Phil Fogel ( 🦇, 🌳, 🍾)

The @zama confidential USDC vault from @SteakhouseFi is now in the top 10 largest USDC vault across all chains on @Morpho and top 20 across all assets and all chains

Gold. Now at your fingertips. Earn 5% Gold Cashback on every payment with the @MiniPay Card—built by @Opera w/ @Visa & @gnosispay, only on @Celo. Issued in XAUt0, the omnichain @Tether Gold from @USDT0_to. Join the 600K+ waitlist today: minipay.to/card

Many reached out asking for my thoughts on @openstandard announcement. I decided to share my personal reading, and, more importantly, put it in context with my vision of the world. First, the announcement. @stripe / @Stablecoin is not new to extremely powerful announcements—nor to announcements where evidence didn’t necessarily follow. Some will remember October 2025's Open Issuance, Bridge's open issuance platform that was meant to be a technology letting companies issue their own stablecoins, overall with limited adoption—albeit in a challenging market. Open USD is an iteration of the same vision with the opposite architecture: no longer a modular platform, but a single purpose-built entity (called Open Standard) issuing one single token, OUSD, with governance and economics shared among participants. The emphasis has shifted from technology to shared reserve economics, free mint / redeem, aggregated liquidity, and a governance promise that remains without specifics. The partner list is impressive on paper (140+ of the most powerful names), but its quality is harder to assess given its heterogeneity, as far as we know: (i) some partners have communicated strong commitments to embedding OUSD in their flows, (ii) others have signaled a lukewarm desire to support on X, (iii) others still (who shall remain unnamed) have expressed disappointment through various channels at being listed as implied supporters. This is, for all practical purposes, a list of signed Letters of Intent to collaborate. My honest read is that this will not be a 140-company consortium: it is most probably a @stripe + @Visa + @Mastercard initiative with an aggressive economic rebate attached, and everyone else is in that announcement for a different reason. We should be intellectually honest: OUSD might, in the long run, be a powerful force and a genuinely compelling alternative to @circle's USDC for specific use cases. This is Stripe indexing on convenience, and there is a real market for convenience. Today, however, convenience still points to USDC. A tokenized, fragmented future. At @m0 we underwrote, years ago, a vision of the world that has been materializing, albeit more slowly than expected: most money will migrate to tokenized form (whether stablecoins or bank deposits) and it will not sit on one balance sheet. Regulation, competitive dynamics in payments and banking, and the economics of self-issuance all point to a monetary base fragmented across many issuers and many balance sheets. Open USD is, ironically, the strongest confirmation of this thesis to date. Whether liquidity and acceptance are dominated by one company willing to give away economics when required (like Circle today) or by a handful of consortia, the incentive to deviate remains. It is our conviction that fragmentation will increase, not decrease: more proprietary dollars, more counter-consortia, more balance sheets. In such a world, value creation does not reside in rent-seeking NIM retention (issuance itself is a race to the bottom) but in the layer that connects the liability claim (the money) to what it can do: inter-issuer settlement, global sophisticated payments, stablecoin-centric financial experiences, crypto, agentic commerce, geographical distribution, and more. @m0 is building, alongside a handful of others—including many of the signatories of the Open USD initiative, to thrive on fragmentation, by unifying and settling this growing plurality of instruments rather than competing with any of them. Our conviction remains that this productive connective tissue won't be built on announcements and paper alliances, but on technology. The future. 2026 has so far been a lateral, weird, market, in stablecoin-land: an enormous amount of positioning has been signaled (including by @m0) while very little new volume has actually materialized. Lateral markets are where narratives get sold. The Open USD announcement is reminding us that most of the largest financial infrastructure companies in the world are heavily investing in what is the deepest paradigmatic shift in finance we will observe in our lifetimes. While this makes the journey more challenging from a mindshare perspective, it confirms that the main asset of companies like @m0, through which we will continue to grow relevance, attract resources, and increase our financial value, will remain the technology we build ahead of everyone else. Onwards.

a16z-BACKED RWA STARTUP GOLDFINCH FINANCE TO WIND DOWN Goldfinch Finance is shuttering after originating $100M in loans. The governance vote on the wind-down is set to pass on June 23. Depositors face 2+ year recovery as $GFI trades 99.8% below its 2022 peak. Read more here: thedefiant.io/news/defi/gold…

We built our tokenisation around one rule: if you tokenise an asset, it has to be the same, but better. Most tokenised structures don't clear that bar. The token is a digital stand-in for something recorded offchain, so all the old complexity stays put. @TFGolden, our Head of Digital Assets, on what it means to do it properly: the asset is the token, with ownership recorded natively onchain. Own it, natively ↓

Today, @maex242 , @pstanislaus , and I are officially launching @causaprimaai! We raised $10M pre-seed, led by @creandum , with @Kfundvc , @helloworldvc, AngelInvest and 50+ founders & executives from Qonto, Pennylane, SAP, ING, SoFi, LIDL, Google DeepMind and more. Every tool in this space was built to serve one company. Accounts Payable (AP) for the buyer, Accounts Receivable (AR) for the supplier. But human-to-human and human-to-agent both still leave companies stuck chasing payments. Causa Prima is the first agent-to-agent network for B2B finance. It puts buyers and suppliers on the same system. AI agents on both sides can resolve disputes, negotiate payment timing, and capture early-pay discounts - automatically, in real time. 3000+ active accounts are already on the network. If you're a CFO or finance leader, DM me for early access.

Once you start watching this panel, you won't be able to stop. Credit risk. Smart contracts. Moody's. DeFi exits. Liquidity illusions. Investor protection. Tokenized bonds. 🎙️@michellek_web3 · @_ConorMoore · Rajeez Bamra · @Philfog · @hhsahay @pharos_network · @USDai_Official · @moodysratings · @Corkprotocol · @ArchLending Risk Underwriting Across Tokenized Products Panel at The Capital Summit Miami 2026 youtu.be/HQCQijKawFU