Thirteen days ago I posted that @BNBCHAIN was going to pass Tron and become the number one chain in the world for stablecoin holders. The gap that morning was 1,962,763.

This morning it finally happened!

BNB Chain 94,278,390.
Tron 94,143,787.
Ahead by 134,603.

I counted it d the gap never widened once. Not one day in thirteen. BNB Chain is adding 194,485 holders a day right now.

Ninety four million wallets. That's more people holding a stablecoin on this one chain than there are people in Germany and France combined!

For the rest of the picture: 2,110,343 RWA holders, which is 2.5 times Solana and 7.3 times Ethereum. 2,981 tokenised assets live. First chain to a million RWA holders, first to two million, first past $1B in tokenised stocks.

Congratulations to everyone behind this!
@thomasxchen

Look, I know I've been bullposting BNB Chain all month. I counted a thing every morning for thirteen days and then posted about it winning. I hear you.
But come on...

Yesterday a company called BNB Standard Corporation rang the opening bell at Nasdaq. Times Square, the big , CZ standing there in the crowd. It's the old CEA Industries, renamed last month, and it holds the largest corporate BNB treasury on earth. 515,544 BNB, about $380 million at this morning's price!!!

A Nasdaq listed company whose entire pitch is holding this one asset, ringing the bell with the founder watching.

Now the part nobody put in a headline. On 19 October the 37th quarterly burn took 1,646,196 binancecoin:native out of existence. At today's price that's $1.21 billion, gone, to a dead address.

131,512,085 left. The original supply was 200 million, so 34.2% of every BNB that ever existed has now been destroyed. Another 31.5 million to go before it stops.

One company buying it and holding. The protocol destroying it every quarter. Pick a side of that trade ; )

Brazil voted yesterday, Sunday to choose their new president. Lula beat Flávio Bolsonaro. The currency gave its verdict within hours...

Friday's close had the dollar at 4.97 reais. By this morning it had hit 5.52. Anyone holding reais lost 8.8% of their purchasing power over a st point, without touching anything.

Three weeks ago the market said the opposite thing just as loudly. When Flávio led the first round, the real posted its biggest single day gain against the dollar in four years. Same currency, same month, two results, two directions.

That is a market pricing one outcome as better for Brazil than the other, and it is not being subtle about which.

Here is where crypto comes in. Bitcoin fell 1.7% in dollars over that weekend. Priced in reais it rose 7.8%. Nothing happened to bitcoin. Something happened to the currency it was measured in.

Anyone holding plain USDC made 9.7% in local terms by going to sleep.

You vote once every four years. Your savings get repriced the same night.

This applies to many other countries with weaker currencies, crypto can save you money if you use it properly!

Yesterday I posted that @BNBCHAIN passed @trondao for stablecoin holders. Someone replied with the best question I've had in weeks: holder count is the easiest metric to move, so are those wallets doing anything or did they get one airdrop and go quiet?

Went and measured it.
tablecoins in the last 30 days. BNB Chain 23,491,110.
Tron 7,964,702.

As a share of each chain's wallets that's 24.9% against 8.5%. Nearly identical holder counts, and BNB Chain had 2.9 times as many of them actually transacting.

The one thing I couldn't get is median transfer size. Nobody publishes it, not RWA.​xyz, not DefiLlama. So I can't tell you whether that activity is remittances or bots, and anyone who says they can is guessing.

What it does kill is the dormant wallet theory. A quarter of 94 million addresses moved money last month!

By the way the lead doubled overnight. 287,747 now, up from 134,603 yesterday.

Good Saturday, everyone!

October is coming to an end, and in Lisbon, Portugal, we still have this kind of sunny days!

Took the day to relax and enjoy what nature has to give!

Microsoft said no. Alphabet, Goldman Sachs, McDonald's, Wells Fargo, Cisco, Caterpillar, Verizon. Twenty two companies have now filed written objections to their own shares being traded as tokens on the @okx and @NYSE parent venue.

