Stablecoins Hit $10T Monthly Volume, MetaMask Launches Tokenized Stocks & Galaxy Posts $482M Loss.

JP Morgan, Black Rock, DTCC, Fidelity, the entire thing was just institutions. It's just next level. This industry is going to the next level. And guys, I don't know what else to say. I'm bullish.

You said it. You finally said it. I'm so bullish. And he's bullish. I'm bullish. We're bullish. How the above the rollup is headed to the top.

If we're not already at the top, we're going to the top. We're on fourth floor today. We're gonna be on floor one and then we're headed straight to the moon, boys. Man, oh man, where did all of the shareholder value go?

Guys, we're tuning in. Let's see what we've got here. Bitcoin is coming in under 75K. ETH is teetering around the 2K mark. We could continue to go down the line.

ETH actually bounced a little bit. I think it's getting close to that 2K mark. It is looking mighty mighty rough out there for anyone who does not own the neoinancial assets of Hyperlid and Canton.

Hyperlid and Canton are holding up just fine. Hyperlid especially, Hyperlid came out with HIP 4. We're going to be talking more about that today.

Guys, it's time to pivot away from crypto infrastructure slop. The world is moving towards product market fit. We are going to cover a couple of things that are actually coming to us live.

So without further ado, we're not going to dwell and victimize ourselves too much. We're gonna hop over to where the action is today and that is in the capital of finance, New York City.

The Onondo Summit is going on currently and this is something that if it was warmer in New York, we would be there. These guys are unfortunately snowed in and so they are talking about everything that is happening.

This is the third microphone I killed today. So we're going to hear from them. So Patrick Wit said April 3rd, president will have a the Clarity Act signed signed into law.

That is optimism, but I think it's quite realistic given the level of work that your boss and your boss's boss have put into crypto being made in America once again.

And I must say in and to wrap this section, these are two examples of fabulous people working in government, working for the public interest here.

And I think what you've just heard from this panel today is the best of this administration in Washington. They are committed to the public service and to getting quick and solid action on digital assets.

This is a reason why we should be optimistic about digital assets in the United States and the United States being once again the capital of crypto for the world.

And so with that, thank you all for being here. Mr. W, Mr. Williams. And that is a wrap for this section.

Welcome back to the live welcome back to the live desk. You heard it here first. Clarity Act could be signed into law by the president by April 3rd. We shall see.

Patrick Wick sent a message loud and clear to the banks that the sky is not falling and that they should approach stable coins in crypto with humility.

Thanks for tuning in to the live desk and for joining us at the Andondo Summit. Hope you'll enjoy the next session which will get a view at the exchange perspective from crypto to stocks.

Hope you enjoy and we'll see you again soon at the live desk. Frank is such a pro. He's a man. How long we missed that last segment?

Patrick Whit is obviously very involved in the administration and the crypto. All right, that was fantastic. Thank you. the crypto work.

Right along, our next panel is entitled Exchange 2.0 from crypto to stocks and we'll discuss how tokenization and onchain equities are redefining modern crypto exchanges and blurring the lines between digital assets and traditional financial markets.

Please welcome to the stage our panelists along with our moderator Ando's own managing director of global business development, Min Lynn.

Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining the exchange 2.0 discussion. I am particularly very excited to talk about sort of like how exchanges have evolved over the years.

I've been working at exchanges for the last five years just recently joined on. So I have seen and witnessed sort of like the evolution in terms of how this exchange platforms has adapted into truly a super app.

There are you're able to do literally everything within an exchange platform right now. You can invest there's wealth management there are bots already in it and now we're introducing tokenized stocks and ETFs.

So now we are seeing sort of like this blurring between a trapy platforms and a D5 platform. So with me we have leaders in the industry. So I will ask them to introduce themselves.

Great. Well, thanks for having me today. I appreciate it. My name is Peter. I'm the CEO and founder of blockchain.com.

We've been helping people and then later institutions be part of the crypto financial system since 2012. So we've been at it for quite a while now as I'm reminded sometimes.

And today we have about 40 million retail customers around the world about 2,000 institutions that we do various sort of business for and we transact about one to one and a half trillion in volume a year.

