Hello everyone! Another month in the bag – summer is whooshing by way too fast.

👀 You’re reading Crypto is Macro Now, which covers the role crypto is playing in the changing plates of finance, economics, politics, culture and markets. 👀

If you missed my Press Publish chat with Michael Howell about newslettering, you can catch it here (a good chunk of the opening got eaten, I don’t know why).

Permit me a rant, though: yesterday clinched it for me, I will never use Substack Live again – I know I should never say “never” but holy cow, the number of messed up episodes due to tech issues… Some have been my fault, yes, but of the seven things that went wrong yesterday, one was down to me (Ethernet cable not plugged in), the others involved having the episode close on us, stream cancelled so we couldn’t get back in, etc. etc. That said, Michael was gracious and interesting as always, the audience was understanding, and it was a great session despite the issues.

Ugh.

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

How much do stablecoins actually move cross-border?

Together with FXC Intelligence, Allium has sized the flows: in 2025, $135bn moved across borders, up 64% year-on-year vs 9% growth for fiat cross-border transfers.

But the headline hides the real story. Consumer-involved payments over-index ~3x versus fiat, and stablecoins show up first in markets the traditional system serves worst: Turkey, Ukraine, Mexico, Taiwan.

→ Download the full report https://www.fxcintel.com/research/reports/ct-stablecoin-share-cross-border-payments-market-allium

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• The changing shape of onchain ownership

• Term of the day: Transfer agent

• Macro: US PCE and GDP

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 onchain ownership

Spare a thought for transfer agents – hardly anyone ever does, even though they are a key piece in the smooth functioning of global securities markets. (See below for a description of what they do, if you’re not familiar.)

On Wednesday, they grabbed the tokenization mic with an announcement that may seem dull on the service but is actually a big deal for the evolving market structure.

BNY has launched an onchain transfer agent service for tokenized funds (Digital Transfer Agency, or Digital TA). The service will be initially open to select clients in the US and the UK, with plans for expansion.

Why is this a big deal? In several ways:

Read more

Still, it was a great conversation, and Michael was as gracious and interesting as ever.

I first came across Michael’s work via his book Capital Wars, a few years ago now – I settled down in the armchair, highlighter in hand, and it is still one of my most marked-up physical books on the shelf.

And since then I’ve had the pleasure of having my market views often clarified by Michael’s posts and charts, my thoughts condensed, some of them gently corrected – in sum, the learning does not stop, and nor does Michael’s output.

In this chat, we discuss that output – not liquidity or market outlooks or the FOMC press conference. No, the purpose of the Press Publish series is to find out more about how newsletter writers I admire do what they do.

So much attention is on the content in top newsletters, as it should be, it’s where the value lies.

But we overlook the craft that goes into producing that content – the work, the stress, the satisfaction – and in so doing, we fail to fully appreciate the result. We tend to take the production itself for granted, we assume great content just magically appears, and so I want to dive deeper into how it gets made.

I’m sure we can all take away some of the lessons from this series and apply them to our own work and our own interests, whatever they may be.

Capital Wars

Global Liquidity Insights

By Michael Howell

DISCLAIMER: Neither myself nor my guests give trading ideas, and nothing we 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.

Hi everyone! I hope you’re all well…

This is a short email today as this throat infection and consequent lack of sleep are slowing me down.

I am VERY much looking forward to my chat with Michael Howell in today’s Press Publish livestream, though (details below), so DO come and join us – by then, I will have drunk gallons of ginger tea.

👀 You’re reading Crypto is Macro Now, which covers the role crypto is playing in the changing plates of finance, economics, politics, culture and markets. 👀

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Are agentic stablecoin payments becoming a thing?

Software agents now pay each other, for data, API calls or compute – but the volume is tiny. The two main agentic rails are x402 (concentrated on the Base blockchain) and MPP (a protocol on Tempo), and about $4.5 million has moved across them over the last 90 days, in 24 million tiny payments.

→ For more, download Allium’s State of Onchain Finance report: https://allium.so/reports/state-of-onchain-finance-q2-26

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Markets: the performance and the non-message message

• Term of the day: Baumol’s cost disease

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:

✨Press Publish with Michael Howell✨

Join me later today for a Substack Live chat with Michael Howell, founder and managing director of GL Indexes and author of the Capital Wars newsletter. We’re not going to talk about Michael’s area of expertise, global liquidity, tempting as that may be. Instead, we’re going to discuss newslettering.

We’re going to talk about Michael’s writing, why he does what he does, how he juggles his time, highlights, frustrations, publishing platforms and more. A back-room glimpse into how his insightful output gets made.

👉 TODAY – 3pm BST / 4pm CEST / 10am EST – come join us!

Link to livestream: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/294553

Markets: the performance

Well, that was disappointing.

Not that the FOMC chose to keep the US federal funds rate steady – I thought they should hike, but had low confidence they would.

Rather, it was disappointing because I expected a lively press conference. It was one of the most boring I remember, and that’s saying something.

Before we get into the impact of the message in the non-message, a recap: the FOMC decided to keep the federal funds rate at current levels between 3.50%-3.75%, and three voters dissented.

It was widely expected there would be dissents, but three is a lot. True, April’s meeting had four, but only one was on the rate decision (Miran wanted to lower rates), the other three were on the language of the statement. Removing that, there have been only four FOMC meetings with three dissents in the past 10 years.

(chart via Bloomberg)

As Jim Bianco put it, “dissents are the new forward guidance”.

Given the uncertainty regarding the FOMC’s position going into the meeting, the market showed some muted relief that the committee was not worried enough about overheating to raise rates – the S&P 500 jumped and bond yields fell, but just a little bit.

Then came the press conference.

This turned out to be a masterclass of how to say virtually nothing.

We got a lot of emphasis (and I mean a lot) on how committed the committee is, how competent and dedicated etc. How they’re thinking deeply about things, including how to think about things. How they will get the job done but won’t tell us how because they’re thinking about things.

Let’s just say that Warsh is very good at press conferences, better than most politicians, eerily good for a central banker. He’s deft at going through the motions of answering questions while repeating his honed message, deflecting, creating a personal rhetoric. He has the charm and the oration down pat – addressing journalists by their names, using graceful yet emphatic hand movements, and most of the press corp seemed to love it.

But not all.

Read more

Hello everyone, and happy Fed Day! This afternoon’s FOMC press conference should be one of the more interesting in recent memory…

👀 You’re reading Crypto is Macro Now, which covers the interregnums we’re living through and the role of crypto in how this all plays out. 👀

It’s a short newsletter today as I’m battling a throat infection 🤒 and absolutely HAVE to get my voice back for tomorrow’s “Press Publish” Substack Live chat tomorrow with Michael Howell – see below for details!

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Another long-running crypto exchange shuts down

On Sunday, BitMart announced it will cease trading on August 26, with a full wind-down by January 31, 2027.

But volumes started surging a couple of days before, especially in BTC/USDT.

Book a demo: https://www.allium.so/

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Stablecoins in Africa (2): the last mile

• Term of the day: African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA)

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:

✨Press Publish with Michael Howell✨

Join me tomorrow for a Substack Live chat with Michael Howell, author of the Capital Wars newsletter which offers market insight you’re definitely not going to get anywhere else – no wonder Substack tells me it’s the #1 newsletter in the UK. Many of you will already be familiar with Michael’s deep expertise in global liquidity flows – his book Capital Wars remains the only coherent explanation I’ve read on how they are both a massive force and a complex machine that moves economies as well as markets.

But we’re not going to talk about any of that. Instead, we’re going to discuss Michael’s writing, why he does what he does, how he juggles his time, what he thinks of publishing platforms, and more. A back-room glimpse into how the insightful output gets made.

👉 Thursday, July 30^th (tomorrow!) – 3pm BST / 4pm CEST / 10am EST – come join us!

Link to livestream: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/294553

Stablecoins in Africa (2): the last mile

Yesterday, I wrote about the march of digital asset regulation and blockchain payments efficiency across the Sub-Saharan African continent. Today I want to address an overlooked barrier, and a small yet big-name pilot with a direct approach to solving it.

We know the potential of stablecoins in removing the considerable frictions of cross-border transfers in Africa, even more so than in other regions.

In a speech earlier this year, the Governor of Ghana’s central bank pointed out that over 80% of inter-African payments are routed through correspondent banks in Europe or the US, resulting in annual transaction fees of roughly $5.3 billion. Naturally, this takes longer than would a direct settlement, which adds settlement and currency risk.

The reasons for this expensive routing are many:

• Africa has over 40 currencies, and thin FX markets. It is much cheaper to convert a local currency into dollars or euros and then back into another local currency, than to attempt a direct conversion.

• Most Sub-Saharan trade originates or ends up outside the continent. According to the latest Afreximbank report, only around 14% of African merchandise trade is with other African countries. And much of that is invoiced in dollars or euros. A cap on demand for local currency settlement perpetuates the inefficient liquidity distribution.

• Colonial correspondent banking relationships carved deep grooves of trust over the decades and even centuries – trust between African banks does not have a similar history.

• Nor are they encouraged to develop this trust, with global AML rules and regulatory reluctance to incur more risk acting as strong guardrails for the existing expensive system.

There are region-wide initiatives afoot to overcome these barriers, such as the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), backed by Afreximbank and others (I wrote about that here). Adoption is growing with 28 countries now participating. But networks take time.

