Billionaire investor Paul Tudor Jones said bitcoin BTC$76,882.32 stands out as the strongest hedge against inflation, citing its fixed supply as a key advantage over traditional assets like gold.
“Bitcoin is unequivocally the best inflation hedge that there is — more than gold,” Jones said in an interview with Invest Like the Best podcast published Tuesday. He pointed to the largest crypto’s capped supply. Unlike gold, whose supply increases each year, bitcoin has a hard limit on the number of coins that can be created, making it scarcer by design, he said.
Jones framed bitcoin’s appeal through the lens of past market cycles. During periods of aggressive monetary and fiscal stimulus, such as after the March 2020 pandemic crash, he said inflation trades tend to emerge as central banks inject liquidity into the system.
“When you saw all the interventions… you just knew that the inflation trades were going to take off,” he said, adding that bitcoin was the most compelling opportunity at the time.
His bullish view on bitcoin contrasts with a more cautious stance on equities. Jones warned that stock markets are stretched, with valuations that historically point to weak future returns.
At the same time, a wave of upcoming initial public offerings — such as SpaceX and artificial intelligence firms like OpenAI and Anthropic — and reduced share buybacks could increase equity supply, putting additional pressure on prices.
“If you buy the S&P at this current valuation, the 10-year forward returns [are] negative,” he said. “It’s going to be really hard to make money from here.”
While he stopped short of calling the current environment a full-blown bubble, he noted that the ratio of U.S. stock market capitalization to GDP remains near historic extremes, echoing levels seen before major downturns such as the dotcom bubble.
“In 1929 we were, I think at the top, at 65% [stock market capitalization to GDP] and then in ’87 we got to about 85%-90%, in 2000 we got 270%,” he noted.
“And now we’re at 252%, so you can just imagine,” he said. “We’re clearly so leveraged in equities in this country.”
Because of that, a major stock market correction may have broader ramifications on the economy, government budget deficit and the bond market, according to Jones.
“10% of our tax revenues are capital gains. They go to zero,” he said. “So you can see the budget deficit blowing up. You see the bond market getting smoked.”
You can see this kind of negative self-reinforcing effect,” he concluded. “It’s troubling.”
Nvidia on Tuesday launched a multimodal open model that combines vision, speech and language, aiming to help enterprises save time with agents that can provide faster, smarter responses by reasoning across modalities.
Nemotron 3 Nano Omni is the vendor’s latest iteration of its open source family of models. The model removes the need for separate perception models for video, audio, image and text. It combines vision and audio encoders (neural network modules that process complex inputs and capture the most key features of the data) within its 30B mixture-of-experts architecture. This combination enables the AI system to achieve higher throughput than Nvidia’s other Omni models, leading to lower costs and better inference efficiency, the vendor said.
The model is another way Nvidia is trying to extend its dominance in AI hardware into models and services. While the vendor currently leads the AI market in hardware with its ubiquitous GPUs, emphasizing its Nemotron open models may help it to remain on top, especially as its biggest customers — including Google, Microsoft and AWS — have their own chips and are ramping up production. Other customers, such as OpenAI, are partnering with Nvidia competitors like Cerebras and Broadcom, and some foreign customers, notably DeepSeek, are shifting to local chipmakers such as Huawei.
Related:China Moves to Block Meta’s $2B Acquisition of AI Startup
“This is happening at the backdrop of Nvidia’s biggest customers doing everything they can to eat away at the margins that Nvidia is making in hardware right now,” said David Nicholson, an analyst at Futurum Group. “Over the long haul, they’re not going to be able to maintain the hardware margins that they have right now.”
However, Nvidia is also trying to help enterprises be more efficient by helping agents understand context across modalities. The vendor is promising a system that integrates diverse files and methodologies, making it easier for enterprises to build agents.
“The idea that we’re going to give you this environment where when you create an agent, it will automatically understand how to communicate with all of these other pieces of the entire infrastructure stack,” Nicholson said. “It’s one step further in the direction of an intelligently engineered system that delivers efficiency that is hard to get when you don’t have control over all the components.”
Being Efficient
The model can work next to proprietary models and other Nemotron open models to power agentic workflows such as computer use agents, document intelligence and audio and video understanding. With computer use agents, Nemotron 3 Nano Omni powers the perception loop for agents navigating the computer screen and reasoning about its content.
