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Plasma: Stablecoin Infrastructure & The Trillion Dollar Opportunity
By
Anil LullaPlasma isn’t just a response to technical limits. It’s the thesis that stablecoins have grown large enough to justify infrastructure designed for them alone – the same way AWS built dedicated services for specific compute needs. Last year, stablecoins facilitated over ~$5 trillion in adjusted transaction volume, over 1/3 the volume of traditional payment giants like Visa and Mastercard. For crypto-natives, stablecoins represent a fiat-pegged asset to denominate in. For the broader population in emerging markets, it represents a hedge against hyperinflation, a source of savings and payment rails for the unbanked. This points to a future where stablecoins won’t be defined strictly by APYs or protocol incentives, but by infrastructure that can scale to meet real-world usage. If Tether continues to lead that thesis, Plasma may prove to be one of the most direct, high-leverage exposures to the next wave of stablecoin adoption; especially in the parts of the world where crypto isn’t just a trade, but a necessity.
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view allWhat began as a bold balance sheet directional bet has matured into a repeatable financial structure. Public crypto accumulation is no longer confined to Bitcoin, and it is no longer limited Microstrategy (now Strategy). A new class of companies is now using capital markets to systematically acquire crypto assets as part of their treasury strategy.
This report, the first part in a two part series, explores how Ethereum, Solana, and XRP are being absorbed into corporate capital frameworks. From Strategy’s leveraged accumulation engine to Upexi’s discounted Solana lockups, a new financial primitive is taking shape - one that uses public equity, shelf registrations, and validator yield to convert market infrastructure into crypto exposure.
We examine the mechanics behind this shift, the infrastructure enabling it, and the signals investors should track as public accumulation moves beyond Bitcoin and into the altcoin core.
A new corporate archetype is forming … and it is being built on crypto.
Key Highlights Include:
Trump’s Tariff Impact: The report details how Trump’s tariff policies disrupted global trade and financial markets, driving volatility in risk assets—including crypto—and sparking a subsequent recovery, offering lessons for managing market shocks.
Fiscal Sustainability & Bond Yields: It explores rising global fiscal concerns and spiking bond yields, with implications for safe-haven assets and portfolio allocation amid a shifting economic paradigm.
Institutional Crypto Adoption Trends: A surge in Bitcoin ETF inflows and emerging crypto treasury strategies signal crypto’s growing integration into mainstream finance.
Crypto Regulatory Progress: Advances in U.S. stablecoin legislation and state-level Bitcoin reserves reduce uncertainty, potentially paving the way for broader traditional finance participation.
Tokenization Potential: The report spotlights tokenization as a transformative force for financial instruments, hinting at future opportunities in 24/7 global markets.
Wemade’s journey offers a glimpse into what it takes to bring Web2 gamers and Web3 economies together. While their core business continues to deliver strong, compounding cash flows, Wemix still hasn’t reached its full potential. The year ahead will be pivotal in determining whether Wemade can forge a deeper connection between player engagement and token economies, or whether its blockchain efforts will remain ancillary to the core business.
The internet is becoming a house of mirrors.
Those concert tickets for your favorite artist that sold out in seconds? Snatched up by scalper bots. That attractive dating profile you just matched with? Probably a catfish. Even the integrity of social media debates have collapsed, with comment sections flooded by armies of AI accounts pushing identical talking points with just enough variation to seem like different people (sometimes it’s not that hard to tell). World aims to tackle this problem by building what Sam Altman has called “one of the only trillion-dollar opportunities left” – a global proof-of-personhood (PoP) system creating a verified human-identity layer for the internet.
Their mission: build the largest global identity and financial network, owned by humanity rather than corporations or governments.
The transition to RoG-based frameworks reveals two fundamental vulnerabilities within the centralized cloud computing model. The first is blind trust: current cloud platforms do not provide hard evidence verifying that inference outputs are correct and have not been tampered with. The second is brittle scaling: the sophisticated but centralized GPU clusters that hyperscalers rely on lose efficiency once workloads extend across diverse geographies, heterogeneous hardware setups, or regulatory boundaries.
