalist) and so I understand the need to come up with stories that will get clicks. And people do love 1) articles about crypto prices, and 2) proclamations of the end of a controversial asset class. Put them together and you’ll get traffic.

But this approach just perpetuates the dumbing-down of information and diverts any actual thought about what the relevant terms mean.

So, allow me.

First of all, what do we mean by “safe haven” investment? According to Investopedia, it’s an asset that “can hold or lose less value while other investments, like stocks, fall”. I’ll quibble with that definition further down, but let’s take it at face value for now.

Bitcoin has not failed at this – it has grossly underperformed a rising market, but we have not yet had the opportunity to see what it does when stocks fall, because they keep going up.

Of course, there have been bad days in equities. The Friday before last, for instance – Nasdaq dropped more than 4%, so did BTC. But by Monday, it had walked back most of what it lost, while Nasdaq hadn’t. In March, Nasdaq lost 4.4% while BTC gained 1.8%. After last year’s Liberation Day, Nasdaq had lost 9.3% by the close of business the following Monday. BTC was down 7.1% over the same period. In the first two weeks of March 2023, as markets were rocked by an unfolding banking crisis, Nasdaq was down 2.3%, BTC was up 4.6%. What about that month as a turbulent whole? Nasdaq eked out a gain of 6.8%. BTC was up 23%.

And yet people still insist it is not a safe haven?

This is in part because the firehose of news has made most of us short-term in our thinking. BTC is down while stocks are down so therefore it has failed, even though safe havens are not supposed to be short-term bets, just as most portfolio allocations are not supposed to follow day-to-day or even month-to-month moves.

It’s also because the firehose demands quick public reactions which leaves us reaching for easy yet superficial conclusions. When Bitcoin goes down along with other assets, it obviously can’t be a safe haven. That shows a lack of understanding of what “safe haven” means, even according to the traditional definition of “loses less value”.

But let’s ditch the traditional definition and, for the sake of argument ask what “safe” and “haven” actually mean outside of investment adviser jargon.

Safe doesn’t necessarily mean a steady price; it can mean protected from seizure or cancellation or dilution – that can’t be said of either stocks or bonds.

Haven doesn’t necessarily only mean refuge from portfolio losses; it also means a safe space, or an asset that can protect both wealth and access to economic activity – a refuge from the weaponization of finance, unfortunately relevant to a widening group of people (and how sure are you that you’ll never be one of them?).

So, seriously, has Bitcoin failed as a safe haven? No, it hasn’t, whichever definition you choose to latch on to.

It’s underperformed, yes, and I believe there could be more downside ahead if stocks turn ugly. I also don’t think it should be used as a portfolio “safe haven” as it is usually buffeted by several simultaneous narratives and we can never be sure which will predominate. We could even see periods where BTC gets hit more than equities, but we can also play around with the calendar window to prove a broader point: the goal posts are distorted.

Bitcoin is not supposed to go up when stocks go down. That’s a crazy assumption. Bitcoin isn’t supposed to do anything other than obey the rules of its algorithm, as it has no CEO or marketing team to tell us what it even is.

And as long as Bitcoin does that, it hasn’t failed.

ASSORTED LINKS

(A selection of reads I came across this week that I think are worth sharing, not about crypto nor macro. I try to choose links without a paywall, but when I feel it’s worth making an exception, I specify.)

• The FIFA World Cup 2026 is upon us, and in this well-reasoned report, uber-forecaster Joachim Klement of Panmure Liberum predicts that Netherlands will win. Details aside, it’s a fun read, even if (like me) you’re not really into soccer. That said, I would be into Spain winning. (FIFA World Cup Predictions 2026, Panmure Liberum)

“It has become a tradition among banks to make these forecasts to show that economists have a sense of humour (they don’t) and can actually forecast things that matter. They can’t. Or rather, most of them can’t.”

• It’s astonishingly rare to read some grounded advice aimed at young people on how to exit the anxiety trap and side-step the rat race, that also works wonders for old people (cough, who me?) that are also trying to stress less, slow down and appreciate the rhythm of each day. But, unsurprisingly, Jasmine Sun delivers, in a well-written tribute to attitude. (The old world is dying, Jasmine’s Substack)

• The best explanation I’ve seen on why China’s and India’s economic development took different paths – it’s partly top-down centralized decisions, but we often fail to appreciate the role of ingrained social structure. Human capital matters a lot. (Why China got rich and India didn’t, David Oks)

• New York Times readers unsurprisingly pushed back on the journal’s recent list – curated from music industry recommendations – of the top living American songwriters. To their credit, they then canvassed the public, and published the results. (The Reader Top 100, New York Times – paywall)

• Packy McCormick starts out by asking the question: “If new technology is so great, why are so many people unhappy?” – and ends up talking about what the search for meaning has to do with learning how to be yourself. Much less hand-wavy than my description may make it sound, the piece is a worthy read that will probably change your mind about some big things, even if you only get as far as the paywall which is a generous ways down. (Riding the Leopard, Not Boring – paywall)

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!

(in this section, I share stuff that has NOTHING to do with macro or crypto, ‘cos it’s the weekend and life is interesting)

This morning, on the way to the grocery story, my husband and I were reminiscing about our favourite toys from when we were kids. His was a set of interconnecting Lego-like bricks with which you could build castles. Mine was an old Fisher Price telephone, with wheels, a dial, an attached bright red receiver and a string with which you could pull it along and a bell would ting (yes, I’m that old). I have no idea why, but that’s the toy I remember most fondly.

Young people today would probably look at that and have no idea what it was.

We then moved on to reminiscing about the brilliant Muppets sketch with aliens identifying a phone – not from its shape, but from its sound. Which got me thinking: the sound is the generational bridge. The shape of phones may change, and their function may have evolved well beyond communication, but bring-bring still means that someone wants to talk to you, right?

DISCLAIMER: I never give trading ideas, and NOTHING I say is investment advice! I hold some BTC, ETH and a tiny amount of some smaller tokens, but they’re all long-term holdings – I don’t trade. Also, I often use AI for research instead of Google, but never for writing.

Hello everyone, and happy Friday! I hope you all had a meaningful week?

It’s a long newsletter today, but a good story that I’ve been wanting to dive into for ages – a small island nation between Hawaii and Australia has issued the first tokenized sovereign debt that I’m aware of, and the first token for UBI that is also institutional-grade collateral. Read on.

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• From the Pacific to Wall Street: tokenized sovereign debt

• Term of the day: Brady bonds

• Macro: US wholesale inflation

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you so much!! ❤

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

From the Pacific to Wall Street: tokenized sovereign debt

Students of innovation know that it tends to happen fastest at the margins, whether in finance, technology or geography. Sometimes, the combination of the three can produce some surprising moves. One example of this is a Universal Basic Income distribution that has ended up connected to new types of collateral efficiency on Wall Street.

For more detail, we have to travel to a sparsely populated region of the Pacific Ocean.

The Marshall Islands

The Republic of the Marshall Islands consists of over 1,200 islands and rings of coral known as atolls (including the world’s largest, Kwajalein) spread across nearly 2 million square kilometres – roughly the size of Saudi Arabia or Mexico – between Hawaii and Australia. Only 24 of the islands and atolls are inhabited; Majuro is the largest, and hosts the capital of the same name. Almost 99% of Marshall Islands territory is water, the largest proportion of water to land of any sovereign state. Its total land mass is just over 180km2, about the size of Washington DC, and a third of the size of my home city of Madrid. To get an idea of just how remote the Marshall Islands are, in “Everybody Loves our Dollars”, Oliver Bullough describes them as being “as far from anywhere as you can get while still being somewhere”.

Towards the end of World War II, US forces captured the Marshall Islands from the Japanese, after which they became key US military bases. In 1947, the United Nations established a trusteeship covering the Marshall Islands and other Micronesian territories, to be administered by the US.

Starting in 1946 (even before it had a legal right on the territory) and stretching out to 1958, the US conducted 67 nuclear weapons tests across the Bikini and Enewetak atolls, effectively unleashing forces equivalent to 1.6 Hiroshima-sized bombs being detonated every day for 12 years.

Unsurprisingly, many residents suffered long-term health effects, and to this day some atolls are uninhabitable due to radiation.

(Want a not-so-fun fact? The bikini swimsuit apparently got its name from the Bikini atoll, both because of the inference of small-ness – splitting the atom – and because the marketing stressed the “explosive” association. And SpongeBob SquarePants’ home, Bikini Bottom, is based on, well, you can guess where. Ever wonder why the character’s friends look so, um, different?)

In 1979, the Marshall Islands became a self-governing sovereign entity, adopting its own constitution. In 1982, it was officially renamed the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), and the following year it signed a Compact of Free Association (COFA) with the US. This gave it independence while also promising a bilateral relationship that delegates defence to American forces while granting exclusive military base rights, offers substantial US grants and sector funding, brings US postal and weather service coverage, allows residents to live and work indefinitely in the US as well as join the US military, and commits the Marshall Islands to using the US dollar as its only currency. The COFA entered into force in 1986 and was recently renewed up until 2043. In 1991, the island state became a voting member of the United Nations.

The thing is, the fledgling nation was sparse, thinly populated and struggled to find a source of reliable income. It sensibly chose to capitalize on its location by establishing an international ship registry and implementing Delaware law but with stronger privacy protection. A low-cost high-privacy offshore jurisdiction with good shipping services? You can imagine what happened next. It ended up with one of the world’s largest ship registries and thousands of non-resident shell companies.

In 2000, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), responsible for cleaning up global money laundering and terrorism financing, labelled the Marshall Islands as “non-cooperative” and blacklisted it from financial networks, dealing a major blow to its ability to participate in international flows.

The RMI got to work upgrading its regulatory framework and was removed from the blacklist in 2002. Yet it still struggled to get global banks to open correspondent branches on the islands. The 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent hike in fines for “financial safety” infractions triggered a global pullback from small yet active economies, even those not seen as a nexus for financial crime, as increasing compliance costs make them unprofitable.

This makes life more expensive for residents who often have to take a plane in order to cash a check. Remittance fees average 10%, triple the UN target. International USD wires can cost 4-5x the global average, with settlement taking up to a week. The domestic card system is expensive and does not accept international cards from Visa or Mastercard. Even inter-atoll payments can face high costs and due diligence requirements. And because cash is scarce, local banks apply withdrawal limits and ATMs frequently run dry, sometimes for weeks at a time.