So, stablecoins are an obvious solution: almost instant direct connections, on networks that already exist, and a mosaic of services eager to help smooth the flow. The past few months have brought a flurry of headlines announcing new stablecoin partnerships, liquidity pools, etc. All fantastic and much needed, but they tend to overlook a key piece of the distribution: the last mile. Getting funds customers can use directly in their accounts, cheaply and quickly.

Direct to wallet, but not just any wallet

Read more

Hi everyone! I hope you’re all taking care of yourselves. It looks like some of the fires around Madrid are being contained, but temperatures are set to climb today which is not good at all…

👀 You’re reading Crypto is Macro Now, which covers the interregnums we’re living through and the role of crypto in how this all plays out. 👀

📽 Come join me on Thursday for a Press Publish Substack Live chat with Michael Howell, author of the Capital Wars newsletter! More details below.

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Another long-running crypto exchange shuts down

On Sunday, BitMart announced it will cease trading on August 26, with a full wind-down by January 31, 2027.

But volumes started surging a couple of days before, especially in BTC/USDT.

→ Book a demo: https://www.allium.so/

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Stablecoins in Africa: the overlooked story

• Markets: FOMC uncertainty

• Term of the day: Minsky moment

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:

✨Press Publish with Michael Howell✨

Join me this coming Thursday for a Substack Live chat with Michael Howell, author of the Capital Wars newsletter which offers market insight you’re definitely not going to get anywhere else – no wonder Substack tells me it’s the #1 newsletter in the UK. Many of you will already be familiar with Michael’s deep expertise in global liquidity flows – his book Capital Wars remains the only coherent explanation I’ve read on how they are both a massive force and a complex machine that moves economies as well as markets.

But we’re not going to talk about any of that. Instead, we’re going to discuss Michael’s writing, why he does what he does, how he juggles his time, what he thinks of publishing platforms, and more. A back-room glimpse into how the insightful output gets made.

👉 Thursday, July 30^th – 3pm BST / 4pm CEST / 10am EST – come join us!

Link to livestream: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/294553

Stablecoins in Africa: the overlooked story

Every now and then a report on a stablecoin partnership in Africa will cross my screen, and I take note.

In part, it’s because I grew up in Zambia, and the potential of permissionless payments in the region is what drew me to study Bitcoin more deeply (this was a while ago, before Ethereum). But largely, it’s because the potential to improve African cross-border transfers is underappreciated – not just because of fragmented banking and payments landscape, not just because of the relative lack of legacy barriers (Sub-Saharan Africa leads the world in mobile banking), but also because of spreading regulatory clarity.

This will matter for stablecoin payments, sure, and for digital asset trading – but it will also open the door to some fascinating tokenization use cases, covering new marketplaces, commodity collateral and more.

An example:

Read more

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a good weekend. The past few days have been rough here in Madrid with the fires, the most destructive on record. In the city centre, we’re fine (although the air was hard to breathe for a while) – several surrounding regions, however, have been devastated. And the fire season is not over, so if any of you know any rain incantations….

👀 You’re reading Crypto is Macro Now, which covers the interregnums we’re living through and the role of crypto in how this all plays out. 👀

📽 Come join me on Thursday for a Press Publish Substack Live chat with Michael Howell, author of the Capital Wars newsletter! More details below.

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Another onchain pre-IPO market nailed the IPO opening price

CXMT started trading earlier today, opening 472% above the issue price. The Hyperliquid perp had sat 12% under that level on listing eve, then closed most of the remaining gap in the last fifteen minutes as Shanghai’s opening auction published indicative prices.

The bankers’ price, on the other hand, was 82% below the open.

→ For more details on perp investor positioning, join the Allium Research mailing list: https://www.allium.so/research-hub

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Coming up this week: central banks, macro reads.

• Monday musings: The money question

• Podcast episode recommendations

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:

✨Press Publish with Michael Howell✨

Join me this coming Thursday for a Substack Live chat with Michael Howell, author of the Capital Wars newsletter which offers market insight you’re definitely not going to get anywhere else – no wonder Substack tells me it’s the #1 newsletter in the UK. Many of you will already be familiar with Michael’s deep expertise in global liquidity flows; his book Capital Wars remains the only coherent explanation I’ve read on how they are both a massive force and a complex machine that moves economies as well as markets.

But we’re not going to talk about any of that. Instead, we’re going to discuss Michael’s writing, why he does what he does, how he juggles his time, what he thinks of publishing platforms, and more. A back-room glimpse into how the insightful output gets made.

👉 Thursday, July 30^th – 3pm BST / 4pm CEST / 10am EST – come join us!

Link to livestream: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/294553

Coming up this week:

It’s central bank week, with 14 due to make a decision on rates. Plus, some key macro reports.

Tomorrow, we get the latest report from the US Conference Board on consumer confidence. (There’s an interesting op-ed in the Financial Times today by Ruchir Sharma that mentions an overlooked reason why consumer survey responses don’t reflect actual economic conditions, aside from unequal spending: it’s the gloom of economic headlines, themselves influenced by the need for clicks.)

On Wednesday, we get the official US rates decision from the FOMC as its two-day meeting concludes. The market is signalling an almost 40% probability there will be a hike – I don’t remember the last time the odds were this uncertain two days out. In part, the confusion is due to the escalation and then de-escalation of attacks in the Gulf, to conflicting signs on inflation, and to the Fed’s new “no forward guidance” policy …

(chart via Bloomberg)

… all of which should make Wednesday’s post-FOMC press conference – Chair Kevin Warsh’s second in his new role – even more interesting. No doubt journalists will get creative in trying to tease out some indication of timing on the next rates move; no doubt Warsh will yet again politely dodge their questions.

We also get earnings from SK Hynix, Meta and Microsoft.

Thursday brings the US Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) report for June, with the headline index year-on-year growth expected to decelerate from 4.1% to 3.7%, and the core index to slow slightly from 3.4% to 3.3%. On a month-on-month basis, the headline index is forecast to deliver its first negative growth since 2020, echoing what we saw in the CPI report.

We also get the initial US Q2 GDP report, with growth expected to hold steady at an annualized rate of 2.1%.

And we get the initial read on EU Q2 GDP growth, expected to accelerate slightly from 0.3% annualized to 0.4%.

Plus, Apple, Amazon and Samsung report Q2 earnings.

On Friday, we get Japan’s latest inflation read for Tokyo, with year-on-year growth forecast to accelerate slightly from 1.6% to 1.7%. Later in the day, the Bank of Japan announces its interest rate decision, with consensus opinion pointing to no move.

We also get a smattering of inflation reads from Europe, including that of the Eurozone – headline inflation is forecast to accelerate slightly from 2.8% to 2.9% year-on-year, while core inflation is expected to hold steady at 2.4%.

🍧 If you find this newsletter at all useful, or even if you just like my excellent music recommendations and fun gifs, would you mind sharing it with friends and colleagues and nudging them to subscribe? I’d appreciate it! 😊

Share

Monday musings: The money question

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

The essence of money is something that most of us never think about. Maybe we think about how to get more of it and why it disappears so fast – and for many, those threads are all-consuming, about survival. But peer closely and they’re really about numbers and about our actions. We need or want more, and we make plans to achieve that.

Read more

Hello everyone! I hope you’re all taking care of yourselves. Finally, a peaceful night in my neighbourhood, feeling more rested today.

If you missed the livestream with Izabella Kaminska yesterday, you can catch it here, BUT I must warn you that there were serious tech issues on the back end – Substack Livestreams are convenient but not at all flexible when things go wrong, and for some reason my download is in vertical format and the usual thumbnails contained errors. If you’d rather watch it in landscape (I know I would), Izabella has the correct format over on her blog The Blind Spot.

Production note: 🌞 I’m taking a much-needed couple of days off as of tomorrow, and will skip the free weekly summary (little to summarize) – back on Monday! 🌞

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

We know stablecoin volumes are climbing, but what about the rate of increase?

Allium research shows that, over the past two years, supply has doubled but the rate of growth is slowing, the signature of a market moving from a land grab into steady infrastructure development.

→ For more, download Allium’s State of Onchain Finance report: https://allium.so/reports/state-of-onchain-finance-q2-26

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• China vs US: where trust matters

• Term of the day: Thucydides Trap

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:

China vs US: where trust matters

We know that trust in payments matters, whether in physical cash or digital – you need to trust the notes are real, or that the electronic rails will deliver the payment. Even when paying with tokens on a public blockchain, we need to trust the technology.

But trust also influences a much broader swathe of our daily decisions than most realize, starting with where to shop, travel, even live. It tints our relationship with neighbours, our portfolio allocations, our political views.

Its importance is one of the reasons I pay so much attention to the annual Edelman Trust Barometer, published in January. Here’s a quote from what I wrote back then:

“The takeaway is of a global society entrenched in fragmentation and echo chambers. … The message is not just about insularity – it’s also about the unwinding of globalization as we seek comfort in the familiar even if it means less prosperity.”

Indeed, a shift in global trust is one of the reasons I do what I do: focus on how new technologies impact opportunity and resilience for individuals, businesses and nations.

Gauging the temperature

Read more

• will Stripe’s bid for PayPal cast light on their opaque financial structure?

• how a recent OFAC update and a recent FATF update overlap

• how stablecoins can facilitate crime, but they can do a better job of mapping crime networks than traditional finance

• how stablecoins lead to dollarization of developing economies - will we see pushback?

