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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit 51insights.substack.com Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “The next cycle is gonna be defined by on-chain asset management and what does it mean to be a fiduciary for your customers on chain.” My guest this week is Anthony Bassili, who runs Coinbase Asset Management. He spent a decade at BlackRock selling institutions the most traditional products in finance, the iShares pension business. Now he sells the same institutions Bitcoin and digital asset strategies. We recorded this deep in the bear market, with Bitcoin down roughly 50% from its November 2025 peak of $126,000. His big idea is simple. The last cycle settled whether a token is a security. The next one settles a harder question: what does it mean to manage other people’s money on-chain? Whoever answers that first gets to manage the money. About Anthony Bassili: Anthony Bassili runs Coinbase Asset Management, the institutional asset management arm of Coinbase. He spent ten years at BlackRock in the iShares pension business before joining Coinbase in 2021 with a simple pitch: pensions should hold Bitcoin. He led Coinbase’s institutional business before moving over to run the asset manager, where his team’s backgrounds span BlackRock, Millennium, AQR, and Bridgewater. He is the author of “Get Off Zero,” a paper urging every investor to hold at least a small Bitcoin allocation. He is active on X at @smartestbeta. “You’re not gonna catch the low. You just need to start allocating and do it consistently over time.” Why this matters: Bitcoin peaked at $126,000 in November 2025 and is down about 50%. The October 10 leverage wipeout took out $25+ billion and started this bear market. Meanwhile, the incumbents aren’t waiting for the recovery: JPMorgan announced vaults on Kinexys, Grayscale announced on-chain asset management, Bitwise is in, and Anthony expects Fidelity and everyone else to follow. The fight over who gets to be a fiduciary on-chain is starting now, in the bear market, exactly when nobody is watching. This is the map. This ad could belong to you. 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline and revenue. We position you among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers. 🎯 Jump to the best parts 00:00 The Next Big Crypto Opportunity01:00 Anthony B.'s Journey from BlackRock to Coinbase02:11 Is This a Good Time to Buy Bitcoin?07:16 The Fat Protocol Thesis Is Dead?08:36 Where Does Crypto Value Actually Accrue?12:00 How Bitcoin Yield Works18:07 Coinbase's Stablecoin Credit Strategy23:08 Managing Onchain Credit Risk26:21 The Future of Onchain Asset Management32:56 What Regulators Need to Fix35:08 When Bitcoin Became a Real Asset Class39:23 Lightning Round40:03 What Anthony B. Is Excited About for 202740:15 Stablecoin Credit vs Tokenized Treasuries40:19 Crypto's Most Underrated Narrative41:51 Where to Learn More Important Links * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonybassili/ * Coinbase Asset Management: https://www.coinbase.com/institutional/asset-management * X: https://x.com/smartestbeta Watch or listen now: YouTube • Apple Podcasts 🔒 The full breakdown is for subscribers Our biggest takeaways from this conversation 1. The next cycle is on-chain asset management The last four years were spent arguing whether a token is a security. The Clarity Act is codifying the answer. Anthony says the next fight is bigger: what does it mean to be a fiduciary on-chain? “The next cycle is gonna be defined by on-chain asset management and what does it mean to be a fiduciary for your customers on chain.” * The test case is DeFi vaults. Lenders park stablecoins permissionlessly, and the dollars get allocated against collateral through smart-contract rules written by engineers. Is that discretionary asset management, with fiduciary duties and custody rules? Or just technology, user beware? Nobody knows yet. * Hester Peirce’s recent comments on vaults opened the dialogue without settling it. Anthony’s read: that alone is progress. “We did not think that we’d get that kind of treatment back in the Gensler era.” * The incumbents aren’t waiting: JPMorgan announced vaults on Kinexys, Grayscale announced on-chain asset management, Bitwise is in. “Everyone recognizes in the asset management community from BlackRock down that we need vault infrastructure.” * Expect the old fight to reignite: “not your keys, not your coins” collides directly with “if you want risk management, I need discretion over some of your assets.” What to do with this: vaults are a settled technology and an unsettled legal category. Watch the fiduciary framework, not the tech. That’s where the next cycle’s winners get decided. Related reads:→ Banks went onchain 2. Coinbase’s stablecoin fund is 80% off-chain In April 2026, CBAM launched CUSHY, its stablecoin high-yield credit strategy. Investors subscribe with stablecoins, and the fund shares are tokenized by Superstate on Base, Solana, and Ethereum mainnet. The crypto-native wrapper hides a very traditional core, and that’s the point. “Everything in crypto is floating