UBI

Against this backdrop of limited banking infrastructure, the Marshall Islands has developed an intriguing Universal Basic Income (UBI) program.

My baseline opinion on UBI programs is that they herald the end of democracy as we know it, with most voters choosing the political party that pays them more, in a terrifying race to the fiscal bottom.

The Marshall Islands program is an intriguing exception, however, as it doesn’t “print money” to buy votes – it distributes income that technically belongs to the islanders anyway.

A bit of background:

The COFA renegotiation in 2003-4 gave birth to the Compact Trust Fund for the People of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, funded mainly by the US but also to a much lesser extent by the Marshall Islands itself and Taiwan (which the RMI officially recognizes). The fund, professionally managed and incorporated as a non-profit in Washington DC, invests in US securities with a view to earning around a net 7%. In August of last year (the latest report I could find), the fund held around $1.3 billion, with up to $500 million in additional contributions committed through the end of next year.

From this fund stems ENRA, the Marshall Islands’ Universal Basic Income program – in Marshallese, the term “enra” means “sharing plates”, and the aim is to spread the income from the fund around the islands.

The program kicked off in late November 2025 with the distribution of roughly $200 to every Marshallese citizen on the islands. The plan is to continue with quarterly distributions going forward.

Here’s a key twist:

The bulk of the distribution was via physical checks and direct deposits into bank accounts. But, given that 1) not all islanders have bank accounts, 2) digital banking is fragmented and expensive, and 3) the physical disbursement of funds is challenging in such a spread-out and thinly populated geography, the Marshallese government recognized early on that an alternative was needed.

Together with blockchain consultancy M1X, it developed an app called Lomalo (“shared waters” in Marshallese) with a Crossmint wallet built on Stellar, via which eligible ENRA recipients can verify their identity and receive benefits cheaply and instantly.

USDM1

The Lomalo app is set up to receive benefits in the form of USDM1 tokens, which are technically Marshall Islands Digital Sovereign Bonds in electronic form worth $1, offering stronger legal rights for holders than other tokenized assets such as deposit tokens (bank risk) and stablecoins (corporate risk).

Structured along the lines of Brady bonds, these sovereign assets are collateralized 1:1 by US Treasuries and regulated by New York law. USDM1 is Marshall Islands government debt in token form; but its value is backed by US government debt. And it will be distributed to Marshall Islands citizens who opt to receive their UBI directly in their Lomalo wallet rather than via bank deposit or paper cheque.

Here’s another intriguing twist: UBI distribution is just one use case for the token.

Another is as high-grade collateral, for which tokenized sovereign debt carries some key advantages.

The assets underlying the Marshall Islands issuance are US treasuries, which means that the issuance benefits from the “lookthrough” to the US credit rating and qualifies as HQLA (High Quality Liquid Assets, a central component of compliance with Basel III/IV bank capital requirements). Essentially, USDM1 is a pass-through tokenized treasury – I’m not aware of any other examples.

This makes it an attractive asset for bank balance sheets, and a welcome collateral for financial operations. OCC-chartered entity Anchorage has integrated USDM1 for custody, settlement and collateral management, as well as a convenient 24/7 conduit to institutions. Last week, the custodian arm of tokenization services provider tZERO announced regulated USDM1 custody services. And late last year, USDM1 was part of a tokenized repo trial on the Canton blockchain that also involved institutions such as Bank of America, Citadel, Société Générale, DTCC and others.

Another intriguing twist? USDM1 acts like a stablecoin, in that it has a stable dollar value and settles onchain 24/7. But technically it’s high-rated, liquid sovereign debt that “looks through” to US treasuries – the highest quality collateral there is. Stablecoins, on the other hand, are not considered HQLA, and are therefore not eligible for bank reserves without additional capital cost. Nor are they eligible without limitations as collateral on traditional derivatives platforms, whereas tokenized representations of already eligible assets (such as US Treasuries) are.

But wait, what about the revenue from the underlying Treasuries, wouldn’t that make USDM1 a security? Well, yes - but sovereign securities aren’t subject to the same burdensome requirements imposed on securities issued by private entities.

Yet another intriguing twist: the interest only partly accrues to the tokenholder, and partly to the issuer, the Marshall Islands. According to the USDM1 white paper, the income will be used to:

“support long-term development priorities within the RMI’s fiscal framework, reflecting the nation’s realities as one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries with significant climate-adaptation needs, as one of the most geographically dispersed countries where service delivery and economic inclusion entail exceptionally high structural costs, and as a nation still addressing the meaningful long-term impacts of its nuclear-exposure legacy.” (my emphasis)

It’s important to clarify that this institutional use case relies on the same token as the Marshall Islands UBI digital distribution – but the sources of funding of the underlying treasuries are totally different. The former is institutional money that is used to buy the treasuries and mint the digital Marshall Islands sovereign bond. The latter comes from citizens who have opted in to receive their ENRA disbursements in USDM1. ENRA comes from the COFA, with a portion of the fund’s generated income used to buy the underlying treasuries.

So, a stablecoin-like token with sovereign backing is powering an innovative and uplifting example of how UBI can benefit citizens while solving significant distribution pain points. What’s more, it does this without imperilling the fiscal outlook of the issuer, as disbursements are budget-neutral. And it creates a capital-efficient HQLA onchain asset with the maximum credit rating for use as institutional collateral, while generating income for a small economy.

Innovation at the margins, indeed.

(Special thanks to my friend Jordan Goldman for suggestions, additional information and some needed corrections!).

Term of the day: Brady bonds

Here’s something that Scott Bessent would probably not mind: having a security named after him.

For now, there’s only one security that has been named after a US Treasury Secretary. In 1989, as several Latin American countries were either defaulting on their debt or struggling to cover interest, then-Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady proposed a plan to help out the lenders: they were offered the chance to swap their loans to emerging economies for more marketable sovereign bonds denominated in US dollars and partially collateralized with US Treasuries. This was usually accompanied by some debt relief from the lenders and economic reforms from the borrowers.

These became known as Brady bonds: sovereign bonds issued by third countries, denominated in USD, and collateralized with US government debt (often paid for with loans from the IMF and the World Bank). They commanded lower rates given the removal of currency risk and the reassurance of the collateral – a win for the borrowers. And they got bad loans off banks’ balance sheets, replacing them with tradeable securities – a win for the lenders.

Macro: US wholesale inflation

Read more

Hello everyone! I hope you’re all doing well.

Since many of you are new here (welcome!), I’m going to take a moment to reintroduce myself. My name is Noelle, and I’ve been writing crypto/macro newsletters for 12 years now – at first as part of my learning journey, then from 2016 for CoinDesk, then from mid-2021 for Genesis Trading and since late 2022, under the banner you see before you. So, I’ve seen a lot of changes, know there are many more coming, and feel privileged to be able to focus on this, the crypto-macro intersection which is reshaping how global finance works.

If you’re a premium subscriber (thank you!! you are appreciated!), feel free to drop in and say hi on the Substack chat, or respond to this email, I’d love to hear from you!

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Market convergence: What’s in a price?

• Term of the day: oracle

• Macro: US CPI grumbles and yawns

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you so much!! ❤

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

Market convergence: What’s in a price?

One of the many fascinating facets of blockchain technology has been and still is the marketplaces it facilitates. I’ll go further and say, for me, it’s the deepest and most enduring potential impact, and why back in 2014 I decided that I wanted to spend the rest of my professional life watching the crypto industry evolve.

It’s not just the possibilities inherent in a decentralized transfer of value and how that could stimulate activity in forgotten niches. It’s not just the global testing of a substrate for permissionless innovation under a lens of transparency. Put differently, it’s not just the potential of the technology itself.

It’s also watching a structure emerge around that potential – new types of tradeable products and supporting services, adapted applications of traditional structures, the struggle of regulation to keep up. Seriously, it’s not every generation you get to witness an entirely new financial system emerge, let alone one that started as an offbeat idea circulating in a nerdy online chat.

The newness of this financial system is, in a way, an innovation substrate unto itself – or at least a foundation for real disruption. Building a new marketplace from the ground up forces a rethink of first principles and a questioning of established processes; this in turn leads to a deeper understanding of what makes a market.

One aspect of markets we all take for granted is “price”. We know NVIDIA’s share price because the exchange on which it is traded (Nasdaq) feeds that data to our screens.

Read more

Hello everyone! I hope you’re all doing well.

Today I look at the role of crypto in sanctions evasion - it’s more complex than you’d think, and there’s a LOT going on there.

I haven’t been talking much about markets this week as we’re all waiting to see what impact Friday’s SpaceX IPO will have on sentiment, and what tone Fed Chair Walsh sets at his first FOMC meeting next week. Even renewed attacks in the Middle East and a headline CPI of over 4% don’t seem to have done much to jolt indices out of their holding pattern. 🤨

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Stablecoins and sanctions evasion

• Term of the day: Neomercantilism

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you so much!! ❤

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

Stablecoins and sanctions evasion

In 1966, psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote:

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

Tempting indeed, to the extent that it becomes instinctive, we don’t even recognize the situational bias at work.

It’s directly applicable to the construction of finance today. If you’ve ever wondered why regulators keep on adding layers to the Bank Secrecy Act – giving banks even more unproductive paperwork and sunk costs in the fruitless pursuit of proof of money laundering – well, Maslow has your answer: adding controls is the only thing regulators can do. So they do it, a lot. And if the action is not producing the desired result, it’s obviously because they’re not doing enough of it.

The same applies to sanctions. They have proven effective in the past, but targets find workarounds which makes sanctions less effective in the future. Yesterday, the EU presented its 21^st sanctions package against Russia. I’ll say that again, the 21^st. The first 20 didn’t achieve the objective of convincing Putin that he should withdraw his forces from Ukraine, but the 21^st should do the trick, right? And let’s remember that the loudly telegraphed threat of sanctions didn’t stop the invasion in the first place.

The futility becomes almost farcical when it comes to sanctioning crypto exchanges and even stablecoins. I’ve written about this before so I won’t repeat myself at length here, other than to say: sanctions on any activity carried out on a global, decentralized network will fail. The only reasonable explanation I can think of for going through the motions is: “it’s all that we can do, so it’s what we’ll do”. Our hammer hopes that the target will behave like a nail.

Given the flurry of related news items over the past week, it’s time for an update.

Read more

Hello everyone! I hope you’re all doing well.

