We were in DC for Stablecon last week. One number stuck with us. Fireblocks surveyed 600+ C-suite decision-makers at financial institutions this year. 88% of them have committed budget to digital asset infrastructure. Only 16% are actually in production. The blocker was always: trust, control and permissioning. That gap between funded and functioning is exactly where the real work sits right now.

BULLISH: 🇺🇸 SEC Chair Paul Atkins says he expects the Clarity Act to pass on September 15 and reach the president's desk. ✍️ If/When this happens crypto will EXPLODE!!

Tydro setting up fixed rate borrow markets. Nice strategy built on Aave.

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dropping another billion dollar fintech idea: build a neobank with industry-specific financial workflows. there’s nothing unique about ACH, wires, stablecoins, cards, or 2% cashback anymore. every fintech has access to roughly the same financial infrastructure. the next era of neobanks will be won on distribution. and one of the best distribution wedges is building software around the financial workflows of a specific industry. one I’ve been thinking about a lot is medical offices. for context, roughly 50% of medical practices in the US outsource their insurance billing to third-party medical billing agencies. these companies handle everything between a patient receiving care and the practice actually getting paid: > submitting claims > following up with insurance companies > fighting denials > collecting outstanding balances > reconciling payments traditional medical billing companies can charge practices around 5-6% of revenue collected. but over the last year, a new category of AI-native medical billing companies has started emerging. instead of having hundreds of people manually calling insurance companies, submitting claims, and fighting denials, they deploy AI agents to automate large portions of the workflow. this brings the cost down to 2-3%. now take this one step further: build the AI medical billing company AND the financial stack underneath it. the practice uses your software to submit and manage claims. insurance payments flow directly into bank accounts you provide. your software automatically reconciles every payment against the corresponding claim. you handle receivables, collections, cash management, cards, ACH, wires, and eventually credit. and credit here becomes especially interesting. because you control the revenue cycle, you have a real-time view into claims, expected receivables, payment history, denials, and cash flow. that gives you a proprietary underwriting layer and lets you extend capital against future receivables faster and more intelligently. now you’re not just their bank. you’re sitting directly between the work they perform and the money they receive. that is an insanely powerful wedge into banking. instead of: “switch to our bank because we have better rewards.” the pitch becomes: “we’ll automate your billing, help you collect more of what you’re owed, charge you less than your existing billing company, and give you a financial stack built specifically around how your practice operates.” software becomes the distribution. banking becomes the monetization layer. and you can extrapolate this model across dozens of other industries. restaurants → ai voice agent takes orders + payments, paired with banking suite property management → rent collection + vendor payments + banking logistics → freight invoicing + factoring + banking stop building generic neobanks and trying to convince businesses to move their money for another 1% cashback. own a critical financial workflow in their industry. then build the bank around it. banger idea.

Who is actually accruing the value created in crypto? This started as a conversation on the @Blockworks TG group with @santiagoroel and a few others. Venture in crypto has shrunk a lot! and imo the main reason is that on-chain revenue pools have been far smaller than anticipated. From Blockworks data, total on-chain revenue was roughly $8B in 2025, so I wanted to see how much off-chain/Centralized companies are capturing from this industry by comparison. So consider the off-chain pool: public companies like coinbase, Gemini, BitGo, Bullish, plus crypto revenue from Robinhood, Galaxy etc and private players like Binance, Tether, FalconX, Anchorage, etc. The result surprised me: off-chain companies generate ~$70B roughly, consider roughly a range between 60B to 100B, 8.5x more than on-chain protocols and L1s. To put that $8B in perspective: even if you give on-chain protocols generous 70% EBITDA margins and a 30x multiple, the entire addressable market cap today is ~$168B ($8B × 70% = $5.6B EBITDA × 30x). That's the whole on-chain pie, less than a single mega-cap tech company. Do the same for centralized companies at a more realistic 40% EBITDA margin: $70B × 40% = $28B EBITDA × 30x = ~$840B of justified market cap. Even with lower margins, that's 5x the entire on-chain ecosystem. And to put even that in perspective: the entire centralized crypto industry, all of it combined, is basically worth one OpenAI or Anthropic. The breakdowns are telling too. On-chain, L1/L2 chains take almost half the pool (~49%), with launchpads/trading apps and DEXs/perps splitting most of the rest. Off-chain, it's exchanges and brokers dominating at ~66%, with stablecoin issuers second at ~19%, everything else (market making, payments, infra, asset mgmt) is single digits. Both worlds are extremely concentrated at the top of the same funnel: trading and the rails to do it. From a venture perspective, you were often better off investing early in L1s and traditional exchanges than in most tokens. It was a bit simpler than we thought. To me the common denominator: off-chain companies sit much closer to the end user than protocols and L1s. They own that relationship and monetize it well. They abstract away crypto's complexity: trade, stake, store, manage without ever touching a coldcard or metamask app and people pay up BIG for that. On-chain is clearly in a bear market, but the lesson for protocols, L1s, and on-chain primitives is to build and verticalize more. Get closer to the end user. One caveat: this is an approximation, done with Claude's help. Many of these companies don't have public earnings, so the private side (Binance, Tether, and especially "other private") is mostly an educated guess. Directionally though, the gap is hard to argue with.