Delphi Digital

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AI coins see a resurgence this week on our sector dashboard. Top Gainers • TAO (+24.56%) • FET (+20.51%) • VVV (+13.33%) • APT (+11.97%) • JTO (+11.72%)

Sky is splitting its balance sheet across autonomous capital agents. $70M in USDS was recently approved for four agents that will independently deploy stablecoin liquidity into credit markets, DeFi, and RWAs. Under MakerDAO, every allocation ran through a single governance vote. As the balance sheet grew into the billions, Sky moved to a model where specialized agents manage capital independently. Spark currently routes ~$2B through its Liquidity Layer across Ethereum lending and RWA markets. Keel targets up to $2.5B in capital deployment. This latest allocation adds four more with up to 10 planned for 2026.

Read the full analysis from @scotttfreeman here. members.delphidigital.io/feed/an-honest…

Crypto speculative positioning has been flushed out to levels at or below past market bottoms. But for equities, net long positioning remains well above prior periods of economic stress. The caveat is that crypto's positioning reset is likely driven by PTSD from the October 2025 liquidation event rather than any forward looking recession pricing. Both positioning data and current asset prices point to a market that may be underestimating the macro consequences of an energy shock: slower growth, higher inflation, and tighter policy.

DeFi's next growth phase will be embedded. Whop just launched Treasury, a yield feature for their creator payments platform that serves over 21 million users and processes $3 billion in annual payouts. Creator balances that sat idle now convert to stablecoins and route through Aave lending markets via Plasma. Users never touch a wallet or think about what chain they're on. Stablecoin supply added a third of its total value this past year to over $306 billion. That growth is being driven by stablecoins becoming invisible infrastructure inside platforms that already have the users. The protocols that become the default yield and settlement backend for those platforms are competing for the integration layer behind fintechs that already have distribution.

Read our new stablecoin report here. members.delphidigital.io/reports/stable…

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BTC is in Day 48 of Defection in our Game Theory Dashboard. Only 4% of Defection Regimes have this long historically.

Stablecoin issuance is commoditizing. Now a growing wave of white label issuers handle the entire stack. Projects like Paxos, Bridge, Anchorage, and M0 are all providing issuance as a service. The process is becoming standardized and low-margin, which means the moat in stablecoins is shifting from who can issue to who has distribution. That's why Tether and Circle have dominated for five years. Their edge was in liquidity depth and exchange integrations that created a flywheel no one else could replicate. The long tail of stablecoin issuers won't win by competing head to head on those terms. The ones gaining traction are finding a different angle. Paxos is one example. They provide issuance infrastructure and regulatory compliance while partners like PayPal handle distribution. That model has taken the market cap of Paxos-issued assets from roughly 1B to 7.75B in roughly one year. Distribution is the moat.

Read our full stablecoin report here. members.delphidigital.io/reports/stable…

Tempo recently launched the Machine Payments Protocol: an open standard for AI agent payments. MPP is rail-agnostic. Agents can pay with stablecoins or cards through Stripe depending on what the service accepts. Instead of a separate transaction per API call, agents open sessions and deposit funds once. Payments stream continuously as the agent consumes resources, and everything batch settles in a single transaction when the session closes. x402 took a different approach. The protocol is crypto first with per-request payments, though recent updates have added session support. MPP covers more ground today with native fiat support, but both protocols are early. Whether either protocol matters long term comes down to adoption beyond their own ecosystems.

Thrilled to be leading @tori_finance's seed. Most on-chain yield is reflexive, it originates from within crypto and compresses the moment markets cool. Tori sources returns from an entirely different universe: institutionally scalable delta-neutral and HFT strategies in TradFi that have consistently generated strong low double-digit APY for decades. Completely uncorrelated to crypto market direction. Access to this was previously gated behind 7-figure minimums and accreditation. Now it's open to anyone with a wallet. The real unlock though is what crypto adds to this. DeFi composability lets users recursively leverage their position, pushing effective yields considerably beyond the baseline. You can't do that with a traditional fund share, this is a case where bringing something on-chain makes the product strictly better. Add full on-chain verifiability of every position and you get TradFi-grade transparency alongside access and composability that TradFi simply can't offer.

Read the full analysis from @scotttfreeman here. members.delphidigital.io/feed/an-honest…

The US fiscal impulse has been one of the most reliable leads for Bitcoin, tracking about 6 months ahead. It is now negative year-over-year and set to deteriorate further, as the OBBBA spending (tax refunds, SALT cap increases, tip and overtime deductions, bonus depreciation) are frontloaded in the first half of 2026. Post-pandemic, the fiscal impulse has been a key driver for risk assets. Its deterioration removes one of the few remaining macro tailwinds at a time when global liquidity offers little margin of safety and central bank easing breadth is already rolling over.

Our Year Ahead Reports are public thanks to Polymarket. Read the Infra Report here. members.delphidigital.io/reports/the-ye…

The Solana Foundation is building an enterprise developer platform with Mastercard, Western Union, and Worldpay as early users. Institutions can use it to build stablecoin settlement, cross-border payments, and tokenized assets through APIs. SOL was among 16 tokens jointly classified as digital commodities by the SEC and CFTC earlier this month. Visa went live with USDC settlement on the network in December. This is how Solana plans to scale institutional adoption.

Bittensor has evolved beyond AI inference. Templar's Covenant-72B trained 72 billion parameters on 1.1 trillion tokens without a centralized cluster, the largest decentralized pre-training run to date. Over 70 permissionless nodes on commodity internet connections achieved 94.5% compute utilization and outperformed LLaMA-2-70B on MMLU. Subnets are growing across distinct use cases like drug discovery and autonomous driving.

Read the full stablecoin report here. members.delphidigital.io/reports/stable…

Institutional privacy is still the biggest gap in crypto infrastructure. Banks can't send client flows where competitors and random observers can analyze transactions on a public ledger. But regulators and auditors still need full visibility. Most blockchains force a choice between the two. What institutions actually need is selective disclosure, where regulators can see everything but competitors and the public can't. On one end of the spectrum you have fully private systems like SWIFT and Fedwire. On the other you have fully public chains like Ethereum and Solana. Institutional stablecoin infrastructure needs to sit somewhere in the middle, and projects like Payy, Arc, and Keeta are building there. Selective disclosure is what could get institutional money onchain.