Crypto Pulse—CEO Perspective

Earlier this year, we rebuilt our VIP program and relaunched it as VVIP. I want to explain how the new system works, and why we designed it the way we did. The why starts with a weekend in February. February 28 this year was a Saturday. Every major traditional market was shut. The situation in the Middle East deteriorated sharply, and over the weeks that followed Brent crude went from the low-to-mid $70s to above $100, eventually approaching $120. Equities wouldn't open until Monday. Most future

I run a centralized exchange, so I obviously have a position in this. When a retail financial platform with nearly 28 million customers launches its own Layer 2, my first thought is not that Robinhood has decided to build a blockchain. It is a more practical question. If brokers start building chains, wallets start handling trades, and exchanges start connecting to a widening range of onchain and traditional assets, how much meaning is left in the categories we have been using to describe this i

Reach Was Never Presence For most of this industry's history, going global meant something fairly simple. A single platform, operating from a single jurisdiction, could distribute the same products to users in dozens of countries over the internet. Scale arrived quickly and cheaply, and very little of it was anchored anywhere. Reach and presence are different propositions. Operating in a market requires regulatory approval, a connection to local banking and payment infrastructure, products adapt

Within ten days this summer, a consortium of more than 140 companies proposed sharing the reserve income that has made stablecoin issuers rich, and Circle won final federal approval for a national trust bank. Two very different models for the digital dollar are now heading toward each other. From Issuance to Distribution On June 30, a coalition of payment networks, banks, fintech platforms, and technology companies unveiled Open USD, a proposed stablecoin whose defining feature is not its peg bu

On Thursday, July 2, the highly anticipated US Nonfarm Payrolls report arrived a day early because of the Independence Day holiday. The June Nonfarm Payrolls data showed the economy added just 57,000 jobs — roughly half of what economists expected. Within hours of the release, the Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed more than 1% to a record close, while the Nasdaq fell, weighed down by semiconductors and AI heavyweights. Same data. Same day. Opposite outcomes. Much of the commentary I read afte

Kevin Warsh's arrival as Federal Reserve Chair shouldn't be read simply through the hawk-versus-dove lens. What stands out to me is something more structural: we may be entering an era where the Fed is genuinely less willing to over-guide markets, less inclined to use its balance sheet as a permanent backstop, and more comfortable letting uncertainty do its job. That's a meaningful change — not just for rates, but for how risk assets are priced. Key Takeaways ● The Warsh era may mark a structura

Opening Thoughts Over the past several market cycles, I've come to believe that many of the changes that matter most are structural rather than cyclical. Because more often than not, what looks like a market problem is really a deeper shift in disguise. In my view, today's higher-rate environment is one of those shifts. It is not simply a temporary headwind waiting to be resolved by the next Fed pivot. It reflects a more fundamental reality: capital has a real cost again. And when that happens,