Zero have said yes. The rule doesn't let them. e counts as permission and the only thing a company can actively do is refuse.

I spent a month measuring demand for this stuff. Holders, growth rates, how fast people arrive. Demand was never the constraint.

Here's what I found when I went looking for the other side of it. The IMF's October stability report says tokenised equities run about 1.5 times as volatile as the real shares, and less liquid. The World Federation of Exchanges tested 61 token and share pairs last week. The token led price discovery in none of them.

So a company is being asked to accept a worse version of its own stock trading somewhere it doesn't control, for no benefit it can point to. Applied Optoelectronics is the only objector who explained itself and that's exactly what it said.

I'm sure they'll come around when the product is better than the thing it copies. Not before.

Eleven days ago I posted that @BNBCHAIN was about to pass Tron as the number one chain for stablecoin holders in the world. The gap that morning was 1,962,763.

I've counted it every morning since...

This morning it's only 194,434!
Tron on 94,091,343, BNB Chain on 93,896,909.
ng by about 160,000 a day for eleven straight days. Tron is adding 43,299 holders a day. BNB Chain is adding 189,396.

At that pace they cross tomorrow!

Whoever ends up on top, the thing worth noticing is the shape. One chain is adding holders four times faster than the other, and it has done it every single day for eleven days without a single reversal. We are witnessing a real trend!

I'll post the number tomorrow either way ; )

In July 2024 Circle went and got a licence from the French regulator so that USDC would be compliant under MiCA. They opened Circle Mint in France. They did everything the rulebook asked.

Last Thursday the French National Assembly voted to tax swaps into exactly that category of te was 38 to 37, with 25 abstentions. One vote.

Read the amendment and it only touches MiCA e-money tokens, which is the regulated kind. USDC is 23.6% of the stablecoin market. The biggest one, at 59.6%, is not an authorised MiCA issuer, so whether it falls outside this is the open question and nobody has answered it yet.

France's own public accounts minister opposed the amendment and asked for it to be withdrawn. He said they'd need to define what a stablecoin is first.

It isn't law. The Senate still has it and there's a 49.3 available.

If it survives, the lesson a stablecoin issuer learns is to not get licensed in Europe...

As a European, is sad to see the world innovating and Europe regulation and adding more taxes...

Germany's savings banks started selling crypto yesterday. You'll see "50 million customers" everywhere today. I went and read the actual terms.

Five banks are live, out of roughly 350. Each one picks its own start date, 30 to 40 a month, and the association says it has no plans The 50 million is a 2027 ceiling.

Here's the part that matters more. DekaBank holds the private keys and you cannot withdraw to your own wallet.

So 50 million Germans are getting access to bitcoin they will never custody. Not one of them will show up in the 299,263,867 stablecoin holders or the 5,271,139 RWA holders I count on chain every morning. The number I've been tracking for a month is about to start undercounting adoption, badly.

@jpmorgan did the opposite on the same day. They put JPM Coin on Ethereum, a public chain anyone can read. Their platform has settled over $4 trillion.

Two banks, one week, opposite bets on whether the chain should be visible.

There are 87 exchanges with reserves you can verify on chain. $309 billion sitting across all of them.

@binance holds $171.8 billion of that. 55.6%!

More than half of every coin that anyone keeps on an exchange, anywhere, is on one of them. It holds 2.5 times what OKX, Bitfinex ther....

Last week was the part that got my attention. Binance took in $2.18 billion net. The other sixteen big exchanges, added together, took in $130 million.

Now put that next to what else happened last week. @Rus_KhairullinKOL posted that he'd been offered $25,000 to spend a month saying bad things about Binance. @cz_binance quote tweeted him: "Paying to FUD a competitor is the best way to destroy trust for their own exchange."

There is a budget out there for making people distrust this company, and the reserves went up anyway!

Remember, volume can be printed. However a wallet balance on a public chain can be checked by anyone reading this. So can $171.8 billion.

