Peter Warren
2.1K posts











How long until the Circle / Coinbase marriage gets messy? > historically $CRCL = issuer of USDC and $COIN = distributor. Coin pushes USDC, and in exchange gets half the economics w/ some adjustments > but w/ Circle now a pubco, it’s been forced into pitching a much broader growth story to investors -> today that’s become: be the infrastructure layer for global payments + real-world finance onchain > to make that a reality, Circle needs to supercharge itself by owning customers and having their flows live on their new venue, Arc > and the problem is that directly conflicts w/ Coinbase’s own ambition w/ Base to be the exchange + rails for everything, especially payments, settlement & FX > and if you look closely, things have started getting messy: cbBTC vs cirBTC = Circle stepping on Coin’s toes w/ the same product > but Circle / Arc post token raise is a much worse deal. With outside investors underwriting the chain, the incentive becomes drive all your assets + activity from everywhere else (including Base / Coinbase) to Arc: USDC balances, tokenized assets, payments, settlement & eventually FX > the two businesses, which were once symbiotic, are now competing H2H and have public shareholders / token holders to keep track of the scoreboard > inevitable that the relationship ultimately ends in divorce. Circle clearly growing up and planning on moving out of its childhood home




[ ZOOMER ] CIRCLE RAISES $222 MILLION FROM BLACKROCK, APOLLO AND OTHERS IN ARC TOKEN PRESALE VALUED AT $3 BILLION: CNBC




Western Union $WU is down 70% from its 2021 high. Wall Street has written it off as a dying remittance giant getting eaten by Wise, Remitly, PayPal, and crypto. Our lead researcher, @moxt_, thinks Wall St is missing the second business growing in the background (bookmark this). Here's what he's seeing: Yes, the legacy retail business is shrinking. Q1 2026 revenue came in at $983M, margins compressed to 13% from 18-19%, EPS missed by 35-40%. That part isn't coming back. But it's one of two businesses on the same network. Digital transactions grew 21% YoY and now account for 42% of remittance volume. Travel money and bill pay revenue grew 24%. Management is guiding 2026 to 5-8% revenue growth and adjusted EPS of $1.75-$1.85, the first growth year after multiple years of decline. Either guidance is wrong, or the stock pice is. $WU runs 360,000 active agent locations across 200+ countries and 130 currencies. About 90% of those are outside the U.S., concentrated in the corridors where banking access is weakest and remittance demand is highest. Which means the moat isn't the agents themselves, but what has to exist around them: Money transmitter licenses in nearly every U.S. state plus equivalent permissions in 200+ countries, accumulated over a century. AML, KYC, sanctions screening, and FX conversion infrastructure across 130 currencies means any new entrant is looking at a 5-7 year build to replicate it. So does this network get more or less valuable when money moves onchain? The rest of the payments industry is voting with their checkbooks... - PayPal shipped $PYUSD. - Stripe paid $1.1B for Bridge. - Visa is integrating $USDC for cross-border settlement. - MoneyGram has been running a USDC off-ramp on Stellar since 2022. USDC settles in seconds, but a recipient in rural Mexico or the Philippines still needs pesos. Somebody has to handle the last mile. WU already does. @moxt_ maps four revenue streams: 1. Off-ramp fees from third-party stablecoins ($70-810M at maturity) 2. Working capital release from $USDPT ($300M one-time) 3. Reserve income on USDPT float ($12-18M recurring) 4. Internal FX/wire savings. Owning USDPT is what turns WU from a stablecoin off-ramp partner into a stablecoin company that happens to own the largest off-ramp network in the world. All of that said... the risks are real. State-by-state stablecoin reserve recognition could stall, crypto-native off-ramp specialists could fragment the opportunity, legacy pricing pressure could outpace the pivot, and ~35% of CMT revenue comes from U.S. outflows, which makes immigration policy a macro overlay. None individually kills the opportuntiy - but two together would. So is the current price of ~$9.20 enough to justify a position, or do the risks dominate? @moxt_ put a verdict on it in his latest Milk Road PRO report... To get his buy/sell verdict and the price levels he's watching, check the link in the first comment.








Unbelievable : The corporations sponsoring Sean Duffy’s 7 month reality TV trip are all regulated by the department he leads. They literally paid him to take an extended vacation from doing his job.












