The biggest crypto news and ideas of the day |
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Franklin Templeton Expands to Ethereum |
Franklin Templeton is expanding trading of its OnChain U.S. Government Money Market Fund (FOBXX) to the second largest blockchain by market cap, Ethereum (ETH). The asset manager has added a series of new blockchains to support the fund this year, including, most recently, Coinbase’s Base, Aptos and Avalanche. It uses the Stellar network as the primary public blockchain. FOBXX launched in 2021, becoming the first money market fund to use a public blockchain to track transactions and ownership. It currently stands at a $410 million market cap, making it the third-largest tokenized money market fund. BlackRock’s USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund (BUIDL) moved to the top of the list just six weeks after its launch in late March. It currently stands at $545 million, while the second largest fund, Ondo’s U.S. Dollar Yield (USDY), is at $452 million. Among issuers, Ethereum is by far the top choice to issue shares of tokenized treasuries, with the largest blockchain handling over $1.6 billion of assets, followed by Stellar (XLM) and Solana (SOL), according to data by rwa.xyz. |
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Tether Simplifies Tokenization |
Tether, the crypto firm behind the third-largest cryptocurrency (USDT), said on Thursday it has launched its asset tokenization service after CEO Paolo Ardoino teased the project for months. The platform, called Hadron, was designed to simplify the process of converting a wide range of real-world assets including bonds, commodities, stocks, other stablecoins and loyalty points into digital tokens on blockchain rails. Tether's goal with the new platform is to unlock "alternative financing and capital markets opportunities for nation states and corporations," according to a blog post. The service encompasses the full life-cycle of tokenization, including tools for risk management, know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money-laundering (AML) compliance and secondary market monitoring. The platform at the beginning supports Ethereum, Avalanche and Bitcoin scaling network Liquid by Blockstream, and "soon" will add the Telegram-adjacent TON network and other smart contract chains, a Tether spokesperson said in an email to CoinDesk. |
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Bitcoin ETF Inflows Explode |
The largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has just become the seventh-largest asset by market cap on the planet, overtaking oil giant Saudi Aramco. Its dominance over the crypto industry set a high of 61.38% and the price hit a record of over $93,000 on Wednesday. A large part of the recent success is due to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's pro-crypto stance during the election campaign. As of today, the Republicans won the House, completing the trifecta and boding well for cryptocurrency prices due to favorable regulation. Another part of BTC's success comes from the massive inflows into U.S. spot-listed exchange-traded funds (ETF). In the past six trading days, bitcoin ETFs have seen a whopping $4.7 billion of net inflows, including more than $510.1 million on Wednesday alone. This brings the total since their introduction in January to $28.2 billion, according to Farside data. Since the launch, there have been questions raised about whether they were part of the basis trade or net long positions. But as the year has progressed, it seems investors are moving away from the basis trade, which is a net neutral strategy that is becoming a smaller trade over time. |
Polymarket Probe Highlights KYC Difficulties |
Polymarket's current predicament highlights long-simmering compliance questions facing the crypto industry. You might call them Very Persistent, Nagging questions. At the heart of matter is how blockchain protocols or even centralized crypto firms can address the widespread practice of users turning to virtual private networks, or VPNs, to circumvent geographical restrictions imposed by governments. On Wednesday, federal law enforcement raided the New York home of Shayne Coplan, Polymarket's 26-year-old founder and CEO. Although it is not yet clear exactly why the raid took place, and neither Coplan nor his company has been charged with wrongdoing, Bloomberg and The New York Times reported the Department of Justice is conducting a criminal investigation of whether Polymarket let U.S. residents trade on its site, in violation of a 2022 regulatory settlement. Founded in 2020, Polymarket is one of crypto's breakout successes this year, logging billions in trading volume and hundreds of millions in open interest, or contracts outstanding. Bets on the platform are settled in USDC, a stablecoin, which is a cryptocurrency that trades one-for-one with dollars. Traders use the prediction market to bet on the outcomes of real-world events, everything from whether Jake Paul or Mike Tyson will win their boxing match to which actor will be next to play James Bond. But the most popular subject by far has been the U.S. presidential election. Polymarket odds ahead of the vote presciently signaled that Donald J. Trump was in the lead while polls showed a tossup. In the weeks leading up to the election, media reports speculated that the market was being manipulated to show Trump ahead, potentially as a way of somehow influencing the outcome, but prediction market experts found the evidence for such claims wanting. |
The Takeaway: Read, Write, Own, Delegate |
By Jamie Burke, CEO Outlier Ventures In the past week, the markets have seen a huge turnaround. Now is the time for founders and builders to look to the future to the next stage of Web3. The convergence of AI x Crypto and the subsequent explosion of agents on blockchains, we propose, means we are evolving from not “Read, Write, Own” to “Read, Write, Own, Delegate,” creating a new internet paradigm we call The Post Web. We are moving from the era of the “Attention Economy,” where internet properties compete for our mindshare, to the “Intention Economy,” where agents work to optimally solve our intentions, forming an unprecedented market super cycle. How did we get here? Powered by innovations in social media, we went from passively reading to actively writing and contributing to the internet. Then Web3 allowed us to also finally own digital assets and unbundle Web2’s powerful platforms. Buttoday, even with markets picking up, just 5% of the global population uses crypto, and just 1% of internet users (those we assumed would be Web3’s early adopters) use DeFi or DApps at all. In effect, the majority of us still very much live, work, shop and play in Web2, where attention is the fundamental unit of value. Today’s internet is optimised by powerful algorithms that capture, package, and sell data to advertisers seeking to convert it into e-commerce spend. So why has Web3 seemingly failed to be adopted? Ultimately, despite several years of abstraction, Web3 still isn’t usable for the majority of the people. And that isn’t for lack of trying. But, after reflection, its innovations aren’t really about the Web at all. Far from being a new and improved user interface for people to use the internet, it is instead a series of lower-order functionality laying dormant. You could say it’s a sleeping giant, waiting for an actual Web interface that can unlock its potential and make it usable for the average person. In parallel, we’ve seen advances and adoption of AI. From large language models (LLMs) to agentic networks, they have shown that user interfaces can become more intuitive and handle greater task complexity. It's now becoming clear that to unlock Web3’s full potential, we require LLMs as a more intuitive and natural language front-end interface. Agentic networks then can carry out complex backend behaviours on-chain via intents-based-architectures, whether signing transactions or bridging and swapping between different networks. In other words, crypto and AI are convergent and highly complementary technologies. What if Web3 wasn’t for people to use directly at all? What if its innovations are a new set of internet protocols for machines to manage our digital things and lives, where work and much of the consumer internet are delegated to them on our behalf? Read the whole thing |
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