Circle Internet Group, Inc.

Just pretend like that's what you're going to do.

So you take your $100,000 and you buy USDC Circle or TetherCoin or whatever.

It doesn't really matter what you buy.

That company... sits on your $100,000, almost like a bank, but without the same regulation and without all those like droopy-eyed people that work at the bank.

Tokenized assets is the strongest narrative today, up about 96% over seven days.

Circle Internet Group, Ando tokenized stock, is the top coin in that sector, up only a little over seven days.

One sector leads while the rest sits still.

Bitcoin is hovering near $77,000 and the broader structure is still leaning higher despite falling about 5% this week.

are going to perhaps be the enablers of it.

How does that value actually accrue to those altcoins? Does it? Or do the companies that use those altcoins accrue that value via the equities that they may launch, such as Circle, so on and so forth? How do you view that kind of disconnect between Bitcoin and its use case and the broader altcoin market? It seems to be struggling.

Yeah, it's obviously struggling.

Bitcoin's dominance has been higher in this market.

More than half of the total market cap of cryptocurrencies are in Bitcoin.

And then altcoins, especially if you look at a lot of...

Even if there are some projects who are building on the trend, like you pointed out, stablecoin issuer Circle doesn't have a token.

Of course, USDC is a token, but it's a stablecoin.

USDC, right across the front of the shirt.

USDC is a stablecoin, issued by a company called Circle.

Circle is one of the largest stablecoin issuers in the world.

So why is Circle spending what it takes to sponsor one of the most watched sport leagues on the planet? When an American stablecoin buys that real estate, this should tell you everything about stablecoins and where they're headed.

Let's get into it.

Most crypto moves pretty violently.

And hopefully we can get this clarity act done.

OK, moving ahead, Circle agrees to buy cross-border payments firm TazaPay for $400 million.

So we've often talked about, you know, as this asset class industry grows, you're going to see crypto firms acquire TradFi firms and TradFi firms will acquire crypto firms.

Right.

And eventually they're going to become blended where they all offer pretty much the same assets.

services because we see a lot of crypto companies are getting banking licenses from the OCC.

So this is a big acquisition by Circle.

Hanging out at the pool is great.

Um, and then if you go to the next one, uh, a16z-backed Open Reserve, uh, another consortium we've talked about on the show, uh, secures preliminary OCC approval for a national bank charter.

Um, and then if you go to the next one, uh, tweet from Rob Haddock, um, about Circle acquiring Azopay, a cross-border payments company supporting businesses across a hundred markets.

Rob says, "The right move by Circle.

They had been rumored to be in conversations with a number of different companies similar to Azopay, but I like this deal specifically because of their strength in a fragmented APAC region.

Growing importance of Sing- Singapore and the tailwinds behind cross-border business payments in and out of Asia, especially with Africa, a route that is more open to stable coin disruption than more established corridors." Um, and then maybe just one more is, uh, what we've talked or alluded to here a couple times now is the SEC proposing an overhaul of transfer agent rules to support blockchain electronic records.

Because that's the thing that we talk about a lot, and I think Tether's the one that really keyed into is, at the end of the day, like financial services are localized because individuals have to trust who's around there.

They're not gonna just randomly go to a company in San Francisco, and so it's gonna benefit a lot of these firms that are looking to operate at a global scale to figure out who their counterparts are, specifically for the fiat on and off ramps as you move stable coins within that like sandwich.

Yeah, I found that Circle deal particularly interesting in, in sort of the context of all this because we've talked a lot about how Tether sort of started ex-US and is attempting to go inward to the US and sort of take market share there.