Good morning everybody.
Bitcoin is back below $78,000, and the macro picture isn’t helping. The 10-year Treasury yield has climbed to roughly 4.87%, putting us uncomfortably close to the 5% level I’ve been watching.
But some of today’s biggest stories aren’t really about Bitcoin’s price. They’re about traditional finance increasingly adopting the infrastructure crypto spent years building.
Nasdaq is investing in Kraken’s parent company. PayPal wants to help companies launch stablecoins. Visa’s stablecoin settlement business is exploding. MetaMask is becoming its own standalone company. And tokenized equities are creating a fight over what it actually means to own a stock on a blockchain.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin and Ethereum developers are taking quantum computing seriously enough to start preparing now rather than waiting to find out exactly when the threat becomes real.
Nasdaq, PayPal and Visa Keep Moving Onto Crypto Rails
Nasdaq is investing $100 million in Payward, Kraken’s parent company, as the companies deepen their partnership around tokenized equities and blockchain-based trading infrastructure.
That follows Payward’s work with the London Stock Exchange Group to bring tokenized versions of major UK-listed stocks onto its xStocks platform.
This is the direction I’ve been talking about.
Traditional financial institutions aren’t necessarily replacing themselves with crypto. They’re increasingly looking at blockchain and saying, “Can we use this infrastructure to make our existing businesses better?”
We’re seeing something similar with PayPal.
PayPal is reportedly developing infrastructure that would allow companies to issue customized stablecoins while using PayPal USD as the underlying settlement infrastructure.
Years ago, Andreas Antonopoulos predicted that eventually everybody would have their own coin.
Well, here we are.
We went from a few thousand altcoins to tens of thousands, then meme-coin platforms made it possible to create enormous numbers of tokens almost instantly. Now we’re moving toward a world where companies can create branded digital currencies using somebody else’s stablecoin and settlement infrastructure underneath them.
Visa’s numbers might be even more interesting.
According to the figures discussed today, Visa says its stablecoin settlement volume has passed $20 billion, more than 15 times higher year over year. Visa also says on-chain credit infrastructure is increasingly being used to finance card-settlement obligations, reducing financing costs by as much as 30% for some programs. One participant, Rain, has reportedly financed roughly $2 billion across more than 20,000 on-chain borrowing events without a reported default.
That’s not somebody buying a meme coin.
That’s blockchain infrastructure being used to move money, finance settlement and potentially lower costs inside an existing global payments system.
MetaMask is also changing.
Consensys plans to split into two independent businesses by the end of 2026, with the existing company becoming MetaMask while a new Consensys focuses on institutional Ethereum infrastructure. MetaMask says it has more than 100 million downloads across 190 countries and has processed trillions of dollars in cumulative transaction value.
The new MetaMask wants to move beyond being primarily a browser wallet and expand further into self-custody, payments, savings and investing.
That’s a much bigger business if they can pull it off.
Tokenized Stocks Are Creating a New Ownership Question
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev and AMC CEO Adam Aron are publicly arguing about tokenized stocks, and I think the disagreement points toward something the industry needs to explain much more clearly.
Not every tokenized stock is the same.
Some structures can represent ownership of an underlying security. Others may simply give you synthetic economic exposure to its price.
That’s a huge distinction.
If I’m buying something that represents actual ownership, I may expect shareholder rights. I own part of the company. Depending on the structure, that can mean voting rights and other benefits associated with holding the underlying security.
But maybe I don’t care about any of that.
Maybe I’m a trader who simply wants exposure to whether AMC, Nvidia or another stock goes up or down. If that’s the product I knowingly purchased, I don’t necessarily have a problem with it.
I think these are simply two different products.
The important thing is making it completely clear which one you’re buying.
This is also why the CLARITY Act remains important.
Crypto companies and banking groups are intensifying their lobbying ahead of the expected September 15 procedural fight. Crypto companies argue that clearer rules are necessary if tokenization and blockchain infrastructure are going to continue expanding in the United States. Banks are pushing back against provisions they believe could increase competition from stablecoins and digital-asset platforms.
I don’t want to see this stalled again.
If September 15 makes it clear that nothing is going to happen before the midterms, then I think Fairshake and the broader crypto political operation are going to have to decide what they’re willing to do about it.
Do they pull support from politicians who won’t move the legislation?
Do they actually spend against them?
I don’t know.
But crypto spent enormous amounts of money trying to elect politicians who said they wanted clearer rules. Eventually, the industry is going to expect something in return.
Get this shit done.
Bitcoin and Ethereum Are Preparing for Quantum Before the Deadline Arrives
Bitcoin and Ethereum developers are accelerating work on post-quantum security.