• here’s the BIS paper that Izabella talked about: Dollarisation and monetary control: what lessons for the rise of stablecoins?

(I have no idea why the video format is in vertical when the stream was set for landscape - Substack are looking into this for me. If you’d rather see it in landscape, and I know I would, Izabella has the correct format uploaded to her blog The Blind Spot.)

Hello everyone!!!!! We are still recovering over here as the heroes arrived back home yesterday and, after visiting the Royal Family at their residence and then the Prime Minister at his, they made their way on an open-top bus to one of our main roundabouts for a giant party. According to this morning’s press, around 2 million people were out on the streets of Madrid last night to celebrate. The vibe was just amazing.

So, today I have a fuzzy brain which is one of the reasons today’s email is shorter than usual – the other is I have a schedule squeeze.

Production note: 🌞This newsletter will be taking a much-needed short break Thursday-Saturday. 🌞

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Onchain Treasury funds grew 8x in two years, and currently have around $13.8 billion in AUM.

More than 50% is on Ethereum, concentrated in 5% of wallets. Individual holders prefer lower-fee chains such as Arbitrum, which has 28% of wallets but just 1% of assets.

Want to know more about tokenized fund distribution?

→ For more, download Allium’s State of Onchain Finance report: https://allium.so/reports/state-of-onchain-finance-q2-26

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• The whack-a-mole of stablecoins in crime

• Term of the day: FATF

• Markets: BTC still quiet

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!! ❤

✨ Monetary Forces: later today, Izabella Kaminska and I pick at the key headlines that paint the picture of how technology is changing finance. Come join us!

Tuesday, July 21 @ 10am EST / 4pm CEST / 3pm BST

Livestream link: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/284760

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

The whack-a-mole of stablecoins in crime

Over the past few days, there have been a couple of interesting revelations in the murky field of stablecoin use in sanctions evasion and money laundering.

Last week, OFAC added four more crypto addresses to those known to be linked to the sanctioned Central Bank of Iran (CBI). Balances totalling $131 million were immediately frozen by Tether, bringing the total of CBI stablecoin funds frozen since the start of the Iran War to $475 million – not small change.

This raises an intriguing question: where did those stablecoin sums come from? According to a report from Chainalysis, $165 million had been transferred into the four addresses, mainly from an institutional liquidity provider and an Asia-based payment processor. Hmmm.

Chainalysis didn’t give names, but a FATF update published a couple of days later offered a clue.

Read more

Hello everyone!!!!! What a night… ⚽🏆🎉🎉🎉 Sleep-deprived today, you would not believe the racket in my neighbourhood until the wee hours – but CHAMPIONS!!!!!!

Now for a presumably football-free week…

Production note: 🌞This newsletter will be taking a short break Thursday-Saturday. 🍹

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Onchain Treasury funds grew 8x in two years, and currently have around $13.8 billion in AUM.

More than 50% is on Ethereum, concentrated in 5% of wallets. Individual holders prefer lower-fee chains such as Arbitrum, which has 28% of wallets but just 1% of assets.

Want to know more about tokenized fund distribution?

→ For more on tokenized funds, download Allium’s State of Onchain Finance report: https://allium.so/reports/state-of-onchain-finance-q2-26

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Coming up this week

• Monday musings: The AI tide goes out?

• Term of the day: Open-weight models

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!! ❤

✨ Monetary Forces: tomorrow, Izabella Kaminska and I pick at the key headlines that paint the picture of how technology is changing finance. Come join us!

Tuesday, July 21 @ 10am EST / 4pm CEST / 3pm BST

Livestream link: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/284760

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

Coming up this week:

A light week for macro data, and also macro speeches as the Federal Reserve enters its blackout period in the runup to its FOMC meeting next week.

Today, Andy Burnham became the seventh UK Prime Minister in 10 years, after formally becoming the leader of the Labour Party on Friday.

Later, we get the US June Conference Board leading index.

Wednesday brings Q2 results from Alphabet, Tesla and IBM.

On Thursday, the ECB meets to decide on interest rates, with no action expected.

Friday brings global Purchasing Managers Index data from S&P Global, with that for the US expected to show continued improvement in both manufacturing and services activity.

(chart via Bloomberg)

Monday musings: The AI tide goes out?

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

It wasn’t that long ago that the unveiling of DeepSeek gave the US stock market a much-needed jolt out of its complacency – it was astonishing back then how few had even considered that China could compete on AI agents.

But investors didn’t take long to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and continue to ride the ingrained assumption that the US would easily win the AI race, and that demand was of course going to exceed expectations so let’s chase those valuations up.

This was despite many of us asking the relevant questions yet getting no thought-through answers: where is this expected demand going to come from and how will it be monetized? What assumptions underpin the eye-watering earnings expectations? And how will the US stop China from doing what it’s good at: recreating good-enough models better and cheaper?

A vibe shift

On Friday, we got two loud signals that these questions are about to start to matter a lot.

1) Chinese leader Xi Jinping spoke at an AI conference in Shanghai. He stressed the importance of AI cooperation, how one of the most urgent tasks is establishing global governance, and China’s intention to work with partners to extend applications. It will set up AI cooperation and training centres in developing countries around the world. And 29 have signed up to join the China-led World AI Cooperation Organization.

Compare this to the US initiative Pax Silica, in which 24 mostly Western countries have committed to reducing supply chain dependence on China for critical AI components, but don’t get assured access to frontier models in exchange.

For China, AI is a public good. For the US, it’s a private profit-seeking asset with national security implications. Which approach do you think will more rapidly gain global adoption?

2) Also last Friday, Chinese AI lab Moonshot released its latest model, Kimi K3, which reportedly beats all US models except for Fable 5 and GPT-5.6, and even those on some parameters. The cost of access to the model is roughly 70% less that of its US competitors. And on July 27^th, it becomes open-weight, which means anyone can download and iterate on it (see below for a longer explanation of the term).

This raises further uncomfortable questions: why would global AI adopters use the more expensive closed US models? Some will argue that the Chinese models can’t be trusted to give impartial answers – as if the US models can. And not all users rely on AI to discuss politically sensitive questions.

Extend that line of questioning and you get to the alarming one: what, again, is underpinning the earnings expectations from the leading US AI companies?

The thing is, the accumulating stress is not just about expectations and valuations – who knew they could get ahead of themselves in a tech frenzy. The last numbers I’ve seen for OpenAI and Anthropic put them at valuations of almost $1 trillion each. SpaceX listed last month at a price that gave the unprofitable company a $1.8 trillion valuation.

No, the stress is more to do with market structure. SPCX is now trading 45% below its post-listing high, itself a signal. But it’s the silent signals that are potentially more destructive.

We’re not going to see similar revaluations of SpaceX competitors, because they are private and have no interest in publicly acknowledging the new reality. But it’s telling that OpenAI is reportedly considering postponing its IPO.

Investors in OpenAI and Anthropic also have no interest in publicly acknowledging the new reality, as they are mostly private funds who do not want to have to mark down their investments.

Hiding in plain sight

Lifting the lid on the private funds’ impact reveals how messy this could get.

Training AI models and building datacentres requires a ton of capital. Goldman Sachs estimates that expenditure plans for 2027 are on track to exceed $1 trillion, and that the total between now and 2031 will reach roughly $7.6 trillion.

(chart via Goldman Sachs)

For context, that is almost 50% of all US commercial bank lending outstanding today.

Of course, not all of it will come from commercial banks. A considerable amount, yes – AI-related financing is one of the drivers behind last week’s strong US bank earnings reports.

But private credit is playing an increasingly important role. Last week, Morgan Stanley published a report suggesting it could supply roughly half of the external financing needs for datacentre investments alone.

And according to a report out in May from the Financial Stability Board, the AI industry accounted for more than a third of private credit deals in 2025, up from just over 15% in the previous five years.

Any walk-back of either planned expenditure or cash flow expectations would squeeze private credit funds. Only, they have already been feeling pressure from the weakening outlook for software companies as AI agents take over many of their functions – the enterprise services sector is estimated to account for roughly 25% of private credit loans. Redemption requests are reportedly surging, several funds have suspended or capped withdrawals, and lenders are starting to pull back.

The squeeze could get worse as concerns build around the health of AI-related credit. We’re starting to see this in public markets via the uptick in CDS spreads on the massive amount of corporate bonds issued by hyperscalers.

(chart via Apollo Academy)

It gets political

Here’s where it gets sticky.

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. 🌼

If you’re not a subscriber to the premium daily, I do hope you’ll consider becoming one! For $12/month, you’ll get ~daily commentary on how crypto is impacting the macro landscape, and vice versa. I talk about adoption, regulation, tokenization, stablecoins, CBDCs, market infrastructure shifts and more, as well as the economy and investment narratives.

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Where are stablecoins most used?

Allium filters stablecoin volumes for non-economic actions such as inter-group transfers – it turns out that most is outside the US, with 52% in Asia-Pacific and 26% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The leading destinations are South Korea, Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey, places with currency pressure, active remittance corridors, or both.

→ For more, download Allium’s State of Onchain Finance report: https://allium.so/reports/state-of-onchain-finance-q2-26

In this newsletter:

• Manipulation and the Chat Control lever

• Sony’s stablecoin: the bigger implications

• Assorted links: Liberalism, Brand Scotland, epic orality, AI and the tax base,

• Weekend: the music of Spain – send good vibes to New York, please

Podcasts

If you missed this week’s livestream, you can catch it here:

• Monetary Forces, with Izabella Kaminska – we discussed SWIFT, Sony, monetary aggregates and how stablecoins impact the money supply.