We're also a major supplier of liquidity across the ecosystem. And we have sort of helped incubate, invest in or launch a lot of the sort of more successful projects and companies across the space today.

And so yeah, we have a pretty broad sort of view across the whole ecosystem. And one of the things that we're most excited about is bringing sort of more assets from the traditional finance world into the crypto world.

Particularly the sort of really interesting and high quality assets that our customers are eager to have access to.

Hi everyone, I'm Gracie Chen. I'm CEO of Bitgat. Bit is a top crypto exchange established seven seven years ago. According to coin geko coin market cap we are typically top five in terms of trading volume among other offshore exchanges.

So one key strategic change that we are having right now or facing in this industry is exactly what the title point out from crypto to stocks as main pointed we are all partners with them and big partner with mainly on being one of the distributors for their tokenized US stocks and ETFs.

And I think according to your data published in December we contribute about 90% of that volume so that's definitely a lot attractions that we're seeing from our retail users who are interested in trading tokenized US stocks and ETFs.

There's Gracie. You guys recognize more than 100 last week. So definitely also want to explore other opportunities with you guys audience. Anyone who want to expand or collaborate with an exchange like us. Thanks.

Thanks for having us. Uh Michael Shalov, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Fireblocks. We provide infrastructure for institutions and enterprises financial institutions over 2600.

All right guys, well obviously tons of action coming from the summit up in New York. We're going to continue on with our news section. There's some other things to cover here.

Yeah, definitely recommend checking out a lot of the things that are coming out of that conference. this is point in the space where we believe there's plenty of growth opportunities.

It's it's actually pretty amazing to see a lot of the crypto world start to make their institutional push. We saw this at the end of 2025 where we anticipated that a lot more companies were going to be making a push into the institutional world.

All of these crypto companies are now going after what seems to be the same cohort of asset issuers and financial institutions. And so we're going to continue on with our coverage here.

So next up we've got in the stable coin world, we can go ahead and get this up because the stable coin monthly volume has now hit 10 trillion dollars. This is mostly driven by B2B flows.

We're actually still quite quite small in terms of the the fraction of consumer payments, remittances, crossber payments, these sorts of things. But we've got a long way to go.

There's, you know, quite a bit of turnover actually. I believe we're at about two trillion dollars in issued stable coins. So we've got no actually that's going to be we're going to be quite a bit less than that.

So, we're turning over these stable coins quite a bit on this is happening both onchain and off. And we're going to be talking with the Artameese founder Peter a little bit later.

And so, let's continue moving along. Obviously, we're we're big bulls in the stable coin world. This is going to continue to grow. So, we're seeing quite a bit here in terms of losses, guys. It's it's rough out there.

All right. This is a sentiment that's shared. It's not just retail traders and power users. It's it's the companies themselves. Obviously, you know, you guys saw Michael Sailor, Bitmine, Tom Lee, of of Bitine also, you know, take quite quite the L over the last few weeks.

Galaxy Digital reported a $482 million loss in the fourth quarter, far worse than expected as falling crypto prices hit its portfolio. Bitcoin dropped 23% during the period.

Trading volumes fell 40% and the firm's shares slid about 5% pre-market despite the loss. Galaxy ended the year with 12 billion in assets and two billion in net inflows to its asset management business.

So, this just goes to show that there is still life here. And you know, even despite the the losses, there's still billions of dollars in reserves and assets here and even more inflows to its asset reserve this asset management business.

It it's tough to it's tough to navigate here. Obviously, first in the market, we've got to stop the bleeding and then and then we believe that there's a lot more upside room.

This is partially driven by macros. We talked about the the Fed chair you know earlier this week and and late last week. They passed that the government won't shut down. So there is macro belief out there.

One of the pros as we're looking at this headline is that you know Galaxy Digital is a publicly traded company and so that gives us the insight into its balance sheets that's how we know how difficult a fourth quarter they had.

Obviously it doesn't make it any easier, but as more and more of these companies go public, it it does give us a bit more insight into how we should be seeing crypto businesses at large at an institutional scale.

And, you know, obviously, we expect a lot more of these companies to go public. So, we're going to continue on. I think the next headline is is quite ironic here.

Stanie, our good friend of the show, bought a $30 million mansion. Pretty ironic this, this headline comes out on one of the worst market days of the year.