Related:AWS Bets on Frontier Agents as the Next Era of Enterprise AI
With document intelligence, the model can interpret documents, charts, tables, and screenshots, and reason over both visual and textual content. With audio and video understanding, the model maintains the context of both modalities within a single reasoning stream.
Obstacles
The challenge, though, is that it is unclear whether Nvidia envisions this model or system for a specific enterprise size and whether its hyperscale customers will benefit from using it.
Nicholson noted that some Nvidia customers have their own accelerators. “I don’t know if Nvidia is thinking that this is going to be a hyperscale cloud provider strategy that they’ll be able to use.”
Moreover, while the model is open source and Nvidia provided weights, training techniques and training sets, it is unclear if enterprises outside the Nvidia stack environment will use it.
“That’s not very likely,” Nicholson said. “Most of this will be deployed within an entire Nvidia stack environment.”
Nevertheless, developers will still experiment with the model, said Chirag Shah, a professor at the University of Washington’s Information School.
“When you make something like this open source, it makes all those developers quickly try it out, start integrating into their existing solutions, and when it works well, they’re going to want to use Nvidia as their infrastructure partner,” he said.
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Bitcoin is holding above $76,000 as the market pushes against resistance and bulls attempt to build the momentum needed for the next leg higher. The price is constructive but not yet decisive, and an Arab Chain report has just identified a behavioral shift among Bitcoin’s most structurally significant sellers that changes the supply picture behind the current consolidation.
The number of miner deposit transactions on exchanges has fallen to approximately 8,138 — one of the lowest readings on record. To understand why that matters, it helps to recall what the data looked like just months ago.
In late 2025, deposit transactions surged above 100,000 at times — a level of activity that reflected miners actively moving Bitcoin to exchanges, behavior historically associated with selling intent and profit-taking. Every spike above that threshold represented freshly mined coins entering the liquid market and adding to the sell-side overhead that recovering prices must absorb.
That dynamic has fundamentally changed. Since the beginning of 2026, the trend has moved persistently lower. The sharp spikes have disappeared. The peaks have flattened. The miners who were flooding exchanges with deposits just months ago have pulled back to a pace that barely registers against where they were.
Bitcoin, attempting to clear resistance above $76,000, is doing so in a market where the group that supplied the most consistent overhead pressure has nearly gone silent.
The Miners Have Stepped Back. The Question Is Whether They Stay Back.
The Arab Chain report connects the transaction decline directly to the current price environment. With Bitcoin trading around $77,000, the data is describing a market where one of its most consistent historical sources of sell-side pressure has effectively withdrawn. Miners are not just depositing less frequently — they are transferring smaller amounts when they do move, reflecting a behavioral shift that goes beyond routine portfolio adjustments into something closer to a deliberate change in strategy.
The report identifies two possible explanations for that shift, and both carry different implications for how long it persists. The first is expectation-driven: miners believe prices will move higher and are holding current production in anticipation of selling at better levels. The second is conviction-driven: miners have reduced their selling intent structurally and are accumulating rather than distributing, regardless of short-term price movements.
Either explanation produces the same near-term consequence. With miner deposit transactions at record lows, the overhead supply that recovering Bitcoin prices typically must fight through is significantly reduced. The path from $77,000 toward the $82,200 short-term holder cost basis — the breakeven zone for recent buyers — faces less resistance from this particular source than it has at any comparable point in recent memory.
The constructive framing the report offers is measured and conditional. Reduced miner selling pressure is a positive structural factor in the short term — but its durability depends on whether market demand holds at current levels or continues to grow. If demand weakens, the reduced miner activity offers support. If demand strengthens, the combination of reduced overhead and growing inflows creates the conditions the market has been building toward.
Bitcoin Holds Breakout Level as Price Tests Short-Term Strength
Bitcoin is consolidating near $76,500 after recently breaking above the $73,000–$74,000 resistance zone, which had capped price throughout March. That level now acts as support, marking a clear structural shift from range-bound compression to early-stage recovery. The breakout was clean, but follow-through is beginning to stall as price approaches the $78,000–$80,000 supply region.