COMING UP:

✨ Monetary Forces: come join us next Tuesday, when Izabella Kaminska and I pick at the key headlines that paint the picture of how technology is changing finance.

👉 Tuesday, July 21 @ 10am EST / 4pm CEST / 3pm BST – livestream link: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/284760

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

Monday, July 13

• Coming up this week: US macro, Fed speeches

• Monday musings: manipulation and the Chat Control lever

• Term of the day: Directive vs regulation

Tuesday, July 14

• Sony’s stablecoin: the bigger implications

• Term of the day: De novo entity

• Markets: yikes

Wednesday, July 15

• How stablecoins create money

• Macro: CPI cooling

Thursday, July 16

• Why DTCC’s tokenization test matters

• Term of the day: DTCC

• Markets: over-confidence again

Friday, July 17

• Visa’s stablecoin platform: more of the same?

• Markets: ominous rumblings

• Podcast recommendations

Manipulation and the Chat Control lever

Social media manipulation can come from unexpected directions.

I’ve been writing quite a bit recently about alarming examples of government trespass, as it is a meaningful part of my “why crypto matters” thesis. But it’s not the only one, and I’m now concerned that our sensitivity to threats is itself becoming a veil. Put differently, seeing monsters around every corner could blind us to the ones that are really there.

So, I’m going to write about government trespass yet again, but from a “not what it seems” angle. Bear with me.

The measure that triggered this line of thought is a temporary exemption to European privacy laws known as Chat Control 1.0, which allows platform providers to voluntarily scan messages for signs of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). It expired in April, but last week the European Parliament held a distorted vote to reactivate it until April 2028. Even though the majority of MEPs voted against the reactivation, it was approved. There’s a lot of nuance here, which I’ll explain below.

It’ll come as no surprise that I follow many accounts focused on protecting freedom of speech and digital privacy, so as I’m sure you can imagine, my feed was furious.

But there’s a whiff of manipulation there. The frustration is justified, the concern is real – but the “democracy is dead” accusations of government shenanigans to push through an unpopular measure feel designed to trigger our emotions and make us feel under attack, rather than keep us informed of the bigger fight at hand.

You’re probably wondering what MEPs have against suppressing the distribution of CSAM, and you’re probably wondering how the European Parliament can move forward with a measure most of its members voted against. It’s complex. And it’s important.

Some background:

In 2002, the EU adopted the ePrivacy directive (on Monday I shared an explanation of EU institutions and terminology). This protects the content of emails, messages and calls from interception or surveillance, with exceptions for law enforcement. It requires user consent or anonymization for the processing of metadata. It (unsuccessfully!) bans unsolicited spam. And, yes, it’s responsible for those annoying “Accept cookie” windows that plague our online existence. But at least it officially recognized our right to define our own online domains.

In 2021, the EU adopted a temporary exemption to the directive. This exemption is known as Chat Control 1.0, and it allows tech platforms to voluntarily detect, report, and remove known CSAM in private messages.

In 2022, European Commission proposed a permanent exemption: Chat Control 2.0. More on this below, but suffice to say for now that it’s controversial, which is one reason it has progressed so slowly through the convoluted legislative process. After five rounds of negotiation between the European Parliament and the Council with the Commission mediating, there is no sign of the parties being even close to an agreement.

The Commission had proposed extending the temporary exemption, but in March, the European Parliament rejected this idea. The temporary exemption expired in April.

Then, on July 2nd, the Council voted in favour of the extension – essentially, one of the EU’s two legislative bodies said yes while the other had said no. This means the proposal goes back to Parliament for what is known as a “second reading”, which triggers another vote but under different rules.

On Tuesday of last week, the European Parliament voted to apply the “Urgent Procedure” to the proposal. This fast-tracks the vote, bypassing normal debate time and committee scrutiny.

The proposal vote took place two days later. It was again split, with 314 voting to reject the extension, 276 voting in favour and 17 abstaining. Under normal circumstances, the proposal would be blocked. But second reading rules require a minimum of 361 votes to reject – although the proposal is still more opposed than supported, it goes through, because not enough rejected.

Many are reasonably screaming that this makes little sense in a democracy – they’re right, but the rules are the rules and they were not broken here. The second reading requirement of an absolute majority to oppose (rather than a simple majority) was designed to unblock impasses and force a compromise – a not unreasonable goal, even if we can disagree with how it’s achieved.

Where the “foul play” cries get loudest, however, is around the timing. Last week was the last full parliamentary session before the summer recess, and 113 MEPs were absent (over 15%, a problem to discuss another day). The accusations suggest that the rush was a deliberate strategy to make sure fewer MEPs were available to register their opposition.

This feels hollow. It’s more likely the urgency has another explanation – those concerned about the distribution of CSAM wanted scanning allowed again before the summer break.

So, despite the horrified reaction from many, nothing untoward happened last week, democracy is still intact, and digital privacy is still available for those who use end-to-end encryption (exempted from the exemption) – and, hopefully, some evil people will have their names forwarded to the relevant authorities.

But…

A bigger concern is that a similar manoeuvre will one day force through Chat Control 2.0.

The current version of the new proposal would not only make the exemption permanent, it would remove the “voluntary” aspect. Platform providers would be required to scan and provide regular assessments, despite an absence of any proven efficacy. According to reported European Commission figures, Chat Control 1.0 provided just over a third of abuse reports in 2024. German police found that roughly 50% of alerts were not relevant while 40% of investigations targeted minors.

We can all agree that the availability of CSAM online is horrific, and those responsible should be punished to the maximum extent allowed by law, at the very least. But those of us familiar with banking regulation know how the pursuit of crime can erode liberties when taken to extreme, liberties we don’t get back even though the crime is not suppressed. The relatively high error rates promise to make life miserable for innocent people. And the easy availability of mass surveillance as a crime prevention tool prevents exploration of more targeted approaches.

It gets worse: Chat Control 2.0 proposes a way around encryption by allowing client-side scanning – messages and other content are scanned on users’ devices before they are sent. It’s not hard to see how, once allowed, the scope could be expanded to include certain types of speech. And this is even before we think about the security risks.

Mercifully, opposition to Chat Control 2.0 is strong, for now. But “don’t you care about the children?” is a powerful lever that will no doubt be used against those protesting the incursion into citizens’ privacy without due process. And, as last week showed, there are ways to push through controversial moves.

Still, we should be wary of manipulation on the other side as well. Being made aware of risks to our privacy is one thing; letting hysteria distract our focus is another. And it may have the pernicious effect of leaving us feeling more helpless than we are.

🌻 If you enjoy this newsletter, I hope you’ll consider sharing it with friends and colleagues and nudging them to subscribe? I’d appreciate it! 🌻

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Sony’s stablecoin: the bigger implications

Last week, Sony got conditional approval from the OCC for a national trust bank in the US for the express purpose of issuing and managing a dollar stablecoin, with target launch in 2027.

This is not just “another stablecoin” story, not at all. It goes much deeper, on three levels:

1) Sony continues to expand our understanding of stablecoin business models.

Here we have a consumer-facing company issuing its own stablecoin, via a financial subsidiary.

Of course, one effective use case could be internal treasury transfers, with obvious advantages for a sprawling multinational with plenty of cross-border transactions between and within divisions.

But Sony has a vast, seriously vast user community. PlayStation alone has roughly 132 million monthly active users. And then there’s the movies, the streaming services, the music labels, all of which involve (or can involve) digital purchases of some kind. And the conglomerate has a fully licensed consumer-facing online bank in Japan

No wonder Sony has been active in blockchain-based exploration for years: tokenization, NFT issuance, application development, metaverse experiences and more.

By introducing a stablecoin into its onchain and offchain worlds, Sony can offer an engaged community new types of transactions in familiar environments, and expand the reach of and connectivity between Sony properties.

Another twist: unlike most other stablecoin issuers, Sony has its own blockchain, Soneium, co-developed with Singapore-based blockchain infrastructure firm Startale Group and launched last year. As far as I know, Sony has not specified that Soneium will be the new stablecoin’s chain, but there are strategic synergies.

The thing is, Soneium already has a stablecoin, Startale USD (USDSC), which launched in December 2025. Its total market cap is tiny (less than $5 million) but steady and with reasonable turnover.

Why will Sony’s stablecoin do better? For one, there’s the obvious brand-name recognition. Pretty much everyone has heard of Sony, and the name brings trust. Plus, there will no doubt be considerable publicity surrounding the launch, which should generate interest. And we can expect some degree of in-house marketing across the Sony empire.

Also, and I think this is more significant than many realize, it will be issued under the GENIUS Act. That also brings some reassurance, especially to American users – USDSC is issued under Singapore’s stablecoin regime.

So, Sony’s stablecoin is unlikely to be just about treasury transfers or payments, although those use cases will no doubt feature. The intersection of consumer experiences and payments promises to be one that will deliver digital applications that change our understanding of terms such as “audience”, “transaction” and even “property”.

2) The concession also reveals an intriguing interpretation of banking law.

The charter is granted to Sony’s US subsidiary Connectia Trust.

When Connectia applied for its charter last October, the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) objected.