Yesterday I posted that 420 stablecoins exist and two of them are 83% of the market. A few people asked why nobody can break in. Circle published the answer on Thursday without meaning to.

USDC settled $36 trillion in the first six months of this year. Circle made $1.395 billion paid out $819 million of that to distribution partners. Fifty nine cents of every revenue dollar, gone to whoever puts USDC in front of people. $655 million of it went to Coinbase alone, which is 47% of Circle's total revenue.

Another $473 million went on licences, banking and compliance.

What was left is 7 cents on the dollar. For every million dollars that moved through USDC, Circle kept $2.71.

So that's why PayPal and BlackRock couldn't dent this. You don't win stablecoins by launching a coin. You win by buying distribution, and distribution takes 59% before you've paid a single lawyer.

Circle published this because rivals are pitching partners even bigger cuts. The toll is going up.

There are 420 stablecoins in existence right now. I counted them this morning. Two of them are 83% of the market.

Tether holds $183.3 billion, which is 59.6% on its own. USDC holds $72.7 billion. Everything else, all 418 of them, splits what's left of a $307.7 billion market.
e whole list clear $5 billion. The third biggest is 26 times smaller than the first.

Here's the bit I keep rereading. PayPal launched a stablecoin. So did Ripple. So did BlackRock. Three of the most powerful distribution machines in finance, and between them they hold $7.4 billion. That's 2.4% of the market.

PayPal has hundreds of millions of accounts and couldn't move this.

Money is the one product where being first beats being big. Tether got there in 2014 and the whole of Wall Street has not dented it since.

Which is why the Samsung news last week matters more than any of these launches. They didn't make a coin. They put USDC on 82 million phones.

On @CoinMarketCap​'s dashboard this morning: altcoin season index at 61, up from 33 a month ago. Right underneath it, bitcoin:native dominance at 59.78%, up from 58.97% over that same month.

Alts winning and bitcoin taking share at the same time. That didn't fit, so I went and e on every major and put it next to bitcoin's +8.0%.

Both numbers are right. ALGO is up 33.9%, Bitcoin Cash 27.1%, Litecoin 18.2%, Cardano 17.3%, Cosmos 16.2%, Polkadot 14.6%, Chainlink 14.4%.

Then the ones you hear about. Solana +7.7%. XRP +3.3%. Ethereum +2.1%. Dogecoin +1.6%. BNB +0.6%. Tron +0.1%. Every single one lost to bitcoin this month.

That's how both can be true. The rotation is real, it's just happening in coins nobody has mentioned since 2021, while the names everyone holds sit flat.

Not a call on any of them. Just the thing I'd want to know before buying "altcoin season".

Everything is red this morning. Bitcoin down 2.7%, Ethereum down 5.3%, the whole market down 3.3% in a day and 4% on the week.

So I went and checked the numbers that don't trade.

8,671,171 people picked up their first stablecoin in the last thirty days. That's 289,000 a day, right through the week everyone spent watching candles go red. People holding tokenised real world assets grew 16.4% over the same month.

Now the part I'm not going to hide from you. The money inside those stablecoins grew 0.0%. Flat. $292.4 billion a month ago, $292.4 billion today. The average stablecoin balance fell from $1,012 to $982.

So millions of people are arriving and bringing almost nothing with them.

I'll take that trade. Wallets are a one way door, and balances are the easy part to fix later. Getting someone to open the app for the first time is the hard part, and that's happening three times a second on a week the price went down.

I think we can finally close the case on NFTs.
They're DEAD, and it was good while it lasted.

@blur_io shuts its website on 12 November. I measured the rest of the neighbourhood this morning, each token from its own peak. FLOW, Gala, ApeCoin, Enjin, Axie, Sandbox. All down 99%. very single one below 95%...

This isn't crypto being crypto either. Bitcoin is up 21% from its November 2021 peak over the exact same years. The money stayed in crypto, it walked out of one category.

Now we want to focus on where it walked, and that was to stablecoins and RWA. 296 million wallets hold a stablecoin today, and tokenised asset holders grew 20.6% last month!

