Stablecoins, as tokenized representations of fiat currency circulating on the blockchain, are undoubtedly the 'killer application' of the crypto market to date. By the end of 2024, this currency operating parallel to traditional financial infrastructure has a total market value exceeding $200 billion. With the rise of stablecoins in the past five years and their deepening integration into the global economy, the potential of blockchain as financial infrastructure will inevitably be tapped and fully utilized by the traditional financial world beyond the crypto market.
VISA believes that stablecoins are a payment innovation with the potential to provide safe, reliable, and convenient payments for more people in more places. While we are still searching for specific data on the use of stablecoins for payments, Ripple, the earliest and most seasoned blockchain payment company in the market, and its token XRP have already seen value discovery and reassessment in the market.

Musk's journey is toward the stars and the sea. Similarly, for the $20 trillion crypto market aiming for Mass Adoption, the $400 trillion - $600 trillion traditional financial market is also the stars and the sea.
We can see some paths, such as the rise of tokenization, but currently, the early RWA 1.0 assets are migrating to on-chain, yet the relatively illiquid model is not a long-term solution. Even if DePIN can revive the Internet of Things, it still struggles to hit the core.
Thus, we see Web3 payments can promote the large-scale adoption of stablecoins, which is core, especially for non-trading scenarios. The VISA stablecoin report tells us: the total supply of stablecoins is about $170 billion, settling assets worth trillions of dollars each year. Approximately 20 million addresses engage in stablecoin transactions on-chain each month. More than 120 million addresses hold non-zero stablecoin balances on-chain.

From ancient times to the present, shells, chips, cash, deposits, e-wallets, etc. are all carriers or forms of expression of currency. These carriers and forms of expression are constantly changing in line with the times, just like the digital currency form derived from blockchain technology in today's digital economy era, and the Web3 payment ecosystem built on this basis.
The most important thing is to understand that the essential attributes of money (measure of value) and its core functions (medium of exchange) remain unchanged.
The birth of programmable payment, programmable currency and special currency is also aimed at further highlighting the essential attributes of currency, strengthening its core functions, improving the efficiency of currency operation, reducing operating costs, strictly controlling risks, and giving full play to the positive role of currency in promoting exchange transactions and economic and social development through digital currency and blockchain technology.

At the beginning of 2024, Cathie Wood, the most shining Wall Street investment manager of technology stocks, led her ARK team to release the "Big Ideas 2024" report. The report aims to cover the field of "disruptive innovation" around the world, has a very high gold content, and is an important reference for global technology entrepreneurs and investors.
This article extracts content related to cryptocurrency and blockchain from two research reports in 2023/4 and presents a way of looking at Crypto from the perspective of Wall Street funds.
Among them, we can see the changes that public blockchain can bring to currency, finance, and the Internet, the solutions that smart contracts/DeFi provide for the real world, and the value growth rate brought by digital wallets combining crypto/blockchain payment capabilities.

Despite the lack of macro momentum and crypto internal narratives that have caused major market movements to stagnate, the tokenized market, whether driven by traditional finance or various breakthroughs in distribution channels, has pushed the tokenized market to new highs, exceeding US$1.5 billion for the first time.
We can see that after the publicity, popularization and hype from last year to now, tokenized U.S. debt products have continued to deepen into actual use cases, such as collateral for DeFi, treasury reserves, payment currencies, etc. At the same time, OpenEden's tokenized U.S. debt products also received ratings from the world's three major rating agencies for the first time.