BTC consolidates above the $75K level | Source: BTCUSDT chart on TradingView
The 50-day moving average has turned upward and is providing dynamic support below the current price, reinforcing the short-term uptrend. Meanwhile, the 100-day moving average sits just above and is beginning to flatten, acting as immediate resistance. The 200-day moving average remains downward sloping overhead, indicating that the broader trend has not fully transitioned back to bullish.
Price structure shows higher lows since the February capitulation near $63,000, confirming steady accumulation. However, recent candles reflect hesitation, with smaller bodies and wicks forming near resistance — a sign of balance between buyers and sellers.
Volume supports this interpretation. The recovery phase has occurred on moderate participation compared to the capitulation spike, suggesting controlled accumulation rather than aggressive expansion.
A break above $78,000 would open the path toward $82,000, where previous breakdown pressure originated. Failure to hold above $74,000 risks a return to the mid-range structure.
Featured image from ChatGPT, chart from TradingView.com
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Stablecoin monthly transfer volume fell by nearly 20% over the past 30 days, even as the market’s total supply and holder count continued to rise.
According to data from RWA.xyz, 30-day stablecoin transfer volume dropped 19.18% to $8.31 trillion as of April 28, while stablecoin market capitalization rose 2.06% to $305.29 billion over the same period. The number of stablecoin holders also increased by 2.32% to 246.94 million, while monthly active addresses edged up 0.26% to 51.28 million.
The divergence suggests that stablecoin growth is not translating evenly into onchain activity. While more capital appears to be sitting in dollar-denominated crypto assets, fewer dollars are being moved across blockchains compared with 30 days earlier.
The 30-day net flows were led by Tether’s USDT, which added $3.6 billion, followed by Circle’s USDC with $2 billion and MakerDAO’s DAI with $1.2 billion. Ethena’s USDe saw the largest net outflow at $1.1 billion, while Paxos’ PYUSD recorded $509 million in net outflows.
30-day stablecoin net flows as of April 28, 2026. Source: RWA.xyz
Stablecoin momentum cools after stronger network activity
The decline in broader stablecoin transfer volume comes after stronger stablecoin activity was flagged on some of the major blockchain networks for stablecoins.
In its Q2 Signals Report, asset manager Fidelity cited Coin Metrics data showing that Ethereum’s stablecoin transfer values had recently exceeded historical averages, with transfer value over the past 12 months surpassing $18 trillion.
Aggregate stablecoin transfer volume. Source: Fidelity
Fidelity said the trend suggested network utility persisted even as crypto prices remained under pressure. The company said the increase may signal that stablecoins are being used for payments, settlement and onchain access to the dollar, regardless of broader market sentiment.
Related: Stablecoin inflows rebound to $1.7B as Washington battles over yield rules
Solana showed a similar, though smaller, trend. Citing Coin Metrics data, Fidelity showed that Solana consistently processed over $5 billion in stablecoin volume, while its 30-day average transfer volume increased from $6.7 billion to $7.2 billion as of March 31.
Fidelity said the data suggest that Solana may be moving toward more mainstream financial activity after being closely associated with memecoin trading.
Magazine: AI-driven hacks could kill DeFi — unless projects act now
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Stancer, a European digital payments fintech already active in France, is officially expanding into the Italian market. The move follows the iliad Group‘s recent launch of its cloud activities in the country through Scaleway just a month prior.
Stancer’s Italian operations will be spearheaded by general manager Alberto Rescigno, who will oversee the company’s market entry, consolidation, and the gradual establishment of a local team.
Democratising digital payments
The fintech’s core mission is to make payment infrastructures across Europe more accessible and immediate. The offering is tailored directly for SMEs, freelancers, and e-commerce operators, providing omnichannel solutions that cover both online payments and in-person transactions via smartphone using Tap to Pay.
Stancer differentiates its approach through simplicity and accessibility, deliberately eliminating fixed fees, long-term commitments, and rigid subscriptions. Instead, the company provides transparent and competitive pricing, an easy onboarding process, and the ability to manage all payments from a single unified platform.
Why Italy?