One warning though, because this isn't the same trade. NFTs were quick money. A jpeg, a Discord, 10x in a weekend! Tokenised assets are slow, regulated and dull, and they move in quarters.

Nobody is going 10x in a weekend on a tokenised treasury bill. However the money in this one goes to whoever builds it!

In case you're skipping the news today, here's the one worth your time.

@MorganStanley and @OliverWyman put tokenised real world assets at $2.3 trillion by 2030. I measured the starting line: $39.11 billion on chain this morning. Their paper says "about $40 billion", so we eans tripling every year. The last thirty days grew 0.3%.

Then I looked at the holders. Up 20.6% in the same month, to 5.23 million wallets. People are arriving 69 times faster than the money!

Here's what explains it. Over ten years the dollar index is up 0.8%, so by that measure nothing happened. Gold is up 259% over those same ten years, silver 269%.

Both are true, because the dollar index only measures the dollar against the euro, the yen and the pound, and all of them are sliding together. Priced in gold, a dollar buys 28% of what it bought in 2016.

I'm bullish and the 0.3% doesn't move me. Stablecoins went from a curiosity to 296 million wallets. Tokenised assets are at the curiosity stage, retail first, institutions behind, governments after!

The month that flips, nobody will be talking about 0.3%. They will be looking at the trillions dollars!

In case you're skipping the news today, here's the one that matters!

From the end of this month, anyone with a Galaxy phone in the US will be able to send USDC straight out of @Samsung Wallet, to a bank account in more than 60 countries. It runs on @solana.

That's a stablecoin where people keep their boarding passes and their cards, on a phone built by a company that ships more than 1 in 5 handsets on the planet.

One correction before you repost the headline. Everyone is writing "82 million users". Solana's own announcement says "82 million U.S. Galaxy devices". Devices. Solana has 13.18 million stablecoin holders worldwide right now, so the headline is six times bigger than the thing it's landing on.

Even a 10% take up would add 8.2 million holders, roughly the whole of Base, in about a month...

The number to watch is that 13.18 million. If it jumps in November, the plan worked!

One year ago today crypto had its largest liquidation ever. $19 billion gone in 24 hours, 1.6 million accounts wiped, nine times bigger than any single day before it!

Bitcoin touched $104,782 that day. A flush that violent usually marks the bottom...

This one didn't! Bitcoin ore months and bottomed at $57,800 on 1 July, 45% below the crash day. Today it's $82,772, still 21% under where the panic stopped.

What did change is how I like to call "the plumbing". Open interest peaked at $1.12 trillion the day after the crash. Today it's $378 billion, down 66%. Bitcoin liquidations across the whole of the last month came to $3.4 billion, so that single day in 2025 was 5.6 times an entire month now!

The cycle kept falling for nine months. What ended that day was the leverage, and it never came back (until now).

That's why the July low held so quietly. There was nobody left to liquidate!

Do you expect any similar event this year?

One year ago tomorrow, crypto's total market cap peaked at $4.22T. Open interest peaked on the same day at $1.17T.

Today the market sits at $2.82T, down 33%. Open interest sits at $416B, down 64%.

Leverage fell twice as fast as price!

As a ratio it's clearer. At the top, h 27.7% of the entire crypto market. Today it's 14.8%. The casino emptied out and most people didn't notice.

Now look at the recovery. The market is up 38% from the July low, open interest is flat over the last thirty days, and funding is down 44%. That climb was bought with cash.

Spot bitcoin ETFs added $9.17B in the same month.

Boring, slow and unlevered. After the year we've had, boring is what you want!

Happy to let you all know I'll be at Meridian, @StellarOrg's event in Lisbon, on 28 and 29 October!

The speaker list is strong, but I'm mostly going for the room. Two days with people who want this industry to work properly!

It's in my hometown too, so there was no way I was you're going, let's grab a coffee.
My DMs are open!

PS: registration closes 9 October.