Robinhood Bets Big On Solana, Polymarket vs. Kalshi Crypto Rivalry & More

Welcome back!

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

• Beautiful Tragedy: Why Stripe’s Tempo might have limited upside.

• Crypto Predictions: Kalshi to scale crypto markets and integrations.

• China Worries: USD stablecoins pose a structural challenge to China.

We’re all familiar with Saylor’s Bitcoin shopping spree. But what gets less airtime is just how broadly Bitcoin has seeped into the financial system—it’s no longer fringe, it’s institutional grade. The asset class your pension fund once sneered at is now sitting in its portfolio.

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

Click on any underlined heading/hyperlink to learn more.

Spotlight

Beautiful Tragedy

In the past weeks, Stripe, Circle, and Dinari each announced new stablecoin-focused blockchains. Robinhood and others have already gone down a similar path. The playbook is familiar: launch a network optimized for your own ecosystem, and capture more of the value that flows through it via distribution advantages. 

Having said that, these efforts may have limited upside for Stripe & Co. That’s because a blockchain built around a company’s business can work within its existing ecosystem, but it’s difficult to see its universal appeal. 

Adyen is unlikely to use Stripe’s blockchain, and Tether probably won’t settle on Circle’s. Each bridge adds complexity, reinforcing each networks’ moat at the cost of broader adoption of stablecoins in particular, and crypto in general. 

Consequently, the memetic desire to “win” in solving global payment inefficiencies—fragmented liquidity, opaque settlement, and divergent messaging standards—could inadvertently reproduce the same silos we currently see in traditional finance.

Yet, in the scramble to launch new stablecoin-focused blockchains, some of the toughest issues have been left unresolved:

• How do you balance privacy with compliance when solely relying on shielded balances? 

• How do you capture network benefits with the looming temptation of sequencer fees? 

• Is it possible to reconcile regulatory permissioning with the unfair advantages of meaningful decentralization?

For the past 18 months we have been building quietly in this direction at SphereNet, toward a different kind of network. Less a stablecoin-focused blockchain and better thought of as a discovery engine for regulated financial services, powered by stablecoins.

Here's how SphereNet addresses the key issues outlined above:

• Privacy & compliance: Balances and transactions on SphereNet are encrypted by default, but visibility can be granted under defined policies to regulators or auditors when required. This is achieved through multiparty computation and threshold key management, ensuring disclosures are controlled, collaborative, and verifiable. The result is a system where compliance and confidentiality reinforce one another: regulators gain the visibility they need, while institutions keep sensitive commercial activity private.

• Network benefits: SphereNet is a credibly neutral network with no centralized sequencer and no single entity controlling order flow. Value instead accrues to stakeholders through the native token, which secures the network, pays for execution and storage, and serves as the settlement collateral trusted by institutions. In other words: we don’t capture value by taxing order flow—we capture it by being the most credible venue for it.

• Decentralization: One example of how SphereNet reconciles regulatory permissioning with decentralization is our blind peer review system. It ensures that all new participants are licensed to provide financial services in the jurisdictions they operate in, while maintaining sufficient decentralization in the approval process.

And most critically, SphereNet is unaffiliated with any institution. That’s the 10,000x unlock, as this design enables the network to maximize high-quality counterparties, standardize compliance, and unify liquidity—precisely what retail users, entrepreneurs, businesses, and governments need around the world. 

Seen through this lens, the beautiful tragedy is that stablecoin-focused blockchains from incumbents may, in the end, fully cede the very control they sought to capture in the first place.

Chart Of The Week

News Bites

Wolf Pack: Pantera Capital is raising up to $1.25bn to acquire and restructure a Nasdaq-listed company into a Solana-focused digital-asset treasury. At the same time, Galaxy Digital, Jump Crypto, and Multicoin Capital are pursuing a parallel $1bn vehicle with the same objective.

Dark Liquidity: Proprietary AMMs on Solana have bifurcated the liquidity landscape: they increasingly capture volume in liquid trading pairs, leaving niche or illiquid trading pairs for legacy AMMs. While this offers clear benefits to traders, it comes at the expense of openness and transparency.

Distribution Convergence: Monzo, one of the UK’s leading digital banks, is preparing to launch its own mobile phone service as it seeks to diversify revenue streams. The convergence of telecommunication and finance is hardly novel; Nubank is following a similar path in Brazil, and in Africa businesses have long demonstrated the power of integrating mobile money with network operations. Interestingly, Solana is increasingly becoming a backbone for these ecosystems, here's why.

Stablecoin IPO: Crypto exchange Bullish has received $1.15 billion of its IPO in stablecoins minted largely on Solana. This marks the first time that stablecoins have been deployed at this scale in a US IPO, signalling a significant step in the institutionalisation of blockchain-based finance. Jefferies acted as the billing and delivery agent, coordinating the mint, conversion, and transfer of the funds, a task that once fell solely to traditional settlement rails.

Big Wyoming: Wyoming has broken new ground by issuing the Frontier Stable Token (FRNT), the first state-backed stablecoin in the United States. The token is fully collateralised by dollars and short-term treasuries, and operates across seven major blockchains, including Solana.

China Worries: The monopoly over money creation and movement once held by sovereign states is increasingly contested by blockchains. Dollar-backed stablecoins in particular present a structural challenge, especially for China—read the full story here.

Crypto Predictions: In a bid to rival Polymarket, Kalshi has appointed a head of crypto to develop more engaging crypto markets and expand its onchain integrations. The move reflects the company’s ambition to broaden retail participation in prediction markets and position crypto at the centre of its growth strategy.

Deal Flow

When the Solana ecosystem moves, it moves fast.

We give capital allocators an unfair advantage: high-signal research, due diligence, and warm intros.  

Drop us a line and we’ll help take your Solana deal flow to the next level.

Caught In 4K

Weekly Take

Keks & Giggles

And that's a wrap!

You can reach me anytime over on 𝕏.

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.}