🎙️ Ep. 54. With Onchain Lending - Who Needs Banks?

If you're reading this and still haven't signed up, click the subscribe button below!

In this week's episode, hosts Simon Taylor and Cuy Sheffield are joined by Diogo Mónica, General Partner at Haun Ventures and Co-Founder & Executive Chairman of Anchorage Digital, and Michelle O'Connor, Founder of The Digital Future and former VP of Market Expansion at TaxBit.

🎙️Listen to the full episode here on your favorite podcast app or 📷 watch on YouTube.

Key Takeaways: The Infrastructure Shift Behind Payments Chains

The payments chain thesis isn't about rebuilding blockchains - it's about financial infrastructure finally adapting to a new form factor. As Diogo noted, "the form factor of smart contracts on these ledgers that have these kinds of ability for developers to interact with permissionlessly, are a fantastic form factor that is winning out on the internet for entrepreneurs building their companies."

This shift became tangible this week with Tempo's $500 million raise led by Greenoaks and Thrive Capital, alongside the acquisition of Ithaca and addition of Ethereum researcher Dankrad Feist. But beneath the funding announcements lies a more fundamental question: What infrastructure requirements remain unsolved at internet scale?

The 99% Problem

The blockchain industry has spent a decade optimizing for the 1% who use stablecoins daily. The remaining 99% require something different: reliability over ideology. "You can't have payroll not happen. You can't have critical market structures go down if you're going to bring in the 99%," as Taylor noted, referencing the network congestion challenges during recent depegging events.

Mónica framed the payments chain evolution through a pragmatic lens: "We started with sovereign resistance, and we're sort of like chipping away at the requirements... And I love that there's a spectrum for us to engage with." The debate isn't about abandoning decentralization - it's about understanding which requirements must be solved first to achieve institutional adoption.

Corporate Treasury: The Silent Catalyst

While acquisition headlines dominated, Ripple's $1 billion GTreasury purchase, Coinbase acquiring Echo for $375 million, Modern Treasury acquiring Beam Cash - the corporate treasury conversation revealed where institutional pressure actually originates. "Every large bank's biggest customers have been asking them what they're going to be doing with stablecoins," Taylor observed.

The complexity isn't primarily about fees. As Michelle highlighted from her TaxBit experience: "You have different banks, different entities, different legal entities, different countries, different geographies, different regulatory bodies have different requirements." A global corporation managing 30 bank accounts per legal entity across 100 entities needs operational simplification, not marginal cost savings.

This explains Ripple's acquisition strategy - securing customer relationships and payment flow to influence which stablecoins enter corporate infrastructure. The $12.5 trillion in annual payment volume GTreasury processes represents distribution leverage at institutional scale.

The Fed's Quiet Revolution

Federal Reserve Governor Waller's announcement of "payments accounts" - skinny versions of master accounts - marks a significant regulatory moment. His statement that "the DeFi industry is not viewed with suspicion or scorn" signals substantive policy evolution.

For institutional players, the implications extend beyond stablecoins. As Cuy noted, this could enable stablecoin issuers to back assets directly with central bank reserves: "Doesn't that start to look like synthetic CBDC?" The concept of separating payments infrastructure from credit provision - historically bundled in traditional banking - creates new competitive dynamics for institutions operating at the intersection.

Mónica characterized the broader M&A environment's significance: "Before 2025, I believe there was exactly zero over a billion dollar M&A in crypto. And then in 2025 alone, we've already had four, maybe five acquisitions over a billion dollars. This has just turned candidly the conversation in VC land from tokens are the thing that matters in crypto to: Oh, it turns out equity actually has a lot of value."

What's Next

The regulatory harmonization challenge remains acute. Different approaches across the US, China, Europe, and UAE create operational friction for global enterprises. Yet early movers like Ant Financial - operating their own L2 while pushing banks toward tokenization and exploring privacy-preserving technologies - demonstrate what corporate treasury infrastructure could look like in three to five years.

The institutional opportunity isn't in choosing between chains. It's in solving the unsexy infrastructure problems that currently prevent enterprise adoption: regulatory compliance, privacy at scale, interoperability across fragmented systems, and building payment reliability into the protocol layer rather than bolting it on afterward.

Thanks so much for reading the Tokenized Newsletter!

Please share this edition or share it with your colleagues if you enjoyed it!

Disclaimers