Happy Friday!

Today we look at how Open USD is quietly rewriting stablecoin economics. The new consortium returns almost all reserve income to distributors, sending Circle down 18% and reframing the whole business around who owns distribution. Elsewhere, risk is back on: memes led the week at +17.6%, Solana Eco gained 9%, and tokenized equity volume hit record highs onchain.

Memes led this week at +17.6%, atop a broad green board where crypto equities (+13.1%), DEXs (+9.4%), and the Solana ecosystem (+9.0%) all beat bitcoin and the S&P 500, up 2.9% and 1.5%. Revenue leaders (+8.7%) and L1s (+7.6%) followed. Hence, risk appetite is back and seems to be concentrated in the speculative long tail.

Solana Eco +9.0% traces to a memecoin resurgence. ANSEM, a Pump.fun launch from mid-June, ran to nearly $200M this week while PUMP also gained 27.3%. Ansem appears to be using the tokens to airdrop to the community, trying to simulate the PUMP airdrop that was promised to the market.

Among Solana DEXs, Raydium (+16.8%) and Meteora (+16.7%) led the index over Orca (+10.9%). More interesting is what else is starting to route through those pools. Tokenized equity volume on Solana hit all-time highs this quarter, and the chain now settles over 95% of the category.

Zoom out, and it inverts. The DEX index is down 58.4% on the year; its two leaders this week are the worst annual names: Raydium -67.7%, and Meteora -68.3%, as fees evaporated with the meme craze. But the drawdown may be the setup: proprietary automated market makers (prop AMMs) like HumidiFi and SolFi dominate the most liquid pairs, yet that model isn't economical or worthwhile for the long tail. Pool models keep the franchise on new memecoins, and possibly tokenized equities too, if we see thousands of stocks listed in tokenized form through players like Backpack.

— Sam

The Stablecoin Business Model Is Changing

The Open Standard consortium launched on June 30 with more than 140 partners, including Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, and Coinbase. Open USD offers free minting and redemption, no volume limits, and returns nearly all reserve income to distribution partners after a management fee. Circle shares fell 18% following the announcement, extending their decline to nearly 56% from recent highs, as investors questioned how much reserve income stablecoin issuers will retain in a more competitive market.

The announcement reflects a broader shift that was already underway in stablecoin economics. For years, stablecoin issuers retained most of the interest earned on reserve assets while distributors such as exchanges, wallets, and payment providers negotiated a share of that income. The economics were already moving toward distributors as revenue-sharing agreements became more generous. For example, Circle paid Coinbase $1.4 billion under its USDC distribution agreement in 2025, equivalent to more than half of Circle’s reserve income for the year. Open USD pushes that trend to its logical conclusion by returning almost all reserve income.

The competitive advantage, therefore, shifts toward whoever owns distribution. Banks, wallets, exchanges, payment processors, and fintechs control customer relationships, deposits, and payment flows. Open USD rewards those firms for bringing users and capital onchain.

Prioritizing distribution also changes what differentiates incumbent issuers. As reserve income becomes increasingly commoditized, infrastructure, liquidity, and integrations become more valuable. Circle’s long-term position now depends more on the network it has built around USDC through products such as CCTP, Mint, Arc, and CPN. Circle also benefits from broad integrations across exchanges, wallets, and institutional platforms, as well as relationships built over several years. USDC has $73 billion in supply and processed $4.48 trillion in adjusted transaction volume in 2025 (41.5% of total), making it the largest regulated US stablecoin.

Those advantages make incumbent stablecoins difficult to displace. Distribution agreements create incentives, but they do not automatically create liquidity. For example, Paxos launched the partner-owned USDG consortium with a similar thesis in late 2024, yet the stablecoin has grown to only about $3 billion in supply.

Better economics alone do not create liquidity, but Open USD accelerates a trend that was already underway. Stablecoin issuers are increasingly sharing reserve income to acquire distribution. Liquidity, infrastructure, and customer relationships increasingly determine where the economics of stablecoins accrue.

— Jake Koch-Gallup

Robinhood Chain Goes Live

Robinhood launched the public mainnet of Robinhood Chain on July 1 at a London keynote. Robinhood Chain is an Arbitrum-based Ethereum Layer-2 pitched as permissionless, AI-native, and built for tokenized real-world assets. Block times run near 100 ms with settlement on Ethereum; day-one partners include Uniswap, which is deploying a dedicated AMM as the primary public liquidity venue, alongside Alchemy, BitGo, and Chainlink.

The headline product is Stock Tokens, tokenized equities tracking names like NVIDIA, Apple, and Google, live 24/7 in more than 120 countries but blocked for US persons and restricted in jurisdictions including Canada, the UK, Switzerland, and the UAE. Robinhood paired the launch with Earn, a 7% USDG lending product routed through Morpho, and said AI-driven Agentic Accounts for US crypto trading will roll out soon.

Deciding Where AI Should Live

Robert Burkhart from Blockworks published a framework on X for deciding whether a product task stays manual, gets in-app AI, or moves out-of-app through API/MCP. Each task is scored on three variables: difficulty, frequency, and interest level. The question is not can AI do it, but should it.

Simple, infrequent, exciting tasks stay manual; complex ones like a Hyperliquid DCF get AI regardless, since complexity alone justifies agentic execution. Moderate tasks split across four cases, with repetitive, boring ones pushed out-of-app. The more difficult, repetitive, and boring a task, the higher its agentic fit.