There are now hundreds of startups doing stablecoin payments. Many of them will struggle to make it through the next two years. Last week, at one of our events, I was discussing this with one of our clients. We both see the same thing coming: a wave of consolidation that this sector hasn’t really been through yet. For many corporates, that will come as a relief. What we keep hearing from them is "it’s too complicated, there are too many offers." The market is real. On our latest Future of Finance podcast lead by @BukovskiBuko3, @coinbase and Worldline put B2B stablecoin payments at close to $400bn in 2025, up about 700% year on year. Fewer, stronger providers will make the choice easier for traditional companies and should speed up adoption further. Those stronger providers are already taking shape. The payment giants and the crypto-native leaders, @stripe, @Visa, @Mastercard, @coinbase, @Payward and @circle among them, are accelerating, and most of them already cover the full stack. The banks are moving too: @SG_Forge, @CACEIS and a growing number of European and US banks are building their own stablecoin and digital asset offerings. For a corporate that wants one trusted partner, these names are the obvious first call. That leaves hundreds of VC-backed startups in a difficult spot. They raised a Seed, a Series A, sometimes a Series B, often around a single feature. Many of them depend on a handful of clients. That is their main exposure. When a few clients make up most of your revenue, a large player doesn’t need to buy you to hurt you. Winning those accounts is enough. It can offer the full stack, a competitive price and a stronger balance sheet, and revenue can shrink very quickly. Several large crypto-native players have told me that this is exactly where they are going. For single-feature startups, the next two years will be demanding. Some will be acquired, which is the outcome many of their VCs invested for. Some will find a defensible niche, a hard-to-serve corridor or a specific regulatory edge. Many others risk being marginalised. At @TheBigWhale_, this is one of the topics we follow most closely for our clients: who builds what, who is gaining volume, who is likely to be bought or pushed out, and which provider fits which need. We’ll be digging into it next week at our event in Las Vegas during Money20/20: luma.com/tbw_money2020_vegas And again at our Geneva Summit 🇨🇭 luma.com/tbw-summit If you’ll be there, or want to discuss it and access our research, ping me.

Buongiorno Milano! 🇮🇹 We're in Milan for two days at Forum Banca, alongside Italy's leading banks and fintechs. Tonight we're also hosting our first corporate cocktail in Italy, together with @boersestuttgart and @trmlabs. Join us at 5:30pm in one of Milan's finest hotels for a conversation on banks and digital assets 💫 luma.com/tbw_milan We have two spots left. Message me if you'd like to join!

We're hosting a private event with @PythNetwork during @Sibos! If you're in Miami and want to talk digital assets, ping me! luma.com/k1gxaa7c

Christine Lagarde intervened to block @binance from obtaining its MiCA license in Europe. The @WSJ confirms the information @gregory_raymond broke on June 17 in @TheBigWhale_, exactly 3 months ago 👇 thebigwhale.io/article/mica-…

One of the things we do best at @TheBigWhale_: we get the people actually building the digital assets market to talk. Latest example - @BukovskiBuko3 sat down with @adcv_, co-founder of @SteakhouseFi: thebigwhale.io/article/adria… Relentless work from him to keep landing conversations like this one. If you want to understand where stablecoins and onchain credit are actually heading, this is essential reading. Some of what Adrian told us: 👉 On the real opportunity everyone's missing: "Everyone focuses on fintech integrations and savings reward programs - that's only one piece of it. We see vaults as credit software. Anywhere credit is created, you can plug in a vault." 👉 On what actually drives vault adoption: "Vault adoption follows stablecoin adoption. Stablecoins are what you need to watch to anticipate what comes next." 👉 On the @coinbase and @RobinhoodApp partnerships: "On Coinbase we're talking hundreds of thousands of users; Robinhood is getting close. What's striking is that they've brought a significant amount of new stablecoin volume into the credit market that wasn't there before." 👉 On why @tether doesn't pay yield - and why that won't last: "USDT is so useful that its holders give up all yield to hold it. That won't last forever." 👉 On how regulation should actually work: "The deciding factor is how much discretion the manager has. A vault that operates like a hedge fund should be regulated like one." 👉 On the euro's stablecoin problem: "About 99% of stablecoins are dollar-denominated. MiCA won't change that if nobody wants euros in the first place." @BukovskiBuko3 also hosts our Future of Finance podcast, where he digs into these conversations in even more depth. Want to go deeper on stablecoins, vaults or onchain credit? Book a call with him.

2026 will go down as the year stablecoins became impossible to ignore. Every bank, fintech and card network has a stablecoin strategy now. But behind the noise, there’s a structural shift most takes miss. The split that matters is infrastructure vs. distribution. The stablecoin itself is becoming a commodity. USDC, USDT, PYUSD: functionally interchangeable dollars or euros on a new rail. The real moat is distribution: the relationships with banks, merchants and consumers that make a dollar or a euro actually move and get spent. That’s where @Visa, @Mastercard and @stripe have a huge advantage. They’ve spent decades building those networks. No stablecoin issuer can replicate that overnight. And that’s why the real battle isn’t @circle vs. @tether. It’s about who controls the full stack: the asset, the wallet, the rail and, most importantly, the distribution. @coinbase is pushing in that direction with @base. Banks are doing the same with their own stablecoins, from @SG_Forge to @qivaliseu and its 37-bank European consortium. Why? Because they already own the relationships. That’s the real risk for crypto-native issuers. Without distribution, you’re not building a moat. You’re building plumbing. We’ve spent the summer at @TheBigWhale_ digging into this shift, and we’ll unpack it live on September 24 in Paris at our Corporate Breakfast on onchain cash management for treasurers, with @herclegroup and @utila_io. Cross-border payments, stablecoin infrastructure, tokenized money market instruments, and where the real distribution power sits. Seats are limited 👇 luma.com/tbw_onchain_treasur…

