TLDR Crypto 2026-03-23

Gemini faces a class-action lawsuit filed in New York, alleging the firm misled investors about its business strategy before and after its 2025 IPO. Shares debuted at $32 in September 2025 and have since fallen over 80% to approximately $6. The combination of the stock's collapse and a securities lawsuit raises questions about disclosure standards for crypto-native firms pursuing public listings.

Coinbase Asset Management is launching a tokenized share class of its Bitcoin Yield Fund on Base, partnering with Apex Group to offer a covered-call-and-lending yield strategy onchain to non-US institutional investors. The fund uses ERC-3643, embedding KYC/AML compliance checks directly into the token so that only approved wallets can hold or transfer shares, with Apex retaining transfer agent duties for NAV reconciliation. Apex, which acquired Tokeny last year after the platform facilitated over $32 billion in tokenized assets, is targeting $100 billion in tokenized funds via its T-REX Ledger infrastructure by June 2027.

World Liberty Finance's AgentPay SDK is an open-source, self-custodial toolkit enabling AI agents to hold and transact USD1 stablecoin across EVM chains, with private keys isolated in a local signing daemon communicating via Unix domain sockets rather than exposing credentials to the agent process. It has a policy engine that enforces per-transaction and daily spending caps, routing routine payments without human review while pausing higher-value operations for approval, and the SDK halts on insufficient balances rather than submitting transactions that would fail and waste gas. The SDK includes a skill pack that auto-installs into seven major AI development environments, including Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, with USD1 pre-configured on Ethereum and BSC, built-in Bitrefill integration for gift cards and eSIMs across 12 EVM payment methods, and no telemetry sent to WLFI.

Figure Forge, deployed on Provenance blockchain, converts pools of similar loans into pro-rata participation tokens priced at mark-to-market (a $100 notional asset worth $97 issues 97 tokens), making coarse-grained credit instruments such as auto loans averaging $42K infinitely divisible and redeemable for fiat, stablecoins, or whole loans. The mechanism unlocks loans as viable DeFi collateral by solving the partial-liquidation problem: a position can be sized to any notional without requiring full-loan granularity. Figure seeds two-sided liquidity via a limit order book with committed bids and offers, pairing originators looking to monetize at a premium with securitization desks that buy discounted tokens, convert back to whole loans, and route them into wholesale capital markets. Fintech Agora Data is the first third-party partner, bringing auto loan yield to Figure's Democratized Prime DeFi marketplace through Hastra protocol yield tokens, with receivables, consumer, and SMB loan pools slated as future asset classes.

Electric Capital mapped 501 yield sources across 15 asset categories, finding tokenized treasuries (~$11B) dominate RWA markets while private credit ($2.8B) and corporate bonds ($1.9B) trail, with the top 10 assets capturing 64% of total value and stablecoin supply surpassing $280B as on-chain risk-free rates became accessible starting with Ondo in 2023. Every tokenized asset faces a structural timing mismatch between 24/7 onchain capital movement and off-chain settlement, and all three available workarounds compress yield, while distribution remains thin: 33 of 35 non-stablecoin RWAs above $50M have fewer than 2,000 holders. BlackRock's BUIDL simultaneously backs Ethena's USDtb, Ondo's OUSG, and Sky's Grove, creating a concentration risk that materialized when Grove's $327M redemption caused JAAA to drop 44% in a single day. Demand is compounded by an expanding stablecoin base, diversification pressure, vault infrastructure (Apollo signed a Morpho cooperation for 90M tokens), yield decomposition tools (Pendle, Royco Dawn, Strata), and leverage loops.

With 95% phone and 97% browser support, passkeys have sufficient infrastructure coverage for production deployment in self-custodial wallet UX. WebAuthn Level 3's cross-origin iframe embedding allows a single passkey credential to authorize transactions across apps, devices, and chains, as Ithaca demonstrated with Porto, while Access Keys add scoped per-token spending limits that remove repeated authentication prompts from transaction flows. Passkeys sync across devices via OS keychains, including iCloud, Google Password Manager, and 1Password, and Tempo's Account Keychain model uses a Root Key with layered Access Keys supporting Secp256k1, P256, and WebAuthn credential types alongside optional Ledger or YubiKey hardware factors. Persistent limitations include broken functionality in WkWebViews on mobile and a total device loss scenario where, absent backup Access Keys, fund recovery is impossible, mirroring seedphrase loss.

Tempo engineering lead Georgios Konstantopoulos discussed the vision for machine payments at web scale in an appearance on TBPN, arguing the industry needs to shift from thinking about financial transactions to thinking about API calls per second, scaling to hundreds of thousands, millions, or billions of payments per second.

AI agents consuming web content without engaging ads are collapsing the internet's ad-based revenue model, with StackOverflow traffic down 75% since GPT-4's release and tech news sites reporting 60% declines. There is a direct parallel to the 1990s browser wars: ChatGPT's ACP/UCP checkout represents the AOL-era walled garden, while open protocols x402 (Coinbase) and MPP (Tempo/Stripe) are positioned as the HTTP equivalent for agent-native commerce. The HTTP 402 status code, reserved in 1997 but never deployed due to unviable micropayment economics, now has a working implementation via stablecoins on modern blockchains, which resolve the sub-cent fixed-fee problem that blocked earlier micropayment attempts. AgentCash bundles x402 and MPP into a unified payment-plus-discovery layer serving 2,000+ agents through x402scan[.]com and mppscan[.]com, enabling agents to discover services, negotiate payment, and execute transactions without pre-approved merchant lists.

Traditional card payments exceed stablecoin card transactions by approximately 67,000x in monthly volume, with stablecoins accounting for less than 0.0015% of total card transaction volume.

Cyprx Research identifies stablecoin payment chains as an emerging crypto category, noting the shift from general-purpose blockchains to purpose-built networks optimized specifically for payments, liquidity, and settlement.

The Tempo Machine Payments Protocol hackathon produced over 40 projects, now browsable in a single gallery at tempo-hackathon-projects.vercel.app.

USDC leads year-to-date stablecoin flows, adding $4.5B this year.