Decentralized AI (DeAI) networks, which leverage verifiable compute and semi-synchronous (or fully asynchronous) distributed training methods, are uniquely positioned to address these twin issues.
The regulatory environment for crypto has never been more bullish. With the SEC dismissing case after case against DeFi and crytpo, as well as Paul Atkins becoming the new SEC chair, the growing demand for 24/7 financial market access means blockchain technology is poised to take over.
The tokenization of securities and real world assets represents the future for onchain applications through bringing high-friction, high-barrier-to-enter financial vehicles to the blockchain for 24/7 cross-border trading.
Pump.fun is vertically integrating Solana's memecoin economy through PumpSwap, capturing billions in trading value previously flowing to Raydium. Now controlling both token creation and trading, Pump.fun's strategic power play has forced Raydium's defensive LaunchLab response. Will Pump.fun's streamlined approach maintain dominance, or can Raydium's creator-aligned strategy gain traction? Explore the battle reshaping Solana's memecoin infrastructure.
We are witnessing the slow, structural inversion of crypto’s power dynamics. From infrastructure-heavy protocols with bloated valuations and abstracted use cases, to application-first ecosystems that own the user, the orderflow, and increasingly, the revenue.
The next cycle won’t be led by chains racing to 100,000 TPS. It’ll be driven by focused, composable applications that prioritize usage over architecture, and sustainability over speculative hype. The winners will be those who sit closest to where demand originates – not where blocks get finalized.
This conversation features Yan Liberman (Delphi Ventures), Oleg Ivanov, and Omar-Shakeeb (SecondLane), and addresses common misconceptions, deal logistics, valuation dynamics, best practices, and regulatory nuances as it pertains to these types of transactions. The goal of this collaboration is to educate the industry as part of a broader research series on secondary markets, exploring their function, mechanics, and impact on spot markets.
Story Protocol offers an exciting, forward-thinking vision for intellectual property management in an AI-driven, digital economy. Rather than extending outdated legacy systems, Story takes a bold leap by developing a specialized layer-1 designed to address modern IP challenges like attribution, royalty distribution, and licensing—areas where other solutions frequently fall short. Nevertheless, meaningful challenges remain. Opting for a dedicated chain involves inherent trade-offs, particularly around adoption, integration, and user experience compared to simpler and more familiar general-purpose platforms. Ultimately, Story’s architecture must convincingly justify these trade-offs by clearly demonstrating intuitive usability, genuine creator engagement, and tangible operational benefits.
Celestia has the tech and the thesis. What it doesn’t have is validation. It needs one breakout rollup, one app with traction and DA needs big enough to matter. That’s what turns the narrative into fees, and fees into value. If crypto is shifting toward a fundamentals-based valuation model like TradFi, this is what will ultimately matter. If that happens, $TIA becomes a high-leverage bet on bandwidth scale. If not, it’s just another subsidized token with nothing real behind it.
While the broader Web3 gaming market has been struggling, a handful of extremely well capitalized teams have seen their valuations retrace significantly from their early 2024 highs. Among them, MON Protocol, a team that has continuously shipped throughout the last 24 months while having access to one of the largest cash-treasuries in Web3 gaming. Are we finally entering a gaming market with attractive opportunities?
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Macro & MarketsMarket Musings - April Showers… May Flowers? - Macro & Markets May 2025
By
Anil LullaKey Highlights Include:
Trump’s Tariff Impact: The report details how Trump’s tariff policies disrupted global trade and financial markets, driving volatility in risk assets—including crypto—and sparking a subsequent recovery, offering lessons for managing market shocks.
Fiscal Sustainability & Bond Yields: It explores rising global fiscal concerns and spiking bond yields, with implications for safe-haven assets and portfolio allocation amid a shifting economic paradigm.
Institutional Crypto Adoption Trends: A surge in Bitcoin ETF inflows and emerging crypto treasury strategies signal crypto’s growing integration into mainstream finance.
