TLDR Crypto 2026-01-15

Stablecoins power trillions of dollars in global money-movement, however, the economics are concentrated: a few players keep most yield, set fees, and control user experience—limiting choice and revenue for builders.

With Bridge's Open Issuance, any business can launch their own stablecoin in days to earn rewards on reserves and choose how to distribute.

→ Day-one adoption tools: use Bridge + Stripe infrastructure to accept, store, spend, and move your stablecoin

→ Own design choices: set reserves, fees, chains, and rewards.

→ Built-in liquidity: stablecoins launched on the Open Issuance are interoperable, enabling easy conversions.

→ Get to market quickly: Bridge handles liquidity, reserves, and GENIUS readiness so you can focus on adoption.

Build on Bridge

Coinbase said it cannot support the Senate market-structure bill after the release of a more than 270-page text that raised unresolved issues around tokenized equities, DeFi treatment, provisions that would “kill rewards on stablecoins,” and the role of the SEC. Timing pressures, 70+ filed amendments, new illicit-finance language, and uncertainty that concerns would be addressed led Coinbase to withdraw backing, and the Senate Banking Committee postponed the scheduled markup while negotiators work to fix the problems.

Crypto custody provider BitGo filed for a US IPO seeking to raise up to $201 million at a $1.96 billion valuation, offering 11.8 million shares priced at $15-17 on the NYSE under ticker “BTGO” with Goldman Sachs and Citigroup as lead underwriters. The firm holds approximately $104 billion in assets under custody across 1,550+ digital assets for institutional clients. The IPO comes shortly after BitGo received conditional OCC approval in December to operate as a federally chartered national trust bank, representing one of the first major public offerings from a pure-play crypto custody provider.

Noah and NALA partnered to create a cross-border settlement network that converts global USD collections into stablecoins and routes real-time local-currency payouts via Rafiki, enabling instant USD settlement, 24/7 treasury, and rapid local distribution for businesses across Africa and Asia. This partnership targets payroll, merchant payouts, and treasury use cases while bypassing slow, fee-heavy legacy rails.

BVNK will provide stablecoin infrastructure for Visa Direct pilot programs, enabling select business customers to pre-fund payouts in stablecoins and to pay recipients in stablecoins (with validators receiving their preferred stablecoin via a backend flow). This demonstrates a deeper Visa and BVNK integration after Visa Ventures' 2025 investment and signals a push to embed tokenized dollars into high-volume money-movement rails for faster, 24/7 global payments.

Vitalik Buterin has published a framework that outlines seven protocol requirements for Ethereum to achieve “ossification” - the ability to function independently without ongoing developer intervention. The first priority is implementing century-scale quantum resistance to prevent future quantum computing advances from compromising user funds and network consensus. Additional requirements include scaling to thousands of TPS through ZK-EVM validation and PeerDAS, implementing statelessness and state expiry, moving beyond ECDSA to fully abstracted accounts, and establishing censorship-resistant block-building mechanisms. Buterin proposed a staged rollout that completes at least one requirement per year.

Crypto's biggest barrier to mainstream adoption is that everything onchain is public by default - wallet balances, transaction history, DeFi positions, and payroll are all visible to anyone. While early crypto users valued this transparency, it's wildly unsafe for normal people, businesses, banks, and governments. Zama is building what it calls “HTTPS for blockchains” using Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) to enable confidential smart contracts, aiming to upgrade crypto from “everything is public” to “encrypted by default” - potentially the most important infrastructure shift since smart contracts.

AI is a foundational operational infrastructure that addresses DeFi's “attention tax” – the mounting cognitive burden of synthesizing fragmented data across 100+ chains and dozens of disjointed sources that creates asymmetric advantages for well-resourced institutions. General-purpose AI models fail crypto-specific analysis due to a lack of domain training, creating an opportunity for specialized infrastructure that operationalizes sophisticated risk assessment. Chaos AI, trained on four years of proprietary crypto data, democratizes institutional-grade risk intelligence by converting raw blockchain data into actionable analysis.

Excessive pivoting to trading platforms creates overcrowded markets and sacrifices long-term defensibility. Founders should prioritize genuine product development over speculation-driven token dynamics. Imminent crypto market structure regulation will eliminate industry distortions caused by legal uncertainty - such as avoiding transparency and designing economically valueless tokens - by replacing “enforcement roulette” with clear standards.

Allowing stablecoins to pay interest would pull deposits out of the banking system, reduce banks' lending capacity, and force them to rely on more expensive wholesale funding, ultimately raising borrowing costs.

Ethereum's net supply growth remains below Bitcoin's even with low gas fees around 0.1 gwei, reinforcing ETH's post-merge issuance advantage.

Polygon Labs spent $250 million to acquire two regulated payments companies as it intends to enter the US market and compete with Tempo/Stripe in the onchain payments space.

This ETP is the first to combine a digital asset and a traditional asset for retail investors.