On May 31, 2024, PayPal announced that its stablecoin PayPal USD (PYUSD) was launched on the Solana blockchain. This is another major milestone since Paypal first launched PYUSD on the Ethereum mainnet in August last year. It not only provides its users with a new and efficient payment method, but also provides an important reference for the future trends of the entire payment industry.
When writing a research report on Web3 payments and discussing with industry companies, I have been thinking about a question: Is stablecoin payment really necessary? Coincidentally, PYUSD was launched on Solana. Paypal gave an answer about payment freedom from a very pragmatic perspective:

Happy Dragon Boat Festival and happy holidays!
During the holiday, I still want to share some hot spots and trends in the RWA market in the past two weeks.
Money Never Sleeps!
1. Macroeconomic data this week
This week, U.S. economic data continued to unexpectedly decline, raising questions about whether the Fed will take more aggressive rate cuts again in 2024, or whether the data will exacerbate stagflation risks. This week, both the Bank of Canada and the European Central Bank began their easing cycles, and the Fed remained hesitant, complicating the macro outlook.

Meanwhile, U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs have seen inflows for 16 consecutive days, starting on May 13. This equals the longest inflow streak between January 26 and February 20 (soon after the first ETF launch).

Written by: Will Awang
Investment and financing lawyer, Digital Assets & Web3; independent researcher, tokenization & RWA & payment.

The myth of getting rich quickly in the crypto market exists every day. Most players come here not to double their money, but to turn over. In this dark forest, crypto market makers, as the top predator closest to money, are becoming more and more mysterious.
Price manipulation, pump and dump, and profiteering are synonymous with crypto market makers. However, before labeling crypto market makers with these “derogatory” labels, we need to face up to the important role they play in the crypto market, especially for early-stage coin listing projects.

Things are evolving in real time.
This is the tone of the 2024 US election year. In order to win over 10% of crypto voters in the United States, policymakers will inevitably continue to introduce favorable crypto policies.
The SEC is no longer the same SEC as before. It is constantly compromising and has passed the Ethereum ETF. Many issues left over from the previous SEC and the court will also be resolved in this year's political game. We have already seen the FIT24 bill passed by the House of Representatives. With the achievement of regulatory consensus, it will inevitably promote the development of crypto innovation and the derivation of US dollar hegemony (US dollar stablecoin).

Written by:
Will Awang, investment and financing lawyer, crypto researcher.
Chris Chuyan is a crypto lawyer, former senior product manager at an exchange, and on-chain data researcher.

The ultimate goal of most Web3 projects is to issue their own tokens, especially in the crypto bull market. As token prices rise, FOMO sentiment spreads. The road in the pursuit of "freedom" is bumpy, and there may be alarms from the unknown dark forest, severe ambushes by law enforcement officers, and even jail time at any time.
How to issue tokens legally and in compliance with regulations is the top priority that Web3 projects need to clarify, but this is far from the end. The end is to achieve decentralization of the project. Decentralization will not only bring the next step of healthy development to the project, but also bring more compliance space for the project.

In January 2023, VitaDAO, a decentralized organization focused on longevity research and drug discovery, received $4.1 million in funding led by traditional pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. This was a milestone in the DeSci Biotech field and also brought DeSci into the mainstream for the first time.
Different from DeFi's closed-loop business model that can be achieved only through encrypted native assets, DeSci's underlying assets come from off-chain and need to be closely integrated with the off-chain real world. This not only involves the transformation of traditional Science using Web3 technology and token economic models (such as scientific research collaboration, funding acquisition, data sharing, results transformation, technology transfer, product commercialization, etc.), but also involves many off-chain issues such as privacy protection, data security, IP property rights, product commercialization and compliance with the on-chain encrypted world.

Analysis of Blackrock's tokenized fund BUIDL, opening up a brave new world of DeFi for RWA assets

Since Blackrock successfully promoted the launch of BTC Spot ETF this year and introduced crypto assets into traditional finance, two months later on March 21, 2024, Blackrock teamed up with Securitize to launch the first tokenized fund BUIDL "BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund" on the public blockchain - Ethereum, introducing traditional finance into the crypto market.
The launch of the BUIDL Fund marks an important milestone in the tokenization of RWA assets. Through the BUIDL Fund, Blackrock, the world's largest asset management company, allows people to witness the future of blockchain technology transforming the financial system and achieve seamless connection between crypto assets and real-world assets.