And just to reiterate, I mean, let's see. Bitcoin is down four and a half% today. ETH is down 6% today, down 25% this week. Bitcoin's down 15% this week. This isn't even commentary. This is just these are just the facts.

If in case you guys care, Ripple is down 17%. And then Hyperlquid is up 20% this week. Pretty pretty incredible. Canton is up 17%. Chain Link down 20%. Zcash down almost 30%. And the list goes on.

So, a founder buys one of the most expensive homes in the past year. Nodding Hill in the UK. He congrats I a I mean stuck around. They've obviously been here through the cycles and have built something that is seeing a lot of institutional capital inflows.

And so as we just saw the summit, right, these financial institutions are gathering and they're deciding where to place their chips. And at the same time, the markets out there are just getting rinsed.

And so I anticipate who knows when that bleeding will stop, but eventually it will. and these institutions will come in, they'll swoop in, they'll buy assets at very cheap prices and and then we will see the markets turn around.

So, it's pretty incredible what's going on out there. And if we're just to if we're just going to take a quick look at, you know, some of the other things that are out there, you look at gold today, futures are trading just below 5,000.

Stretched all the way back to almost 4,400 on gold earlier in the week. Now almost back up to 5,000. So, quite the bounce. We'll see. Maybe that was just the dip there. Let's see what else we got.

Yeah, we'll see. That that last week once the Fed share got announced, that was rough for the debasement trade. But stocks doing quite well. I anticipate a lot of these crypto companies are aiming to go public so that they start to benefit from some of these institutional flows as well.

We're going to speedrun through the rest of our headlines. MetaMask integrate. Let's let's let's move on to the next one. MetaMask integrates US stocks. And so again, we're just we're continuing to see how more and more of this is is happening there.

The the worlds of legacy finance in terms of the legacy financial assets, the tokenized stocks, the metals, the ETFs, the commodities, all of this is merging with decentralized finance.

Wallets are becoming the access layer for onchain markets to access these these institutional grade assets. Really no surprise here. It just means that the bar for crypto companies is going to be that much higher because crypto companies are going to have to start competing with legacy financial companies as now everyone's offering the same assets.

This is now one asset universe. And so all of the infrastructure, all the wallets, the neo banks, all of the frontends, the user experience, everything in the back end, all of this is becoming one industry and serving one asset universe.

And so for a long time, you know, we were kind of closed off from a lot of what was happening, but no more. And so that that's what's happening there. Let's keep going. Our next headline is from our friends over at MZero.

And so MZero pitches a plural future for digital dollars. It's pretty interesting. You know, we sat down with Luca from MZero a couple of times. You can see here they've got several stable coins that they're helping to power USDA.

You know, Loop USD money is plural. It should be plural. out of many forms of money, one technology to unite them all. That's M0. M0 is powering a lot of these stable coins behind the scenes.

And ultimately there is one orchestration or unification protocol for all of these stable coins. So obviously if you look at the institutional world, you see know Robin Hood, Robin Hood will have a stable coin, banks will have their own stable coin, Clar will have their own stable coin.

Everyone believes that they have the distribution where they can own you know some piece of the stable coin market. This will benefit because they will be able to hold their money in stable coins benefit from the net interest income rather than paying that out to the banks that are holding their deposits.

And so fundamentally it is a good business model. But when it comes to the fragmentation along all these stable coins we anticipate that will be solved. And so MZ is helping solve that, as, as you see there.

So, next up, we've got our friend from the show. We've got Ben. He's going to be joining us very, very soon. We're going to take a quick commercial break before he comes in and then we will bring Ben from Starknet talk to us about Neo Finance.

Do a quick commercial break and then we'll be chatting with Ben.

We're here. We got Benjamin. Benjamin is one of the prominent people in the L2 ecosystem, but Vitalik is got second thoughts there. We're not going to talk about that too much today.

We're going to talk about the Neoinance playbook that Benjamin posted today. Ben, before we get into the Neo Finance playbook, I at this point our coins have less of a store of value than the Pokemon sign you have behind you.

Just give us give us a sense of like how you're reacting to the market on a day like today.