rate.” * On-chain and off-chain credit are two parallel worlds that haven’t intersected. On-chain: floating rate, transparent, crypto-backed (staking, lending pools, basis-trade products). Off-chain: fixed rate, longer duration, wrapped in funds that don’t work on-chain. * There isn’t enough high-quality credit on-chain to fill a fund that wants to be billions. So the portfolio is 80% traditional structured credit (CLOs, trade finance, asset-backed securities, receivables) and 20% tokenized, diversified across hundreds of names with 90 to 100 day liquidity. * The core tenet: only work with originators, like Apollo, that are on a tokenization pathway. When the two worlds connect, CBAM can hold the tokenized or the traditional version of the same asset and arb the spread between them. * And on-chain leverage cuts both ways. Looped positions in tokenized credit can unwind and force selling: “I may choose to just wait for the unwind to happen in the on-chain market and then go in and buy everything at a discount.” What to do with this: treat the 80/20 as a live gauge of tokenization’s real progress. When that ratio flips, the two credit worlds have actually merged. Until then, the alpha is in straddling both. Related reads:→ Same loans, better rails: the tokenized private credit opportunity 3. Tokens are cheap equity, and that’s why protocols don’t earn Two weeks before this episode we published our case that the fat protocol thesis is dead: ten years on, value hasn’t accrued to the base layers. Ethereum earned about $1,500 from Robinhood’s launch on $600 to 700 million of daily volume. I put the thesis to a man whose employer is the strongest counterargument, the biggest distribution platform in crypto. “It’s very cheap equity. It’s probably the lowest cost of capital financing you could utilize.” * His explanation of why protocols don’t earn is the sharpest I’ve heard: tokens aren’t a business model, they’re financing. Protocols pay customer acquisition costs with tokens created out of thin air, granting distribution platforms hundreds of millions in tokens for priority access to customers. * TVL grows, usage grows, customers grow. But “where does the revenue switch turn on?” The moment it does, a competitor with a fresh token undercuts you. * And the thesis eats itself: crypto was supposed to be a public good, nearly free. A protocol that captures enormous value stops being the thing it claimed to be. * The direction of travel: “it’s the distribution platforms who have the customer relationship” that accrue value. His honest caveat: jury’s still out. Some once crypto-native protocols are now integrating into fintechs and brokerages serving hundreds of millions of customers. What to do with this: when you underwrite a token, ask who pays the revenue and who owns the customer. If the answer to both is “someone else,” you’re holding the financing, not the business. Related reads:→ There Won’t Be Another Cycle: the fat protocol thesis is dead 4. How Bitcoin pays you without being sold

Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “Now my balance sheet as an originator drops from a week’s worth of production to one loan’s worth of production.” Mike Manning, Head of Institutional Finance, Ava Labs That is the most useful way I have heard someone explain the promise of onchain private credit. Private credit has grown to roughly $2 trillion. Yet many facilities still run on spreadsheets, monthly reports, emailed PDFs, and weekly funding cycles. An originator may make a loan today and wait days for the money that funds it. I sat down with Juan Montero, co-founder and CEO of Fence, Anant Matai, Investments & Product at Grove, and Mike Manning, Head of Institutional Finance at Ava Labs. We talked about what changes when the loan and the money move on the same rails, why most tokenization still stops at the wrapper, and what code should never be trusted to decide. This is a playbook for building working private-credit rails, not a podcast about putting old assets inside new tokens. This ad could belong to you. 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline and revenue. We position you among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers. Why this matters now The first wave of tokenization changed the ownership wrapper. A fund share or bond became a token, but the underlying loans, servicing, covenants, and cash movements often stayed in the old system. The second wave is trying to change the operating model. A loan is created digitally. Its legal documents point to an authoritative record. Eligibility and covenant rules can be checked continuously. Repayment can arrive in digital cash and map back to that exact loan. That distinction separates a faster transfer rail from a faster credit business. Our 51 Insights report estimates that working rails can compress funding from 5 to 15 days to 1 to 3 days, distributions from T+5 to T+30 to near real time, and refinancing from 4 to 8 weeks to 1 to 2 weeks. The loan does not become safer because it is onchain. The capital around it can move with less waiting and less clerical work. About the guests * Juan Montero is co-founder and CEO of