And now we build

While markets are bleeding, the infrastructure buildout hasn't slowed down for a second. Fidelity just launched a stablecoin. Ondo shipped a perpetual futures platform. Jupiter became the first DEX to launch global payments. CME's CEO is publicly musing about launching their own token. And Johnny just walked out of the SEC's crypto task force meetings in DC, giving the government agency a five-star review.

Back to building.

📈 RWA market cap: Small contraction, holding around $24 billion
🏆 Biggest RWA winner: Syrup USDC added 10% to reach $1.4 billion
🏆 Biggest network winner: Avalanche C-Chain added 6% to reach $970 million

📈 Stablecoin market: Essentially flat
🏆 Biggest stablecoin winner: USD1 added a few hundred million to reach $5.3 billion (winner two weeks running)
🏆 Biggest network winner: Aptos added ~$2 million to reach just under $1 billion in stablecoins

📈 Onchain risk free rates:

• Short term treasuries (1m): 3.7%
• Aave / DeFi: 2.9%

When DeFi Rates Fall Below the Risk-Free Rate, Pay Attention

When borrow rates compress this hard, it means demand for leverage has evaporated from the system. People aren't borrowing to go long. They're pulling back.

For those with a longer memory, the last time we saw this kind of DeFi rate compression was around the FTX collapse. That's not to say the circumstances are identical (they're not) but the signal is the same: risk appetite has left the building. For builders and long-term allocators, moments like these are when the real foundation gets laid.

Impressions from meeting with the SEC's Crypto Task Force

Johnny spent the week in DC meeting with the SEC's Crypto Task Force and other divisions within the Commission. He and the Digital Securities Initiative met to discuss how tokenized securities could trade in DeFi and be used as collateral in decentralized lending.

You've heard him talk about this before: there are two financial systems emerging in parallel. The intermediated system (brokers, exchanges, FDIC, SIPC) is mature and serves important functions. But the disintermediated system, DeFi, offers something potentially more economically interesting for users who want to self-custody their assets.

He walked them through Aave as a case study. At the time of our meetings, the borrow rate was still roughly 100 basis points over the risk-free rate, which raised eyebrows in the room. The case for allowing tokenized securities into DeFi in careful, measured ways isn't about replacing TradFi. It's about letting the market experiment with products that could be better for everyday users.

He recounts that the staff he met with were curious, highly intelligent, and working around the clock to get ambitious things done. They want crypto to have clear rules that can actually be followed. Never thought he'd be giving a five-star review to the government agency we've all been terrified of for a decade, but here we are.

If he does his job well, all of these DeFi platforms will eventually have the ability to incorporate tokenized equities and securities under the hood. Hopefully we win.

White House Clarity Meeting: Cordial Handshakes, Zero Resolution

The White House convened a meeting between banking committee members, crypto companies including Galaxy and Coinbase, and banking lobbyists to try and break the stalemate on the Clarity Act, specifically around the stablecoin yield question that's been holding up progress.

The result? Still deadlocked. Every attendee publicly described the meeting as "cordial and friendly," which in DC speak usually means nothing got resolved. The good news is that the White House is actively pushing to get this done. The bad news is that we still don't know what Clarity will look like, particularly around how truly decentralized protocols (DEXs, lending platforms, smart contract code) will be treated.

This matters enormously. The scope of what the SEC can greenlight around tokenized securities in DeFi depends in part on what Congress decides the rules are. We're watching this one closely.

Fidelity Launches a Stablecoin, But Let's Talk About That Ticker

Fidelity has entered the stablecoin arena with FIDD, launching on Ethereum. Details are thin so far: no announced distribution partners, no platform integrations, just the coin itself with standard blacklisting functionality similar to Tether and USDC.

The strategic logic is clear. Fidelity manages trillions in retirement assets and has a massive customer base with cash sitting at rest. A stablecoin becomes another revenue line, especially if it finds its way into DeFi where yield opportunities can make idle cash productive. It's the same playbook we've seen from every major financial institution: distribution is the moat, and Fidelity has distribution in spades.

The real question: who's left? Coinbase hasn't launched their own. Apollo hasn't. The neobanks are piling in (Klarna, Revolut through partners). Phantom and Metamask have their versions. At this point, if you're a financial institution of any scale and you haven't at least explored launching a stablecoin, you're behind.

