A weekly research-driven brief tracking how onchain systems actually work — focused on structure, adoption, and what lasts beyond the hype.
This week, five developments in roughly 96 hours confirmed that Open Money's coordination layer — governance tooling, onchain identity, protocol decision-making — is entering the same structural inflection the settlement layer went through in 2024.
Wall Street meets DeFi — and both change. BlackRock, SocGen, and Nasdaq move onto public blockchains as Across moves toward corporate governance. A new hybrid model is emerging, reshaping who controls finance and how value flows.
Onchain yield may be DeFi’s killer use case. As stablecoins bring dollars onchain, lending, staking, and tokenized real-world assets are turning that liquidity into programmable returns. The result: global, self-custodial capital markets.
AI agents are starting to get wallets. Autonomous agents may soon be able to buy services, pay APIs, and route transactions without human mediation. That shift could turn the internet into a network where software not only thinks and acts, but also buys and sells.
A fictional 2028 memo about an AI-driven crisis rattled real markets. Not because it revealed new facts, but because it offered a coherent plot investors could trade. In a memetic market structure, narrative velocity shapes price — and programmable settlement rails start to look less optional.
Crypto proved it can make finance transparent. But can it make it private? As AI agents become financial actors, public-by-default rails turn into attack surfaces. This issue explains why privacy must become a base-layer primitive.