JPMorgan CEO Declares War On Stablecoins, Robinhood Prediction Markets & More

Welcome back!

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

• Jamie Dimon: Yield-bearing stablecoins threaten financial stability.

• Stablecoin Breakthrough: Mastercard secures a BitLicense from the NYSDFS.

• Prediction Markets: Robinhood to leverage FIFA World Cup.

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

Click on any underlined heading/hyperlink to learn more.

Spotlight

The Perpification

For most of their existence, perpetual futures have been a creature of crypto, confined to the industry's permissionless fringe.

That is changing fast, and on two fronts.

The first is the asset class itself: perpetual futures are now going live for equities, indices, commodities, foreign exchange and, most recently, private markets. The second is who is offering them. What began on crypto-native venues is being taken up by established incumbents and conventional fintechs alike.

The reason is not hard to find. 

Perpetual futures solve a problem traditional derivatives never quite cracked, namely giving ordinary investors continuous, leveraged exposure to assets they otherwise could not touch. No expiry, no contract-roll, no minimum lot designed for institutions. For the retail trader, the appeal is obvious. For the platforms, it is arguably greater still, since perpetual futures are extraordinarily profitable to operate and irresistible to a clientele that loves leverage. When incentives align this neatly, expansion tends to be swift.

It helps, too, that perpetual futures are simply what is en vogue. We live in the age of the directional take, where a generation raised on prediction markets has discovered the singular joy of trading plainly on yes or no, up or down, and being proven gloriously right or humiliatingly wrong by Tuesday. The same people placing $20 on an election outcome will place a leveraged trade that the S&P 500 rises. Conviction, meet expression.

Also, perpetual futures may be a better hedging instrument than much of what came before. A conventional future expires, which means a business hedging a currency exposure or a commodity input must roll its position, eating transaction costs and basis risk each time. A perpetual future simply persists. A treasurer can hold a hedge open for as long as the underlying risk lasts, paying or receiving funding along the way, without diarising a quarterly scramble. The same logic flatters the retail user, who can offset a concentrated holding indefinitely rather than juggling expiry dates. A continuous risk, it turns out, is more naturally met by a continuous contract.

The result is a live experiment in financialising everything. The instinct is to flinch, and the risks are real: the same instrument that broadens access can import volatility into portfolios never built to absorb it.

Yet markets have always advanced by widening the circle of who may participate, and price discovery improves when more views, not fewer, are expressed. Consequently, perpetual futures may prove one of the more genuinely useful exports crypto has produced, provided it is understood as one component of a portfolio rather than the be-all and end-all.

Chart Of The Week

News Bites

Stablecoin Breakthrough: Mastercard has secured a BitLicense from the New York State Department of Financial Services. The charter clears the payments group to transmit and settle in stablecoins within the state, using its own infrastructure and accounts rather than third-party intermediaries.

Stablecoin Expansion: Cash App has switched on stablecoin transfers for all eligible customers, extending dollar-pegged tokens to millions of users. Sending and receiving stablecoins will be free of charge at launch.

AI Agents: Robinhood will soon allow customers to connect their own AI agents to the platform, enabling them to delegate trades and credit-card purchases. The move places Robinhood among the first retail brokers to treat autonomous agents as first-class users.

Prediction Markets: Sticking with Robinhood, the broker has launched prediction markets through Rothera, its proprietary exchange and clearing house, built as a joint venture with Susquehanna. The timing is deliberate: Rothera has filed a suite of soccer contracts ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

Bitcoin Lawsuit: A plaintiff is asking New York's Supreme Court to grant him legal title to about 39,000 dormant Bitcoin wallets that he identified with a proprietary algorithm. The value runs to roughly 3.8m BTC (~$266bn), yet the claim is largely theoretical: the plaintiff holds no private keys, and experts have reportedly valued the realistic recovery at under $10.

Burning Bitcoin: This was not the week's only curiosity. Five accounts recently sent a combined 107 BTC, worth about $7.5m, to a long-established burn address, rendering the coins permanently inaccessible. Galaxy Research has floated several explanations for the episode, from tax-loss harvesting to an errant AI agent.

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.}