The Rundown: Degen-ifying mainstream investors

ISSUE #11 · October 6, 2026 · By Michael Casey

Welcome to the eleventh issue of The Rundown.

One interesting aspect of the expansion of real-world asset markets, differentiating it from the growth patterns in pure crypto, is that the disruption is happening in two directions. Onchain technologies and decentralized finance ideas are working their way into traditional financial markets at the same time that traditional financial assets are moving into decentralized exchanges and occupying a growing chunk of crypto trading. In each case, the shift means more than just an intersection (and potential clash) of technologies; it’s also a battle for culture and mindset. The question is which one wins out.

Today’s Digest includes a report by financial analytics provider Dune that highlights changing behaviors in equity market investing and, in so doing, answers that question. If the conclusions are to be believed, it raises questions about trends highlighted in the past week’s stories, including how tokenized stock trading is now challenging more “traditional” crypto investing, such as the interest in memecoins.

Also on people’s minds are the geopolitical implications of the expansion of dollar stablecoins. To discuss that and other aspects of this profound revolution in money, A Conversation With sits down with J. Christopher Giancarlo, former Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The Digest

New report finds that rapid expansion of tokenization is giving rise to new styles of investing

Investing in individual stocks rather than buying mutual funds, flipping those stocks 24/7, turning equity stakes into collateral for borrowing — this, according to analytics firm Dune, is the new normal for investors, and it’s driven by tokenization. This sounds very much as if “Degen” culture from decentralized exchanges is moving into real-world assets via tokenization. It’s also likely more prevalent among synthetic versions of these tokenized stocks rather than on platforms trading fully tokenized, onchain stocks. It will be interesting to see if something similar happens once traditional exchanges such as the New York Stock Exchange open up 24/7 trading in tokenized equities.

Is the meme coin era ending? Tokenized stocks just took 11% of DEX trading

In a similar vein, Kamina Bashir of BeInCrypto asks whether the emergence of this new RWA-focused breed of crypto market speculation is supplanting trading in other types of assets that were once the darling of this hyperactive investment community, such as memecoins. In other words, are crypto traders growing up or are equity markets growing down?

The SEC is finally modernizing transfer-agent rules. Wall Street must not repeat the ‘paperwork crisis’

It’s ironic that a technology and a related policy reform intended to remove intermediaries, reduce friction and boost trading efficiency might create the opposite effect. But this warning from Joris Delanoue is worth keeping in mind. Regulations can support efficiency, but if financial entities don’t embrace interoperability and end up with competing standards, they can end up creating more bureaucracy. In this case, Delanoue takes aim at synthetic “wrapper” tokenized assets whose onchain trading could easily fall out of sync with ownership changes for the underlying asset, creating a paperwork crisis as institutions are compelled to reconcile across these mismatched versions of the same asset.

Securitize joins the OUSD stablecoin network as a partner

The thing that the OUSD stablecoin’s Open Standard consortium has going for it is the market depth of its 120+ well-established member organizations. The two things it doesn’t have going for it are proven liquidity — OUSD has nothing like the trading presence of USDT or USDC — and a “burn” risk, as on-and off-ramp payment providers such as Visa are incentivized to transfer their daily stock of stables back into “real” dollars. Are tokenization platforms like Tokenize the answer? Stablecoins deployed into tokenized assets should attract liquidity as the market for real-world assets grows. At the same time, they shouldn’t suffer the same burn rate as institutions like new OUSD member Securitize and its users aren’t incentivized to sell for dollars.

Ripple quietly made Brazil the center of its XRPL tokenization push

Brazil has a tokenization and digital currency-friendly policy framework. It seems to be working in achieving the government’s goal of attracting outside investment from crypto and fintech firms.

Kyobo Life Group expands digital asset push across insurance, securities, prepares for regulatory shift

Suddenly, insurance (and the business of investing insurance firms’ funds) seems to be a go-to market for tokenization. Kyobo is following in the footsteps of New York Life Investment Management into this sector.

J. Christopher Giancarlo is an attorney, financial executive, and former 13th Chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). His new book, The New Adventures of CryptoDad: The Quest for Financial Freedom in the 21st Century, will be published on Oct. 27, 2026.

