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Perps: Swaps or Futures?
Perpetual futures may borrow the name of futures, but their mechanics look far more like modern cleared swaps. The case for regulating perps as swaps starts with how they actually work, not what they are called.
Licensed to Shill: Taiwan's Banks & AI Hardware Makers Could Fuel Asia's Largest Stablecoin Corridor | Justin Wang, Capital Layer
Wang says manufacturers selling AI devices into Latin America are paying up to 11% in local transfer fees, the gap Capital Layer is betting stablecoins can close.
Licensed to Shill: Ethereum's Staking Yield Cut Won't Fix What's Actually Broken
The panel, featuring Blockhead's Tim Han, discusses why cutting ETH's risk-free rate from roughly 3% to 1.2% cannot fix a token that still has nowhere useful to go.
Licensed to Shill: Retail Barely Touches Stablecoins – Treasury & Remittance Are the Real Adoption (Jeannie Lim, Xweave)
At Xweave, Jeannie Lim says her team moved $1 million for an e-commerce client in under three minutes, cutting settlement costs 30% against a Tier 2 bank's SWIFT rate.
Licensed to Shill: DeFi's Third Phase is Tokenized Yield, and Institutions Are Already Buying In (Ben Nadareski, Solstice)
The Solana-based yield protocol has $500 million in liquidity and a delta-neutral strategy with four and a half years of trading history – but its CEO's bigger argument is about what most DeFi investors still fail to check before they deposit.
Report Finds Onchain Investors Trade Tokenised Stocks While Tokenised Treasuries Sit Idle
Equities make up a small slice of the roughly $34 billion tokenised asset market yet account for 93% of its spot trading, with perpetual futures on Asian chipmakers doing much of the work.
Bitcoin Walks Into a Data Gauntlet With Yields At 2007 Highs
The ETF bid has kept Bitcoin above $80,000, but 5%+ Treasury yields and an oil-driven tightening cycle leave the market with little room for error.
Polymarket's Wild Swing Reveals Bitcoin's Fragile September
A surge in Bitcoin’s $82,500 Polymarket odds reflects a market looking for a floor, not a breakout.
$84,000 Fulcrum: Why Bitcoin is Refusing to Break
Bitcoin has absorbed a barrage of macro shocks without breaking $77,000. With ETF flows recovering and on-chain signals remaining relatively healthy, $84,000 has become the market’s key battleground.
AI Agents Could Close the Wealth Gap in Emerging Markets – Or Widen It
Crypto promised to democratise finance in Southeast Asia. The results were mixed. AI agents could be a second chance, but only if the infrastructure is built for everyone, not just those who can already afford a seat at the table, argues Morph CEO Colin Goltra.
The Retail vs. Institutional Divide: How Trading Patterns Reveal Two Completely Different Markets
As ETFs, corporate treasuries, and tokenized real-world assets absorb supply, the old four-year retail cycle is giving way to a macro-driven, institution-led regime where liquidity concentrates, volatility compresses, and value accrues to utility over hype.
Industry Inflection Point: How 2026 Will Define Enterprise Adoption of Crypto’s Fastest-Growing Asset Class
Bhau Kotecha, co-founder and head of Paxos Labs, explains why programmable stablecoins are becoming core financial infrastructure—and how institutions can capture value beyond payments.
Crypto Wasn’t on the Ballot in Japan, But the Mandate Will Shape It
Sota Watanabe, CEO of Startale Group and founder of Astar Foundation, discusses how Japan's snap election could affect crypto tax and regulatory reforms.
Perps: Swaps or Futures?
Perpetual futures may borrow the name of futures, but their mechanics look far more like modern cleared swaps. The case for regulating perps as swaps starts with how they actually work, not what they are called.
EU Regulators Question Binance's Use of MiCA Exemption to Keep Serving European Customers
Three months after Europe's licensing deadline passed with Binance unauthorised, the exchange's reliance on reverse solicitation and an Abu Dhabi entity is testing how narrowly ESMA's carve-out will be enforced.
Coinbase Teams Up With Citi on Fiat-to-Stablecoin Business Payments, Wins CFTC Clearinghouse Approval
The Citi deal gives Coinbase's business customers a regulated bank on the fiat side of stablecoin payments, while the CFTC registration lets Coinbase clear its own fully collateralised derivatives using USDC.
The Sanctions Shuffle
The problem with running a global crypto exchange from offshore is not just compliance. It is who stands behind you when a major power comes calling.
Asia's Next-Generation Wealthy Want AI for Payments, Humans for Planning, Crypto From Their Private Bank
A new WealthSummit survey finds demand for crypto access among heirs running close to gold and strongest among Gen X, which puts the burden on private banks to supply it before clients who have already left the family bank look elsewhere.