Italy presents a highly strategic market for the fintech. According to the Community Cashless Society 2026 index, cashless transactions in Italy have surpassed €500billion since 2015, accounting for 46.5 per cent of Italians’ total consumption. Furthermore, as of 2024, the sector generated €17.7billion in revenues and €9.4billion in added value.
“Italy is a particularly attractive market, combining the growth of digital payments with an economic fabric in which micro, small and medium-sized enterprises account for 99.9% of all non-financial sector businesses: a segment that broadly matches the businesses we target,” explained Rescigno.
Rescigno noted that current market solutions are often designed for large players, trapping smaller businesses in fixed fees and long-term contracts that fail to accommodate irregular or seasonal revenue volumes. “Stancer’s offering fits into this context and is designed to provide an alternative, with flexible, simple and transparent services that respond concretely and effectively to the needs of Italy’s entrepreneurial fabric.”
European infrastructure and scale
A major selling point for the fintech is that it operates on a fully European infrastructure. Its proprietary payment technology was developed entirely in-house and is hosted directly on the iliad Group’s data centres.
George Owen, CEO of Stancer, highlighted the critical importance of this setup regarding security.
“This allows all data to remain in Europe and therefore be subject exclusively to the European regulatory and supervisory framework, in full compliance with GDPR and the highest protection standards,” Owen stated.
Currently, Stancer processes over 250,000 transactions daily, handles more than 7.6 million recurring subscription payments every month, and collects over €1.7billion annually for its clients.
Future plans for the region
Looking ahead, Stancer aims to progressively build its presence in Italy through active digital acquisition. The company also plans to establish targeted local partnerships with key stakeholders—including banks, trade associations, and technology platforms—as it seeks to cement itself as one of Europe’s leading players in digital payment services.
The US-Iran war lay behind risk assets’ cold feet, with oil taking center stage amid the ongoing blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
WTI crude oil returned to $100 per barrel on the day, as US President Donald Trump continued to keep markets guessing on the outcome of the Hormuz impasse.
“Iran has just informed us that they are in a ‘State of Collapse,’” he wrote in a post on Truth Social.
“They want us to ‘Open the Hormuz Strait,’ as soon as possible, as they try to figure out their leadership situation (Which I believe they will be able to do!).”
Source: Truth Social
Commenting, trading resource The Kobeissi Letter noted the ongoing impact on Asian countries, with Iran rapidly running out of oil storage capacity.
“Asia’s energy crisis will soon intensify even further,” it predicted in a post on X.
Crypto sources also drew attention to the impact of oil on market mood, among them onchain analytics platform Glassnode.
“Disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz persist due to stalled US-Iran talks, tightening supply and spooking markets across the board,” it told X followers on the back of the WTI jump.
CFDs on US WTI crude oil four-hour chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView
BTC price breakout hopes fade into monthly close
BTC price action thus continued to shy away from attacking $80,000 after sealing a weekly candle close above a key resistance trend line.
Related: Bitcoin price set for best gains since Q4 2024 with $77.5K monthly close
Instead, the two recent visits to $73,000 made market participants wary of calling a “double bottom” formation too early.
“So far, $BTC bulls aren’t showing much enthusiasm for a robust double bottom bounce. Expecting to see volatility increase as we move to and through the monthly close,” trading resource Material Indicators commented.
An accompanying chart showed exchange order-book liquidity and whale orders, with only the largest class of investors stepping in to buy.
BTC/USDT order-book liquidity data with whale orders. Source: Material Indicators/X
Others also demanded more proof that bulls could crush the multiple resistance levels immediately above spot price, including the bear market support band.
“We’ll need to see follow up to actually confirm a proper breakout though. But at least the bulls are putting in an effort for now,” trader Daan Crypto Trades wrote on X.
BTC/USD one-week chart with bull market support band, moving averages. Source: Daan Crypto Trades/X
This article is produced in accordance with Cointelegraph’s Editorial Policy and is intended for informational purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or recommendations. All investments and trades carry risk; readers are encouraged to conduct independent research.
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Blockchain for Europe has called for targeted reforms to the European Union’s (EU) landmark crypto framework in a new report, seeking to boost the global competitiveness of Euro-denominated stablecoins.
