Chris Harrsch

The Cari announcement sparked a debate about institutional blockchain infrastructure. Much of it focuses on technical architecture. But first, consider the business case of proprietary vs. open standard. Governance of proprietary networks like Canton or Tempo is going to be controlled by a small group with disproportionate voting weight. It's "permissionless", but to join you have to submit a Google Form with opaque admission criteria. It's unclear who decides. Over time, the most influential participants will set the terms of access and pricing. If you're a bank evaluating this today, you recognize the pattern from SWIFT and Visa: early incumbents locking in structural advantages while late joiners absorb the cost. This is what we hear from banks. Everyone wants to build their own SWIFT-killer. Nobody wants join someone else's SWIFT-killer. Ethereum is the only settlement layer where that dynamic can't take hold, because no single entity can capture it. It's the only place where every participant can permanently trust that no future coalition will rewrite the rules against them. That's what makes Ethereum the only game-theoretical equilibrium as a global settlement layer for institutional finance that works long term.

JUST IN: 🇺🇸 SEC approves Nasdaq rule to allow tokenized stocks & securities trading.

🇺🇸 BIG: The SEC has approved a Nasdaq rule change enabling the trading of tokenized securities.

Microsoft appears to be using AI slop to promote Windows 11 features that don’t look real. Yes, it looks like Microsoft’s marketing team can’t even capture a screenshot in Windows 11 to promote a basic feature like the Snipping Tool or the desktop. Microsoft proudly says the AI-slop screenshot of Windows 11 was generated using Copilot. In the image, the UI feels off, the details also don’t line up, and some of the so-called features don’t even look like the real UI of Windows 11. That’s the bigger problem with AI-generated marketing. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is partly a marketing strategy to promote Copilot itself 🤷‍♂️

Goldman Sachs CEO: Tokenized equities is something we’re thinking a lot about David Solomon asks Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong how he sees tokenized equities unfolding. Brian responds: “A few years ago, people were talking about stablecoins, and they were saying, ‘Why do we need a digital dollar? We kind of can already make digital payments… What’s the point of that?’ It turned out to be a massive market. There’s high demand for the dollar in all these countries around the world, and a lot of people can’t get access to dollar-denominated accounts — they live in a high-inflation country like Turkey or Argentina or Nigeria. So that was one piece. And the other was it just reduced friction in terms of all kinds of payments people wanted to make in crypto for trading and B2B payments. There’s something like $30 trillion of stablecoin payment volume in the last year.” Brian believes tokenized equities will follow a similar path: “We don’t know exactly how it’s going to play out, but if you simply store a share of a company with a traditional custodian and issue a token equivalent of it on-chain, what does that enable? Similar to stablecoins, there’s an international component to this. There’s lots of people in the world who would love to buy Tesla or Nvidia. If you’re wealthy in Argentina, you can probably get a brokerage account open somewhere to trade that kind of stuff, but the vast majority of people cannot. There’s also this 24/7 trading aspect — people want to do that, and I think crypto is going to get there faster. There’s fractional shares, where you can trade a tiny piece of a share. There’s things like perpetual futures markets which have done really well in crypto — why shouldn’t that exist for securities as well? I think you’re going to see some things like this where crypto reduces friction and allows people to try new things. There might even be novel governance things which get created: let’s say you want to create a stock where short-term holders of your stock can’t vote — you can program that into a smart contract on chain and make that new type of token with those capabilities.” And it’s not just equities. Treasuries, private credit, real estate, and many other real world assets (RWAs) are being tokenized, with Ethereum is the preferred settlement rail for compliant institutional capital markets. More than 60% of all tokenized assets — over $200 billion — reside on Ethereum.