OpenAI Seeks at Least $30 Billion at $1.4 Trillion Valuation as Bridge to Delayed IPO
The round would reprice OpenAI 64% above its March valuation and put it back ahead of Anthropic in private markets, days after a leaked Anthropic prospectus set a $2 trillion bar for AI listings.
Robinhood Brings Leveraged Crypto Perpetual Futures to US Customers, Launches AI Trading Agents
The perps, routed through Bitstamp at 10x leverage on bitcoin and ether, put Robinhood in direct competition with Coinbase's US derivatives business, while the agent accounts let AI models place trades on customers' behalf.
ByteDance Secures $29.6 Billion Loan From Nearly 30 Banks to Fund AI Buildout
The unsecured, three-year facility ranks as Asia's second-largest loan of the year and shows how far Chinese tech giants are willing to lever up to compete in AI infrastructure.
Circle to Acquire Singapore's Tazapay for $400 Million in Stock – Its Largest Deal Since Poloniex
The all-stock acquisition gives Circle direct banking relationships across 100-plus markets where more than 60% of Tazapay's $25 billion in annual payment volume already moves through stablecoins.
Ethena Launches Ethena Pay, a Self-Custodial Neobank Built Exclusively on Avalanche
The app gives Ethena's USDe stablecoin a route into everyday spending just as the token's circulating supply has fallen by more than 70% from its September 2025 peak.
Singapore Fintech Funding Falls to Decade Low, But Crypto Deal Count Holds Up
KPMG's Pulse of Fintech report shows Singapore investment dropping to $499 million in H1 2026, with capital concentrated in a single mega-round, even as digital assets and cryptocurrency accounted for more deals than any other vertical.
Dunamu, Visa Partner to Explore Stablecoin Payment, AI-Driven Financial Services
The Upbit operator and the global payments network unveiled a roadmap in San Francisco covering OUSD-based business models, cross-border remittances and agentic commerce, days after Visa joined MAS's BLOOM initiative and signed a separate stablecoin MOU with Shinhan Financial.
StraitsX to Bring XSGD, XUSD Stablecoins to Monad in Early 2027
The Singapore issuer is pitching the move around card and payment settlement, though XSGD's circulating supply of about S$16.5 million shows how much room the token still has to grow outside its existing chains.
Digital Assets Summit Returns on Oct. 6 With Focus on Scaling Tokenisation
The second edition of the Digital Assets Association's Singapore summit will feature Senior Minister of State Desmond Tan and former Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat, with the programme shifting from whether tokenised assets work to how they operate at scale.
Henley's Crypto Wealth Report Buries Its Real Story Beneath Singapore's Crown
The investment migration industry's flagship crypto report leads with Singapore topping its adoption index, but the more revealing numbers are a client base that may have shrunk by a fifth since 2024 and a quiet admission that onchain history alone can't prove where crypto wealth came from.
Singapore Stablecoin Payments Firm dtcpay Extends Series A to $25 Million as SBI Group Joins as Strategic Investor
The Japanese financial group is backing dtcpay through two investment vehicles as it looks to build digital-asset links between Japan and Southeast Asia, adding to a round Vertex Ventures led in March.
Editors' Picks
Perps: Swaps or Futures?
Perpetual futures may borrow the name of futures, but their mechanics look far more like modern cleared swaps. The case for regulating perps as swaps starts with how they actually work, not what they are called.
The Sanctions Shuffle
The problem with running a global crypto exchange from offshore is not just compliance. It is who stands behind you when a major power comes calling.
Defining Accuracy in Blockchain Analysis
A new study using real EU regulatory data finds that the multi-input heuristic can be highly accurate in some cases and completely wrong in others, raising serious questions about its use as forensic evidence.
Escalating the Prediction Markets Fight
The CFTC says federal law clearly overrides state gambling rules. The problem is that the courts have never actually said that — and the agency’s aggressive defense of Kalshi could put its own powers at risk.
The ColdCard "Hack" Should Not Be Called Theft
ColdCard’s security failure exposes an uncomfortable truth about self-custody: if private keys are meant to be the final authority, users cannot invoke the legal system whenever that authority produces an outcome they did not intend.
The Fine Print in Singapore's New Fund Tax Break That Crypto Managers Should Read
Hong Kong just wrote digital assets directly into its carried-interest tax law. Singapore's competing package leans on an older, asset-neutral scheme that Singapore's crypto funds already use, leaving the crypto-specific certainty to Budget 2027.