Yeah, great. Well, first of all, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me on. Excited to share my thoughts. I'll take a more longer term outlook when I'm looking at the market today.

I am of the belief that crypto and the blockchain industry as a whole today has never been in a better state. And I think a lot of people would disagree with me given the prices, but if you actually objectively look at it from a non-emotional perspective, there has never been more interest in the crypto industry.

There have never been more institutions involved. There have never been more people involved in a net positive way. And so I think in a day like today, it's good to to look at the good and then you also need to look at the bad.

And the bad is a lot of these projects that have probably been at over inflated values and that are kind of slowly maturing over the last few years to the valuations that they should have been in at the start.

On the contrary, you have assets like hype which are continuing to go up which are generating millions of dollars of revenue every year or every day and buying back the token. And that's kind of the whole point of neo finance, right?

It's converging in assets that make money. Those assets are spreading the wealth to everyone else and everyone else is benefiting. It's cutting out the the toxic intermediary and letting everyone benefit.

And so it's it's hard sometimes to look at the market going down 5% every single day for what feels like months. But if we if we look at it objectively, we've never been in a better place. And so I'm extremely bullish.

Yeah. I I was having a conversation with a friend at another company earlier today and you know this was this came up and it was sort of this this bifurcation this cognitive dissonance that on on one hand it does feel like we're getting massive adoption from massive financial institutions and that has to be really bullish but on the other hand obviously we're seeing prices go down and it's this really narrow adoption like in this in this particular segment where We're seeing a lot of adoption happen and so a lot of teams are getting kind of fallen by the wayside.

Weren't able to find product market fit but then there are a lot of companies out there like we were just live streaming the Onondo Summit. They've got Patrick Wit from the administration. They've got you know people from Wisdom Tree, Janisenders and Anchorage Digital all of these institutions that are actually issuing real assets and bringing those into the onchain markets.

So if you're at a company that you know is is let's say let let's approach it from the crypto first side here like how do you think a cryptonative company ought to approach this industry and where it's headed because I think a lot of people are generally going to agree it feels like where everyone is going is after these these financial institutions like it almost feels like the entire industry is pivoted to try to cap to capture those like the minds of those companies because that's where the capital inflows are coming from.

Do you think that's the right way that cryptonative companies should be approaching this or do you think everyone should kind of stick to their guns, keep doing what they've been doing and the market will catch up?

Yeah, it's a it's an interesting question. And I think there's a few different answers depending on the skill set of of your company, right? But first to to set the stage and let's be blunt for a cryptonative company to go in and try to win over institution institutional volume institutional users it's going to be tough to compete against companies that have an institutional background which is why we see trady first companies like likeo and securitize they're massively winning against um you know more cryptonnative counterparties that are doing the exact same thing and so if you're a cryptonative company who has very cipher punk ideals s crypton native a lot like starknet I think it's it's very beneficial to lean into what you know that you can do better and find a way to monetize that and so something related to starknet is a good example of this is we have a big privacy background our founder Ellie was the founder of Zcash there's a lot of knowledge that goes into the privacy sector from us and so what we're thinking about with relation to that is we know that we are better at this than than other people we're going to be able to do this better than everyone Let's figure out a way to monetize that to capture real flow from it and let's just go all guns blazing ahead with relation to that.

I think that that kind of thinking is a lot more beneficial than playing from the ground up against companies to to capture institutional flow.

Yeah, it I I think that's the right approach, right? Especially, you know, if you take privacy as a as an example, you guys have a unique edge. You're going to slam that because that's where your advantage is over the rest of the market.

It does seem like a lot of these cryptonative companies are kind of playing catch-up. Like there's been actual financial and fintech companies that have been, you know, working with a lot of these institutions for a long time.

The the idea that a lot of these crypto native guys are going to catch up to where they've been after they've, you know, there's been incumbents there for half a decade, if not longer, is is uh is probably few and far between.

Okay. So you also wrote this Neo finance playbook. Can you just take us through it? Like what was the nature of this article? And generally how did you structure this and and what was the thesis?

Yeah, for sure. So I wrote this article about the Neo Finance playbook. The idea is how do you go from not having a business to having a business that can capture real flow, give real value back to users and ultimately win a market that is getting extremely crowded by the day.