Today’s newsletter flies south to Nigeria, where I look at the latest in its CBDC strategy and at lessons this holds for the ECB push. I also look at the barriers to cross-currency networks, and at why US consumer surveys can differ so widely.

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Nigeria’s CBDC: next steps and lessons learned

• Term of the day: PAPSS

• Macro: the consumer expectations question

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you so much!! ❤

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

Nigeria’s CBDC: next steps and lessons learned

Last week, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) published its Payments System Vision 2028, a roadmap for the country’s financial system development over the next couple of years. It builds on previous modernization initiatives, setting targets for greater payment system interoperability, scaled instant transfers, further reduction of cash use, higher financial inclusion and deeper cross-border integration.

It also contains an update on the country’s CBDC, the eNaira, and is quite blunt:

“CBDC (eNaira) adoption is slow.”

Read more

Hi everyone! I hope you all had a good weekend.

My city Madrid was one big celebration of the visit of Pope Leo XIV (you can see some mainstream media coverage of yesterday’s mass here and here). I’ve been posting some pictures on X of the preparations, the decorations, the security, the traffic cuts, the impressive logistical deployment… but nothing in the build-up prepared me for just how deeply moving it was to share a space on Saturday with 600,000 young souls all there for the same reason: to show respect. From the uplifting cacophony of joy to the profound moments of silence, the vibe was hopeful. I didn’t attend the open-air mass (I’m not Catholic) – 1.2 million others did, which is spectacular – but I watched it live on my screen and it was beautiful.

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Coming up this week: inflation, politics, geopolitics

• Monday mood: No, Bitcoin has not “failed” as a safe haven

• Macro: job perks

• Markets: nerves up

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you so much!! ❤

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

Coming up this week:

Key inflation data this week in the form of US CPI and PPI – it’s unlikely to be good news.

Today, China’s leader Xi Jinping is visiting North Korea for the first time since 2019. Short-term there’ll be no change, but keep an eye on this relationship for deep medium- to long-term impact as North Korea gradually re-joins the global economy. I’m sure it’s sheer coincidence (??) that the Wall Street Journal yesterday ran an article with the headline: “The World’s Most Surprising Economic Success Story Is…North Korea.”

Also, today we get the latest report on consumer inflation expectations from the New York Fed, which is unlikely to bring good news.

Tuesday sees primaries in Maine, Nevada, North Dakota, and South Carolina.

On Wednesday, we get the US CPI report for May, not expected to cheer anyone up. The consensus forecast for the headline index growth is of 4.2% year-on-year, which would be the highest since April 2023. The core index ex-energy and food prices is expected to increase by 2.9%, the highest since September of last year.

(chart via Bloomberg)

Thursday brings the US Producer Price Index (PPI) wholesale inflation gauge for May, with the headline index year-on-year growth expected to accelerate from 6.0% to 6.8%. The core index is forecast to increase by 4.4%, the same as in April.

Also on Thursday, the European Central Bank is widely expected to raise interest rates by a quarter of a point, joining smaller economies such as Norway, Australia and South Africa in what could soon become a widespread hiking cycle.

And the 2026 World Cup kicks off (ha!) in Mexico with the host country facing South Africa. ⚽

On Friday, we get the preliminary consumer sentiment report for June from the University of Michigan. Although it uses a very different methodology than the New York Fed survey (which we get today), it also is unlikely to cheer anyone up.

And stock market volatility could get a further boost as SpaceX goes public in the largest IPO in history – where will the raise’s expected ~$80 billion come from?

Monday mood: No, Bitcoin has not “failed” as a safe haven

(what’s on my mind as we head into the week)

Read more

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

In this newsletter:

• The changing shape of reserves

• Stablecoins and Treasuries: which affects which?

• Assorted links: AI and writing, AI and humanity, dysfunctional politics, books and movies, corporate kitchen gossip

• Weekend: stunning nature photography

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you!! ❤

Some of the topics discussed in this week’s premium dailies:

Monday, June 1

• Coming up this week

• Monday mood: The hijacking of the sovereign

• Term of the day: OECD

Tuesday, June 2

• The CFTC and perpetual motion

• Term of the day: perpetual futures

• Markets: structural weakness

Wednesday, June 3

• Stablecoins and Treasuries: which affects which?

• Term of the day: endogeneity

• Markets: it’s all relative

• Macro: US jobs are doing OK

Thursday, June 4

• The changing shape of reserves

• Markets: mining the data

• Term of the day: realized profit/loss

Friday, June 5

• How tokenized deposits could compete with stablecoins

• Term of the day: Balkanized

• Recommended podcast episodes

The changing shape of reserves

One of the recurring themes I write about in this newsletter is the changing monetary structure of global finance. This compelling topic draws on the politics of stablecoins, deposit tokens and other onchain representations of money-like assets. It also covers the geopolitical use of CBDCs, the looming threat of capital controls and other methods to more directly influence how money is used. And it touches on the changing role of the US dollar in global finance: the weaponization of access, the emergence of alternatives and what that suggests for reserve balances going forward. Ultimately, all this is changing our understanding of what money is.

I could write volumes on this (and probably will, so stay tuned), but given today’s limitations of time and space, I want to focus on two pieces of news I’ve seen this week that are ringing a shiny bell.

The weight of gold

One is an article in the Financial Times that highlights data from a European Central Bank report showing that the weight of gold in global central bank reserves (27%) has overtaken that of US treasuries (22%) – the implicit suggestion is that US government debt is no longer seen as the world’s “safest asset”.

(chart via the Financial Times)

I’ll get to the implications, but first some caveats to the FT chart.

First, the total weight of dollar assets still surpasses that of gold – add in the “other USD” category and you’re up to 42%. So, faith in the dollar is still strong.

Also, the increase in the weight of gold in reserves is largely influenced by the surge in the metal’s price in 2025. The ECB did the math: revaluing gold reserves at the end-2024 gold price brings the weight down to 20%, below that of the more stable US Treasuries (see chart further down).

But still, whatever the reason, the weight of gold in central bank reserves is going up, and that of the US dollar is coming down.

My interest was piqued here because of what this says about reserve currencies. The dollar settles the bulk of global trade. But its weight as a reserve asset is declining, while that of gold is increasing. We’re so used to conflating reserve currencies with reserve assets that it will take a while for the idea that they can be separate to sink in. Gold could become the world’s reserve asset without being its reserve currency.

This is especially relevant given the fragmentation in not just global trade but also payment systems. SWIFT still dominates the coordination of cross-border bank transfers, but use of China’s alternative CIPS system is growing.

(chart via the Financial Times)

Earlier this year, India said it would use the upcoming BRICS summit in New Delhi to propose a platform linking the group members’ digital currencies. Russia is expected to launch its CBDC in September.

This week, Macau’s monetary authority announced that 11 of its banks have joined CBDC connector mBridge, built by the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the UAE, with Saudi Arabia joining the club in 2024.

And while a February report from Allium showed that cross-border stablecoin flows were still modest, use of onchain tokens instead of the traditional system is likely to grow as the onramps and rails expand and as sanctions and other forms of weaponizing dollar access become a more frequent feature of global trade.

(chart via Allium, sponsors of this newsletter but that’s not why I’m sharing this)

In sum, the shifting balance of assets in central bank reserves suggests an evolving view of diversification.

It’s not just about holding value, it’s also about utility. For many countries, especially those fearing sanctions or asset seizures, gold has a more resilient reserve utility than the dollar. The ECB report points out that the central banks most active in gold purchases tend to be in or near conflict regions. Indeed, a report out earlier this week from the World Gold Council shows that the top central bank buyers so far this year have been Poland, Uzbekistan, China and Kazakhstan.

(chart via the World Gold Organization)

And in a 2025 survey, almost 95% of central banks surveyed for the report say they expect their gold reserves to increase over the next 12 months, up from just over 80% in 2024.

(chart via the World Gold Organization)

But the ECB does not approve. It argues that gold makes a terrible central bank reserve asset, given its volatility, its lack of remuneration, and the cost of its storage. Also:

“More importantly, the supply of gold is not fully elastic and does not adjust seamlessly to shifts in international demand for liquidity.”

A very central banker thing to say.

And here’s an interesting detail: the report singles out Tether as an even larger buyer of gold in 2025 than Poland, the top hoarder among central banks.

(chart via the ECB)

Tether’s CEO Paolo Ardoino did say earlier this year in an interview for Bloomberg that his firm was becoming a “gold central bank”. Given that it is the world’s largest stablecoin issuer, that stablecoins are muscling in on fiat money rails, and that ECB Chief Christine Lagarde often highlights dollar stablecoins as a threat to the euro and to her institution’s monetary sovereignty, you can imagine how much this must have ruffled feathers.

At least threatened central bankers can take comfort from the fact that you can spend fiat currency but you can’t spend gold.

This segues nicely into the next item from this week that caught my attention.

Tether and gold

On Wednesday, Tether announced the launch of a card that would allow holders to spend their tokenized gold.

Let’s back up a bit. Tether launched XAUt back in 2020. It was not the ecosystem’s first gold token, but it quickly became the leader in terms of market share and trading volumes, and you can see from the below chart just how much these have grown.

(chart via The Block)

Demand has been helped over the years by steady improvements in wallets, custody and market making services, which together streamline onboarding, improve utility and deepen liquidity of gold-backed tokens. The concept gets especially interesting when you picture tokenized gold nestled next to tokenized dollars – in April, Tether launched a self-custodial wallet that enables anyone to hold XAUt, USDT, USAT (its GENIUS-compliant dollar stablecoin) and BTC, using the same interface.

Now, per this week’s announcement, users will be able to get a Visa card that links to their XAUt wallet, enabling holders to “spend” gold.

Ok, technically the XAUt token is converted into USDT which is then converted into USD for distribution to the merchant. But in the minds of users, they’re spending gold.

You can see how this could further blur definitional boundaries. Gold, as we saw above, is increasingly becoming a reserve asset, but it’s not a currency.

Only, if you can spend a gold-backed token, does the distinction matter that much?

Of course, peel back the layers and users are actually spending USD – merchants don’t want to accept gold. But the reason for holding gold is changing.

To circle this back around to the question of reserves, above I shared a chart from an FT article published a couple of weeks ago that shows the surge in payment volumes on China’s CIPS system. The article was discussing the internationalization of the yuan, a key goal of the current Five Year Plan. It mentions the recent expansion of the Shanghai Gold Exchange, and suggests that this could pave the way for greater acceptance of the renminbi in trade settlement – receivers of the Chinese currency can convert into gold until conversion back into renminbi is needed, without touching dollars. Gold as a “safe” reserve asset, and as a currency placeholder?

