Crypto & Web3

Stablecoins and their infrastructure were a recurring theme across several outlets. American Banker Fintech covered BVNK and Marqeta's payments approach to stablecoins, and separately addressed how tokenizing assets opens opportunities for banks. Fintech Futures argued that stablecoins will not kill banks but will eliminate excuses, and also reported on Circle's $400m Tazapay acquisition aimed at scaling global USDC adoption. Linas's Newsletter framed the same Circle-Tazapay deal as a move to own USDC float rather than payment fees, valuing it at $400M, while also covering Meta Muse's positioning in the AI Agent race against Grok Bot and Gemini on the theme of trust.

Institutional and infrastructure deals featured prominently as well. The Fintech Blueprint published a podcast on how Zerohash won Morgan Stanley's crypto business, and separately covered Robinhood's DeFi launchpad activity stapling $5B of memes to stocks. Fintech Futures reported on Cari landing $32.5m for a blockchain banking network and on KB Kookmin Bank partnering with JP Morgan for blockchain corporate trade payments. Bankless covered Robinhood taking stakes in Crypto.com and OG.com, alongside pieces on ETH's outlook ("ETH Is Lining Up for Trillions") and Vitalik's pitch for EIP-8288 as Ethereum's next cryptography unlock.

Market and asset-specific coverage appeared through Stack and Story, which covered Uniswap's new hook targeting LP fee leakage, bitcoin miners missing the recent rally, a $987M weekly snap-back in Bitcoin ETFs, and Tether's $91B position resting on two signatures. Fintech Wrap Up covered a discussion with Kraken/Payward CCO Mark Greenberg on whether tokenized stocks can open global markets to everyone.

Overall, the week's coverage spanned stablecoin economics and infrastructure, tokenization of assets and stocks, institutional crypto partnerships and acquisitions, and market-level developments in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and DeFi protocols, as reported respectively by American Banker Fintech, Fintech Futures, The Fintech Blueprint, Linas's Newsletter, Bankless, Stack and Story, and Fintech Wrap Up.