As for the ticker: look, FUSD was right there. Just saying.

Ondo Ships Perpetual Futures: The Perpification of Everything

Ondo announced a perpetual futures trading platform at their summit in New York. 24/7 trading of US stocks with up to 20x leverage, targeted at non-US traders. The platform will accept tokenized securities including OUSG and USDY as collateral, with 19 major assets at launch covering stocks, ETFs, and commodities.

This puts Ondo squarely in competition with Hyperliquid (HIP-3) and Ostium, which pioneered the RWA perpetuals space. Interesting that this was a build rather than a buy for Ondo, given their recent M&A streak, but with the market this early, owning the full stack makes sense.

The timing is... well, launching a highly speculative trading platform while everything nukes isn't ideal. But there's nowhere to hide, so might as well ship. The broader perpification trend is worth watching: perps may be the best retail trading product ever invented, offering the directional exposure of options with dramatically simpler UX. If you understand leverage multiples, you understand perps. No Greeks, no expiry, no exercise decisions.

One caveat worth flagging: perps carry liquidity risk that's distinct from spot. You're not just taking directional price exposure. If the underlying liquidity dries up, your ability to exit disappears. Be careful out there.

CME's CEO Drops a "CME Coin" Bombshell on an Earnings Call

CME Group CEO Terry Duffy told a Morgan Stanley analyst on an earnings call that the exchange is exploring launching a "CME coin" that could operate on a decentralized network. His exact words: "Not only are we looking at tokenized cash, we're looking at different initiatives with our own coin."

The PR team is probably still recovering. Duffy declined to clarify whether this would be a stablecoin, settlement token, or something else entirely, which is exactly the kind of ambiguity that makes crypto Twitter lose its mind.

Our best guess: this is likely a yield-bearing settlement token for CME's existing institutional customers, similar to what Figure did with Yield. The use case would be making cash more capital-efficient while sitting on the sidelines between trades. CME already accepts a surprisingly broad range of collateral (including gold and letters of credit) so extending that to a tokenized cash product isn't a huge leap.

What would be a huge leap is CME actually deploying this on a public decentralized network. To CME's credit, they've been in the blockchain space longer than most, offering Bitcoin futures well before it was fashionable. But the gap between "earnings call musing" and "live token on a decentralized network" is enormous. We'll see.

The Decentralized Everything App Wars Have Officially Started

Jupiter, Solana's dominant DEX, just launched a global payments platform with virtual fiat accounts, USDC cards, and multi-currency on/off ramps. This makes Jupiter the first decentralized exchange to make a serious play for the "everything app" throne.

The logic is sound: Jupiter knows exactly where its users are coming from and what currencies they're converting between. If you're already routing massive swap volume and you can see the payment corridors forming in your user data, building payments infrastructure is a natural extension.

But the bigger story is the convergence happening across the entire stack. Look at who's competing for the everything app:

Coinbase (centralized exchange into everything app) Base (L2 network into everything app) Phantom (wallet into swap revenue into stablecoin into payments) Robinhood & Revolut (neobanks into crypto into everything) Aave (DeFi lending into app, potentially payments and cards) Jupiter (DEX into wallet into stablecoin into payments) Binance (already has trading, earn, P2P payments, and now tokenized stocks)

Everyone is converging on the same destination from different starting points. And the pattern is remarkably consistent: launch your core product, add a wallet, add a stablecoin, add payments, add yield, repeat until you've absorbed every financial function.

We called it on the show: the decentralized everything app wars have started. This could be one of the defining competitive dynamics of the next two years.

TAC Member Shoutouts: Congrats to Avalanche (C-Chain up 6% in RWA TVL to $970M) and Maple/Syrup USDC (up 10% to $1.4B). Fidelity, also a TAC member, for launching FIDI. And Ondo for shipping yet another major product at their summit.

The Bottom Line

The markets are brutal. DeFi rates have collapsed. Everything is getting crushed with no safe haven in sight.

And yet: the SEC continues to engage thoughtfully with the industry. Fidelity just launched a stablecoin. CME is exploring its own token. Jupiter is pioneering DEX payments. The infrastructure has never been more mature.

Bear markets are when the real work gets done. The builders haven't stopped. The regulators are finally listening. And the plumbing being laid right now is what the next wave of adoption will run on.

Stay safe out there. It always comes back up.

Watch or listen to the full episode on Spotify.