So, combine shifting reserve balances with the evolving utility of new technologies, and you can start to glimpse a new landscape that blurs definitions while reshaping power structures. Interesting times.

See also:

• A CBDC alternative to SWIFT? (Nov 2023)

• China’s digital yuan changes shape (Jan 2026)

• Stablecoins and geopolitics in Africa and the ME (Jan 2026)

🌿 If you’re not a subscriber to the premium daily Crypto is Macro Now, I hope you’ll consider becoming one! You’ll get ~daily commentary on how crypto is impacting the macro landscape, and vice versa - plus links, charts, and some fun stuff because why not. 🌿

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Stablecoins and Treasuries: which affects which?

This week I started skimming an updated BIS paper by Rashad Ahmed and Iñaki Aldasoro that looks at the relationship between stablecoin demand and Treasury yields. I’m not sure why I did this, as I’ve seen so many of these papers before. Yes, we know they’re related, and yes, we know that’s why the US Treasury Secretary is so excited about the potential demand.

I’m glad I did, though, as it turned out to be a lot more interesting than I expected, especially because of the discussion of endogeneity (when factors and variables in an equation affect each other), which has been largely absent from most other papers I’ve skimmed.

(A confession that may sound like a humblebrag but really isn’t: I have a degree from Brown University in Applied Mathematics and Economics, which perhaps goes some way towards explaining why I can be such a pedant at times. Anyway, despite that, I understood very little of the technical side of the paper, which is no doubt more down to my terrible memory and rapidly advancing age than to the education received. I bring this up because I had to look up “endogeneity” and am now fascinated with it – I gave a more detailed explanation earlier this week.)

The BIS paper finds that stablecoin demand influences short-term Treasury yields.

No surprise there, but the authors provide numbers:

• A $3.5 billion 5-day inflow into stablecoins lowers 3-month T-bill yields by 0.7 basis points on impact, and up to four basis points within 10 days (deployment lag, some tokens distributed from pre-issued stock).

• The effects can be roughly double at times of market stress.

Lifting the lid, the conclusions get more interesting when we compare the updated paper with the initial version, published just over a year ago. I asked Grok to pull the differences for me:

• The methodology has been changed to get a more refined flow-through estimate, but I won’t go into more detail here because there’s not much hope of my understanding it in the time I have to write this. It has to do with a more granular exploration of endogeneity.

• This has led the authors to almost double the estimated impact.

• Also, the original paper highlighted the asymmetry of the stablecoin impact – a jump in demand had a more pronounced impact than a drop in demand (more upside than downside). The new paper downplays this, focusing more on the state of the market – the impact of stablecoin demand is greater when markets are stressed.

So, extrapolating, if the total current market capitalization of fiat-backed stablecoins of around $270 billion goes up by 10% from here, we’re looking at a roughly 30 basis point drop in the 3-month T-bill yield. That… doesn’t feel particularly significant.

And it’s much, much less than other studies I’ve seen.

Here’s where the endogeneity (this can also be understood as formula reflexivity, the formula influences itself) comes in. The authors recognize that:

1) There are factors that affect demand for both stablecoins and Treasury bills that are not directly related to either. For instance, imagine that Fed Chair Kevin Warsh manages to do what President Trump wants and convinces the FOMC committee to lower rates by a full percentage point (I know, a stretch but work with me here). In theory, this would lower short-term Treasury yields. It would also boost demand for stablecoins by ushering in a “risk-on” trading environment (for now the main use case for stablecoins is in crypto trading). In this case, we couldn’t say that the yields were coming down because of a jump in stablecoin demand. I mean, partially, but not really.

2) The influence channel works in both directions. Stablecoin demand influences T-bill demand, but T-bill demand also influences stablecoin demand. Lower yields would normally encourage more demand for stablecoins by stimulating crypto trading (a more “risk on” environment) and by making DeFi yields more attractive in risk-adjusted terms.

So, the conclusions of the paper itself are interesting in that the suggested impact is not as great as other sources have claimed.

But more importantly, the authors give us tools with which to question impact claims that just feel too optimistic.

See also:

• Term of the day: endogeneity (June 2026)

• The overlooked stablecoin pushback (May 2026)

• Overlooked stablecoin risks (March 2026)

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ASSORTED LINKS

(A selection of reads I came across this week that I think are worth sharing, not about crypto nor macro. I try to choose links without a paywall, but when I feel it’s worth making an exception, I specify.)

• An encouraging piece by Jasmine Sun on how to get by as a writer in the age of AI. It’s about telling secrets, delegating where possible, meeting people and enjoying the glorious freedom of independence. (The independent writer’s advantage in the age of AI, On Substack)

• Whether you’re Catholic or not, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on the new technological age is a meaningful document for millions around the world who fear humanity’s essential spirit is hanging by a thread. I confess I haven’t read it, but even though I’m not Catholic, I plan to, as perspective is often elusive in the fire-hose of snippets and narrow views. This review by Bloomberg’s Flavia Krause-Jackson was both thoughtful and moving. (The Pope’s AI Encyclical Made Me Feel Like a Catholic Again, Bloomberg – paywall)

• Sinéad O’Sullivan deftly diagnoses the stagnation of politics and economies using Ireland as an example. (Kaleidoscopes, But This Time It’s Different)

• How’s this for a job? Reading books and then recommending whether they should be made into a movie or series. Many of us would happily do this for free, but it turns out it requires special skills. Julien Levy profiles one of the best in the industry at this particular task, and gives us a glimpse of where what we watch on the screen is born. (The Man Who Reads Books For a Living (One Every Two Days), Literary Hub)

• Not kidding, I’ve often wondered how corporate kitchens are run. Do people working there enjoy it? Do they feel company loyalty? Do they hear inside scoops while restocking the salad bar or ladling out soup? What do they think of the people they are feeding? This is a fun, deep and yet also sobering post by a former pastry chef for Meta that sheds light on some of the above questions. (I Fed the People Building the Metaverse, Titty Boobowitz)

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!

(in this section, I share stuff that has NOTHING to do with macro or crypto, ‘cos it’s the weekend and life is interesting)

It feels like it’s been ages since I shared some stunning images from a photography competition, so I’m going to make up for that today with my favourites from this year’s GDT Nature Photographer of the Year 2026 – too many breathtaking photos to choose from, so do check them all out for a welcome reminder that this planet and its wildlife are endlessly fascinating.

photo by Christian Kosanetzky

photo by Marte Engelbrecht

photo by Preeti John

photo by Christoph Kaula

DISCLAIMER: I never give trading ideas, and NOTHING I say is investment advice! I hold some BTC, ETH and a tiny amount of some smaller tokens, but they’re all long-term holdings – I don’t trade. Also, I often use AI for research instead of Google, but never for writing.

Hello everyone, and happy Friday! I’m going to try to keep today’s newsletter short because you’re probably even more exhausted than I am. So much going on, though…

I have glimpsed the strong jobs data and seen the eye-opening jump in US bond yields, but I’ll leave comment on that until Monday, generally can’t get much from initial reactions – but, yeah, rate hike expectations will climb further and this isn’t good for crypto.

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• How tokenized deposits could compete with stablecoins

• Term of the day: Balkanized

• Recommended podcast episodes

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you so much!! ❤

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

How tokenized deposits could compete with stablecoins

This could work.

I’ve written often over the years on banks, their limited view of blockchain flexibility and how we have to remember that regulated financial institutions have a certain embedded DNA that triggers a recoil in the face of open, public networks. After all, the past few years have drummed into regulated financial institutions the need to document everything, identify everyone and always err on the side of caution.

But they are also increasingly aware of the public relations need to be seen as forward-thinking, abreast of new technologies, not stuck in the past.

So, we’ve seen many banks give lip service to stablecoins, with some even announcing they’re planning a launch. Generally, they don’t mean it. (SoFi is a shining exception, their stablecoin is live and has an interesting hybrid internal-external model, I’ll go into more detail on this next week. Custodia Bank, working with Vantage Bank, also has an innovative stablecoin solution – again, more to come on that. And there’s the Qivalis bank stablecoin consortium over here in Europe which is growing fast and has a good chance of producing something that sticks.)

Over the past year, I lost count of the times I heard a stablecoin practitioner declare “every bank will have a stablecoin!” – mercifully, that narrative is dying down as the bank preference for careful, limited innovation has become more obvious.

A handful of banks have for some time been leveraging private blockchains to move client money internally 24/7, with some launching programmability features. These tokenized deposit services are an improvement on banks’ normally clunky, slow and expensive cross-border transfer systems. But they operate in walled gardens, which limits their advantages to just a small subset of blockchain potential.

Yesterday, the tokenized deposit concept took a big step forward. According to the Wall Street Journal, Clearing House – a real-time payments company owned by JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and other large US commercial banks – will build a tokenized deposit network for use across the banking sector. Launch is expected in the first half of 2027.

Read more

Hello everyone! I hope you’re all doing well. I have found it hard to concentrate today as Pope Leo XIV is hosting a vigil for over a million people on Saturday just a couple of blocks from where I live, and they’re testing the sound system for the giant screens and speakers mounted up and down the main avenue. Distracting, I won’t lie, but the general buzz of excitement is palpable and refreshing. Although let’s see if I still feel this way tomorrow.

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• The changing shape of reserves

• Markets: mining the data

• Term of the day: realized profit/loss

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you so much!! ❤

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

The changing shape of reserves

One of the recurring themes I write about in this newsletter is the changing monetary structure of global finance. This compelling topic draws on the politics of stablecoins, deposit tokens and other onchain representations of money-like assets. It also covers the geopolitical use of CBDCs, the looming threat of capital controls and other methods to more directly influence how money is used. And, it touches on the changing role of the US dollar in global finance: the weaponization of access, the emergence of alternatives and what that suggests for reserve balances going forward. Ultimately, all this is changing our understanding of what money is.

I could write volumes on this (and probably will, so stay tuned), but given today’s limitations of time and space, I want to focus on two pieces of news I’ve seen this week that are ringing a shiny bell.

The weight of gold

Read more

Hello everyone! I hope you’re all doing well. Apologies for the late send today. Sometimes I’ll dive into a topic, thinking I’ll scribble a quick comment, only to find it’s much more interesting than I expected. It turns out rabbit holes are hard to get out of, who knew.

