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Weekly Recap: The Week Wall Street Bought In

This week the incumbents stopped experimenting with stablecoins and started buying the whole stack. Stripe bid $53 billion for PayPal, a deal that would put Bridge and PYUSD under one owner, while Visa launched a stablecoin platform on Open USD aimed at 200 million merchants.

The plumbing went live, too: the DTCC began real tokenized-securities trades and OKX pooled tokenized stocks into one book — as Washington pushed the Clarity Act toward a floor vote.

Enjoy!

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Top Stories This Week

Stripe Bids $53B for PayPal, Combining Bridge and PYUSD

Stripe, with Advent International, made an unsolicited ~$53 billion bid for PayPal. If accepted, it would fold Stripe's Bridge stablecoin rails and PayPal's PYUSD token into one company — a vertically integrated stablecoin powerhouse and the clearest sign yet that payments giants treat stablecoins as core infrastructure.

Visa Launches a Stablecoin Platform Built on Open USD

Visa launched an enterprise stablecoin platform that crypto head Cuy Sheffield says will reach more than 200 million merchants, initially through Open USD, the consortium stablecoin positioned against Circle's USDC. Merchant distribution is the moat issuers cannot buy, and Visa just wired it to a USDC rival first.

DTCC Starts Live Tokenized-Securities Trades

The DTCC, the plumbing that settles most US securities trades, began live production trades of tokenized real-world assets with more than two dozen firms, a full launch set for October. When the settlement layer for US markets runs tokenized trades in production, tokenization stops being a pilot story.

Washington Pushes the Clarity Act Toward a Vote

President Trump urged the Senate to pass the Clarity Act, the crypto market-structure bill, in honor of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham. Days later, Sen. Cynthia Lummis said bill text would land within days — the closest the SEC-versus-CFTC turf question has come to a floor vote.

Builder-Deployed Markets Overtake Crypto on Hyperliquid

Hyperliquid's builder-deployed markets for stocks, commodities, and indices overtook its native crypto volume on several weekday sessions this month. The largest onchain perps venue is growing past crypto, on markets its own users deployed — turning into a general onchain derivatives layer.

Other Stories

OKX Launches Tokenized US Stocks on a Shared Order Book — the exchange pooled 40+ tokenized US equities like XAAPL and XNVDA into one order book against USDT, backed by xStocks, a bet that consolidating fragmented liquidity makes onchain equities tradable at size.

Standard Chartered Launches USDC Minting Access With Circle — the bank said it is the first globally systemic bank licensed to offer institutional USDC minting and redemption, starting in the UAE, putting a stablecoin inside regulated banking rails.

Coinbase's Jesse Pollak Hands the Base App to Cobie — Pollak called Base's onchain-social bet 'definitively wrong' and refocused the largest Ethereum L2 on trading, payments, and AI agents, a rare public concession from a major chain.

Cap Cuts Its 'Stabledrop' Airdrop to $4.2M From $12M — the Franklin Templeton-backed stablecoin protocol slashed a promised reward by two-thirds amid backlash, its founder apologizing and denying he steered rewards to a wallet tied to his former employer.

CFTC Orders Kalshi to Honor Trades a Michigan Court Told It to Cancel — the regulator invoked emergency authority and called the first state attempt to void executed derivatives trades unprecedented, planting a flag for federal preemption over prediction markets.

Tether Leads a $7M Round in Pact Labs to Push USAT Into Payroll — the stablecoin issuer is targeting payroll, wage access, and everyday payments for its US-focused USAT token, chasing the stickiest stablecoin use case before bank-issued coins arrive.

EthSystems Launches Privacy Tools for Institutional Ethereum — backed by Bitmine and SharpLink, the firm is building confidential-transaction tools for institutions that can't trade on a public ledger, one of the last missing pieces before large desks size up on Ethereum.

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That's it for today — have a great weekend! If you enjoyed this newsletter, tell your friends!