Q: The Digital Dollar Project, which you launched in January 2020, is often mistaken for a CBDC advocacy group. What is it actually for?

A: We formed the Digital Dollar Project to address three issues and three issues only. How do we future-proof the dollar for this world of digital networks of value? How do we preserve its reserve currency status in this new world? And most importantly, how do we make sure the dollar continues to stand for the values of a free society, whether that's free trade or free economic expression, but also the right balance between privacy and law enforcement surveillance? We knew that China was working on its digital yuan to be a control instrument. Europe has since taken up its digital euro, which increasingly looks like a surveillance instrument. How do we make sure that any digital forms of the dollar would be a freedom instrument?

We were always neutral about CBDC or private sector development of digital dollars. We felt then, and we continue to feel now, the future is going to be all of the above. But a few months later, a bill was introduced in the House that used the term "digital dollar," and it was a CBDC project. As a result, a lot of people thought we were a CBDC advocacy association. We're not. We never have been. We take no government money. We're privately funded; some of our benefactors are the likes of Accenture and DTCC. We exist simply to ask how we modernize the dollar for a digital future, and how we do so in a way that is true to our democratic ideals.

Q: Privacy concerns are a major factor driving opposition to CBDC. But are stablecoins under current identity-tracking regimes any better?

A: We've always felt that privacy was just as important whether the dollar was digitized as a government instrument or by the private sector. In the last few years there's been an outcry, mostly on the right, against central bank digital currency on the argument that it would violate people's privacy. I always found that somewhat perplexing. The same people making that argument didn't raise a finger when Congress applied the Bank Secrecy Act to stablecoins. The Bank Secrecy Act has very little to do with secrecy and everything to do with government surveillance. It's just that the government does its surveillance through third parties, through the private sector. So stablecoins are going to provide no privacy.

It's almost as if very clever people in Washington were saying: look over here, at how we're banning CBDC because we want to protect the public's privacy. But don't look over here, at how we're applying the Bank Secrecy Act to its fullest extent to stablecoins. We will not only be able to collect data from them; we will be able to stop them if we wish to, in the name of law enforcement. Look, I'm a big supporter of law enforcement, but we've got to get the balance right. Western democratic societies have always tried to balance the right level of state involvement in our lives for law enforcement purposes against our right to lead our lives privately.

To be clear, I'm not an advocate for a US central bank digital currency. I think the right way to experiment with digital money is through the private sector. And having watched the Federal Reserve's experience with FedNow and the government's experience with healthcare.gov, I'm not optimistic that any government agency could design a digital currency that would be attractive at the retail level.

Q: Is there any scenario where you envisage a government role in digital currency?

A: I don't think it's far-fetched that if stablecoins are successful, and I expect they will be, a wholesale form of US central bank digital currency may be necessitated simply by that success. The liquidity in Tether is enormous. But let's say a local retailer decided to put out a stablecoin to its customers, to have a new relationship with them that it lost with Visa and Mastercard. Are we going to believe that retailer's stablecoin will trade at par with Tether or Circle's? The liquidity differential is thousands to one. And say one has a three-day redemption period and the other a one-day period. How do we work out that difference? The equivalent of foreign exchange markets will emerge for dollar-based stablecoins, assigning discounts and premiums. Once upon a time we had US dollars issued by mining companies, railroad companies and local banks, and they didn't trade at par. Eventually we developed the Federal Reserve System, where those dollars could all be put on deposit at the same value. That established the notion that a dollar is a dollar is a dollar. We may need to do the same thing with stablecoins.

Maybe existing market mechanisms will be enough to take away that concern. But if the government does it, it will probably be for a host of reasons. Another may simply be a run on stablecoins. There have been runs on stablecoins in the past, and there will be runs in the future. When there's a run on a bank, you go to the ATM. What you're really doing is converting a bank liability into a sovereign liability. You're saying, give me the bills with a sovereign backstop. If there's a run out of stablecoins, people will want to go to a digital sovereign. If there's no digital dollar, they may go to the next best thing, which is a digital euro. The moment that happens, stablecoin issuers are burning stablecoins and selling Treasuries. That's not something our central bank will be able to tolerate for very long.