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Stablecoins and Treasuries: which affects which?

• Term of the day: endogeneity

• Markets: it’s all relative

• Macro: US jobs are doing OK

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you so much!! ❤

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

Stablecoins and Treasuries: which affects which?

This morning I started skimming an updated BIS paper by Rashad Ahmed and Iñaki Aldasoro that looks at the relationship between stablecoin demand and Treasury yields. I’m not sure why I did this, as we’ve seen so many of these papers before. Yes, we’ know they’re related, and yes, we know that’s why the US Treasury Secretary is so excited about the potential demand.

I’m glad I did, though, as it turned out to be a lot more interesting than I expected, especially because of the discussion of endogeneity, which has been largely absent from most other papers I’ve skimmed.

(A confession that may sound like a humblebrag but really isn’t: I have a degree from Brown University in Applied Mathematics and Economics, which perhaps goes some way towards explaining why I can be such a pedant at times. Anyway, despite that, I understood very little of the technical side of the paper, which is no doubt more down to my terrible memory and rapidly advancing age than to the education received. I bring this up because I had to look up “endogeneity” and am now fascinated with it – I do my best to explain it in the “Term of the day” section below.)

This paper finds that stablecoin demand influences short-term Treasury yields.

No surprise there, but the authors provide numbers:

• A $3.5 billion 5-day inflow into stablecoins lowers 3-month T-bill yields by 0.7 basis points on impact, and up to four basis points within 10 days (deployment lag, some tokens distributed from pre-issued stock).

• The effects can be roughly double at times of market stress.

Lifting the lid, the conclusions get more interesting when we compare the updated paper with the original, published just over a year ago. I asked Grok to pull the differences for me:

• The methodology has been changed to get a more refined flow-through estimate, but I won’t go into more detail here because there’s not much hope of my understanding it in the time I have to write this. It has to do with a more granular exploration of endogeneity (see below).

• This has led the authors to almost double the estimated impact.

• Also, the original paper highlighted the asymmetry of the stablecoin impact – a jump in demand had a more pronounced impact than a drop in demand (more upside than downside). The new paper downplays this, focusing more on the state of the market – the impact of stablecoin demand is greater when markets are stressed.

So, extrapolating, if the total current market capitalization of fiat-backed stablecoins of around $270 billion goes up by 10% from here, we’re looking at a roughly 30 basis point drop in the 3-month T-bill yield. That… doesn’t feel particularly significant.

And it’s much, much less than other studies I’ve seen.

Here’s where the “endogeneity” comes in (see below for definition). The authors recognize that:

Read more

Hi everyone, I hope you’re all doing well! Today I dive into Friday’s big announcements from the CFTC, exciting stuff for us market structure nerds. Below, I do my best to explain why it matters, within newsletter limitations of time and space – let me know if you have any questions, though, either responding to this email, or hop into the chat on Substack.

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• The CFTC and perpetual motion

• Term of the day: perpetual futures

• Markets: structural weakness

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you so much!! ❤

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

The CFTC and perpetual motion

A stack of announcements from the CFTC last week add up to arguably the biggest change in derivatives markets since the structural reforms after the 2008 financial crisis. And, they were made possible by blockchain technology and crypto asset innovation, a clear example of how crypto is slowly changing traditional markets for the better.

In brief, on Friday the CFTC:

1) Published a staff advisory outlining expectations for any registered entity that wants to offer 24/7 trading and settlement of derivatives contracts. This is not blanket approval – case-by-case review is still needed – but it removes a layer of uncertainty while opening the door to more concrete conversations with the derivatives market regulator.

2) Issued an order approving Kalshi’s application to trade BTC perpetual futures, launching the first US perpetual futures market. (This is a big deal, more on why and what perpetual futures even are below.)

3) Issued an interpretation and no-action position allowing Coinbase to offer its US users access to offshore crypto asset perpetual contracts traded on Deribit (the Dubai-based derivatives platform it acquired last year), and can post crypto assets and stablecoins as collateral.

4) Published a policy statement to reassure regulators and market participants that it wasn’t flinging open the gates to crypto innovation, approval for perpetual futures contracts based on anything that isn’t BTC would be on a case-by-case basis.

In sum, perpetual futures for BTC can now come onshore in the US, under the supervision of the CFTC. And US-based clients of Coinbase can access a much wider range of perpetuals offshore.

These options will prove popular, of that there is no doubt. From nothing just over 10 years ago, perpetual futures traded almost $90 trillion in volume last year, making them one of the fastest-growing financial products ever.

The big deal is not just that traders get access to new types of derivatives – and perpetual futures are indeed different. It’s that perpetual futures markets work better than traditional futures markets for most use cases. For now, they will only be available for a range of crypto assets for US-based traders (and only for BTC on Kalshi) – but with time, confidence in the mechanism will deepen and they will spread to other asset classes. Zooming out, these approvals open the door to a much deeper transformation of US capital markets.

To see why perpetual futures are a better product than traditional futures, I first have to explain what they are for those of you not steeped in crypto market nuts and bolts.

Read more

Hello all! I hope you had a great weekend, and a smooth entry into June. Just think, we’re almost at the halfway mark for 2026…

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Coming up this week

• Monday mood: The hijacking of the sovereign

• Term of the day: OECD

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you so much!! ❤

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

Coming up this week:

Jobs week! And some political twists.

Today, we get US manufacturing PMI, expected to show a slight increase.

And hot on the heels of her precedent-breaking visit to China, Taiwan’s opposition leader Cheng Li-wun arrives for a two-week US visit to solicit support for her platform of stability and reconciliation with the mainland. This comes immediately after the US Secretary of War urged allies at the weekend’s Shangri-La Dialogue security forum in Singapore to stay quiet on the topic of Taiwan.

On Tuesday, we get the US Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), expected to hold steady.

In politics, Californians go to the polls to choose candidates for governor, Congress and the state legislature. California is unusual in that it operates under a top-two “jungle” model, where all candidates for all state elected positions appear together on the ballot, regardless of party. The two candidates that get the most votes go through to the November election, even if both are from the same party.

And S&P Global kicks off its annual Middle East Petroleum & Gas Conference, held in London this year rather than one of its usual regional locations for obvious reasons. The keynote by Daniel Yergin will be worth listening to, we’ll hear from some of the world’s largest energy producers and traders about the mood in boardrooms across the industry, and sector analysts will share their global outlook.

Wednesday brings the private ADP payrolls report, forecast to show a slowdown in new jobs created but to a still reasonable level.

We also get the US services PMI reports, which could show a slight slowdown while remaining in expansion.

The Federal Reserve releases the Beige Book, which brings anecdotal reports from the various regional central banks of business sentiment on the ground.

And the OECD (see below) releases its 2026 Economic Outlook.

On Thursday, we get the Challenger job cuts report, forecast to show a modest pick-up in layoffs.

We also get the final read of US non-farm productivity and unit labour costs (a gauge of wage inflation)

And then on Friday, we get the official US jobs report. Consensus estimates point to a slowdown in net new payrolls, but to a level that would make the three-month average the highest in more than a year. The unemployment rate is expected to hold steady at 4.3%.

(chart via Bloomberg)

Monday mood: The hijacking of the sovereign

(what’s on my mind as we head into the week)

The word “sovereignty” is being thrown around more and more, and yet not much thought is given to how it has been hijacked and turned into a politically loaded term that drains it of actual meaning. On the flip side, an instance where it could be used but isn’t sheds light on shifting power dynamics at play across our screens.

Over the weekend, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave a speech in which he talked about the need to rebuild domestic production “to restore American sovereignty”.

Read more

You’re reading the free weekly send of the premium daily Crypto is Macro Now, where I re-share a couple of the week’s posts and add some non-crypto and non-macro links since it’s the weekend. 🌼

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

In this newsletter:

• Stablecoins and mission creep

• What prediction markets and crypto have in common

• Assorted links: AI on jobs, the theatre of money laundering, attention sovereignty, maritime chokepoints, heavy metal

• Weekend: the last hope

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you!! ❤

Some of the topics discussed in this week’s premium dailies:

Tuesday, May 26

• Coming up this week: PCE, defence

• Stablecoins and mission creep

• Macro: US consumer sentiment

• Term of the day: Shangri-La Dialogue

Wednesday, May 27

• Big moves in tokenized MMFs

• Markets: BTC blues

• Term of the day: enrichment

Thursday, May 28

• The race for tokenized money utility

• Markets: chips ahoy

• Term of the day: BIS

Friday, May 29

• What prediction markets and crypto have in common

• Macro: US inflation and GDP

• Term of the day: Hobson’s Choice

Stablecoins and mission creep

They’re not even pretending anymore: the European Central Bank (ECB) doesn’t like the idea of stablecoins.

There has been some lip service to the concept over the years, some mumbling about supporting commercial bank initiatives to modernize payment rails. Even the central bank’s digital euro project was initially presented as a reluctant alternative to ineffective private solutions – the implication is that a euro stablecoin would be great if only it were possible, but since it looks like it isn’t (so we’re told), here is the helpful central bank with a beautifully centralized alternative.

But innovation is a natural force (yes, even sometimes in Europe), and last week produced a handful of headlines that must have ruffled many ECB feathers.

First, there’s the surge in the number of commercial banks joining the Amsterdam-based Qivalis stablecoin consortium, with 25 new entrants pushing the total up to 37. I’ve never seen a consortium in any industry, but especially not in finance, grow so fast.

Also, last week the European Commission (EC) published two public comment consultations on the MiCA crypto framework, including questions such as whether users should be able to earn interest on stablecoin balances, whether redemptions should be charged fees, whether tokenized securities should be brought into the framework, and so on. The vibe is one of wanting to adapt to the US GENIUS Act by giving private euro stablecoins some breathing room in order to lift their volumes from insignificant levels in the face of continued global growth of stablecoin adoption.

And on Tuesday, President Trump signed an Executive Order requesting that US financial regulators look into how to give stablecoin issuers (and other fintechs) access to central bank liquidity.

That idea is rearing its head in Europe, too. Last week, Brussels-based think tank Bruegel put out a policy brief advocating for stronger euro stablecoin support as, rather than protect the euro-area financial system from digital asset risks, the EU’s restrictive approach is likely to do the opposite. Tokenization is picking up in global markets, the authors argue, and the absence of a liquid euro stablecoin ecosystem means more users will choose dollar-based alternatives.