Fence. The company builds operating infrastructure for asset-backed finance, from loan onboarding and borrowing-base calculations to covenants, cash flows, and reporting. Fence says it administers about $1.5 billion across live facilities. * Anant Matai works across investments and product at Grove, an institutional credit protocol backed by Sky. Grove allocates onchain capital to tokenized credit and provides financing against eligible digital assets. “The lenders are here ... what we’re really looking for is that end to end originators to originate assets that are on chain and borrow against them on chain.” * Mike Manning is Head of Institutional Finance at Ava Labs, which develops the Avalanche network. He previously led blockchain and digital-currency work at Amazon and held roles at Provenance and Symbiont. “This is a settlement and operational technology. It’s not a judgment technology.” The discussion was part of Same Loans, Better Rails: The Institutional Rebuild of Private Credit, presented by 51 Insights and Avalanche. Chapters 00:00 The $2 Trillion Private Credit Problem00:56 Meet the Panel02:38 Why Private Credit Still Runs on Spreadsheets06:38 Blockchain Without the Hype09:44 Bringing Institutional Credit Onchain12:41 Tokenization vs Onchain Lifecycle Management15:04 The Money Rail Meets the Asset Rail17:28 How Banks Save 80% in Operational Costs19:06 Can Blockchain Prevent Double Pledging?21:59 Is Regulation Holding Blockchain Back?25:01 Why Banks Will Adopt This26:50 Which Blockchain Should Institutions Use?29:00 What Really Needs to Go Onchain?31:56 The Future of Onchain Credit34:13 Final Thoughts Important links * Event page and guest details * 51 Insights report: The tokenized private credit opportunity * Fence case study: BBVA and Payflow * Grove Allocator * Grove’s $250 million Avalanche deployment target * Avalanche for institutions 1. The wrapper is not the product Thesis: A tokenized claim is useful. A digitally native loan lifecycle changes the economics. Mike drew a clean line between putting an ownership wrapper onchain and moving issuance, servicing, covenants, repayment, and settlement onto the same system. “Asset-backed finance and securitization is composable finance without a composable stack.” A wrapper gives investors a new way to hold an asset. It does not automatically change how the loan is originated, checked, funded, serviced, or enforced. * The underlying loan needs a durable digital identity. * The credit agreement needs machine-readable eligibility, covenant, and waterfall rules. * Cash movements need to reconcile to the same loan record. * The legal documents need to say which record controls ownership. What to do with this: When someone pitches a tokenized credit product, ask where the underlying loan, covenants, servicing events, and repayments live. If the answer is still email, PDF, and spreadsheet, the token changed the wrapper, not the operating model. Related read: The tokenized private credit opportunity 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline. Win in digital assets. We produce institutional-grade research that helps digital asset companies own a category, then distribute it to 100,000+ decision-makers. Let’s talk. 2. Capital velocity is the business case Thesis: The most valuable output is not a token. It is less time between creating an eligible loan and receiving the capital that funds it. In a weekly borrowing-base process, an originator may carry days of new loans on its own balance sheet. If each loan enters the facility as soon as it passes the agreed rules, that inventory can fall sharply. “Now my balance sheet as an originator drops from a week’s worth of production to one loan’s worth of production.” “It turns a capital intensive model into a capital light model.” Juan used a Fence facility with BBVA as the proof point. Fence’s published case study says the system handles 100,000 transactions a month, reduced interest expense by about 30%, and increased the advance rate by more than 10%. Fence separately reports up to 80% lower operating overhead and up to 40% lower cost of capital across clients. These are company-reported outcomes and should be read that way. What to do with this: Measure idle funding days, reconciliation hours, advance rates, and the cost of carrying unfunded loans. Those numbers tell you whether new rails changed the business. Related read: Inside JPMorgan’s $3T tokenization machine 3. One ledger does not stop every double pledge Thesis: A ledger can prevent two claims against one digital asset only when that asset is the authoritative legal record from origination. The panel discussed the alleged double and triple pledging in the collapses of First Brands and Tricolor. A shared record can make duplicate claims visible, but only inside the system that everyone recognizes. “You can prevent double pledging of an asset once that it is on chain, but then the question is, well, how do I know the asset that’s on chain is the original one?” A digital twin can still be pledged on one chain, another chain, and a traditional facility. A signature can prove who submitted a record. It cannot prove that the