Franklin Templeton's Roger Bayston shared a wild story: One of the world's largest pension funds sees every investment opportunity on Earth, and Google still told them they're only seeing half the assets on the globe. Here's what that means for tokenization @FTDA_US

Wow. @Stripe is reportedly paying $7B+ for @OpenRouter, which, as it stands, is an off-chain alternative for the onchain micropayments stack the payments giant has been building. Stripe's machine payments docs set a 1-cent minimum for stablecoins, compared to 50 cents for cards, since cards can't handle 1-cent payments. That's the case for blockchain rails. But growth had been slow. Tempo, the chain Stripe co-built so machines could pay each other, collected $5.34 in fees over the past 24 hours, according to @DefiantNews Meanwhile on OpenRouter, millions of sub-cent AI charges get metered against one prepaid deposit, rather than settling onchain. Growth with this model has been explosive. OpenRouter’s homepage on Monday listed 200 trillion monthly tokens and 10 million users. OpenRouter's revenue is the credit card fee on those token purchases: 5.5% + $0.80 on cards, 5% on crypto. (Stripe had already processed those card payments as its PSP. Now it owns the fee entirely.) Again, all entirely off-chain. Maybe there's a plan to integrate OpenRouter to onchain flows, but without confirmation on that, it's a bit... awkward.

ROBINHOOD CHAIN OVERTAKES BASE ON DAUS @base spent years building distribution. @RobinhoodApp Chain needed three weeks to pass it on DAUs. The race for retail on-chain just got a lot more interesting. Read more here: thedefiant.io/news/defi/robi…

Here's my Top crypto podcasts. What's yours? geobrowser.io/r/2007127a803e…

We're seeing leaders emerge in the crowded SpaceX tokenized stocks space Just within Solana ecosystem we have - @Backpack issued SPCX - @OndoFinance issued SPCXon - Kraken's xStocks issued SPCXx SPCX now has 10,000 holders, nearly double xStocks' SPCXx 👇 thedefiant.io/news/markets/s…

Not bad: @HyperliquidX 's reference contract called the SpaceX IPO valuation within 3%. The May 18 launch implied a $1.78 trillion market cap at a $150 reference. Today's open priced SPCX at $135, a $1.75 trillion market cap.

Binance stock trading: 84% of week-one volume from emerging markets, $400M AUM in 7 days. Crypto-native rails are doing what traditional brokers never did for these users. thedefiant.io/converge/tradf…

How do you know stablecoins have strong pmf? When Bitcoin maxi @jack had to add them to @CashApp even if he hates the idea 🤭 "I don't like that we're going to support stablecoins but our customers want to use them," he said. Read more about how Cash App's 59M users can now use stables: thedefiant.io/news/tradfi-an…

Issue #4 of the Converge newsletter is out: Big stories this week: ⇒ @DTCC sets July for live tokenized trades and October for full launch — Russell 1000, ETFs, and Treasuries, with Goldman, JPMorgan, BlackRock, Circle, @OndoFinance and 45+ firms in the working group ⇒ @OndoFinance, Kinexys, @Mastercard & @Ripple complete the first cross-border, cross-bank tokenized Treasury redemption — outside banking hours, settled in under 5 seconds ⇒ @WesternUnion launches USDPT on Solana — the world's largest remittance network goes on-chain ⇒ @Amazon builds AI agent payments with @Coinbase and @Stripe, putting stablecoins at the center of agentic commerce Also worth watching: ⇒ @krakenfx parent acquires Hong Kong payments firm Reap for $600M + files for OCC federal trust charter ⇒ @Securitize gets FINRA custody approval + launches regulated trading venue with @jump_trading and @JupiterExchange ⇒ @BitwiseInvest takes over Superstate's $267M Crypto Carry Fund ⇒ Morgan Stanley E*Trade launches retail crypto for 8.6M customers ⇒ 19 European banks form Qivalis to build a MiCAR-compliant euro stablecoin on @FireblocksHQ

Check out the first issue of @DefiantNews's Converge newsletter, a weekly briefing on the highest-signal RWA, tokenization and stablecoin news & in-depth analysis. Subscribe: thedefiant.io/newsletter/con… Follow: @ConvergeDefiant And that's just the newsletter. Converge website is loading :)

