Fortune Crypto

Hi, Ben Weiss here! I’m filling in for Jeff for the next three weeks while he’s on vacation. Last week, crypto investors debated one of the wonkier terms in blockchain. In a discussion on X, Ali Yahya, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm, mused about how previous iterations of DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations, didn’t work. “We spent the last 10 years rediscovering the hard way that direct democracy is a bad idea,” he wrote. Crypto loves decentralization.

There are IPOs, and then there is what SpaceX pulled off on Friday. The initial public offering for Elon Musk’s rocket shop didn’t just exceed previous IPOs—it blew them out of the water. SpaceX raised an eye-popping $75 billion, which is roughly triple what the previous record holder, Saudi Arabia’s Aramco, pulled in during its 2019 IPO, and nearly five times what a little company called Meta pulled in when it went public.

The stablecoin market, which has been dominated for a decade by Tether and Circle, could look very different in a year. The leading legacy players in payments, Visa and Mastercard, have been circling the sector for some time and are reportedly cooking up a plan with other big players to put their own spin on stablecoins. According to a CoinDesk report, the credit card giants are in talks with Stripe and Coinbase to launch a stablecoin platform.

I had the pleasure last week of hosting a discussion with fintech CEOs at the Reagan National Economic Forum in lovely Simi Valley, Calif. The focus was on how the U.S. can keep its edge as the world’s top economic power by leading in the two technologies that are defining the next era of finance: blockchain and AI. The good news is that, so far, the U.S. is more than holding its own.

In the midst of a riveting NBA and NHL playoff season, we’re hearing about unsung heroes—a term to describe players who are not flashy, but who make quiet contributions essential to a team’s success. If there’s such a thing as unsung heroes in the crypto world, it would be the wallet builders. These are the people and companies that have toiled in the background since the early days of Bitcoin, making software that makes crypto accessible in the first place.

A debate broke out on X last week that, by the standards of social media, was refreshingly civil and informed. The topic was whether Visa will continue to dominate payments in the age of agentic commerce, or if that future belongs to blockchain natives wielding stablecoins. The debate kicked off with the cofounder of a startup called Modern Treasury musing that it’s easy enough for agents to memorize a 16-digit card number, so why is there a need for stablecoins in the first place?

The never-ending cycle of crypto conferences continues this week with the latest installment of Consensus getting underway in Miami. You can argue the industry would be better off if its biggest players spent more time building and shipping than palavering on stage, but, if nothing else, the conference scene is useful as a vibe check. At one extreme, I can recall the 2018 edition of Consensus.