Ethereum is targeting a quantum-resistant base layer by December 2029, while Bitcoin developers are working on proposals including BIP-360 and BIP-361 aimed at introducing post-quantum signatures and creating a path away from cryptography that could eventually become vulnerable.
The important point isn’t that somebody can crack Bitcoin today.
They can’t.
The concern is migration time.
You have millions of wallets, exposed public keys, enormous amounts of value and an entire global network that would need a path toward safer cryptography. You don’t start planning that migration on the morning somebody announces a quantum computer capable of attacking your existing system.
And I’m skeptical whenever somebody confidently tells me that we know exactly what quantum computers will or won’t be capable of in 2029.
We don’t.
IBM’s public roadmap is pushing toward increasingly large, fault-tolerant systems. But raw qubit counts aren’t the real issue. What matters is whether researchers can create enough error-corrected logical qubits and keep them stable long enough to perform useful cryptographic attacks.
Technology doesn’t always improve in a smooth line.
Sometimes you get incremental improvements for years. Then somebody solves a major engineering problem and suddenly the capabilities jump.
AI could accelerate that process too.
You think nobody is pointing increasingly capable AI systems at quantum error correction, hardware design, materials science and algorithms?
Of course they are.
That doesn’t mean quantum computers will break Bitcoin in 2029.
It means pretending we know with certainty that they won’t is unnecessary when we can start preparing now.
AI Makes the Security Race Even More Complicated
This connects directly to what I’ve been saying about GPT-6 Astra and AGI.
My opinion remains that we’re already entering AGI territory.
I understand that AGI has competing definitions. I’m not presenting my definition as some universally accepted technical threshold.
But look at what these systems can increasingly do: research across domains, operate computers, write software, find vulnerabilities and complete complicated multi-step work with decreasing human involvement.
And we’re looking at the public products.
I don’t believe the model released to consumers necessarily represents the absolute limit of what these companies have internally. I think companies build more capable systems, study them, test their limits, put guardrails around them and then figure out how to turn them into products.
That’s my opinion. I can’t prove what unreleased internal models exist.
I also find it extremely difficult to believe that governments aren’t deeply interested in this technology.
If you’re developing systems with significant implications for cybersecurity, intelligence, military applications and scientific research, I assume the NSA, CIA, Defense Department and other agencies want to understand exactly what those systems can do.
Again, that’s an inference.
But this is an arms race.
And when you combine increasingly autonomous AI with accelerating quantum research and financial systems built on cryptography, I think preparing early is considerably smarter than waiting for somebody to prove exactly where the breaking point is.
Other Notable Stories
Tether is moving deeper into traditional finance through a $400 million private-credit fund with Fasanara, structured around stablecoin settlement. It’s another example of stablecoins expanding beyond payments and into lending, treasury management and settlement infrastructure.
Kalshi is also putting prediction-market data onto DoubleZero, giving developers and institutional users another way to access market information through crypto-native infrastructure.
And then we have the Hunter Biden laptop meme coin.
It launched, briefly reached an enormous implied valuation and almost immediately collapsed approximately 99%. The project blamed sniper bots and thin initial liquidity and says it plans additional liquidity incentives and prediction-market-related token burns.
I don’t care.
I was hoping this was some kind of satire showing how stupid the meme-coin market has become.
Apparently not.
Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Crypto Prices
Bitcoin is sitting around $76,917, down approximately 3.3% over 24 hours and around 1% over the previous hour.
Ethereum is approximately $2,416, down 3.8%.
BNB is around $706, down 5.7%.
XRP is approximately $1.35, down 5.5%.
Solana is around $99.25, down approximately 5%.
TRON is approximately $0.338, essentially flat.
Hyperliquid is around $81.19, down approximately 6.2%.
Zcash is approximately $1,175, down around 7% today but still up roughly 40% over seven days.
Total Crypto Market Cap: approximately $2.62 trillion, down around 3.4%.
Fear & Greed: 68, Greed.
My Take
Bitcoin is having a bad day, and Treasury yields moving toward 5% certainly aren’t helping.
But I think today’s bigger story is what’s happening to the infrastructure around crypto.
Nasdaq is investing in Kraken’s parent company. PayPal wants companies issuing customized stablecoins. Visa is settling billions through stablecoin infrastructure. MetaMask wants to become a broader financial platform. Tokenized stocks are forcing us to define the difference between actual ownership and synthetic exposure.
At the same time, Bitcoin and Ethereum developers are preparing for quantum computing before quantum computing becomes an emergency.
That’s the correct approach.
I don’t know whether the quantum breakthrough happens in 2029, 2032 or later. Nobody does. I also don’t know exactly how quickly increasingly capable AI will accelerate quantum research.
What I do know is that waiting until cryptography is vulnerable to start preparing for new cryptography would be stupid.
Prepare now.