One of the brief’s proposals is that policy makers allow regulated issuers access to central bank reserves, effectively making euro stablecoins fully-backed programmable central bank money – this would remove the risk of banking sector stress spilling over into stablecoins.

The ECB immediately pushed back with the usual nonsensical rhetoric about stablecoins weakening bank lending and introducing structural risk. That the US is heading in that direction won’t be enough to sway ECB chief Christine Lagarde, who earlier this month said:

“Our task is not to replicate instruments developed elsewhere, but to build the foundations and the infrastructure that serve our own objectives.”

In that same speech, she also said:

“…the case for promoting euro-denominated stablecoins is far weaker than it appears”.

What no one is asking is why she is giving speeches on new technology applications in the first place? Sure, the way value moves around an economy can have an impact on the smooth functioning of payment systems – but it’s not clear that would matter much for price stability, the ECB’s main mandate.

It’s also not clear how introducing a digital euro to compete with the digital appeal of stablecoins has anything to do with price stability. The stated aim is to prevent mass adoption of dollar stablecoins – but it’s not clear why a central bank solution is essential, nor why the central bank itself should be trusted to make that call.

Come to think of it, a lot of what Lagarde herself has been promoting over the past few years does not have much to do with her institution’s mandate. From belittling some new technologies while promoting others, to pushing a certain climate agenda and meddling in fiscal matters, we are looking at a clear example of mission creep, and no influential European leader is daring to question her power grab.

The blatant mission creep started almost immediately after Lagarde took office in 2019.

In May 2020, the ECB published a guide on environmental risks – why?

Oh, right:

“The ECB is of the view that institutions should take a strategic, forward-looking and comprehensive approach to considering climate-related and environmental risks.”

In 2021, the ECB announced that it would take a corporation’s ESG footprint into consideration when deciding which bonds to buy (this was at a time when the central bank was resorting to corporate bond purchases in an attempt to stimulate economic activity as its government bond purchase capacity had reached its practical limit). Essentially, the central bank was choosing to favour some companies over others within the same credit quality for ideological reasons.

In 2022, the ECB started requiring banks to assess and disclose climate-related risks in their lending portfolios, a direct attempt to influence private company decisions by linking capital requirements to environmental considerations – for instance, banks with a high exposure to the oil and gas industry would face a higher capital requirement than banks with a similar exposure to risky startups or private equity funds.

And despite supposed central bank independence, Lagarde has frequently meddled in fiscal policy, giving several speeches over the past few years advocating for certain government spending strategies.

Now, the ECB wants a direct line into consumer activity by managing digital wallets. If the “activist” mentality continues even after Lagarde steps down next year, it’s not a stretch to imagine the digital euro wallet disincentivizing certain types of purchases for being not environmentally friendly enough, or for weakening certain policy objectives.

All of the above seems to forget that the ECB’s principal mandate is price stability. Supporting the economy is relevant but secondary. It is arguably not the ECB’s job to recommend certain non-monetary policies, nor is it the ECB’s job to favour one type of technology application over another based on risk assumptions that reveal a limited understanding of what the technology does.

The digital euro project has been painted by many (myself included) as an inappropriate power grab from an institution that wants to expand its relevance at the expense of greater opportunity for financial institutions and greater convenience for consumers.

What many of us are missing is that it is just one symptom of the mission creep that seems to have accelerated under Lagarde’s leadership. That makes it harder to push back on, as even if the current plan does not go through in the form she wants, we can expect other similar initiatives.

Or, perhaps the overreach of the digital euro could, finally, trigger stronger questions about the ECB’s role in the European economy.

Then again, if there is only muted pushback and the European Parliament passes the draft law at the hearing tentatively scheduled for next month, we could see an emboldened ECB continue to march into new policy areas, further enhancing the economic and social power of an unelected institution.

Put differently, the digital euro fight is not just about CBDCs or stablecoins. No, it’s really about checks and balances on centralized power that always, instinctively, reaches for more.

See also:

• ECB: stablecoins bad, CBDCs good (May 2026)

• EU tokenization and wholesale CBDC (March 2026)

• Digital euro politics (Feb 2026)

🌿 If you’re not a subscriber to the premium daily Crypto is Macro Now, I hope you’ll consider becoming one! You’ll get ~daily commentary on how crypto is impacting the macro landscape, and vice versa - plus links, charts, and some fun stuff because why not. 🌿

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What prediction markets and crypto have in common

Regular readers will have noticed that I hardly ever talk about prediction markets, other than to share the occasional chart. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever written about them as a concept, and given the firehose of headlines, it’s time to 1) explain why and 2) change that.

The main reason I’ve been ignoring them is that there’s not much that is “crypto” about them. Blockchain has not been their interesting feature. Kalshi doesn’t even really use it (there are now tokenized versions of its markets on Solana, but they are not core to its model). Polymarket does – its engine operates via smart contracts on Polygon, bets are placed in USDC – but that is rarely mentioned as a key operational advantage. While Kalshi and Polymarket run on different systems, they are usually lumped together in the term “prediction markets” with the blockchain part hardly ever mentioned – because, it turns out, for now most users don’t care.

(chart via The Block Data)

Both platforms have strong volumes, with Polymarket dominating the international markets while Kalshi wins overall in the US – Polymarket has only recently been allowed to resume operations there after a 2022 CFTC settlement pushed its operations offshore.

But the relative volumes of each are not the point here. What is more interesting is why prediction markets feature regularly in crypto media and in crypto sections of mainstream media. Why are they considered “crypto”?

There are two threads to pull on:

1) Prediction markets “feel” crypto because they are mainly speculation. And, for mainstream media, crypto is about speculation. So, intuitively, it feels right that even offchain betting platforms be considered a crypto platform.

2) Plus, we’re still trying to figure out what prediction markets are. This is something that those of us attempting to explain crypto to traditional finance are well familiar with (what kind of an asset is BTC? no simple answer), and so for this reason it feels like prediction markets belong over here in the crypto space where the clash of innovation with markets is forcing a reassessment of long-standing definitions.

This is worth pulling on a bit more, as it explains many of the prediction market headlines we’ve seen over the past few months.

A battle is currently waging in the US between states and the federal government on who gets to regulate prediction markets: roughly 16 states are involved in legal proceedings against Kalshi and/or Polymarket, and the CFTC has sued six of them to block their enforcement actions.

Here it very much matters what prediction markets are.

The US founding fathers felt that states should have the right to influence public behaviour and morals within their territory, so anything to do with gambling is regulated at the state level. When you bet yes/no on whether the Knicks will win the playoffs, it can be argued you are gambling. So, sports and other event contracts are supposed to fall under state oversight, and many states don’t approve.

Derivatives, on the other hand are regulated by the CFTC at the federal level – after all, capital markets need to be equal and accessible for all Americans. And event contracts can be used as a capital markets tool. When you bet on whether it will rain in Idaho next week, you could be gambling or you could be hedging your wheat crop. My wager on who wins the Chilean election could be a coin toss, or a hedge against a negative impact on my investment in certain Andean electric utilities. And no-one can say with a straight face today that there is no “gambling” in stock and derivative markets.

Who’s right? Are prediction markets gambling, or are they part of capital markets?

It gets even more complicated when you throw in some moralizing overreach. In 2023, the previous CFTC blocked Kalshi’s political contracts for two cited reasons: they are “gaming” which is contrary to some state laws, and they are “contrary to the public interest” – election bets were seen as a conduit to political manipulation, and would “reduce key facets of the democratic process to a source of revenue for some, fascination and entertainment for others, and, critically, an unmandated duty for the CFTC.” Kalshi sued the CFTC, won, but the CFTC appealed and proposed a ban on sports and political contracts (although this was never finalized and was formally closed this past February). Does the CFTC have the right to decide what is good for American morals?

Plus, it can be argued that use of prediction platforms should be considered an exercise of free speech, and participation in electoral contracts a form of political expression. If I firmly believe that Dwayne Johnson should be the next Speaker of the House, I can charge people an event fee to hear my eloquent argument, but some states want to block me from expressing my view on a public betting platform. I know, this is a bit of a stretch, and commercial speech is not the same as political speech – but it highlights how blurry the definitional boundaries are becoming.

The battle is not limited to the US. Just this week, Indonesia and Spain banned prediction markets. (I can confirm, when I try and access either Kalshi or Polymarket outside my VPN, I get a “This site can’t be reached” page). In both cases, the official reason was they were unlicensed gambling platforms. It’s quite possibly pure coincidence that in each case the bans came shortly after contracts betting on premature ends to the terms of the two countries’ leaders started getting more attention.

Like crypto, prediction markets are forcing a rethink of how we understand markets. It’s not just what an event contract is – a derivative? a random bet? a personal expression? It’s also that regulation still runs on the assumption of hard definitions: before we can figure out how to create a legal framework for something, we need to decide what it is so we know which regulator will be in charge. Crypto has taken so long to crawl through the halls of power because there is still open debate about whether onchain assets are gambling, equity, utility tokens like laundromat coins, or an anti-system political expression. Awareness seems to finally be sinking in that the answer is either “it depends” or “all of the above”. The evolving framework in the US is doing its best to take that into account.

Prediction markets are heading into that rarefied territory also. The courts in the various legal cases will no doubt produce a range of outcomes – such is the nature of the system. The issue could even end up at the Supreme Court, but hopefully before then there will be a greater understanding that prediction markets represent a lot of different concepts rolled into one, and that rather than trying to fit them into existing buckets, new buckets are needed.

Bottom line, technically prediction markets have little to do with “crypto” – but, spiritually, we are kin. And together, we can bring enough consumer demand to convince regulators that the old buckets need flattening, and that new regulation is needed for a new generation of marketplaces.

✨ If you find this newsletter interesting, or even if you just like my excellent taste in music and gifs, would you mind sharing it with friends and colleagues, and nudging them to subscribe? I’d appreciate it! ✨

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ASSORTED LINKS

(A selection of reads I came across this week that I think are worth sharing, not about crypto nor macro. I try to choose links without a paywall, but when I feel it’s worth making an exception, I specify.)

• Kyla Scanlon distils the simmering concern over the impact of AI on jobs into a deeper understanding of what a job even IS, what we are optimising for, why we get that wrong – an easy yet also deep read that will change how you understand the coming employment problem. (Is AI Going to Destroy Our Lives or Not?, Kyla’s Newsletter)

• John Lanchester writes about the massive business of money laundering and the “theatre” of measures to fight it – measures that are not only ineffective, they are destructive and repressive. (Squillions, London Review of Books)

• Jon Haidt spoke to the graduating NYU Class of 2026 about how to navigate adulthood amidst an empty clamour for our attention. Recovering some agency in our focus, he argues, is not just possible, it’s essential for a full life. (Treasure Your Attention, After Babel)

“Because what you pay attention to shapes what you care about. And what you care about shapes who you become.”