Euro Stablecoins On The ‘Regulatory Laffer Curve’ Downside
On Monday, Blockchain for Europe, an organization that represents international Blockchain industry players in the EU, said that while the EU’s Markets in Crypto Asset Regulation (MiCA) has established a framework that makes euro-pegged stablecoins safe, it has also made them less competitive than their US-denominated rivals.
In its report titled “Reforming MiCA for Euro Stablecoins,” the industry group observes that the absence of regulation hinders market development. Conversely, excessively stringent regulations may prove ineffective, as they risk driving the targeted economic activity to less regulated or more welcoming jurisdictions.
“If compliant projects do not ultimately locate domestically, then regulation fails to achieve its objectives,” Blockchain for Europe affirmed, adding that a framework’s goal is to have a regulated but strong local industry.
The report noted that euro-pegged stablecoins account for less than 1% of global stablecoin volume, far below the level the euro’s broader role in global markets would suggest.
Under this premise, the group argues that the ground-breaking, comprehensive legislation has placed Europe on the “downward-sloping part of the regulatory Laffer curve,” as skepticism prevails among European policymakers regarding the trajectory of euro electronic money tokens (EMTs).
Last year, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Systemic Risk Board (ESRB) expressed concerns about financial instability risks, pushing for stricter regulations, including a ban on multi-issuance stablecoins in the bloc.
Nonetheless, the European Banking Authority (EBA) addressed these concerns in November, asserting that MiCA already has safeguards against potential risks posed by the tokens.
Reforming MiCA To Boost The European Market
Blockchain For Europe suggested multiple reforms to improve the regulated European stablecoin market and maximize MiCA’s positive impact on the industry, the Savings and Investment Union, European citizens, and businesses.
To achieve this, the industry group proposed allowing remuneration of euro-denominated EMTs with adequate regulation to ensure liquidity, arguing that there is no justification for such a ban.
In addition, the industry group suggested removing or reducing the minimum bank deposit requirement, replacing the 30% and 60% thresholds with a principle-based approach to reserve composition. This would allow issuers to allocate across high-quality liquid assets without forcing concentrated exposure to bank deposits.
They also proposed broadening and diversifying the eligible reserve asset suite and introducing a more proportionate and risk-based transparency regime for EMTs to reduce concentration risk, improve market functioning, and avoid raising barriers to entry.
Meanwhile, the report listed enabling calibrated access to central bank infrastructure and providing clarity and a “workable framework” for cross-border stablecoin usage as potential reforms to support the token’s competitiveness.
Europe Eyes Centralized Crypto Oversight
Blockchain for Europe’s report comes as the European Central Bank backs a proposal to shift oversight of key financial markets, including crypto, from national authorities to a centralized supervisory authority.
As reported by Bitcoinist, the ECB has supported the European Commission (EC)’s plan to integrate the EU’s capital market through a centralized entity, the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), to enhance competitiveness and harmonize regulation.
The EU initially proposed the plan, led by France and Germany, during MiCA’s development, but ultimately scrapped the plan. Notably, multiple nations and industry participants have opposed the measure.
In November, the Secretary General of Blockchain for Europe, Robert Kopitsch, argued that a shift towards a more centralized supervisory model should happen in the future based on “concrete” evidence gathered from MiCA’s initial years, and pointed out that local regulators have more direct and frequent interactions with firms.
The total crypto market capitalization is at $2.54 trillion in the one-week chart. Source: TOTAL on TradingView
Featured Image from Unsplash.com, Chart from TradingView.com
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Something fundamental is changing in how commerce works. It’s happening right now, at the intersection of artificial intelligence and blockchain payments, and most people haven’t fully registered what it means yet.
AI agents – software systems that can perceive, decide, and act autonomously – are beginning to transact. They’re paying for APIs, settling invoices, and interacting with infrastructure in ways that traditional payment rails were never designed to handle. The credit card, the bank login, the merchant onboarding flow: all of it is friction that agents can’t navigate the way humans do.
Ask yourself: how many agents do you think you’ll have? Three, five -it’s a common answer. Ten. I have 200.
