The big story of this year is the blurring line between the 99% of finance that is offchain and the 1% that is onchain. Crypto founders assume this integration automatically means a bigger slice of the pie. But it's more likely that they'll be reduced to a zero margin synthetic asset, structured product, or wire format. Traditional markets are already supremely efficient, run by neutral parties and increasingly accessible, and will find and squeeze any profit you're taking. If you want to win, you have to ask yourself "What can my product do that a traditional financial institution is completely incapable of doing?" Just "being decentralised" isn't the answer.

Looking at all the different approaches that people are taking, ZKs, Permissioned Networks, TEEs, Homomorphic Encryption, by 2030 there aren't going to be any public transactions left on Blockchains. @Sig_Network will give you access to all of these techniques everywhere.

First week back looking at @CantonNetwork and DAML with the team after a brief 8-year hiatus. A few things stick out: Canton is super weird. It feels like a completely different evolutionary path from everything post-Bitcoin, but it's highly purpose-built. This makes some things bafflingly complex (AMMs!) but others incredibly simple (intents, RWAs). If it's your first time, prepare for contracts that are themselves UTXOs(!), written in Haskell, and worrying a lot about who actually owns a contract. So many successful Defi products right now are off-chain matching engines with on-chain settlement (@CoWSwap, @Polymarket, @near_intents). Canton makes this architecture native "on-chain" with exactly the right level of privacy and global atomicity. This makes sense, at its heart it’s a settlement language and that's the thing it excels at. If they can get the cross-chain story working (hint @Sig_Network), this is absolutely where I'd build that kind of infra in the future. The divide between what's running on your local infra and what's running globally is also beautifully blurry. The contracts are the same, it's just a matter of who has the right to see what. There is also a bit of a cult of KYC in their DeFi apps. The vibe is "licensed entities dabbling in permissionless DeFi," whereas on most other chains it's, "I might geoblock North Korea once men with guns show up at my house." I think the happy medium here is more progressive onboarding ala CEXs. Finally, I realize I had absolutely no idea what I was working on when I was at @digitalasset. Thinking about it now is like remembering being lost in a city that’s now familiar. Definitely the most unique chain I've dived into in a while.

The stablecoin with the best reach will win axelar.network/blog/circle-i…