Hi all, happy Wednesday!

The 30-year Treasury touched 5.2% yesterday, its highest since 2007, as the energy shock from the Iran war kept pushing long-term borrowing costs higher. Equities slipped, gold fell for a second day despite the geopolitical backdrop, and Qivalis pulled in another 25 European banks for its euro stablecoin push.

Today, we are also hosting the Jito Q1 2026 quarterly call at 1:00 PM ET, with BAM's stake share doubling, the JTX launch on deck, and the VanEck ETF in SEC review.

Wall Street slipped on Tuesday as a tech selloff and surging bond yields weighed on sentiment. The S&P 500 fell 0.54% and the NASDAQ 100 dropped 0.46%, while the energy shock from the Iran war continued to push up long-term borrowing costs. The 30-year US Treasury yield hit 5.2%, its highest since 2007, before easing slightly, and the 10-year yield climbed 5bp to 4.67%. 

Oil eased slightly, with Brent down 1% to $111.03, after the US extended a waiver on Russian oil sales for another 30 days and Iran submitted a new peace proposal. Trump also postponed a planned attack on Iran overnight, though the Strait of Hormuz remains closed and peace talks have made little meaningful progress. European equities were marginally higher, with the Stoxx 600 up 0.3%. The pound fell 0.3% to $1.338, extending a heavy weekly selloff, while the euro weakened 0.5% to $1.159.

Gold dropped 1.91% on the day, continuing to struggle as rising yields make interest-bearing assets more attractive. The precious metal has been unable to reclaim its haven premium despite the geopolitical backdrop.

In stablecoin news, Amsterdam-based Qivalis secured backing from 37 European banks for its planned euro-denominated stablecoin, adding 25 new lenders including ABN Amro, Intesa Sanpaolo, and Rabobank to an existing group that includes BNP Paribas, ING, and UniCredit. The project reflects growing European concern over dollar dominance in the crypto market. ECB President Lagarde recently warned that rising dollar stablecoin usage in Europe risked entrenching dollar dependency. Of $320B in stablecoins in circulation, nearly all are denominated in dollars. Qivalis has applied for a Dutch central bank license and aims to go live in the second half of this year.

Bitcoin was roughly flat at -0.16%, holding up better than traditional risk assets. In crypto sectors, Meme tokens again led at +9.2%, followed by Privacy Index (+3.0%) and Crypto Equities (+1.5%). Perps (+1.2%) and Crypto Miners (+0.7%) also posted gains. The downside was broad: Modular fell 3.0%, RWA and DEXs dropped 2.6% and 2.4% respectively, Ethereum Eco lost 2.1%, and Bittensor Ecosystem slid 2.3%. The split between speculative momentum plays outperforming while infrastructure and DeFi-linked sectors lag has become a recurring theme.

— Boccaccio

Jito Quarterly Call

Today we are hosting the Jito (JTO) Q1 2026 Quarterly Call at 1:00 PM ET / 5:00 PM UTC.

The dominant story of Q1 for Jito was continued adoption of the Block Assembly Marketplace (BAM). BAM's stake share grew from 14.0% to 28.1%, with the validator count up 56% to 363 and SOL staked to BAM rising from 59.2M to 119.3M ($9.83B). Combined with the Jito-Solana client, Jito's block-building stack runs on roughly 60% of network stake, compared to Harmonic's 16.8%.

On the financial side, Jito generated $2.33M in protocol revenue and processed $19.85M in gross tips across 1.04B transactions. Revenue declined QoQ in USD terms, reflecting lower SOL price and reduced on-chain activity versus Q4 2025. TipRouter's share of protocol revenue rose from 19.4% to 23.1%, while epoch fees remained the largest stream at $836K (35.8%).

JitoSOL TVL was $1.02B with a 30-day implied APY of 8.03%. Market share among Solana LSTs was 19.2%, down from 21.8% at the start of the quarter, though it remains the largest standalone LST. Supply declined 14.8%, which the report attributes to the SOL price drop and competitive pressure from Sanctum-issued LSTs.

Institutional distribution continued to build out. 21Shares launched the JSOL ETP on Euronext in January (ending Q1 at $582K AUM), Hanwha Asset Management signed an MOU in February to develop a JitoSOL ETP for South Korea, and VanEck's JitoSOL ETF entered SEC review on March 10.

On the tokenomics side, 9.71M JTO was burned in Q1, bringing cumulative burns to 13.48M. Buybacks were paused under JIP-31 to redirect revenue toward BAM adoption incentives.

Topics for today's call include the BAM plugin pipeline (Maker Priority Plugin launched late April), the JTX launch (unveiled May 5, early June launch), the VanEck ETF review, and the JIP-33 Coinbase collaboration.

— Boccaccio

1. VVV: Crypto AI's Most Underappreciated Revenue Story

   Yan Liberman published an article on X titled "VVV: Crypto AI's Most Underappreciated Revenue Story" making a bullish case for Venice, a privacy-first AI inference platform offering anonymous, private, TEE, and E2EE modes selectable per request. Liberman estimates current ARR around $60M with new ARR being added at roughly $200M annualized and accelerating. At a $660M market cap, VVV trades at 11x current revenue versus OpenRouter's 26x. He maps six user segments pushed off default AI by content policy or compliance, analyzes the VVV/DIEM token mechanics, and acknowledges risks from hyperscalers, local inference, and privacy-native competitors.

2. The Technical Stack for Autonomous Agents

   Aaron Wright published an article on X titled "The Technical Stack for Autonomous Agents" arguing that autonomous AI agents need market infrastructure, not just better models, to function as economic actors. He maps a ten-layer stack across three planes: trust (identity, discovery, reputation), market (quoting, contracting, settlement, dispute resolution), and control (governance, compliance, orchestration). Wright highlights ERC-8004 as the emerging shared trust substrate and identifies real-time machine-to-machine price discovery as the most undervalued layer. He concludes that whoever assembles identity, settlement, and governance into a coherent marketplace will own the transaction rails of machine labor.