And I kind of structured this with three different phases. And this is more structured for the broader crypto industry. How do we win as a whole? How do we capture value back from the institutions? And then what can a specific company here do to actually win?

And so the first phase is onboarding assets, which is currently the phase that we're in. It's bringing every single tokenized version of a of a stock, of an equity, of a commodity, of of whatever you need, you bring it onchain.

And the importance of this is that if we want to get real users to switch from their Charles Schwab and brokerage and checking accounts and for them to do those same actions like investing and trading in crypto, you need all of the same assets and you need all of them.

It can't just be a small subsection of them because convincing someone to move from something that works perfectly for them to crypto, you can't have any trade-offs with relation to the assets that they can actually interact with.

The second phase is going to be actually onboarding users. So once you have the assets, then you have to go to these users and you have to convince them that what they're doing can be replicated even better in crypto.

And there's three components of this that I think are are critical in order to get users. You need to be able to offer save, spend, and invest. and save. I'm going to hamper on a little bit because I think that this is where you can get the real differentiation and edge from the traditional banks and traditional brokerages.

And so with SAVE, everyone knows when you open up a Wells Fargo account and you deposit a couple thousand, the interest rate they're going to offer you is extremely under the risk-free rate. We're talking one basis point when Treasury bills are paying out 350 of them.

And so what can you do as a crypto bank to actually get these users and convince them that um you can get higher yield? And that's right. It's you offer real yield. And this is why Brian Armstrong is going into going into the White House and going into DC and pushing for the regulatory ability to give yield on stable coins because this is the edge.

Banks make 50% of their money from the delta between treasury bills and the interest they pay out. If you can compress that, offer it transparently through um a crypto neo bank, then you are in first step immediately going to get all these users that want more money.

And to offer this safely, you're going to need secure battle tested infrastructure. Crypto is prone to hacks. You need to make sure you're properly audited for a long time. You your infrastructure stack is very good.

And then you're going to need transparent competitive yields. And the second part of that is so if you can offer more competitive yields, you also need to be able to offer transparent yields. Right now, you know, depositing into a traditional bank is really just a black box with users not properly compensated for their risk.

They're getting pennies on the dollar for the the lending that they're providing. And you know, like bank loans are private users. If I give money to Wells Fargo, I have absolutely no idea where my money is being utilized.

Um, and crypto actually fixes that because everything is transparent on a public blockchain. You can see where your money is being lent out. You can have control over it. And you can ultimately make the same checking account um just a lot more transparent and a lot better for users.

The second part of that is going to be spend. And so, you know, a lot of neo banks today, they they offer regular debit cards. This, unfortunately, isn't going to be practical for the long run. Over a third of the population uses credit for everyday purchases.

And I think in early 2026 there's something like over $1.2 trillion dollars in credit card debt, which is a massive issue, but that's not the one we're discussing. And so how do you offer that? I mean, this is a this is a real issue.

I think there's probably leeway somewhere where you can partner with a bank like JB Morgan and have them underwrite the risk. You'll need to still go through KYC, CIP, AML, all of that sort of stuff. But I think that that's okay, right?

I mean, neo bank shouldn't be offering anything that isn't properly regulated. We should just be doing it through crypto. And we may have different neo bank offerings, right? Like we may have a KYC neo neo bank. We may have, you know, one that offers with no KYC.

Maybe you don't have the credit option, but you have a debit card option. But if you want like a fully versed traditional finance bank built through crypto, you're going to need to be regulated. That's just the reality of the state of of where we are.

And I honestly I think that's okay. Maybe that's not as cryptonative as I as I should be, but I think it's perfectly okay to to have regulation um with banking infrastructure.

And then the last trait you're going to need to kind of get people to onboard users is going to be investing. And we don't really have this today. We're bringing on a lot of tokenized equities and tokenized commodities that people can interact with.

But for a NEO bank to really win in my opinion, you're going to need the same interface, the the ability to, you know, buy options, buy equities. And I think Hyperlquid H kind of has this ability here where a NEO bank can integrate HIP3, run their own front end, run their own markets.

This is going to be a huge profit source for the Neo Bank, and it's also going to kind of finalize this third component that no bank has been able to offer, which is the ability to invest.