The debate around @circle and the $285 million Drift exploit has focused on whether the issuer failed to take steps to freeze the stolen USDC. I argue this framing misses the fact that Circle took active steps, under its sole control, to issue new USDC to the malicious party through its CCTP bridge. Full analysis: newsletter3.thedefiant.io/p/…

Who are you calling pet rock?? In episode 4 of our Beyond Digital Gold docu-series we break down the real BTCFi playbook: • borrow against BTC without selling • earn yield through lending and staking • spend it through Lightning • provide liquidity • use structured BTC yield vaults We also unpack the tradeoffs behind each route: more yield and liquidity usually means more trust assumptions. This Bitcoin DeFi Docu-series, made in partnership with @StarkWareLtd , is a practical guide to how Bitcoin holders are using DeFi today. @EliBenSasson @NathanOnCrypto @avihu28 @AriEiberman @JacobPPhillips @mhluongo @StarkWareLtd @Lombard_Finance @babylonlabs_io @MezoNetwork @aave @Morpho @spark @WrappedBTC @Starknet @vesuxyz @kryptosopus @rootstock_io @Stacks @SovrynBTC @ZestProtocol @RujiraNetwork @THORChain @endurfi @Uniswap @MerlinLayer2 @LightningBTC @SolvProtocol @veda_labs @pendle_fi

What does tokenization look like when it reaches the heart of U.S. market infrastructure? Chris Storaker sat down with Tom Sullivan, Managing Director at @The_DTCC Digital Assets, to talk about: - Why SEC clarity changed everything - What DTCC is actually tokenizing - Why collateral is emerging as the key use case - How traditional finance and blockchain rails are starting to merge This is one of the clearest conversations we’ve had on how tokenization scales from experiment to real market infrastructure. 🎙️ Watch the full interview below

We just launched Circle Nanopayments on testnet, and I want to explain the core problem this solves. Let’s say you want to charge $0.01 for an API call, especially for agentic use cases. That seems completely reasonable. But the gas fee to process that payment costs $0.005. You just lost half your revenue to infrastructure. Now imagine you want to charge $0.001 per request. The gas fee is still $0.005. You are now losing money on every single transaction. The payment literally costs more than the service itself. This is why pay-per-use models have not worked at scale. The infrastructure economics prevent it from working. The most natural way to price digital services is by usage. - Pay per API call. - Pay per computation. - Pay per data query. These models are what power agentic commerce, where developers and AI agents need a financial rail built for high-frequency, high-volume payments. Nanopayments solves this through batched settlement. Instead of paying gas for every transaction, Circle’s Gateway aggregates thousands of payments and settles them together in a single onchain transaction. The gas cost is distributed across all of those payments. Here is the result: - 1,000 payments that would normally cost $10 in gas fees now cost $0.01 total. - That brings the cost down to $0.00001 per payment instead of $0.01. Gas is no longer the limiting factor. The way it works is straightforward. You deposit USDC into a Gateway Wallet contract once. That is the only time you pay gas. After that, every payment is just a cryptographic signature. You sign a message authorizing the transfer, but nothing is immediately broadcast to the blockchain. The signature is verified instantly, you receive access to the service, and Gateway batches your payment with thousands of others for settlement later. From a developer perspective, you make a request, the server responds with payment details, you sign the authorization, and you immediately receive the resource. The entire interaction happens in milliseconds. There is no need to wait for block confirmations, and there are no individual gas payments for each request. What this enables is true usage-based pricing. - You can charge $0.001 per API call and maintain margin. - You can implement pay-per-token pricing for AI inference. - You can charge per second for streaming services. Pricing models that were economically impractical because of gas costs now become viable. This is particularly important for AI agents that need to autonomously pay for services. An agent cannot operate if every $0.01 payment carries $0.005 in overhead. When payments cost $0.00001 in overhead, the economics make sense. Agents can pay for compute, for data, and for API access, enabling an autonomous agent economy. We are live on testnet today. Developers can start building with gas-free USDC transfers down to $0.000001. This is what makes usage-based pricing viable. developers.circle.com/gatewa… Reach out to me if you need help building with this.