By the numbers -if you have 10 or 20 agents per human, you’re between 70 to 140 billion agents in the world. Universally, most people will agree: there’s going to be more AI agents than there are humans. – Yat Siu, Animoca
What comes next -the rails, regulatory frameworks, and business models – is precisely what Consensus 2026 is convening to figure out. When 15,000+ of the world’s most influential crypto, AI, and finance minds gather at the Miami Beach Convention Center from May 5 to 7, agentic commerce will be one of the defining conversations of the week.
“That’s assisted checkout, not true agentic payments”
Christian Catalini, MIT professor and founder of the Cryptoeconomics Lab, draws a line most people in the industry haven’t drawn yet.
“Most agents today operate just as LLMs paired with a credit card,” he says. “That’s assisted checkout, not true agentic payments.”
“Real agentic payments begin when the AI is the counterparty,” Catalini explains. “The actual test for programmable rails isn’t whether an agent can pay – it’s whether it can do things no human-facing rail allows: atomic settlement against delivery, per-second payment streaming, or transacting with a counterparty that has no KYC footprint.”
That’s not a near-future scenario. It’s a near-term engineering problem. And Consensus is where the engineers, investors, and policymakers working on it will be in the same room.
The internet was built for humans. Agents need something different
Google Cloud is not a company known for hedging its bets on technology cycles. Its presence at Consensus 2026 – and its active investment in blockchain payment rails – is as clear a signal as any that agentic commerce is being taken seriously at the highest levels of the technology industry.
“The convergence of agentic AI, blockchain payments, and commerce is still in its early stages, but momentum is building,” says Rich Widmann, Google Cloud’s Global Head of Strategy for Web3. “Google is actively participating in open protocols like x402 and deepening partnerships across the Web3 ecosystem to help bring these use cases to scale.”
Widmann is direct about where the friction lies: “The biggest friction points center on the fact that most products are still built for humans, not agents. Sign-ups, logins, and manual onboarding create barriers that slow agentic commerce down.”
The rails race: x402, MPP, and the fight for the agentic stack
If AI agents are going to transact at scale, they need payment infrastructure designed for them from the ground up. Two protocols are emerging as early contenders for that role, and both will have a presence at Consensus 2026.
x402, the open payment protocol built on HTTP and championed by Coinbase, is designed to allow agents to pay for API access and digital services with stablecoins in a single, frictionless flow. Erik Reppel, x402’s founder and Head of Engineering at Coinbase, will be at Consensus making the case for why open, interoperable rails are the right foundation for the agentic economy.
MPP (Machine Payments Protocol), developed by Tempo and backed by Stripe, offers another vision for how agents can negotiate and settle payments autonomously. The presence of both protocols at the same event – in front of 15,000 developers, investors, and enterprise decision-makers -makes Consensus the de facto arena where the early standard-setting debate gets played out.
Also in the room: Stefano Bury, head of Virtuals Protocol, one of the leading platforms for deploying autonomous AI agents, and Chi Zhang, co-founder of Kite, whose team is building at the intersection of agent infrastructure and decentralized payments.
CoinDesk University: From Theory to Implementation
For attendees who want to go beyond the mainstage debates and into the mechanics of how to actually build and deploy agentic payments, CoinDesk University offers a structured, three-day curriculum that takes participants from first principles to advanced implementation -no prior crypto experience required.
Day 1 lays the foundation. Afternoon workshops walk attendees through setting up a stablecoin wallet and business dashboard with Circle, then pivot to session on compliance, followed by back-to-back workshops on using OpenClaw and x402.
Day 2 goes deeper into the stack, with sessions on building a full agentic infrastructure, managing agentic economy risks, and the increasingly urgent question of how to prove human identity in an AI-saturated world. By Day 3, the curriculum reaches masterclass territory: workshops on deploying AI trading bots with stablecoins, trading on prediction markets with autonomous agents, and a capstone Agentic Masterclass that brings the full arc together.
The format is intentionally immersive. Each day pairs hands-on workshops with mainstage sessions, networking lunches, and “No Dumb Questions” Q&A sessions.
The window is open. It won’t be open forever
Agentic commerce is not a future state. It is an early-stage present, moving faster than most industries have had time to notice. The protocols being debated at Consensus 2026 could become the rails that trillions of dollars in machine-to-machine transactions run on. The regulatory frameworks being discussed could define what’s permissible for a decade.