And so once you have the users then you have this this last one which is just phase three is actually onboarding behavior. You have the right system, you have the people there, but how do you actually convince them to to really use it?

And I think you know going back to to what I was talking about earlier, it seems simple but I think fair savings yield is really just the best example of how you get people to start interacting with the neo bank and interacting with the product offerings you have.

And the best opinion or the best example I can give of this is Robin Hood. So Robin Hood came into an industry where to create a trade, you needed to pay a $4.95 execution fee every single time.

For a small investor, that adds up because that adds up to a $9 $9 just to swap in and out of a trade with on a $1,000 trade. That's 90 basis points. That's, you know, maybe the difference between whether the trade is profitable or not.

And they came in and they basically said, "This is corrupt. we're going to offer $0 trading fees and we're just going to let you trade for free. Um, and you know, today I can't find a bank that still charges that $4.95 execution fee.

And so all of that to be said, if we can come in, we can offer fair savings yield, the banks are going to be forced to follow in our path because it is ultimately a better system for the user and over the long run, if executed properly, the users will always go towards where they can benefit.

Yeah. Yeah. You make a good point. I think, you know, the Robin Hood moment was a lot like Netflix for Blockbuster. It was like it, you know, before you had to go into a Blockbuster, you paid, you know, 10 bucks per movie.

And then it flipped it on its head and it said, "Hey, we're going to make you, you know, you'll pay a subscription fee. It'll cover the whole month. You can have unlimited movies throughout that whole month. Just like Robin Hood, you have unlimited trades."

Um, you know, I think Brian Armstrong also says something that's pretty similar on this on this frame. uh when he was in Davos and he was talking to I think it was a Frank French bank uh French banker about how you know right now the traditional banking world forces you into their system and then shortch changes you on the interest.

You can't opt out of the fractional reserve banking system. But if you're on chain and you're deposited in one of these NEO banks, you know, you could be earning four or 5% if you opt in. And that was the point he was making that and Coinbase is a great example of this.

You can go on Coinbase, you can deposit into Morpho via Coinbase, but if you don't want to deposit into Morpho, you don't have to. Your funds will just sit there not being rehypothecated. If you want the extra yield, you can go into it.

And so it does flip the banking model on its head because it becomes optin rather than not even having a way to opt out. Um, the one thing that I wanted to actually I that I particularly enjoyed about the article I read it and uh I I like how and even you know as you were talking about today you said you know that maybe that's not as cryptonative as you should be like these you know the ethos of everyone kind of coming in and uh you know kind of integrating KYC these kinds of things.

I think people want forgot password buttons. Self-custody is important. Maybe we can figure out the right ZKI verifiable way in which people can have self-custody but make it you know retrievable if they end up uh having a poor UX.

Um and you structured this article so that look this may not be the endgame. This is a stepping stone or a progression towards a better system. Whereas I've I've heard other people see the institutional wave and they they've kind of said hey crypto is becoming co-opted.

You know, I I think people may have that opinion in the short term, but in the long run, the idea is that ultimately we we kind of have the best of both worlds. Um, all that aside, Ben, I have we just got a couple minutes left and and so I just want to get your take on one thing.

Um, and that is the idea that if you start at the beginning of your article, it starts with bringing high quality assets into the space. I think that's first and foremost. important in order to get more investors in, have people actually stick around so it's not just meme coins and, you know, yield farms via token emissions.

We actually need assets that people are willing to buy and hold in order for them to come and stay. As we do that, these, you know, the the legacy finance industry and the DeFi industry really starts to melt together.

Like if we're offering the same asset universe, you know, the infrastructure and the UX, the portals by which we access those assets, you know, we're really competing on the same playing field as a lot of these financial institutions because ultimately we're we're offering access to the same assets.

How do you think this the nature of this competition is going going to play out, right? If you have incumbents, they have market share like Interactive Brokers and you know the NASDAQ, the New York Stock Exchange, those are the exchanges that are used to offering these this caliber of assets.

Now we're talking about tokenizing those assets, putting them on chain. People are going to access them on chain, but you know those those user experiences are going to start to compete with the legacy financial ones that people have been used to for 50 to 100 years.

Is it a matter of catching up? Should people be looking at getting