Countdown to CLARITY

The policy clock is ticking, the stablecoin stack is going to production, and the infrastructure for compliant onchain lending just got its most important upgrade yet. This week the threads connecting regulatory clarity, real-world asset markets, and the plumbing of global payments pulled tighter than ever, and the industry is starting to look less like an experiment and more like an inevitability.

Market KPIs (brought to you by RWA.xyz)

📈 RWA market cap was down ~1.3% WoW to $31.3 billion
🏆 Biggest RWA winner: Figure Prime added $22M, up to $400M
🏆 Biggest network winner: Stellar added $400M, up to just under $3 billion

📈 Stablecoin market cap was down ~1.3% WoW to $299.6 billion
🏆 Biggest stablecoin winner: Ripple's RLUSD added $20M, up to $1.8 billion
🏆 Biggest network winner: Hyper EVM added $1.5 billion, up to $4 billion (continuation of converting bridged USDC into native USDC)

📈 Onchain risk free rates:
Short term treasuries (1m): 3.60%
Aave / DeFi: 3.53% (onchain rates have dipped below SOFR for the second consecutive month)

The Clarity Countdown Clock Is Live

We launched a Clarity Act tracker on the TAC website this week. It is a full historical record of the journey from FIT 21 through the current Senate process, and it will track every meaningful inflection point between now and July 4th. That date is not a legal deadline. It is a psychological one. If we slip a week past it, we slip two weeks past it, and then we are looking pretty bad, frankly.

Two things I think will actually hold this back. First, the ethics provision and the politicization of the Trump family's crypto holdings, specifically World Liberty Financial and the Trump meme coin. That is the real friction. Second, and this one gets more airtime than it deserves, the stablecoin yield debate. Coinbase has been going to the mat with the entire banking industry over a prohibition in Clarity that would prevent distributors of stablecoins from passing yield through to passive holders. Jamie Dimon recently called Brian Armstrong full of it publicly. Tensions are hot. But I do not think yield is what kills this bill.

The tracker will also surface relevant news flows, congressional testimony, and notable commentary as they happen. Scott Bessent was in front of the Senate Banking Committee this week, bullposting on Bitcoin, reshoring, and financial industry innovation through Clarity. These are all things that will flow through the site. If you are a nerd trying to track where market structure legislation stands at any given moment, this is the resource for you.

One stat from Electric Capital that I want to embed here because it is worth knowing. Pre-Trump, from 2015 to 2025, the SEC and CFTC charged the crypto industry roughly $25 billion in aggregate. In the last year alone, the SEC brought only 13 actions, down from hundreds, and levied $142 million in penalties. That is roughly 3% of the prior pace. During the Gensler era, the share of crypto developers based in the US fell from 40% to 20%, with Asia overtaking the US at 32% of all crypto development. Regulation by enforcement drove builders out of the country. We should be the heart of financial innovation in the world, full stop.

Citi's 2030 Tokenization Outlook: $5.5 Trillion Base Case

Citi put out a major follow-up to their landmark 2023 tokenization report this week, projecting a $5.5 trillion tokenized asset market by 2030 at the base case, with a bear case of $2.7 trillion and a bull case of $8.2 trillion. The most interesting part of their forecast is not the headline number. It is the composition. Citi sees public equities and public fixed income as the dominant growth driver, which is a meaningful divergence from a lot of the other analyst reports floating around from McKinsey, BCG, and others that have tended to anchor on private credit and fund tokenization.

Their underlying assumption is that roughly 10% of US investors will be participating in onchain public securities by 2030. We are currently at fractions of a basis point on that journey. Ondo Global Markets recently crossed a billion in onchain equities, which is a remarkable milestone and also a reminder of how much room is left to run.