Not a surprise, the lobby group generally opposes anything to do with stablecoins, but this particular objection was intriguing in that it alleged that issuing retail-facing stablecoins is beyond the scope of the charter.

The GENIUS Act specifically empowers national trust banks to do that, but the ICBA raises a point: national trust banks are not empowered to offer retail-facing services. The provisional concession of Connectia’s charter shows that the OCC does not find that relevant.

Another objection raised by the ICBA is that the OCC overstepped its authority in its 2021 interpretive letter broadening the scope of national trust banks. Again, the banking regulator did not pay this much attention, further expanding the scope earlier this year.

An additional twist: No US entertainment company that owns a bank, because the Bank Holding Company Act forbids it. But Sony is based in Japan, where there are no such barriers.

This implies that Sony will be able to issue stablecoins to enhance the utility and profitability of its global entertainment properties, with most of the benefits presumably flowing to the head office in Japan. Disney, a US company, can’t do that – unless there’s a legal workaround that would enable Disney to issue a stablecoin. Perhaps, I’m not a lawyer. But it is striking that it is easier for foreign non-financial conglomerates to issue stablecoins in the US, essentially taking deposits and offering financial services while boosting innovation, engagement and profit, than it is for a US non-financial conglomerate.

3) Despite the spread of stablecoin regulation in key economies, jurisdiction still matters.

The move is also interesting given that Japan, Sony’s home country, was the first major economy to pass stablecoin legislation back in 2022. Even under the GENIUS Act, Sony’s stablecoin could launch in Japan but circulate in the US if its reserve structure and operating conditions were sufficiently similar to those set out in the US law.

But Sony chose the US as its launch jurisdiction.

It’s worth thinking about why it did so. The potential size of the US market for the Sony stablecoin is no doubt the main consideration.

But I expect there’s also the confidence that the US will continue to be more innovation-forward than most other countries.

Japan may have been first, but as far as I know, it only has two authorized stablecoins in circulation, only one of which is issued by a trust bank (SBI Shinsei Trust Bank, part of financial conglomerate SBI Holdings). What’s more, SBI Shinsei submitted its application in early March 2025, and the stablecoin only launched last month. The Japanese authorities are being careful.

There’s a lesson in here for regulators around the world focusing on caution over innovation: safety is important, but being too careful brings an opportunity cost, especially significant in a new field in which shaping consumer habits creates moats.

See also:

• Sony’s stablecoin: some interesting threads (Dec 2025)

• Sony’s blockchain backlash (Jan 2025)

• Sony’s crypto exchange: the convergence? (July 2024)

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.)

• Marlene Laruelle argues that we can’t fix the “crisis of liberalism” without first asking where it went wrong, why, and what we want it to be. Thought-provoking for sure, but what throws me is the framing of liberalism as something to be “fixed”, like a corporate culture or a political party. It’s a philosophy, which rarely conform to formulas rigid enough to be “reformed”, and which don’t have a central authority let alone a “marketing team” to communicate the changes. That said, it is a useful examination of why liberalism lost its lustre. (Liberalism, Heal Thyself, Persuasion)

• We know that AI is coming for jobs – but what will it do to the structure of work? Derek Thompson looks at how income distribution is changing as AI makes it easier for people to work for themselves. Great for opportunity and probably life satisfaction – but there are social downsides as more of us become isolated solo-preneurs, and economic ones as the US tax base changes. (It’s the Best Time Ever to Become a Millionaire by Working Alone, Derek Thompson – paywall)

• One of the many uplifting memories from this World Cup will of course be the impact Scotland made on the US, not so much via their game as via the enthusiasm and charm of the fans. Ed West gives us a brief history of Brand Scotland, and how the Americans have fallen for it to the extent that the day the Scots left Boston in June was a day of mourning. (The triumph of Brand Scotland, The Wrong Side of History)

• I’m undecided on whether or not to see Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” – I was leaning towards no, but Ted Gioia’s account of the power of the story and its “orality” (meant to be heard) has me intrigued, not just for the images the spoken word can conjure, but also for the resulting music. (What You Won’t Learn About the Odyssey from a Movie, The Honest Broker – 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)

Don’t worry, no football photos today, although it is a pretty big football weekend for us in Spain.

Instead, in the hopes that you’ll join me in sending plenty of good vibes over to our team in New York, here are some iconic Spanish musicians:

Paco Lucía – Entre Dos Aguas

Jarabe de Palo – La Flaca

Joaquín Sabina – 19 Días y 500 noches

C. Tangana and Antonio Carmona – Me Maten

Rosalía – Despechá

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!!!

Production note: As I mentioned earlier this month, my plan is to take days off here and there this summer, rather than the typical extended holiday. My fuzzy brain is pleading for a break from deadlines, so I’m going to start with next Thursday-Saturday. I have no set plans other than to catch up on reading, get ahead of some writing, pootle around a few air-conditioned museums, perfect my watermelon cocktails, that sort of thing. Bliss.

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Where are stablecoins most used?

Allium filters stablecoin volumes for non-economic actions such as inter-group transfers – it turns out that most is outside the US, with 52% in Asia-Pacific and 26% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The leading destinations are South Korea, Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey, places with currency pressure, active remittance corridors, or both.

→ For more, download Allium’s State of Onchain Finance report: https://allium.so/reports/state-of-onchain-finance-q2-26

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

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

• Visa’s stablecoin platform: more of the same?

• Markets: ominous rumblings

• Podcast recommendations

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

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

Visa’s stablecoin platform

I’ve written before about the evolution of the stablecoin narrative over the years from “product” (USDT and USDC) to “service” (white-labelling, transfer coordination) and now to “infrastructure”. We don’t hear so much about stablecoins as a “thing” anymore, nor do we talk about how easy launching your own stablecoin can be. Rather, the attention-grabbing news these days is more about platforms, packaging the stablecoin products and services and putting them where the clients already are.

Yesterday, we got another key example, with the unveiling of the Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP), designed to enable the payment company’s enterprise clients to:

• mint and burn the OUSD stablecoin,

• create and manage wallets on Ethereum, Solana and Tempo,

• handle compliant self-custody,

• and send OUSD around the Visa network.

At first glance, it’s potentially powerful – it would in theory embed stablecoins into existing payment flows with only minor operational tweaks, while still ensuring compliance and security. For large enterprise, brand name matters, and Visa is trusted.

Not only that, it also has extensive reach, which itself ensures adoption – even the most convenient payment option is not convenient if your counterparties don’t accept it.

Less clear is how VSP fits into Visa’s other blockchain initiatives.

Read more

Hey everyone! I hope you’re all doing well, and braced for the “peak” of summer which I’m informed runs from today until the 15^th of August. Now is when my home city of Madrid really starts to empty as families head for the beach and youngsters take off for northern Europe, leaving us die-hard summer enthusiasts to enjoy a more peaceful urban atmosphere. People keep asking me where we’re going for the summer – for us, enjoying a quieter Madrid is the best treat of all.

Apologies for the late send again – I dove into the weeds of the DTCC tokenization platform and eventually had to come up for air as there’s too much going on there to fit into just one post. That’s another way of saying I didn’t get to all I hoped to today, but there’s more to come.

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Which is the preferred chain for stablecoin payments?

About 90% of stablecoin payment volume settles on Tron. Of this, B2B is taking a growing share, now up to around 36%. By number of transfers, though, consumers still send the vast majority.

→ For more, download Allium’s State of Onchain Finance report: https://allium.so/reports/state-of-onchain-finance-q2-26

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Why DTCC’s tokenization test matters

• Term of the day: DTCC

• Markets: over-confidence again

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:

Why DTCC’s tokenization test matters

Yesterday, the DTCC held what is arguably the most consequential tokenization event to date.

It trialled its tokenized asset platform with over 30 big-name participants from both traditional and digital asset finance.

Some of the firms involved: BlackRock, JPMorgan, BNP Paribas, Société Générale, State Street, Goldman Sachs, CME Group, Nasdaq, NYSE, Vanguard, Invesco, S&P Dow Jones Indices, Circle, BitGo, Flow Traders, Ondo, Talos, Chainlink and I could go on.

Over the span of a few hours they tested various tokenization functionalities: securities lending, pledging collateral, delivery-versus-payment trades, margin workflows and more. The chains used were DTCC’s own permissioned chain (based on EVM-compatible Hyperledger Besu) and Digital Asset’s Canton network.

By “consequential”, I don’t mean that I expect this to lead to the rapid tokenization of everything. That will be a slow, careful process spanning perhaps a decade.

Rather, this is a big deal because trials like this grease the wheels for a deeper understanding of how new rails can fit into existing market structures.

And there are few better positioned to bring the traditional finance industry together in such a trial than DTCC – if you’re not familiar with its size and scope, I offer an introduction below.

Also, I’ve written before about why its blockchain platform launch is so fascinating – it’s not about yet another incumbent struggling to stay relevant in a changing landscape. (Last week, I wrote about SWIFT’s blockchain launch).

The DTCC trial is yet another signal, a particularly loud one, that tokenization is moving in from the fringes.

Yesterday was a well-promoted test, not the DTCC platform launch – that is expected later this year. Before then, I’ll have time to explain how it works and how it evolves the DTCC’s role.