4 years ago we started @TheBigWhale_ with a simple hypothesis: information about digital assets would still be worth something, even as the internet made most information worth nothing. 4 years in, that hypothesis has split into 2 very different problems. The first, we have mostly solved: become the reference for market intelligence on digital assets AND agentic finance. Build the network, the benchmarks, the events - over 1,000 industry leaders willing to be in the same room (Paris, London, Geneva, Berlin, Amsterdam, New York...), willing to share what they would never post online. The second is the one we are still solving in real time: what is the actual business model of information, once information itself has become free. Here is what 4 years taught me. Public information is now a commodity. The moment a fact, a data point, or a piece of news becomes public, it gets copied, indexed, summarized by AI, and distributed everywhere at zero cost. That is what broke the media industry over the last decade: it costs money to find information, and it earns nothing to publish it. The only thing that still earns money is advertising riding on top of information as it circulates. And that is exactly what kills the core product. The more an article is built to be shared and to carry ads, the less it is built to actually inform. We have entered the golden age of private information. What has value today is what only a few people know, and are willing to pay to keep knowing first, and alone. Unlike public information, private information does not lose value with time. The longer it stays secret, the more it is worth, and the more it earns. That is our actual business at TBW. Not media in the traditional sense. Our benchmarks and our events exist to keep information inside a closed circle. Our clients pay us precisely to keep it there, not to publish it. This model has a built in filter, a flight to quality. Every serious company, crypto or not, ends up becoming a client, because every serious company participates in the market and needs to see it clearly. Companies built on fake business models never become clients. They have no reason to pay for the truth about a market they are not actually playing in. We see this quality every day, in who joins our network, in who shows up at our events, and in who the best benchmarks choose to interview. Public information runs on the attention economy. Private information runs on the economy of intelligence. That is our baseline at TBW. 4 years in, with a team of 10 people, our 2026 results tell us we are on the right track: thebigwhale.io/the-drop

We rebuilt @TheBigWhale_ from the ground up this year. Not the product. The company itself. For decades, organizational hierarchy existed for one reason: to manage information flow. The more complexity, the more layers. Middle management was never about control - it was about routing. AI breaks that logic entirely. When every person in your company can directly access data, query the organization's knowledge, and move without waiting for a chain of approvals, the hierarchy becomes redundant. An AI-powered organization absorbs complexity that used to require people to absorb it. The deeper shift: every decision your team makes, every correction, every judgment call becomes reusable signal. Your company's expertise stops being trapped in people's heads or buried in processes. It becomes executable. Queryable. Compounding. The firms that understand this aren't just becoming more efficient - they're building a completely different kind of asset. That's exactly what @ZakLaMedaille, @DG2 and @Arthurws14 are building at TBW right now. We're a team of ten spread across Europe - Paris, Geneva, Novi Sad, London, Lisbon, Brussels. Everyone reports to me directly. Everyone owns their vertical completely. We sync regularly throughout the week - no bottlenecks, no waiting. And it shows in what we actually deliver: the best market intelligence on digital assets and agentic for financial institutions and corporates. More product features, more clients, more content, more events. All at once. The best proof of that: the MCP we launched a few weeks ago. Built fast, built well. It's the entire intelligence of TBW, directly distributed to our clients. Flat isn't a structure. It's a bet that the right people with the right tools don't need layers between them and the work. All of this started four months ago. We cover this agentic revolution for our clients every week through "The Agent", our dedicated newsletter. Last week's interview with Su Yang from @BNPParibas is a must-read - a rare inside view of how AI is reshaping one of Europe's largest financial institutions: thebigwhale.io/article/su-ya… Over 150 companies get it every week, and they can book direct calls with The Big Whale analysts (@gregory_raymond, @BukovskiBuko3) to go deeper: thebigwhale.io/

2022: @TheBigWhale_ started as a newsletter. This week: 75 clients and partners in @MorganStanley's NYC 🇺🇸 offices for our first private event in the US - alongside some of the best crypto projects out there as partners: @tradeon21x, @Morpho, @FireblocksHQ. Four years. From a newsletter to a room full of banks, asset managers and top-tier crypto builders in Manhattan. Today TBW works with 150+ institutions - banks, asset managers, PSPs, fintechs - giving them the intelligence they need to navigate digital assets and agentic finance. Every week: exclusive benchmarks on which markets are moving and which products actually work. Next stop: Paris, July 7. @jpmorgan, @coinbase and Worldline will be in the room. A few seats left: luma.com/tbw_raise_summit

MiCA is officially live in Europe. From today, only licensed entities can operate in the EU crypto market. No license, no activity. At @TheBigWhale_, we tracked every company that secured a MiCA license across Europe. The breakdown is not what most people expected: - 32% are crypto platforms - 26% are fintechs - 17% are banks - 11% are asset managers Crypto-native companies are no longer the majority of licensed players. TradFi is moving into this market faster than most assumed. Everyone who said MiCA would reshape the sector was right. MiCA is not a niche crypto framework anymore. It is becoming the entry ticket for any financial institution building around digital assets in Europe. The full dataset and rankings are live on our new MiCA dashboard: thebigwhale.io/products/mica… I'm proud we keep shipping products like this for our clients - real data, real analytics, not just commentary. Built by @Arthurws14, @BukovskiBuko3 & @mc_9393, who spent months compiling and structuring the entire license landscape. Want a walkthrough of the dashboard? Book a call with the team: thebigwhale.io/ Who do you think are the next players to enter this landscape?