offchain asset exists or that no competing claim sits elsewhere. * Origination must create the first authoritative asset record. * Legal documents must define control and priority. * All relevant lenders need access to the same ownership state. * Servicing data and cash need to reconcile to the asset continuously. What to do with this: Ask which record has legal priority, whether the same receivable can still exist offchain, and what happens when a servicer or borrower disputes the data. Related read: DTCC’s $20T October debut 4. Lenders are ready. Originators are the bottleneck Thesis: Capital is already willing to move onchain. The missing piece is a deeper supply of loans that are created, funded, and serviced onchain from the start. “The lenders are here ... what we’re really looking for is that end to end originators to originate assets that are on chain and borrow against them on chain.” Grove shows the allocator side of the market. As of August 2026, its site shows $2.80 billion in TVL and 16 active allocations. Its first Sky mandate put more than $1 billion into Janus Henderson’s JAAA strategy. On Avalanche, Grove announced a $250 million deployment target, which is different from saying the full amount has already been deployed. The harder step is moving beneath the fund token. Originators need loan data, documents, controls, servicing events, and payment rails that lenders can rely on without rebuilding the deal by hand. What to do with this: Build the allocator roadmap around originators who can create a legally native loan record and keep it current. Separate capital allocated to tokenized wrappers from capital funding digitally native loans. Related read: Same loans, better rails 5. Code should run operations, not judge credit Thesis: Smart contracts can execute the agreed rules. They should not decide whether a borrower deserves capital. “Code should do ninety nine percent, we should flag that one percent.” “This is a settlement and operational technology. It’s not a judgment technology.” There is plenty to automate: eligibility checks, concentration limits, payment status, waterfalls, borrowing bases, and defined covenants. Future-receivables facilities are especially clean examples. A missed payment can remove a receivable from the borrowing base, while a digital-cash repayment maps to that loan and releases capital for the next one. Underwriting, audited accounts, change-of-control analysis, bespoke waivers, and enforcement remain human work. The system also needs a controlled way to handle exceptions. A rigid smart contract that cannot process a sensible waiver creates a new operating problem. What to do with this: Draw a line through the workflow. Put deterministic checks and cash movements below it. Keep credit judgment, legal interpretation, and exception approval above it, with a clear audit trail between the two. Related read: Where automation ends in tokenized private credit 6. Serious counterparties beat endless chain choice Thesis: Institutions choose a market, not a feature list. Mike argued that optionality can become fragmentation. A bank does not care that a product can move across 100 networks if the counterparties, cash rails, legal arrangements, and liquidity it needs are scattered across all of them. “What opportunity through optionality does is it ... institutionalizes fragmentation.” Juan and Anant added the practical tests: resilience, uptime, security, observable infrastructure, builders who can support the product, and reliable on- and off-ramps. Distribution comes from depth in a room that serious participants already want to enter. What to do with this: Choose infrastructure by the counterparties it can convene, the legal and cash workflows it can support, and the reliability it has proved. Maximum portability is a poor substitute for one market that works. Related read: Banks went onchain The bottom line The skeptic has a strong case. A bad loan does not become a good loan because its data is onchain. Enforcement still happens in courts. Bespoke credit still needs judgment. And one important question from the discussion went unanswered after the connection dropped: how does an allocator offer fast withdrawals when the underlying loans may take weeks to sell? Better records do not remove the liquidity mismatch. But that is not the main claim these systems need to prove. They need to show that a good loan can be funded, monitored, paid, and transferred with less idle cash and less clerical work. Fence’s live facilities suggest that operating gain can be large. Grove shows that institutional capital is already willing to use the rails. Avalanche is betting that the market will gather around a small number of networks with enough depth to support it. Underwriting decides whether the loan deserves capital. The rails decide how long that capital sits still. That’s all for now, folks. – Marc & Team This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 51insights.substack.com