The people in the room at the Miami Beach Convention Center from May 5 to 7 will be the ones who had a voice in how this unfolds. Everyone else will be working with what they decided.
Join 15,000+ builders, investors, and industry leaders at Consensus 2026, May 5–7, Miami Beach. Register now at consensus.coindesk.com
Sports-focused blockchain Chiliz is expanding its roster of over 70 fan tokens to Solana and Base, the Ethereum layer-2 network developed by Coinbase (COIN).
Chiliz rolled out its own layer-1 network in 2023 to host the trading of its tokens, but is transitioning to what it calls “omnichain distribution,” according to an announcement on X on Tuesday.
“By using an Omnichain Fungible Token (OFT) standard, fan tokens will exist on each supported chain with a unified supply, eliminating the need for wrapped tokens or fragmented liquidity pools,” Chiliz said.
Fan tokens are digital assets that represent membership of a community such as a sports team’s fan base. Chiliz has developed over 70 such tokens, including tokens for some of Europe’s soccer giants like Paris Saint-Germain, Barcelona, Manchester City and Juventus. These teams use tokens to farm engagement from fans who are not in the stadium, by giving holders the chance to win exclusive rewards and voting rights on minor issues such as the colour of the players’ warm-up kit.
Chiliz said it hopes that expansion to Solana and Base will give these tokens a major trading volume boost ahead of this summer’s FIFA World Cup. Chiliz already offers tokens representing the Argentina and Portugal teams with more expected to be unveiled in June.
Read More: SportFi’s next act: onchain markets built around match-day results
As stablecoins move further into mainstream financial discussion, attention is starting to turn from simple payments use cases to questions around yield, risk and how digital dollars connect to the wider economy.
For companies working in this area, the challenge is not just putting assets on-chain, but building structures that can link crypto liquidity with real-world credit markets in a way that is credible and sustainable.
In this week’s In Profile, John O’Connor, CEO of RealFi, which builds yield-bearing stablecoin infrastructure backed by real-world credit and fixed income, talks about the role digital assets could play in real-world finance.
John O’Connor, CEO of RealFi
Tell us more about your company and its purpose
RealFi is building infrastructure to make stablecoins productive. Today, a large share of stablecoin capital sits idle, functioning as digital cash but not contributing to economic activity. Or worse, any yield is directly correlated to crypto markets and highly volatile.
Our purpose is to bridge that gap by connecting global on-chain liquidity with real-world credit markets. Through USDr, we enable users to access yield derived from instruments like private credit and fixed income, rather than speculative crypto-native sources.
At the same time, we direct capital toward businesses that are underserved by traditional financial systems. The objective is twofold: improve capital efficiency for stablecoin holders and expand access to financing for businesses that need it. We see this as a necessary step in the evolution of digital assets from passive stores of value into active components of the global financial system.
What are some of your recent achievements you’d like to highlight?
Over the past year, our focus has been on building the foundational infrastructure for USDr and validating the model behind productive stablecoins. This includes establishing partnerships across credit origination, risk management and distribution, as well as developing the architecture that allows on-chain capital to be deployed into real-world assets in a controlled and transparent way.
We have also spent significant time refining our approach to risk, ensuring that yield is derived from diversified and cash-flow-generating sources rather than short-term market dynamics. Another key milestone has been preparing for our mainnet launch, which represents the transition from concept to live deployment. Importantly, we have been deliberate in how we scale, prioritising sustainability and credibility over speed, which we believe is essential in rebuilding trust in yield-bearing products.
How did you get into the fintech industry?
My route into fintech was not linear. I started in advertising technology, working in business development and product roles, before moving into blockchain as part of the early Cardano ecosystem. That was a formative experience, as it exposed me to both the potential and the limitations of early-stage financial infrastructure. From there, I moved into roles that focused on applying blockchain in real-world contexts, including leading operations in Africa and working on large-scale deployments like national digital identity systems.
What drew me into fintech more broadly was the opportunity to rethink how financial systems operate at a structural level. Rather than optimising existing processes, fintech allows you to redesign how capital moves, how access is granted and how trust is established. RealFi is a continuation of that trajectory, focused on making digital asset infrastructure usable in practical, economically meaningful ways.
What’s the best thing about working in the fintech industry?