Again, I'm not advocating for it, and I would never advocate for it if it's not privacy-preserving. At the end of the day, it's not about technology, it's about values. If we make sure anything with the dollar on it balances privacy against law enforcement better than a digital euro or a digital yuan, it will win. That will stand us in good stead despite terrible fiscal policy, terrible monetary policy and everything else. The world aspires to economic freedom, and if people associate that with holding a dollar, that's good for the United States in the long term.

Q: The U.S. is decentralizing money through stablecoins, but in the parallel technology of AI it is concentrating power in a few frontier labs. In China, digital money is centralized through a CBDC, but its AI models are more open and, one could argue, more decentralized than their U.S. equivalents. How do you make sense of that tension?

A: In the introduction to my new book, I draw upon Niall Ferguson's masterful book The Square and the Tower. He describes how, over the course of human history, power is often centralized, like the towers of a medieval village from which the elites observed and ruled the square below. In the square, common people conducted their affairs through networks of family and guilds. And every so often, the decentralized network of the square topples the towers of power.

My book is being released in the 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence. When Paul Revere rode from Boston into the countryside, he wasn't a lone rider. He was a node in a giant decentralized network of yeoman farmers and tradesmen, calling it to action against the British military marching on Lexington and Concord. That network toppled the tower that day. But the revolution was ultimately won because we formed our own centralized power, the Continental Army, got help from the French, and defeated the British at Yorktown. What emerged was a government that combines centralized and decentralized power: state and federal power, a separation of powers at the center. Silicon Valley was the power of decentralized networks of financiers and engineers. There was never a command from Washington to go become the tech center of the universe.

Chinese history is also a multi-millennial process of power being centralized, then decentralized, then centralized again. Ferguson's analogy applies to the era we're entering, whether it's networks of compute and superintelligence or decentralized forms of money. The stablecoin experiment is one of decentralizing control of one's own currency. So at the same time we're decentralizing control of our currency, we're centralizing control of our intelligence. It's really interesting. Contrast that with Europe, which has centralized so much power in Brussels. They're nowhere when it comes to stablecoins. The last statistics I saw put non-dollar stablecoins at about 0.3% of the global market. That's partly their focus on protecting their banking industry, and partly their attempt to centralize everything in a bank-based CBDC rather than encouraging private sector innovation.

Q: Russia has called stablecoin-driven dollarization a form of colonialism. How does the US keep global buy-in if other countries see a loss of monetary sovereignty?

A: I truly believe the dollar's service as the world reserve currency has been a net positive for the world, not just for Americans. I don't think the last 30 years of globalization would have been possible without the stabilizing impact of the dollar as a basis for commercial trade. That period lifted more people in the developing world out of poverty than ever before in recorded history. The dollar deserves a bow from everybody. Yes, some currencies might lose sovereignty to the dollar. I don't think the Swiss franc will, because Switzerland manages it very, very well. Weaker currencies will suffer, but that's been going on since the dawn of history. I'm sure many kingdoms on the periphery of the Roman Empire were annoyed that Roman coins were squeezing out their own. Some people call it the straw effect.

I'm a free trader of long standing, and the business we've been through with tariffs is deleterious to the dollar. But the biggest threat to the dollar's reserve status is, number one, debasement and, number two, control and surveillance. It's one thing to sanction drug runners. It's another to use surveillance as part of routine law enforcement and to go after people for their political views. Operation Choke Point under Obama continued under Biden, and I don't think the current administration has forsworn using bank account information to punish adversaries. That gratuitous use of control over the financial system to squeeze lawful businesses and political opponents is very dangerous to the standing of the dollar. We need to get back to the right balance between law enforcement and privacy, and we need to get our fiscal house in order.

If we do that, the dollar only faces a threat from a real rival. It's not a controlled instrument like the yuan, or a weak-economy currency like the euro, and it's certainly not the ruble. Having studied the history, reserve currencies don't die on their own; they get replaced. And I don't yet see a replacement. In many ways, that's the genius of the GENIUS Act. By authorizing stablecoins to be built by a private sector that can build them for agentic AI, we probably have the world's first instrument suitable for agentic AI. Nothing equivalent is being built in Europe. It's very possible the dollar turns out to be the first digital currency suited to agentic use, and that's a real first-mover advantage.