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit 51insights.substack.com Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “We did over $1.2 trillion of onchain trading volume across spot and perps.” One app on Solana processed $1.2 trillion in trading volume. Not an exchange with servers and order books. An app that runs entirely on a blockchain. Its president spent years at KKR, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, before he switched sides. His name is Xiao-Xiao J. Zhu, President of Jupiter, the biggest DeFi platform on Solana. At KKR he led the firm’s digital assets and blockchain strategy. Now he runs a company with 20+ onchain products, $3 billion in TVL, and a plan to put US stocks, a stablecoin, a neobank, and AI agents on the same rails. His core argument is simple: the value in crypto has moved from blockchains to applications. He calls it the fat app thesis. And he thinks onchain finance is still 10x to 100x smaller than its real market. This isn’t a recap. It’s the playbook: the six best ideas from the conversation, the exact quotes, and what to do with each one. About Xiao-Xiao J. Zhu: Xiao-Xiao J. Zhu is President of Jupiter, Solana’s largest onchain finance platform. Before Jupiter, he was Digital Operating Partner at KKR, where he led technology value creation across the portfolio and ran the firm’s global digital assets and blockchain strategy, backing crypto funds and companies including Anchorage Digital. He has seen both sides: how value gets built in traditional private equity, and how it gets built onchain. “The biggest companies in crypto are basically centralized exchanges or market makers who are extremely intransparent and are running on centralized databases.” Why this matters: Jupiter is what the next generation of financial institutions might look like. It started as a DEX aggregator three or four years ago. Today it is the number one trading venue and the number one TVL protocol on Solana, it launched a stablecoin backed by BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, and in May it put regulated US equities onchain with Jump Trading and Securitize. Robinhood, Coinbase and OKX already route through its APIs. We recorded this live at Proof of Talk in Paris. Here it is in six ideas. 🎯 Jump to the best parts [00:00] Cold open: $1.2 trillion and the road map[00:30] Live from Proof of Talk in Paris[01:05] From KKR to the biggest DeFi app on Solana[02:26] The inflection point: blockchains finally got fast[03:12] The fat app thesis[03:43] What Jupiter is: 20+ products, $1.2T in volume[04:44] Jupiter Lend, JLP, and their own stablecoin[05:52] Why “onchain finance,” not DeFi[07:56] The 100x gap: millions of users vs. Binance’s 300M[09:00] The two unlocks: RWAs and agentic finance[10:31] Agents don’t do KYC[11:39] The Jupiter agent kit is live[12:37] How institutions plug in today[14:29] Bitwise and up to $1B into Jupiter Lend[15:11] Jupiter Global: the onchain neobank[15:40] Tokenized US equities with Jump and Securitize[17:07] What tokenized stocks actually unlock[17:52] The road map: super app, neobank, JupNet[18:38] Wrap Important Links * Jupiter: https://jup.ag * Securitize / Jump / Jupiter tokenized equities announcement: PR Newswire * Jupiter Lend x Bitwise (Ethena market): PR Newswire * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/xiao-xiao-j-zhu-12078730 Watch or listen now: YouTube • Apple Podcasts 🔒 The full breakdown is for subscribers Our biggest takeaways from this conversation 1. The value moved from blockchains to apps. For years the money in crypto was made at the protocol layer. You bought the chain, not the things built on it. Zhu says that flipped, and it flipped because blockchains finally got fast enough to build real products on. “Value was initially in crypto created at the protocol level, at the blockchain level, to now really an era of the fat app thesis.” The irony he points out: everyone came to crypto for decentralization, but the biggest crypto companies are centralized exchanges and market makers running on ordinary databases. Not because they were lazy. Five to seven years ago, chains simply couldn’t handle the volume. * The inflection came in the last two to three years, when Solana and newer L1s and L2s solved most of the scalability problems. * The result is a new generation of apps like Jupiter and Hyperliquid: permissionless, self-custodial, and built fully onchain, at global scale. * The question he thinks matters now: what applications, brands and user experiences can you build at scale on top of blockchains? Not which chain wins. What to do with this: if your digital asset exposure is all protocol-level, you own the last cycle’s thesis. Look at where usage and fees actually accrue now: the application layer. Related reads:→ 184: Kraken is buying DeFi This ad could belong to you. 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline and revenue. We position you among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers. 2. Jupiter is Robinhood, rebuilt fully onchain.