The reason I am bullish on the public equities thesis is not just the scale of the market. It is the experimentation that becomes possible once you have deeply liquid, well-disclosed assets living onchain. We have barely scratched the surface of what the trading interface could look like. There was a viral options trading UI floating around recently where you literally tapped squares on a grid and a live ticker ticked against your position in real time. Addicting. Probably dangerous. But the point is that the UX of finance has not been rethought since people were standing on a physical floor yelling hand signals at a pit boss. Equities and fixed income onchain give you the building blocks to reinvent that from scratch, because the underlying assets already have structure, disclosure, and liquidity. I have no idea how Citi built up to $5.5 trillion specifically, but I agree with the direction of travel on the asset class thesis.

Mastercard Launches Stablecoin Settlement Across Eight Networks

Mastercard launched stablecoin settlement for merchants this week, matching what Visa rolled out earlier and covering the same basic use case: businesses accepting card payments can now opt to receive settlement in stablecoins rather than routing exclusively through the traditional banking channel. The launch supports six stablecoins including USDC, RLUSD, and PYUSD, across eight networks: Aptos, Canton, Base, Arbitrum, Ethereum, Polygon, Solana, and XRPL.

The initial implementation settles between the issuing and acquiring banks in stablecoins, which handles the plumbing that most consumers will never see. But Mastercard has signaled this is the first step toward direct settlement from cardholder to merchant, which is how Rain has built its model and why Rain has been so successful in terms of cutting out intermediary friction entirely.

I want to push back on the narrative I used to hold early in my thinking about payments, which was that push payments would eventually make credit card networks obsolete. I do not think that anymore. The dispute mechanism is real and valuable. If a merchant charges you after you cancel, or if you falsely claim you did not authorize a purchase, there is an arbitration layer baked into the card network that protects both sides. That does not go away just because settlement is now in stablecoins. What changes is the speed and the cost of settlement upstream. So the end state I see converging on is: all the consumer protections stay, settlement gets faster and cheaper, and the merchant gets their money sooner. That is not a revolution, it is a long overdue infrastructure upgrade. Mastercard is near and dear to me, I was part of their accelerator program years ago, and it is always good to see them on the forefront of this stuff.

Euler and Securitize: The First Programmatically Compliant Lending Pool

This is the story of the week for me. Euler and Securitize announced a lending market where tokenized securities can be posted as collateral, with compliance rules enforced programmatically at the protocol level. The assets available at launch include VanEck VBILL, STACK, and a tokenized CLO fund.

Let me explain why this matters. Lending protocols work because of liquidations. When your collateral value drops below a certain threshold, the protocol liquidates your position automatically. That is why Aave and similar protocols have performed flawlessly through every major market shock, including FTX. The collateral gets sold, the loan gets repaid, the system stays solvent. Beautiful.

But that mechanism completely breaks down with permissioned assets. If your collateral is something like a tokenized fund or a tokenized security, it has transfer restrictions. It has KYC and AML requirements. It may have OFAC restrictions. A liquidator bot that does not satisfy those requirements cannot actually receive the asset. Which means the liquidation cannot happen. Which means the lending market cannot work.

What Securitize has done through their registrar infrastructure is make those compliance rules native to the asset itself, enforced in real time at the smart contract level. Liquidators must satisfy the same compliance requirements as any other holder. The pool enforces this automatically. This is, as far as I know, the first instance of a fully programmatically enforced compliant lending pool for tokenized assets.

Aave Horizon launched roughly six months ago with a similar concept and deserves full credit for getting to market first, carrying assets like Janus Henderson's JAAA, VanEck Treasury, the Superstate/Invesco short-duration fund, and the Bitwise crypto carry fund. Volumes have been relatively modest so far, and that is fine. This market is immature. But having multiple compliant lending venues in market now is the right setup for the moment when volume does arrive. We will look back on this period and recognize it as when onchain leverage on real-world assets actually became possible, with the compliance rails to match. Huge congrats to Jonathan and the Euler team, and to Securitize, whose registrar business keeps looking more like the connective tissue of all of this than most people appreciate.

Deel Goes Live on the Stripe Stablecoin Stack

Deel has become the first major production user of what I am calling Stripe's trifecta stablecoin stack: Bridge for issuance, Privy for wallet infrastructure, and Tempo for settlement. Deel is issuing DLUSD to pay contractors across 150 plus countries, serving 40,000 businesses and 1.5 million contractors. They are, by some measures, the fastest fintech company to reach a billion in ARR in the pre-AI era, and they have the payment volume to make this a real test.

