8 entries tagged stablecoins. All writing.
OCTOBER 7, 2026 Twenty-Eight Questions, Nine Thousand Answers A $15 trillion asset manager footnoted a study saying AI models would save in Bitcoin and spend in stablecoins, and the footnote became a headline. I went to the study. Thirty-six chatbots, twenty-eight distinct questions, and a spread from 91.3% to 18.3% that tells you more about who trained the chatbot than about money. Then I checked what real AI agents are paying with today, and the number is smaller than anyone's slide deck. OCTOBER 6, 2026 Is Bitcoin "Tokenized Compute"? Jason Lowery's AI Argument, Checked Jason Lowery, the MIT researcher behind Softwar, posted that Bitcoin is "tokenized compute" and that AI will need BTC to afford its own actions. Some links in that chain hold and some strain. Here is what his thesis actually says, what the numbers on AI payments look like today, and where I think the argument bends. OCTOBER 1, 2026 Two Lines Cross on the Page A friend shared a tweet from Bitwise's CIO citing a San Francisco Fed chart on stablecoin issuers' growing Treasury holdings, with "the entire stablecoin ecosystem is going much, much higher." Another friend in the same group chat flagged the chart's scale. A third asked the more basic question: higher in what? I pulled the actual Fed letter to answer both. SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 Eighteen Months and Twenty-One Million A Microsoft executive says most white-collar work gets automated in the next 12 to 18 months. A New York Times investigation says Silicon Valley is already bracing for the underclass that leaves behind. And I keep getting told, in real time, that Bitcoin is the one thing standing between any person, company, or AI agent and what comes next. I checked the actual mechanism — the energy, the bond math, the reserve data, and what AI agents are literally paying each other with this year — and the honest answer splits the argument instead of settling it. SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 The Exchanges CME Decided to Trust "Nine Hundred and Twenty Million, Paid in Cash" left one honest thread hanging: CME's Bitcoin futures settle against a reference rate built from real spot exchanges, but can those specific exchanges be gamed? I went and found out which six exchanges CME actually uses, what vets them, and what's still genuinely unresolved about two of them. SEPTEMBER 25, 2026 The Fed Wrote the House Rules. Nobody Lives There Yet. On September 24 the Federal Reserve proposed its rulebook for the stablecoin issuers it will supervise under the GENIUS Act — Treasury bills of 93 days or less, a two-business-day redemption promise, a capital charge that starts at two percent, and an automatic wind-down for anyone who falls short. The headlines say the Fed is telling stablecoins what to hold. Mostly Congress already did that. What the Fed actually decided is more interesting, and the list of issuers it applies to today is empty. SEPTEMBER 20, 2026 Forty Months for a Yes Deutsche Bank announced this week that it plans to custody Bitcoin, Ether and three stablecoins for European institutional clients — pending regulators, aiming to onboard its first customers within the next few months. The custody plan is straightforward. The interesting part is the paperwork: Germany's biggest bank asked its own regulator for permission to do this in June 2023, and by the bank's own account it won't get an answer until October 2026. Four smaller German banks asked later and finished years ago. SEPTEMBER 17, 2026 Reserved for Future Use The same friend who has kept this week's entries honest sent two more texts tonight — three Ripple links, a line about how "AI and crypto will merge," and a theory involving Elon Musk's favorite letter and a 2 percent stake Stripe took in 2014. I read all three announcements. He's right that the pipeline is full. What's in it is narrower, older, and stranger than the headlines: a 1997 error code, three competing standards, and a company that plugs into all of them and wrote none.