The most compelling aspect of fintech is its ability to reshape fundamental financial primitives. You are not just improving user interfaces or marginal efficiencies, you are rethinking how money, credit and ownership function. That creates an environment where innovation can have a direct and measurable impact on people’s lives. Your economic identity, for example bank account eligibility, can often be determined by geography. DeFi begins to rebalance that.
It also sits at the intersection of multiple disciplines, from technology and economics to regulation and user behaviour, which makes it intellectually demanding. In digital assets, there is an additional opportunity in building systems that are global by default. You can design infrastructure that is accessible across borders and operates with a level of openness that traditional systems struggle to achieve.
For me, that combination of technical challenge and real-world impact is what makes the space compelling.
What frustrates you most about the fintech industry?
A recurring frustration is the gap between innovation and discipline. The industry is very effective at generating new ideas, but less consistent when it comes to building sustainable systems around them. This is particularly evident in areas like yield, where short-term incentives have often taken precedence over long-term viability. Another challenge is fragmentation.
Different regulatory regimes, technical standards and market practices can make it difficult to scale solutions globally, even when the underlying technology supports it. There is also a tendency to over-index on narratives rather than fundamentals, which can distort how products are evaluated. For fintech to mature, there needs to be a stronger alignment between innovation, risk management and regulatory clarity. Without that, it becomes harder to build the kind of infrastructure that institutions and users can rely on over time.
How have your previous roles influenced your career?
My previous roles have consistently reinforced the importance of execution and real-world applicability. Working on Cardano in its early stages provided a strong foundation in building and scaling blockchain ecosystems. Moving into operational roles, particularly in Africa, shifted that perspective toward implementation, where success is defined by whether systems actually work in practice, not just in theory.
Delivering a national digital identity solution at scale highlighted the importance of aligning technology with government, regulatory and user requirements. Across each role, the common thread has been translating complex technology into usable infrastructure. That has shaped how I approach RealFi. We are focused on solving concrete problems, such as capital inefficiency and access to credit, rather than building abstract systems. It has also informed our emphasis on partnerships, as meaningful adoption typically requires coordination across multiple stakeholders.
What’s the best mistake you’ve ever made?
One of the more valuable mistakes in my career was underestimating how long it takes for new financial infrastructure to gain traction. Early on, I assumed that once the technology was in place, adoption would follow relatively quickly. In reality, financial systems are deeply embedded and require trust, regulatory alignment and behavioural change before they shift.
That experience changed how I think about building in this space. It reinforced the importance of patience, sequencing and focusing on the right entry points rather than trying to do everything at once. With RealFi, that has translated into a more deliberate approach to scaling, where we prioritise robustness and credibility over rapid expansion. In retrospect, that mistake helped clarify that success in fintech is less about speed and more about building systems that can integrate into existing financial structures over time.
What has the future got in store for your company?
The immediate focus is the launch and scaling of USDr, which represents our entry point into the market. Beyond that, the priority is distribution and integration. We are working to embed yield-bearing stablecoins into platforms that already manage significant flows of digital dollars, including fintech lenders and financial service providers. The goal is to make productive capital a default feature rather than a separate product.
Over time, we expect to expand the range of underlying assets and deepen our credit infrastructure, while maintaining a disciplined approach to risk. This will allow us to bring lenders and borrowers closer into the system, enabling better rates and more aligned returns. Traditional banking and DeFi models still tend to keep users at arm’s length. We are in a position to change that.
More broadly, we see RealFi evolving into a bridge between on-chain capital and real-world financial markets.
What are the next key talking points or challenges for your industry as a whole?
One of the central questions for the industry is how stablecoins evolve beyond payments into broader financial infrastructure. That includes defining how yield is generated, how risk is managed and how these products fit within regulatory frameworks. Another key challenge is rebuilding trust, particularly in areas where users have experienced losses due to unsustainable models. There is also an ongoing need for regulatory clarity, especially as digital assets intersect more directly with traditional financial systems.
Finally, interoperability between on-chain and off-chain markets remains a structural issue. For digital assets to reach their full potential, there needs to be seamless integration between blockchain infrastructure and existing financial rails. Addressing these challenges will determine whether the industry remains niche or becomes a foundational layer in global finance.