Crypto Regulatory Progress: Advances in U.S. stablecoin legislation and state-level Bitcoin reserves reduce uncertainty, potentially paving the way for broader traditional finance participation.
Tokenization Potential: The report spotlights tokenization as a transformative force for financial instruments, hinting at future opportunities in 24/7 global markets.
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view allPlasma isn’t just a response to technical limits. It’s the thesis that stablecoins have grown large enough to justify infrastructure designed for them alone – the same way AWS built dedicated services for specific compute needs. Last year, stablecoins facilitated over ~$5 trillion in adjusted transaction volume, over 1/3 the volume of traditional payment giants like Visa and Mastercard. For crypto-natives, stablecoins represent a fiat-pegged asset to denominate in. For the broader population in emerging markets, it represents a hedge against hyperinflation, a source of savings and payment rails for the unbanked. This points to a future where stablecoins won’t be defined strictly by APYs or protocol incentives, but by infrastructure that can scale to meet real-world usage. If Tether continues to lead that thesis, Plasma may prove to be one of the most direct, high-leverage exposures to the next wave of stablecoin adoption; especially in the parts of the world where crypto isn’t just a trade, but a necessity.
This conversation features Yan Liberman (Delphi Ventures), Oleg Ivanov, and Omar-Shakeeb (SecondLane), and addresses common misconceptions, deal logistics, valuation dynamics, best practices, and regulatory nuances as it pertains to these types of transactions. The goal of this collaboration is to educate the industry as part of a broader research series on secondary markets, exploring their function, mechanics, and impact on spot markets.
The agentic economy may prove to be the most lucrative investment theme of our generation. With the value of your labor going to zero, the train only leaves the station once. The industrial revolution provoked changes in societal organization - from farms to factories - which demanded institutional reform - from feudalism to markets - which, in turn, required new legal and governance arrangements to cope with, and capitalize on, these fundamental shifts. Looking at our current trajectory, AI's impact on the economy will be more meaningful: transforming society not in two centuries, but in as little as two decades.
Software is eating the world. AI is eating software. AI is largely the combination of data, compute and talent. The entity or network which most effectively organizes these resources is set to own the 21st century. Whether you or I have any role to play in this future may very well be decided by how efficiently the long-tail can coordinate. Distributed training, efficient routing, verifiability, privacy, and effective developer incentives may will decide the difference. DeAI will live or die based on this test. The test of composable compute.
Dive into the Infrastructure Layer of the Decentralized AI (DeAI) crypto stack in part 2 of our DeAI series. Learn about Compute projects like Render, Gensyn, io.net and more, plus whether the "Airbnb for GPUs" narrative has legs. Then focus on Data: Scaling Data, Synthetic Data, AI Search and how Agentic Protocols like DataDAOs and DePIN fit in. Finally, the enablers of these data ecosystems like marketplaces, Lakehouses Storage and Retrieval. Will DeAI helps us achieve Digital Liberalism?
Can decentralized AI (The Square) compete with the behemoth that is centralized AI (The Tower)? The following report is an exploration into the AI value-chain: a peek into the awesome resources being deployed by the hyperscalers and the emergent decentralized AI ecosystem, assisted by cryptography & distributed incentives, aiming to present a viable alternative.
Are we heading for a world of a few 10 trillion parameter models governed from four thrones in the Pacific Northwest? Or are we destined for a tapestry of models in the millions underpinned by open source communities and collective ownership? An internet of agents? A Hivemind.
Telegram trading bots burst on the scene last summer, offering the market a much-needed fun new concept in the midst of a lethargic bear market. Trading bots were a major driver in the memecoin rally that pushed PEPE to $1.5B market cap in Jul. 23.
The bot narrative lost steam as the memecoin phase subsided, but trading bots have continued to gain users and add new features. In this report, we will unpack the impressive fundamentals of Telegram bots, and discuss their role in the DEX landscape moving forward. Are telegram bots a profitable niche, or income giants just getting started?
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