• A fascinating report from the Financial Times on maritime chokepoints, their impact, security and alternatives – a lot of detail and cool graphics including an interactive one that shows which countries rely on which chokepoints. (The power struggle in the world’s narrow seas, Financial Times – paywall)

• Fans of heavy metal music will enjoy this interactive map of different variations of the genre. (Map of Metal)

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!

(in this section, I share stuff that has NOTHING to do with macro or crypto, ‘cos it’s the weekend and life is interesting)

If you haven’t seen Project Hail Mary, well, what are you waiting for? This is one of my favourite scenes of the film, and one of the most controversial – it’s not in the book, which has upset purists like my daughter. But I think it adds to the story by encapsulating a moment that could not be conveyed in print.

DISCLAIMER: I never give trading ideas, and NOTHING I say is investment advice! I hold some BTC, ETH and a tiny amount of some smaller tokens, but they’re all long-term holdings – I don’t trade. Also, I often use AI for research instead of Google, but never for writing.

Hi all, and happy Friday! I hope you’ve got some good things planned for the last weekend of May – I plan to enjoy the early summer vibes, before the sweltering Madrid heat descends.

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• What prediction markets and crypto have in common

• Macro: US inflation and GDP

• Term of the day: Hobson’s Choice

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you so much!! ❤

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

What prediction markets and crypto have in common

Regular readers will have noticed that I hardly ever talk about prediction markets, other than to share the occasional chart. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever written about them as a concept, and given the firehose of headlines, it’s time to 1) explain why and 2) change that.

Read more

Hello everyone! I hope you’re all doing well. I went for a long walk this morning, before the heat and the traffic set in – even if you don’t have the luxury of blue skies and green leaves, it sure works for decluttering crowded minds and recovering some perspective, a strong recommend.

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• The race for tokenized money utility

• Markets: chips ahoy

• Term of the day: BIS

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you so much!! ❤

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

The race for tokenized money utility

With Schrodinger’s War stretching out in the Gulf (apparently renewed attacks don’t invalidate a ceasefire, who knew) and chip stock valuations reaching areas with thin oxygen (see below), it’s comforting to descend into the bowels of financial plumbing and look at the accelerating drumbeat of moves to upgrade the crusty pipes. This isn’t just about payment formats; it’s about what money even is.

Read more

Hi everyone, I hope you’re all doing well! I’ve been told that today is Nothing to Fear Day, which 1) begs the question of who makes up these stupid holidays anyway, and 2) hahahaha yeah right.

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Big moves in tokenized MMFs

• Markets: BTC blues

• Term of the day: enrichment

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you so much!! ❤

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

Big moves in tokenized MMFs

Unless you’re paying close attention, you might have missed the flurry of announcements over the past few weeks about tokenized money market funds (TMMFs).

They are not a new concept, and over the past few years we’ve seen some of traditional finance’s biggest names wade into the space, as well as meaningful growth from crypto-native issuers. But recently the rhythm has picked up, and yet coverage is still thin, which is surprising given the asset’s significance in the intersection between tradfi and crypto.

Below, I’ll summarize some of the relevant news items I’ve seen, and then go deeper on why this matters.

Read more

Hello everyone! Those of you who enjoyed a long weekend for the memorial day holiday, I hope it was a great one, whatever the weather. I took advantage of the break to put away the winter clothes and pull out the t-shirts, and I am now so ready for summer. Got the mint water chilling in the fridge, watermelon on the countertop, and a new mug for my iced coffee. Bring it on. 🌞

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Coming up this week: PCE, defence

• Stablecoins and mission creep

• Macro: US consumer sentiment

• Term of the day: Shangri-La Dialogue

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you so much!! ❤

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

Coming up this week: PCE, defence

The big deal this week is the April Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) data, which should confirm the uptick in US inflation. We also get a ton of speeches from Fed officials, not that interesting really since we know what they’ll be saying. There could be some diplomatic sparks over the weekend in Singapore.

Today (Tuesday), the US Conference Board releases its consumer confidence report for May.

On Thursday, we get the April read of the US Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) index. The core index, ex-energy and food, was former Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s preferred inflation gauge. Current Chair Kevin Warsh seems to favour the trimmed mean, but he will struggle to get us all to divert our attention from the PCE – muscle memory is strong.

Anyway, the consensus forecast for the headline PCE year-on-year growth in April is for 3.8%, an acceleration from March’s 3.5% and a full percentage point higher than just two months ago – this would mark the steepest two-month acceleration since late 2021. As with the CPI, much of that is due to higher food and energy costs – strip those out, and the core index is forecast to have increased by 3.3%, the highest since November 2023.

(chart via Bloomberg)

We also get data on US personal spending and income, which should give a hint as to whether the decline in consumer sentiment (see below) is seeping through to economic activity.

And we get the second estimate of US GDP for Q1 – the first estimate, released almost a month ago, showed growth accelerating to 2.0%, from 0.5% annualized in Q4. We’ll also get the revised quarterly core PCE growth for Q1, which covers only one month of the Iran conflict – the first estimate showed an acceleration to 4.3% from 2.7%.

Friday sees the kickoff of this year’s Shangri-La Dialogue, Asia’s most significant defence and security conference – see below for more detail.

Stablecoins and mission creep

They’re not even pretending anymore: the European Central Bank (ECB) doesn’t like the idea of stablecoins.

Read more

You’re reading the free weekly send of the premium daily Crypto is Macro Now, where I re-share a couple of the week’s posts and add some non-crypto and non-macro links since it’s the weekend. 🌼

On Thursday, I was a guest on Steven Ehrlich’s Bits & Bips: The Interview show, you can see the playback here (weirdly, they got my title wrong, I haven’t been Head of Market Insights at Genesis Trading for a long time).

Production note: It’s Memorial Day in the US on Monday, and since most of you will be taking the day off, so will the daily premium newsletter. ☀ I’ll share the usual Monday features on Tuesday.

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Tokenized equities hit ~$1B in supply since launching in mid 2025. The market structure is more interesting than the milestone.

Allium’s latest research covers where liquidity actually lives, how tokenized prices compare to traditional equities, overnight price discovery, and why ~90% of volume is outside the US.

For fintech platforms, exchanges, institutional investors, and builders evaluating the tokenized equities opportunity.

→ Read the report: https://www.allium.so/reports/allium-tokenized-equities-report-q1-2026

In this newsletter:

• Stablecoins: separating payments from credit

• What the Bliss Trade has to do with crypto

• Assorted links: wokeism, niceness, cultural heritage, book signalling, art plunder

• Weekend: Cultural heritage

Crypto is Macro Now offers ~daily commentary and updates on the overlap between the crypto and macro landscapes. Plus links and more.

If you’re a premium subscriber, thank you!! ❤

Some of the topics discussed in this week’s premium dailies:

Monday, May 18

• Coming up this week: PMI, primaries, Nvidia, G7

• Monday mood: Politics, moral foundations and crypto duality

• Markets: getting nervous

Tuesday, May 19

• Innovation exemption? Some questions

• Markets: if it moves…

• Term of the day: Inflation-linked bonds

Wednesday, May 20

• What the Bliss Trade has to do with crypto

• Term of the day: Monetize the debt

Thursday, May 21

• Stablecoins: separating payments from credit

• Markets: What are investors thinking?

• Term of the day: Cantillon Effect

Friday, May 22

• Stablecoins, banks and innovation

• Macro: stagflationary pressure gets stronger

• Term of the day: PMI

Stablecoins: separating payments from credit

The push to change the nature of US banking continues.

On Tuesday, President Trump signed a bombshell of an Executive Order that aims to remove access barriers to financial innovation. But, ultimately, it’s about much more than signalling support for the digital assets ecosystem.

The President asked the US central bank’s Board of Governors and the heads of all Federal financial regulators (there are five: CFPB, SEC, CFTC, NCUA, FDIC, OCC) to, within 90 days:

“conduct a review of existing regulations, guidance, supervisory practices, and application processes to identify those that could be updated to facilitate innovation, and competition to financial products and services for fintech firms, particularly those that are small and emerging.” (my emphasis)

Excellent, let’s bring more fintech firms into the regulatory fold, arguably a win-win for everyone except the incumbent institutions terrified of competition.

But the more transformative part of the EO was further down, in Section 4. There, Trump asked the Federal Reserve to, within 120 days:

“conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the legal, regulatory, and policy framework governing access to Reserve Bank payment accounts and payment services by uninsured depository institutions and non-bank financial companies, including those engaged in digital assets and other novel financial activities.” (my emphasis)

Trump has asked the central bank to come up with ways to allow non-banks, including stablecoin issuers, to access central bank payment systems.

This is huge, and not just because it signals full institutional acceptance that digital asset rails will form an integral part of the US (and therefore the global) financial system going forward.

It’s a big deal because of what it means for the concept of banking.

Banks and payments

You’ve probably heard the joke about the bank robber who, when asked why he robbed banks, answered: “Because that’s where the money is.”

The same can be said for why banks handle our payments. It’s where our money is usually kept, and so it makes sense that payments originate from our bank accounts.

What is less intuitive is the marriage between payments and lending. This is not just about final payment settlement between banks relying on intraday and overnight credit; it’s also the centuries-old practice of taking funds deposited for safekeeping and convenience, and lending most of them out to a range of borrowers. Put differently, the payments we route through banks rely on a web of promises.

Obviously, the payments landscape has diversified and spread over the decades, diluting direct bank participation while extending the plumbing. But virtually all electronic payments touch bank credit at some stage of their journey.

This generally works fine. But history has shown that payment networks can freeze at times of systemic stress. Even outside a widespread banking crisis, issues with any one institution can create mayhem as network participants are reluctant to enter into even short-term settlement commitments.

Stablecoins, running on a separate settlement network, remove the reliance of payments on bank networks. As we saw in March 2023, this does not mean stablecoins would be immune to any fallout from a banking crisis, but the settlement of stablecoin payments does not depend on the traditional financial system.

