Anthropic Gains Crypto Lead Over OpenAI, Elon Musk’s Crypto Hiring & More

Welcome back!

This is J264G and this week I’ve got these titbits for you:

• OpenAI vs Anthropic: Claude emerges as the default model for finance.

• AI x Crypto: xAI recruits “Finance Expert – Crypto” to leverage digital assets.

• Crypto Banking: Peter Thiel-backed Erebor receives national banking charter.

Payments are drifting onchain because the economics demand it, and blockchains are capturing volume by doing what legacy rails can’t: move money instantly, cheaply, and at scale.

Now, let’s jump right into this week’s newsletter!

Click on any underlined heading/hyperlink to learn more.

Spotlight

Defaults = Destiny

As AI agents start spending, trading, and settling value on our behalf, the real contest is no longer for users—but for default status inside the machine economy.

An AI has no innate brand loyalty, does not respond to policy incentives, and has no attachment to legacy workflows. Instead, it leverages whatever solution stack it was coded to use. For that reason, AI systems are unlikely to rely on traditional banking APIs at all, gravitating instead toward digital rails that are open and offer speed, programmability, and global reach. 

The result is a subtle but profound shift: markets may be shaped less by which financial products regulators approve for people, and more by which technologies developers enable for machines.

In that sense, the next generation of economic power may accrue not to those who win consumer mind share, but to those who define machine preferences. Human adoption curves are slow, expensive, and uncertain, shaped by trust, habit, and regulation. By contrast, an AI agent configured with a financial stack can generate billions of economic interactions almost overnight. 

This makes the seemingly technical question of default settings enormously consequential. The choice of self custody tool, stablecoin, and settlement path that an AI agent uses “out of the box” effectively determines how and where value flows.

The companies that quietly become part of the default financial stack for AI agents may, therefore, wield influence on a scale traditionally reserved for central banks or global payment networks—all without ever facing the public scrutiny those institutions attract.

Chart Of The Week

News Bites

Crypto Banking: The Trump administration has greenlit its first new bank: Peter Thiel-backed Erebor just received its US national banking charter. Founded by Palmer Luckey and Joe Lonsdale, the bank plans to operate with stablecoins at its core and focus on startups and scale-ups underserved by traditional finance. 

AI x Crypto: Elon Musk’s xAI is recruiting a “Finance Expert – Crypto” to deepen how its models understand and leverage digital assets. Rather than deploying capital, the role focuses on teaching AI systems to think like professional traders—reading onchain data, interpreting market structure, and navigating volatility across centralised and decentralised venues.

Embedded AI: Norges Bank Investment Management (NBIM), which oversees Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, increased its indirect Bitcoin exposure by 149% in 2025. At the same time, the fund faced the challenge of monitoring crypto and other developments across nearly 9,000 companies worldwide. To manage that scale, NBIM has adopted Claude from Anthropic, reporting productivity gains of around 20%.

AI-Powered Trading: Boba, described as the first agent-native AI trading terminal on Solana, has gone live. The platform enables users to equip their Claude agents with professional-grade trading tools, effectively turning large language models into market makers, traders, or analysts. 

Market Infrastructure: CME Group’s chief executive, Terry Duffy, has suggested the exchange operator is exploring the launch of its own cryptocurrency, potentially on a decentralised network. The comments mark a notable evolution from last year’s more centralised experiment, when CME tested asset tokenisation using Google Cloud’s Universal Ledger.

Crypto Distribution: Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, has agreed to acquire Step, a fintech app aimed at teenagers that offers crypto services powered by Zerohash. The move follows a trademark filing last year for "MrBeast Financial". More broadly, the acquisition reinforces a familiar lesson: attention and distribution are increasingly the central moat on which fintechs are built.

Caught In 4K

Weekly Take

Keks & Giggles

And that's a wrap!

You can reach me anytime over on 𝕏 or drop me a line. 

Talk soon!

J264G

_{DISCLAIMER
None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research. Lastly, please be advised that we discuss products and services from our partners from which our team members may hold tokens/equity.}