But to give you an idea of the scope, I’m going to cheat a bit and quote myself from a previous post (which feels weird):

“The huge deal here is the confirmation that the tokenized assets will have the same legal recognition and protections as their traditional counterparts, serviced and housed by the main depository for the largest capital market in the world. …

An even bigger deal, however, for those of us fascinated by the changing market structure, is the twist in the DTCC’s traditional market role. By offering a tokenization service, it is evolving from service provider to issuer. For now, the tokenization will be of existing assets, and it can be argued that this is not new issuance but a service in line with its industry role. But the platform will essentially be creating new assets, albeit linked. That’s new.

And the DTCC’s tokenization service will compete with similar services offered by some of its owners, such as JPMorgan, Citi and others. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.”

See also:

• SWIFT and the importance of connectors (July 2026)

• DTCC and the incumbents vs innovators debate (Dec 2025)

• DTCC’s stablecoin (June 2025)

• DTCC’s onchain NAV test (June 2024)

Term of the day: DTCC

Read more

Hello everyone! I hope you’re all having a good summer so far.

Apologies for the late send today – a fuzzy day, because WE WON ⚽ 🎉, Spain is in the World Cup finals and last night the racket on the street below my bedroom window went on until the early morning hours. Epic. Happy to be sleep-deprived.

If you missed yesterday’s Monetary Forces livestream with Izabella Kaminska, you can catch it here. I talked about how stablecoins can create money – I’ll expand on that below.

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Where are stablecoins most used?

Allium filters stablecoin volumes for non-economic actions such as inter-group transfers – it turns out that most is outside the US, with 52% in Asia-Pacific and 26% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The leading destinations are South Korea, Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey, places with currency pressure, active remittance corridors, or both.

→ For more, download Allium’s State of Onchain Finance report: https://allium.so/reports/state-of-onchain-finance-q2-26

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• How stablecoins create money

• Macro: CPI cooling

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 stablecoins create money

In yesterday’s Monetary Forces livestream with Izabella Kaminska, I tackled the issue of how stablecoins create money.

I’m going to give myself some points for being brave here, as I am not a monetary expert and knew I’d be presenting to people who understand this field much better than I do (Izabella herself is definitely one of them). Indeed, I was feeling particularly stupid over the weekend as I stared at a confusing mosaic of T-charts with assets on one side and liabilities on the other (I even tried turning them upside down, it didn’t help…).

But I think I eventually got the gist of the moving pieces. And I’m going to trust in the expertise of Claudio Borio, former Head of the Monetary and Economic Department at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) – we can assume he knows a thing or two about monetary plumbing.

In a paper co-authored with Piti Disyatat and Nikola Tarashev called “Stablecoins and the exorbitant privilege of money creation” and published by European think tank the Centre for Economic Policy Research, or CEPR, Borio lays out how stablecoins add to the money supply.

Below, I’ll summarize the mechanism by which they do so.

First, though, it’s worth underscoring why this matters: most seem to assume that stablecoins are money-neutral. They’re 1:1 backed, no lending involved, therefore the logical conclusion is there’s no new money creation. Borio et. al. explain why this is incorrect. I’m perplexed as to why the banks are not up in arms about this – we know they’re energetically protesting the potential deposit flight towards yield-bearing stablecoins, but they’re fighting in totally the wrong arena.

The basics

Read more

• the overlooked business model, regulatory and jurisdictional significance of Sony’s trust charter

• what does SWIFT’s blockchain platform actually change?

• stablecoins included in monetary aggregates (per the Miran/Roubini/Ireland Hudson Bay paper: A Return to Monetarism)

• and how stablecoins add to the money supply - Noelle dives into this CEPR paper by Claudio Borio, Piti Disyatat and Nikola Tarashev: Stablecoins and the exorbitant privilege of money creation

Hello everyone! Happy Bastille Day to my French readers – and, well, go Spain… ⚽🎉

Last week, Substack informed me that I was #36 bestseller in Spain, and this week I’m #35, which is… odd… but I appreciate it, thank you all!!

✨ Monetary Forces: later TODAY, Izabella Kaminska and I pick at the key headlines that paint the picture of how technology is changing finance, and I’ll talk about how stablecoins increase the money supply.

Tuesday (today!), July 14 @ 10am EST / 4pm CEST / 3pm BST – livestream link: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/275514

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Where are stablecoins most used?

Allium filters stablecoin volumes for non-economic actions such as inter-group transfers – it turns out that most is outside the US, with 52% in Asia-Pacific and 26% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The leading destinations are South Korea, Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey, places with currency pressure, active remittance corridors, or both.

→ For more, download Allium’s State of Onchain Finance report: https://allium.so/reports/state-of-onchain-finance-q2-26

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Sony’s stablecoin: the bigger implications

• Term of the day: De novo entity

• Markets: yikes

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!! ❤

If you’re not, you could be getting a lot more out of these newsletters!

WHAT I’M WATCHING:

Sony’s stablecoin: the bigger implications

Last week, Sony got conditional approval from the OCC for a national trust bank in the US for the express purpose of issuing and managing a dollar stablecoin, with target launch in 2027.

This is not just “another stablecoin” story, not at all. It goes much deeper, on three levels:

Read more

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a great weekend and are ready for a big macro week.

✨ Monetary Forces: tomorrow, Izabella Kaminska and I pick at the key headlines that paint the picture of how technology is changing finance, and I’ll talk about how stablecoins increase the money supply. Come join us!

Tuesday, July 14 @ 10am EST / 4pm CEST / 3pm BST – livestream link: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/275514

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

Where are stablecoins most used?

Allium filters stablecoin volumes for non-economic actions such as inter-group transfers – it turns out that most of this economic activity is outside the US, with 52% in Asia-Pacific and 26% in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

The leading destinations are South Korea, Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey, places with currency pressure, active remittance corridors, or both.

→ For more, download Allium’s State of Onchain Finance report: https://allium.so/reports/state-of-onchain-finance-q2-26

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• Coming up this week: US macro, Fed speeches

• Monday musings: manipulation and the Chat Control lever

• Term of the day: Directive vs regulation

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:

A packed week for macro data and Fed speeches – I counted 13 public appearances from US central bank officials over the next five days, including Warsh’s testimony.

Earlier, the two-day WebX 2026 blockchain event in Tokyo kicked off with an address from Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, and the first day closed with a keynote from Japan’s Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama. There were also keynotes from Japan’s Minister of the Economy, Trade and Industry, and the Minister for Digital Transformation and Cybersecurity as well as panel participation from high-level executives from big global and Asian banks, energy companies and market infrastructure providers. According to reports, it has attracted around 15,000 attendees, which would make it one of the largest Asian crypto events of the year.

Also today, OPEC publishes its monthly oil report.

On Tuesday, we get the US CPI data for June. Consensus expectations point to the first month-on-month decline in the headline index since 2020, largely due to the drop in the oil price. The year-on-year increase is forecast to slow from 4.2% to 3.8%. The increase in the core index, ex-food and energy, is expected to hold steady for June at 0.2% month-on-month and 2.9% year-on-year.

(chart via Bloomberg)

On Tuesday at 10am EST, Kevin Warsh makes his first appearance before Congress as Federal Reserve Chair in what will be two days of gruelling testimony. First the House Financial Services Committee and then the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee) will no doubt try again and again to tease out some forward guidance, which he is unlikely to give.

We also get China trade data, with exports expected to show a slight deceleration in year-on-year growth, but to still impressive levels.

The US kicks off Q2 earnings season, with results from JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs – I have never been happier to not be a banking analyst, that sounds exhausting.

And, even more important, Spain plays France in the World Cup semifinals.

On Wednesday, we get the US Producer Price Index (PPI) data for June: as with the CPI, the drop in energy prices should drag the month-on-month growth into negative territory, while the year-on-year increase slows from 6.5% to 6.2%. Core PPI, ex-food and energy, is forecast to have decelerated slightly to 0.3%, but the year-on-year increase is expected to accelerate from 4.9% to 5.2%.

We also get some key China data: consensus forecasts suggest the annualized growth in Q2 GDP has decelerated from 5.0% to 4.5%; June industrial production year-on-year growth is expected to have accelerated slightly to 4.6%; June retail sales are forecast to have declined year-on-year by 0.1%, less than May’s 0.6% year-on-year decline.

The Federal Reserve publishes its Beige Book, which takes the business temperature through interviews with businesses in each Fed region.

And Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, BNY, ASML and others report earnings.

Thursday brings US retail sales for June, forecast to show a notable month-on-month slowdown from 0.9% to 0.2%

Netflix, State Street, US Bancorp and others report earnings.

On Friday, we get US import and export prices for June (the year-on-year growth in May was 6.7% and 11.2%, respectively), as well as industrial production, expected to show some acceleration.

And, we get the preliminary July consumer survey report from the University of Michigan.

Monday musings: manipulation and the Chat Control lever

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

Social media manipulation can come from unexpected directions.

Read more

The dog days of summer indeed…

(This is Milo – he is not a fan of summer, can’t imagine why.)

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 ✨

We know stablecoin volumes are climbing, but what about the rate of increase?

Allium research shows that, over the past two years, supply has doubled but the rate of growth is slowing, the signature of a market moving from a land grab into steady infrastructure development.

→ For more, download Allium’s State of Onchain Finance report: https://allium.so/reports/state-of-onchain-finance-q2-26

In this newsletter:

• The slippery slope of censorship II

• Do stablecoins deserve privacy?