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit 51insights.substack.com Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “Waiting and seeing is not a strategy.” A senior partner and global banking lead at BCG just put a number on the thing every bank CEO is nervous about: up to 15% of bank revenue and 30% of profits at risk by 2035. But the opportunity is bigger than the threat. His name is Christian Schmid, Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG, where he leads the global banking business. He is the lead author of BCG’s biggest ever digital assets report, The Future of Digital Assets. He calls the whole shift the iPhone of money, and he thinks the real fight is not stablecoins versus deposits. It is who owns the screen the customer taps. About Christian Schmid: Christian Schmid is a Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG, based in Zurich, where he leads the firm’s global commercial banking, capital markets and investment banking business and chairs the board of BCG Expand. He trained as an engineer at ETH, came up through IBM, and has spent 27 years advising the CEOs of the world’s biggest banks. He is the lead author of The Future of Digital Assets. “That’s probably the most interesting topic I have seen in my whole consulting career, which is twenty seven years almost by now.” Why this matters: This is the year banks stopped watching from the sidelines. The GENIUS Act gave stablecoins a US rulebook, the market is now north of $300B, and the biggest US banks, JPMorgan, Citi and Bank of America, are building a shared tokenized-deposit network aimed at around 2027. BCG puts the tokenization prize near $88 trillion. So when the person who advises these CEOs tells you what he actually thinks, in plain language, it is worth 40 minutes. Here it is in six ideas. 🎯 Jump to the best parts 00:50 Introduction01:59 Why BCG Published Its Biggest Digital Assets Report04:13 How Banking Conversations Have Changed05:46 Is Tokenization Bigger Than Digital Banking?08:13 Why Banks Could Lose 30% of Their Profits13:08 Are Digital Assets Replacing Banks?16:15 The Three Types of Digital Assets20:08 Where Banks Should Invest23:20 The Biggest Real World Use Cases26:00 What Banks Are Actually Doing27:30 AI vs Digital Assets30:18 Why Waiting Is Not a Strategy32:03 Four Futures for Digital Assets35:14 Stablecoins vs Tokenized Deposits37:41 The Future of Programmable Money38:36 Lightning Round39:50 Where To Learn More Important Links * BCG profile: https://www.bcg.com/about/people/experts/christian-schmid * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/schmidchristianzuerich 🔒 The full breakdown is for PRO subscribers Our biggest takeaways from this conversation 1. The threat is real, the opportunity is bigger Most consultant reports are built to scare you into buying a project. Schmid’s does the opposite. He gives you the scary number, then tells you not to over-index on it. “Whether this number is completely correct or not is actually a bit irrelevant, I would say. But there is a threat.” The threat comes in two parts. Banks lose fee income and net interest margin as deposits and transactions drift toward stablecoins. Then they pay again to run two sets of rails at once. “They also need to maintain the dual rails, which increases the cost base for those banks. And so it’s almost a bit a double whammy.” * The model: up to 15% of revenue and 30% of profit at risk by 2035, versus a world where digital assets barely develop. * The catch he keeps repeating: it is a simulation, not a forecast. The point is the size of the stake, not the decimal. * The upside is the part banks miss. In BCG’s numbers the biggest wins are in asset management and trading. Tokenization makes it easier to wrap more assets, and trading could need less capital and liquidity, which lifts return on equity. BCG pegs the trading upside at up to a 4% RoE bump or $1B+ for an average G-SIB. What to do with this: don’t argue about whether it’s 30% or 12%. Run the model on your own book. The industry number hides a huge spread from one bank to the next. Related reads:→ BCG’s new digital asset playbook: The $88 Trillion Question This ad could belong to you. 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline and revenue. We position you among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers. 2. Stop calling it crypto The word “crypto” hides the most important distinction in the whole report. Schmid splits digital assets into three: tokenized securities, digital money, and cryptocurrency. They are not the same animal, and they don’t have the same future. “Cryptocurrency per se is a very different thing because it’s not backed with any value, and that’s very different from digital money or digital real world assets.” * Tokenized securities and digital money look a lot like what we already have, just in a new wrapper. In 20 years, he says, no one will care whether a security was tokenized or not. * Cryptocurrency itself he barely grows in the model, roughly 2%. His line: “in today’s world that’s where the money is made,” but it “will not be so significant going forward.” * The bigger point is to stop thinking in use cases and start seeing the technology as one general-purpose thing. That’s the “iPhone of money.” “The iPhone of money, which combines all the technologies in one thing through the programmability, through DLT.” What to do with this: when someone says “our crypto strategy,” ask which of the three they mean. If they can’t answer, they don’t have a strategy, they have a headline. Related reads:→ 186: banks went on-chain 3. The real fight is who owns the screen, not the instrument