Only, banks have insisted that their payments settlement is “better” despite more limited operating hours and, in most cases, higher costs. And you know, they have a point. Their payment settlement is technically “better” because it counts on the ultimate liquidity backstop, the central bank. In times of stress, the central bank will step in and make sure payments settle.

(I’ve written before about how the banks’ monopoly on Fed payment rails leads to what Dan Awrey calls a Reverse Gresham’s Law, where reliance on “good money” means bad payments, and the spreading use of good payments means more reliance on “bad money”, as in money not backed by central bank access.)

Stablecoins, of course, operate outside of this protective oversight and could suffer from network glitches, bank-related redemption issues, or other problems the central bank doesn’t have to care about.

If stablecoin issuers get access to federal reserve payments services, however, then they also get access to that coveted central bank liquidity backstop. Their payment services become as reliable as those of banks, and they are likely to be cheaper and faster.

Plus, access to the federal reserve payment system would improve the operating margins of digital asset firms by reducing settlement costs – it turns out that working with the central bank is cheaper than working with commercial banks.

Perhaps more significant, it would also establish a basis for a payment network that did not rely on the solvency of bank loans. Stepping back and zooming out, this could potentially enhance the resilience of the US economy. In the event of another banking crisis, payments could continue to flow unimpeded through non-bank institutions.

Competition

It’s worth pointing out that the United States is, today, the only G7 country that limits central bank payment rails access to banks. The UK opened up access in 2017, Japan in 2022, the EU last year, Canada earlier this year. It’s also not a stretch to guess why the US is so far behind – yes, it’s the collective banking lobby and its bleats about the threat to the US economy should their monopoly be eroded.

Banks are, of course, going to fight Trump’s EO tooth and nail. They have already lost their monopoly on deposits. Now they stand to lose their monopoly on Fed-level payment rails. For the sake of innovation, I hope they lose this fight, largely because they deserve to for resisting consumer-facing improvements to their service that might erode margins, and because the lobbies have been outright lying about the risk this migration away from the centre poses to bank lending. (See also this excellent essay by Omid Malekan.)

Of course, the break will never be total – banks are convenient and familiar and will long continue to be the dominant gatekeepers to financial services. But competition is hammering at the door.

And it seems like the Administration is no longer going to be subtle about its assault on the bank chokehold. Here’s another excerpt from the EO:

“The Federal Government must update regulations to allow integration of digital assets and innovative technology into traditional financial services and payment systems. The Federal Government must also remove overly burdensome and fragmented regulations and supervisory practices that form barriers to entry and primarily benefit incumbent financial services firms.” (my emphasis)

I’ve speculated before that the SEC is using support for onchain marketplaces as a petri dish in which to re-write securities law, updating it for the modern era without a vicious fight for every amendment to wording drawn up in the era before computers.

It looks like the banking regulators will be doing the same: using digital assets as a banking regulation workaround. Let the disruptors in through the side door, and watch the market decide.

See also:

• Stablecoins and the new Gresham’s Law (Feb 2026)

• Stablecoin rewards and bank deceit (March 2026)

• Kraken, the Fed and the new payments landscape (March 2026)

🌿 If you’re not a subscriber to the premium daily Crypto is Macro Now, I hope you’ll consider becoming one! You’ll get ~daily commentary on how crypto is impacting the macro landscape, and vice versa - plus links, charts, and some fun stuff because why not. 🌿

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What the Bliss Trade has to do with crypto

I’m kicking myself for having missed this Financial Times op-ed when it first came out a couple of weeks ago, but it’s still relevant: Gita Gopinath, Harvard economics professor and former chief economist of the IMF, lays out why the US stock market continues to dance underneath storm clouds, and what this means for the global outlook.

She introduces the catchy term “Bliss trade”, which she defines as a belief in market resilience underwritten by “big lasting state support”.

The key word here is “lasting”. The TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) trade, she points out, is certainly a factor in the market assumption that stock market trouble will soon pass.

Indeed, the Bank of America Global Fund Manager Survey released this week showed a record increase in equity allocations and a big cut in cash levels, fuelled by the assumption that the Iran War is pretty much over and that looming inflation and higher yields won’t be a problem.

(chart via @MikeZaccardi)

Fine. But TACO depends on the whims of the President and can’t be extended beyond his term.

The Bliss trade can, as it transcends politics. It is now structural. Parties across the ideological spectrum now favour more spending, and any politician arguing for less knows they will either not get elected or soon find themselves out of a job.

What’s more, actions in recent years have shown that the spending, support, bailouts, whatever you want to call it, does not have to be targeted nor limited:

• During the pandemic, advanced economy government support averaged 25% of GDP, and boosted consumer and business finances for several years.

• When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and triggered an energy price surge, European governments spent 2.5% of GDP on broad price-supressing measures, when fully compensating the bottom 40% of households for the cost increase would have cost 0.9% of GDP.

• The recent climb in energy prices as a result of the Hormuz closure has reactivated subsidies and tax measures in Germany, Spain and Italy.

Gopinath recognizes that supporting citizens and businesses in a crisis is a worthy public goal – but she worries that this support has become large and lasting rather than targeted and temporary, weakening governments’ fiscal position.

And, once given, this support can’t be taken away without backlash. This, of course, creates a moral hazard and quasi-permanent risk-on behaviour – pile in while you can, lever up as much as possible, as your losses will be capped while your upside isn’t.

All that rings true. Where I differ from Gopinath’s conclusion is in the progression from here. She insists that the Bliss trade is fragile because governments are going to run into fiscal constraints. Put differently, markets may be pricing in insurance states can no longer afford to provide.

We have to remember that she is the former Deputy Managing Director and Chief Economist of the IMF, which has fiscal sustainability as one of its main goals. And, arguably, the institution has wielded considerable global influence when it comes to using development loans to incentivize certain policy changes.

This perhaps conditions the institution, and its former officials, to assume that fiscal sustainability is an option for political parties eager to hold on to power. It’s not. Put differently, officials have seen that stimulus works, and the consequences – inflation, stressed bond markets and increasingly entrenched expectations of a backstop – are more palatable than an economic collapse or, just as bad for some leaders, an election defeat.

Sure, eventually investors will start to worry about debt sustainability, pushing global yields up – but that can largely be absorbed by the vast pools of capital that need to park somewhere. Government debt may be getting riskier, but that doesn’t mean it won’t find investors.

We’ve seen in the past how episodes of stimulus can send crypto prices soaring. The pandemic-triggered flood of money into markets pushed BTC up almost 20x between March 2020 and April 2021. We’ve also seen how most traders steer using the rear-view mirror – over the past few years I’ve had so many debates with those convinced the “bazooka” would spring into action again should the economy show signs of slowing. I argued and still believe that future support will take other forms, but the debate itself highlights the assumption, correct I think, that governments can never go back to letting markets crash and citizens hit real poverty.

And no matter the form of the official support, the result is higher government debt, which will require more money printing. By extension, this means more currency debasement, and therefore also more interest in hard assets such as Bitcoin.

This may not manifest as a surge in the BTC price – much depends on the swings of sentiment and the nature of the stimulus signals. Plus, investors these days have so many speculative assets to choose from should they want to lever up a risk-on trade.

Rather, it’s more likely that the debasement effect will predominate over time, supporting periods of momentum swings. Put differently, going forward Bitcoin offers something for long-term investors looking for a debasement hedge, as well as something for short-term traders betting on demand acceleration.

✨ If you find this newsletter interesting, or even if you just like my excellent taste in music and gifs, would you mind sharing it with friends and colleagues, and nudging them to subscribe? I’d appreciate it! ✨

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ASSORTED LINKS

(A selection of reads I came across this week that I think are worth sharing, not about crypto nor macro. I try to choose links without a paywall, but when I feel it’s worth making an exception, I specify.)

• Below, I write more on the Croatian entry to last weekend’s Eurovision Song Contest – here I share a powerful essay by Delphine Chui in Restoring the West that highlights the value in cultural remembrance, however uncomfortable it may make some people. (Croatia’s Eurovision Entry Broke Through Europe’s Cultural Amnesia, Restoring the West)

“Healthy societies should preserve memory honestly, without collapsing into either self-hatred or tribal grievance. Europe does not need historical amnesia disguised as tolerance, nor does it need endless civilizational resentment masquerading as pride. It needs cultural confidence grounded in truth and continuity, which means acknowledging the complexities of European history while still allowing Europeans to honor their ancestors, traditions, symbols, and faith without apology. There is also something profoundly important about younger Europeans rediscovering their own cultural inheritance without immediately filtering it through either nationalist resentment or progressive shame.”

• Abigail Monti opens our eyes to the signalling of books, both to us and from us. What makes you choose one book over another? What do you want the world to know about your choices, and why? For the uninitiated like me, TBR means “to be read”. (The Longer I Work in Publishing, the More I’m Convinced It’s Sorcery, Psychology, and Guesswork, Unsolicited Manuscript)

• Tyler Cowen presents evidence that wokeism was just a passing phase – but asks, what did that phase really represent? And what does its passing mean for the underlying drivers? (Wokeness Has Peaked. What Followed Is Worse, The Free Press)

• Laura Kennedy rips apart the expectation of “niceness” which particularly affects women who don’t want to disappoint. (The Nicest Woman You Know Probably Resents You, Peak Notions)

• A riveting story – an excerpt from a new book – about legacy and art and theft and provenance, ranging from the Cambodia jungle to Manhattan via Mayfair. (Chasing the Man Who Stole the Godsv, Bloomberg – paywall)

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!

(in this section, I share stuff that has NOTHING to do with macro or crypto, ‘cos it’s the weekend and life is interesting)

Last week, I mentioned the Eurovision Song Contest and that I was rooting for Croatia. Predictably, its entry did not do well – I assumed it was because it was too stylish, too harmonious, too original, too Croatian. I confess I was unaware of the cultural criticism, that the reminder of abuses during Ottoman rule was Islamophobic. That makes me even more frustrated that the group LELEK didn’t do better as it’s high time we stop pretending history was not forged through courage and fear, subjugation and victory, atrocities and heroism, identity and bonding. And survival.

Above, I shared a link to a powerful piece in Restoring the West that highlights the importance of remembering our cultural history.

Below, I share the original video of the Croatian entry: Andromeda, by LELEK.

DISCLAIMER: I never give trading ideas, and NOTHING I say is investment advice! I hold some BTC, ETH and a tiny amount of some smaller tokens, but they’re all long-term holdings – I don’t trade. Also, I often use AI for research instead of Google, but never for writing.