• Assorted links: climate pragmatism, alcohol, the Statue of Liberty, AI slop, video roundup

• Weekend: the glory and humanity of soccer

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!! ❤

Podcasts

📽 If you missed any of this week’s livestreams, you can catch them here:

• Monetary Forces, with Izabella Kaminska – we discussed OUSD, deposit tokens and liquidity

• Press Publish, with Marvin Barth – a fun chat about how and why Marvin does what he does, with some great anecdotes and good advice for writers anywhere, of any age

COMING UP:

✨ Monetary Forces: next Tuesday, Izabella Kaminska and I pick at the key headlines that paint the picture of how technology is changing finance, and I’ll talk about how stablecoins increase the money supply.

Tuesday, July 14 @ 10am EST / 4pm CEST / 3pm BST – livestream link: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/275514

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

Monday, July 6

• Coming up this week: NATO, PMIs

• Monday musings: The slippery slope of censorship II

• Macro: US jobs

Tuesday, July 7

• How can deposit tokens be made more liquid?

• Podcast episode recommends

Wednesday, July 8

• Do stablecoins deserve privacy?

• Markets: off the rails

• Term of the day: crack spreads

Thursday, July 9

• Poland, China and the new monetary order

• Term of the day: phosphate

Friday, July 10

• SWIFT and the importance of connectors

• Warsh’s heavy-hitting task forces

• Term of the day: Count Binface

The slippery slope of censorship II

It couldn’t possibly happen here.

I’m talking about censorship, which is a feature of daily life in totalitarian societies run by dictators – we know this because we read our local headlines, we watch the exile interviews, we’ve read the novels or the history books, we’ve seen the movies that depict conformity bred in fear. Censorship happens across the border or in lands far away, not in Western societies that pride themselves on their hard-won “liberal values”.

But I’ve unfortunately had occasion over the years to write about how, yes, it can happen “here”, wherever that may be – there are examples on both sides of the ocean. And the scary part is the lack of coverage and of vociferous protest.

There are exceptions, of course, and brave pockets of outrage that have achieved some redress. But the march of speech control finds new paths, and it does so cloaked in law-abiding virtue, convincing most of us that it’s all fine, smart, sensible, necessary for protection. That’s how we let it in, how we get used to it.

In sum, censorship takes root when it’s sold as “for our own good”, when we’re ok with the adverse consequences happening to people we don’t much like anyway.

Last Thursday, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) dropped a ruling that is ringing alarm bells.

Some background:

By now, we’re all familiar with the seemingly endless stream of sanctions packages coming from the EU, designed to hurt Russia economically and bring about the end of the war in Ukraine. The Council recently adopted package #21.

Less well-known is that the list of prohibited entities includes around 27 media outlets – the sanctions law prohibits any EU “operator” from retransmitting content from these outlets, no matter what the content is.

What is an “operator”, you ask? Good question. The EU Commission’s FAQs on the media bans clarifies:

“the prohibition applies to any person or entity or body exercising a commercial or professional activity that broadcasts or enables, facilitates or otherwise contributes to broadcast the content at issue.”

This can be understood to mean any broadcaster, platform or business with a commercial or strategic relationship with a sanctioned entity.

In 2023, three private German individuals shared videos from one of the banned sites – RT Germany (part of the “Russia Today” network) – on four occasions. They did so on a non-commercial publicly available website set up by one of them, with his name as the url. The three were arrested and, given legal doubts as to whether sanctions law applies to private individuals operating without consideration for profit, the German authorities referred the case to the CJEU.

Last week, the Court ruled that private individuals operating without consideration for profit are “operators” and therefore bound by the sanctions law – even though EU guidance suggests otherwise. The decision now goes back to the German courts for a ruling on the case. If found guilty, the three individuals face a prison sentence of up to five years.

To many, their guilt may seem obvious – the non-commercial website was supported by donations, and it’s not hard to imagine these coming from interested parties (perhaps from outside the EU) in exchange for a wink-wink promise to share certain content. That sounds like a sanctions work-around and a conduit for the dissemination of pro-Russia propaganda.

But peel back the layers here, and the precedent should at least furrow the brow of anyone who cares about freedom of speech.

The key issues:

1) The hypocrisy of the suppression

Article 11 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, adopted in 2000, says:

“Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. The freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.” (my emphasis)

So, the CJEU is defying not just the EU Commission’s guidance, but also the EU’s Charter.

Of course, rights get suspended in wartime, that we can understand. But the EU is not at war.

2) The reasonableness of the suppression

We can get behind the idea of slowing the spread of propaganda, especially given how effective it can be at shaping the public’s views on entities the state views as enemies.

But what about protecting individuals’ rights to share content? If Russia Today were to show a compelling clip of Cape Verde’s second goal against Argentina, why should that not be shared by enthusiastic fans in Europe? Would those that do face jail time?

Am I violating EU sanctions by even writing about this?

3) The expansion of the purpose of censorship

Typically, censorship is about stopping the spread of undesirable information. That itself sounds pretty bad for those that value the idea of free speech even when you disagree with it – but stopping all speech from a source is a suppression escalation.

In this interpretation, it doesn’t matter what is being said, it matters who is saying it. Identity is the crime, not the speech itself. Extend that train of thought further out, and things can get sinister.

4) The expansion of the scope of sanctions

Sanctions started out as an economic chokepoint, a way to starve countries and businesses that are a threat to national security from the flow of funds that could finance aggression.

They do so by mandating the severance of any commercial or strategic relationship with the targeted entity. Fine, fair enough. But the three German individuals in this case had no relationship with Russia Today – they just reposted publicly available content on a blog.

Are sanctions really evolving into a tool for information control?

5) The expansion of Justice

The Court is telling the drafters of the legislation “you are incorrect in your own interpretation of the law you drafted”, which could be read as “you didn’t go far enough”.

True, we can argue that the Court’s job is to interpret the law – but wouldn’t the drafters have a helpful idea of what they meant? In this case, the Court is making the law.

That’s not its job.

Not the only recent example

It’s true that not all censorship attempts are overlooked by public reaction – the fuss around the UK’s alarming approach to policing social media posts seems to have led to a softening (eventually, after several astonishingly egregious cases). But the government now wants all users to identify themselves in order to, cough, prove they’re over 16. Protest on that measure has been dimmed by understandable support for the mental health of Britain’s youth.

And a couple of weeks ago, the UK Minister for Creative Industries, Media and Arts published an open consultation on how the government should handle the fragmentation of the media landscape. The concern is that the authorities no longer control the message when anyone can be a “broadcaster”, and the assumption is that it should do so, for the public good.

“The government’s strong preference remains for industry-led, voluntary agreements to achieve increased prominence [for public service media (BBV, ITV, and other approved outlets)] in a sustainable and robust way that satisfies all parties. … However, should these partnerships not go far enough in delivering our objectives, we would need to consider legislating.” (my emphasis)

In other words, the algorithms running platforms such as YouTube will need to give preference to “approved media”. They’re quite serious about this.

Why it matters

The easiest reaction to cries of “censorship!!” is to assume the measures and therefore the protests have nothing to do with us – we wouldn’t be so stupid as to repost Russian content, would we? And what’s wrong with seeing a bit more of the BBC than we otherwise would?

The reason to care is that it doesn’t stop with just these measures – there will be others. Greater control is a natural instinct for governments eager to hang onto power.

It also doesn’t stop with communication. Financial access is a powerful lever that can be easily pulled when everything is digital. Controlling speech is a short slip away from controlling how we use our money. And if we don’t conform, if we’re doing something the authorities don’t like, our access to it can be curtailed.

But, of course, it could never happen here. And it would never happen to us, right?

This risk, which is sadly becoming more real, is one of the reasons I do what I do, why I care about the crypto industry and why I believe there will always be a baseline demand for privacy-preserving sovereign financial solutions. Those that insist Bitcoin is “useless” are smugly assuming they will never become a target – they may be right, but they can’t make similar assumptions about their children or their children’s friends.

Truly decentralized crypto assets are insurance – and their existence will end up impacting the balance of power between governments and citizens as the reach of the former into the lives of the latter inevitably extends. The thing about insurance, as I’ve written before, is that you may not like it, but you just might one day be glad you have some.

(NOTE: the EU Chat Control vote took place after I published this on Monday, but how it was handled definitely adds to the list of loud signals – I’ll be commenting on that next week)

See also:

• AI, crypto and democracy in the rear-view mirror (June 2026)

• What matters? (Jan 2026)

• The slippery slope of censorship (Dec 2025)

• Think before you post (Aug 2024)

🌻If you find this newsletter at all worthwhile, would you mind sharing it with a friend or colleague and nudging them to subscribe? I’d appreciate it!

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Do stablecoins deserve privacy?

I finally had time last weekend to watch Gita Gopinath’s presentation at the recent BIS Annual General Meeting. And wow, is financial privacy misunderstood in the halls of power.

The gist of the presentation is that stablecoins allow anonymity, and that’s not good. That is the sort of conclusion we expect from someone steeped in global governance (until she left last year, Gopinath was the First Deputy Managing Director for the IMF) – but there is nuance here worth unpacking.

What most stands out in her speech is the conditioning lens through which she looks at anonymity – surveillance is good because it prevents crime which is bad.

I’m going to resist the temptation to call out the narrowness of this lens (at least for now) and instead focus on her arguments.

Perhaps the most egregious has to do with the nature of authority.