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit 51insights.substack.com Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “And they fail to see that sometimes the madness is actually the method.” Germany is losing about 10,000 factory jobs a month. Most people call that an energy problem. My guest this week says that’s the wrong way to look at it. He thinks it’s the result of other countries’ trade policy, and Europe has no answer for it. His name is Michael Every, Global Strategist at Rabobank. The day Trump won again, he wrote that the US would “go back a century or two” in how it runs its economy. Tariffs. The government acting like an investment bank. A new spheres-of-influence foreign policy he calls the “Donroe Doctrine.” He called all of it before it happened. His big idea is simple. Stop asking what GDP will be next year. Start asking what GDP is for. This isn’t a recap. It’s the playbook: the six best ideas from the conversation, the exact quotes, and what to do with each one. POLL: When you look at US policy chaos, what do you see? About Michael Every: Michael Every is Global Strategist at Rabobank, where he analyses major financial and geopolitical developments for RaboResearch. Based in Asia for much of his career, he is one of the few sell-side strategists who reads tariffs, chip bans, sanctions, and stablecoins as a single toolkit of national power rather than separate policy files. He publishes daily and is active on X at @TheMichaelEvery. “Economic statecraft is when you look at every single tool that you have as part of a toolkit, which collectively can be used to gain national power in a zero sum international environment.” Why this matters: Every says we now get “three or four headlines” a day that each would have been the whole story five years ago. Europe is heading into its own trade war with China, and this China is stronger than the one Trump first took on. The Iran talks run on 60-day clocks that he thinks lead back to war. And the US has written its goals straight into its national security strategy: biggest economy, strongest military, energy dominance, AI dominance, factories back home. If your models treat these as separate stories, you’re reading the wrong map. This is the fix. 🎯 Jump to the best parts 00:00 Why the U.S. Entered the Iran Conflict00:46 Introduction01:28 Economic Policy vs. Economic Statecraft03:36 America's Grand Strategy05:48 Why Tariffs Are Back06:57 America, China & Europe08:35 The Iran Conflict Explained14:57 Taiwan & Semiconductor Geopolitics16:45 Europe's Biggest Strategic Weakness21:47 What Is GDP Actually For?22:59 Do Tariffs Really Work?24:56 Europe's Structural Crisis29:41 Why Michael Is Optimistic32:33 Is Free Trade Broken?35:59 Why Inequality Keeps Growing37:24 Lightning Round42:22 Where To Learn More Important Links * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-every-38983214 * RaboResearch: https://www.rabobank.com/knowledge/our-experts/011085368/michael-every * X: https://x.com/TheMichaelEvery Watch or listen now: YouTube • Apple Podcasts This ad could belong to you. 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline and revenue. We position you among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers. Our biggest takeaways from this conversation 1. Ask what GDP is for This sounds academic. It isn’t. Economic policy is one person turning one dial for one goal. Statecraft is every dial at once, all pointed at national power. Miss the difference and a set of planned moves looks like chaos. “The question that you ask if you are using economic statecraft is what is GDP for? Not what is GDP going to be to 2.1. What is GDP for? If you’re not asking that question, you’re not doing economic statecraft.” * Policy is one tool for one job: tweak a tax, or raise rates to defend the currency. One dial. * Statecraft turns every dial at once, tax, money, budgets, currency, energy, defense, transport, all aimed at beating other countries. * His sharpest line: “confusion and bewilderment can actually be a deliberate policy.” Sometimes the market’s confusion is the goal, not an accident. What to do with this: when a headline looks irrational, ask which national-power goal it could serve before pricing it as noise. If you can’t find one, then it’s noise. Related reads:→ How the U.S. Weaponized the Dollar (And Stablecoins), with Eddie Fishman This ad could belong to you. 🚀 Build credibility. Drive pipeline and revenue. We position you among 100,000+ digital asset decision-makers. 2. America is going back a century Every wrote this the day Trump won again, and says he was the first on Wall Street to call it. The point isn’t that tariffs are new. It’s that the years without them were the odd ones out. “Fasten your seatbelt because the US is going to go back a century or two in terms of how it does things going forward.” * Tariffs are “as American as apple pie”: the only era without significant US tariffs was the last few decades.