This is personal for me. I ran a company called Quill that had a very similar business model. We served small businesses with lots of international payment needs, built every rail we could, wires, PayPal, everything, and offered financing on top. We got to around $10 million ARR and a Series B before ultimately selling. Deel is basically Quill at a hundred times the scale. And the problem that haunted us every single payment run was precision and timing. You would send a contractor in Indonesia the right amount of money, it would route through multiple banks, each one would take a small fee, and the contractor would receive 97 instead of 100, a week later, with no explanation. That is a terrible product experience and it erodes trust with every single person in your contractor network.

What Deel is doing with Bridge, Privy, and Tempo potentially solves that problem structurally. The payment either arrives in full or it does not, and the rails are programmable enough that you know what is happening at every step. That is the bet. Bridge kicked off the stablecoin acquisition mania. Tempo sparked its own wave. The ARC network just raised $220 million. And now we have the first production-grade launch of all these bets stacked together. I will be watching the volume data on this one closely.

One piece that is still missing from the full stack, and Charlie and I talked about this on the show, is FX. Stablecoin to stablecoin swaps via Tempo's DEX primitive exist, but true currency pair markets for non-dollar stablecoins are still very thin. Circle's euro product has the most traction. Tether's Laos riel product launched last week. But if you need to actually convert to local currency at the end of the corridor, you are still relying on a crypto exchange or a legacy FX provider. I think either Tempo starts building those corridors natively as demand develops, or Stripe acquires someone to bolt that capability on. Our friends at Tier could also have an interesting play here on the financing side, pairing underwritten onchain lending with this payment network. Kevin, if you are reading this, nudge.

MoneyGram Launches MGUSD

MoneyGram unveiled its own stablecoin, MGUSD (I prefer MEG, personally), joining Western Union and the growing list of legacy remittance players that have decided to keep the net interest margin for themselves rather than route through third-party stablecoin rails. MoneyGram has been using Stellar for cross-border remittances for years. Launching their own stablecoin is the logical next step once you realize how much value you are leaving on the table by not controlling the float.

Details are thin beyond the ticker reveal for now, but the direction is clear. Charlie framed it well on the show: stablecoins have crossed the chasm. You now have laggards adopting. If you do not have one, you are behind. Tokenized assets are not there yet. But the speed at which stablecoins went from crypto experiment to competitive mandate is instructive for how quickly the RWA market can turn when the right catalyst arrives. My estimate is within the next 24 months. Keep building, keep your coffers full, stay in market.

A16Z on Stablecoin Federalism

A16Z submitted a comment letter to Treasury in response to a notice of proposed rulemaking around the two-tiered framework in the Genius Act. Under Genius, issuers below $10 billion in volume can pursue a state-level charter rather than a national bank charter from the OCC. A16Z is essentially asking regulators to ensure that state-level requirements are neither more nor less stringent than the national standard, effectively pushing for perfect fungibility between state-chartered and nationally chartered stablecoins.

I have a nuanced take on this. I understand what they are trying to accomplish. Smaller stablecoin issuers benefit from having a clearer, lighter-touch pathway that does not require the full apparatus of a national bank charter. That is a legitimate policy goal and I support it. But the mechanism they are proposing, constraining states from diverging from the federal standard, cuts against something I actually care about quite a bit, which is federalism and the ability of states to build regulatory brands that reflect the needs of their populations. Wyoming has done this with trust law and now with crypto. That is a feature, not a bug.

My read-through is that A16Z has a lot of stablecoin portfolio companies well below the $10 billion threshold, and this comment letter is written to benefit them. That is fine. Everyone writes regulatory comments to pump their bags a little. If Aiden wrote this one, it is genuinely well-argued. I just subtly disagree on the federalism framing while agreeing on the underlying goal of making the pathway accessible for smaller innovators.

Watch or listen to the full episode on Spotify.