Policy makers deserve congratulations, she suggests, for how successful they have been over the past few decades in eroding the use of anonymity-protecting cash. It hasn’t been easy, she stresses, and the cost has been considerable: the annual expenditure on financial crime compliance in the US and Canada is around $60 billion – but, we’re reminded, “that’s a choice that we’ve made as a society”.

Is it, though? The bodies that set the compliance standards – mainly the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), with input from the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS), the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the Financial Stability Board (FSB) and others – are not elected by “society”. None of them. They are appointed by elites, so it’s a stretch to say that “we” made that choice. Rather, it was made for us, and we bear the cost.

It’s jarring to see former unelected officials assume they have a popular mandate to impose unpopular measures and then tell us that we wanted them all along.

Moving on…

Gopinath points out that more insight into who is moving money, and where, is not just about stopping money laundering (just as well because it doesn’t) – it’s also about more tax collection, stronger sanctions efficacy, useful insight into cross-border flows, all essential for authorities to feel they’re doing their jobs well.

And here come stablecoins to unwind their good work.

To be fair, she does acknowledge that self-custody does not mean criminal intent – again, just as well. But, as the volume of stablecoins in circulation grows, so will the volume held in self-custody. And, she implies, more self-custody will lead to more crime.

So, of course we should want less undocumented self-custody, because combating crime is good.

We’re shown some charts of the proportion of stablecoin balances held in self-custody, relative to how much is held on centralized platforms that conduct robust KYC/AML checks.

(chart via Gopinath, BIS)

Holy cow, look at all that potential crime.

It gets worse. At one point, Gopinath said:

“Stablecoins are the predominant form of identified illicit activity that we have.”

This mistake was probably inadvertent (we can hope), as at the time she was showing a chart of the weight of various crypto assets in identified crime but forgot to say “within crypto assets”. Still, there is a bias in that slip and the detail is lost in the soundbite.

Gopinath doesn’t go as far as suggesting that self-custody be banned. But it should be regulated. In the post-speech panel, former French central bank Governor François Villeroy de Galhau vehemently agreed: self-custody should be regulated. Of course, neither suggested ways to avoid self-custody regulation pushing more stablecoins into the shadows – that’s the regulators’ problem.

But wait, stablecoins are good for US bond yields! Gopinath recognizes that more stablecoins outstanding means greater demand for the US Treasuries that are needed as backing reserves; this should translate into lower interest rates which is good for the global economy.

But she questions whether the lost tax revenue from weaker control is worth it. Roughly $732 billion of tax was evaded last year, we’re told, equivalent to 2.4% of US GDP. Add evasion of state and local taxes, the loss climbs to 3.3% of GDP.

Surely she’s not implying that more surveillance would eliminate tax evasion? Reduce it a bit, perhaps, but eliminate it? I can see how that might look possible on paper. And we can perhaps assume, with respect, that she doesn’t know many tax evaders.

The overall takeaway is the level of gaslighting in ivory tower academic approaches to the trade-off between privacy and crime prevention, almost always coming from people who have never had to worry about authority overreach or threats of exclusion. “It’s for your own good”, we’re told, “don’t you want to suppress crime?”

There’s also the insincerity in the lip-service paid to those who want some financial privacy: “you may have valid reasons for choosing to hold your own assets off-platform, but we need to see what you’re doing anyway”.

And there’s the short-sightedness that fails to realize the reason so many hold tokens in self-custody is precisely because they don’t trust the authorities. Assuming we wouldn’t find alternative solutions using open-source code on decentralized networks is, well, I could say naïve but instead I’ll go with blinkered. What Gopinath sees as an obstacle to the de-anonymization of money is more a consequence of the de-anonymization of money.

This isn’t regulatory whack-a-mole, where you solve one problem only to have it pop up somewhere else. Rather, the image that comes to mind is of an authority smugly thinking it can get everyone to drink from the official, expensive tap by filling in local wells, not realizing people have shovels with which they can dig new ones.

But at least the authority can be seen to be doing its job, even if it isn’t.

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.)

• A mesmerizing graphic report from the New York Times on how history, art and engineering came together to represent Liberty at scale. (The Most Iconic American Artwork Is the Hardest to See – The New York Times)

• Quico Toro, who knows quite a bit about climate change, asks why we are spending so much time and money on panic and prevention, leading to ineffectual waste – and not enough on adaptation. (Climate hazards are unlimited, our resources aren’t – One Percent Brighter)

• Yay, Ted Gioia has dropped one of his video roundups – I love that he doesn’t follow a pattern or theme, just shares what he’s currently liking, and you always find some gems. (12 YouTube Videos I’m Enjoying Right Now – Honest Broker, paywall)

• Derek Thompson likes a cocktail (so do I), but he also wants to live to a ripe old age (so do I), so he dove into the science of whether or not drinking is actually bad for you. It turns out that yes, it is, but not drinking is probably worse. Put differently, the health benefits of having fun and relaxing with friends more than offset the body stress from metabolizing a moderate amount of ethanol. Drinking too much, though, yes, that will kill you. (Is This the End of Booze? – Derek Thompson, paywall)

• AI content detection app Pangram has published findings on how much AI-generated content (known to you and me as “slop”) takes up space and attention on social media platforms. The short summary is: a lot. One in four longform posts are fully AI-generated – on LinkedIn, the percentage goes up to 40% (ugh). Of all detected AI-generated posts, two thirds are on LinkedIn. Only half of X articles were written without AI-generated content. I mean, we all guessed this, right? Sobering, though, to see just how much of our feed has been taken over. (AI Content Is Everywhere on Social Media, Especially LinkedIn – Pangram)

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)

The World Cup is just once every four years, so you’ll understand that I get a bit emotional at seeing the breadth of unity and competition, not exactly everywhere but pretty close. I find the actual games way too stressful to sit through, but I love the people angle – the fans, the players, their families, the team support, the neighbourhoods, the jubilation, the tears.

Today I’m going to share a small handful of the moving photos Reuters has been publishing (their photographers are so good), focusing on ones that highlight the humanity and the power of the sport.

Nathan Ray Seebeck (Argentina vs Cape Verde)

Brian Snyder (Morocco fans)

Mohamed Abd El Ghany (Egyptian fans)

Vincent West (Pamplona, Spain)

Dylan Martinez (Norway team)

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 have good things planned for the weekend and that the weather wherever you are is not too extreme.

I loved my chat with Marvin Barth yesterday for Press Publish – if you missed it, you can see the playback here.

PUBLISHED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ✨ ALLIUM ✨

We know stablecoin volumes are climbing, but what about the rate of increase?

Allium research shows that, over the past two years, supply has doubled but the rate of growth is slowing, the signature of a market moving from a land grab into steady infrastructure development.

→ For more, download Allium’s State of Onchain Finance report: https://allium.so/reports/state-of-onchain-finance-q2-26

IN THIS NEWSLETTER

• SWIFT and the importance of connectors

• Warsh’s heavy-hitting task forces

• Term of the day: Count Binface

(The way the EU Chat Control vote was handled is shocking, but I’ll write about that on Monday – it’s more nuanced than the headlines you might have seen imply… but still a very bad omen for what’s coming.)

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:

SWIFT and the importance of connectors

There are few traditional financial institutions more vulnerable to blockchain disruption than SWIFT, the global transaction messaging platform that connects over 11,500 banks. After all, onchain transactions in theory include both the message and the transfer of value – when value moves directly from A to B, anywhere in the world, you don’t need a separate messaging service.

But that only applies to global, public networks. When you’re looking at a mosaic of permissioned ledgers, you need a coordination layer.

To its credit, SWIFT was quick to see this coming, and knew it had to build itself a role in this evolving landscape. It launched its first distributed ledger proof-of-concept in 2018, and over the years has iterated and tested various applications, eventually landing on a platform to handle cross-border transfers of deposit tokens.

Since then, things have moved relatively fast. The decision was revealed at the entity’s Sibos conference last year, the design was completed by March, and yesterday the platform went live with 17 banks from six continents, including Citi, HSBC, BNP Paribas, BNY, Standard Chartered, MUFG, ANZ, Wells Fargo, DBS, First Abu Dhabi Bank and other big names. It runs on Besu, an open-source permissioned EVM-compatible blockchain.

It’s a clever concept. I’ve written before about the problems with deposit token interoperability which impacts their liquidity and therefore also utility. Consortia and local networks can help, but will always be limited in scope.

Read more

Marvin has a long and storied background, including roles at the Fed, the BIS, Citi and others too numerous to mention (and I found out he also has been baking bread for years). He is now the author of Thematic Markets and Seriously, Marvin?! as well as co-host, with investor Mark Farrington, of the excellent Thematic Edge podcast.

I came across Marvin’s work last year via a wonderful series he did on Global Entropy which came at the intersections I’ve been covering but from a breadth and depth of learning I could only aspire to. It wasn’t just the big picture lens that grabbed me – it was also the excellent writing, the energy, and the tone. Unlike many, Marvin does not write like someone who thinks he knows everything, or wants us to think he knows everything (even though he gets an astonishing number of non-consensus calls right) – he writes like an explorer, enjoying the journey, sharing what he knows along the way.

Subscribe to Marvin’s newsletters:

Thematic Markets

Differentiated, value-added insights into the themes driving the global political economy and markets.

By Marvin Barth

Seriously, Marvin?!

Where the consensus ends and curiosity begins.

By Marvin Barth

DISCLAIMER: Neither myself nor my guests give trading ideas, and nothing we 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.