The Digital Assets sector had plenty to say on stablecoins, the Coldcard hack, and crypto investing this week.
Stablecoins
“It’s a demand-side story for treasuries at exactly the moment the traditional buyers are stepping back.
“The traditional U.S. marginal debt buyer was the foreign official sector, and that bid has been deliberately and structurally impaired. China’s Treasury holdings have fallen from over $1 trillion to around $660 billion, and the freezing of Russia’s reserves in 2022 taught every non-aligned central bank the same lesson: dollar assets carry confiscation risk if you end up on the wrong side of US foreign policy. That’s not a cyclical dip in demand — it’s sanctions policy sabotaging the reserve-asset appeal of treasuries. Central banks responded rationally by rotating into gold.
“Stablecoins are the offsetting flow: every dollar of stablecoin issuance is, by construction and now by law under the GENIUS Act, a dollar of demand for T-bills and dollar equivalents. Tether alone holds $141 billion in total Treasury exposure, including $122 billion in direct holdings — making it the 17th largest holder of US government debt globally, ahead of most sovereigns. With projections of a $2 trillion stablecoin market by 2028, the sector could eventually rival Japan’s Treasury position.
“What makes this demand qualitatively different is who’s behind it. Sovereign demand is a policy decision made in Beijing or Tokyo that can reverse for geopolitical reasons.
“Stablecoin demand is millions of individuals and businesses in emerging markets choosing to hold digital dollars because their local currency is worse. It’s distributed, apolitical, and price-insensitive — nobody in Lagos or Buenos Aires sells their USDT because the 10-year backed up 30 basis points. The US effectively swapped a concentrated, politically contingent creditor base for a diffuse, organic one.
“So the short version: the traditional sources of dollar demand were sabotaged — partly by others, partly by our own weaponization of the financial system — and stablecoins showed up as the incremental buyer right when one was needed. The dollar’s status is increasingly being underwritten from the bottom up rather than the top down.”
– Alex Witt, founding general partner, Verda Ventures
“I see USD stablecoins as the only reason the dollar hasn’t lost credibility, and why adoption has kept growing instead of fading. Over time, we see the same trend happen to a country’s main currency — it loses value, but it also loses adoption, the same way we’ve seen with cash and other payment methods being overtaken by newer ones.
“If you have all those balances parked into US treasuries, you’re strengthening the US economy. You’re solidifying, crystallizing, this US dominance that was otherwise fading. Of course it wouldn’t fade overnight, and it’s very hard for it to lose dominance outright, but it was definitely on a downtrend.
“With stablecoins, I see them as the only factor that keeps the USD as the dominant global currency for the next 10, 20, 30, 50 years. So I think the US should be, and in my opinion is, very thankful for the stablecoin industry and what that adoption has meant for the US dollar.
“The stablecoin market is still sub-trillion; I think we’re about a third of the way there. After GENIUS and after Clarity make it official, companies like Citibank, Standard Chartered, JPMorgan, even Apple, Amazon, Walmart, whoever, now have almost a green light from the government that they can tap into this.
“Imagine all the supply of money currently sitting at JPMorgan, Citibank, Wells Fargo, BofA, and so on, and one of those banks decides overnight, ‘why don’t we tokenize 50% of our deposits into a Citibank stablecoin?’ Overnight, we’re sitting at three, four, five times the market cap, just because one player single-handedly decided that 50% of their deposits are going into this asset class.
“I think the market cap and the industry of stablecoins will go parabolic. We’ll get to one trillion dollars much faster than we got to 100 billion. And I’d argue that going from 1 trillion to 5 to 10 trillion will take about the same amount of time.”
– Bernardo Brites, co-founder and CEO, Trace Finance
“Mastercard doesn’t make an acquisition like (BVNK) on a hunch. This is one of the most conservative, risk-averse companies in global finance putting real capital behind stablecoins as permanent infrastructure, not a passing trend.
“Investors still treating digital currencies as a speculative sideshow are behind a shift that just received one of the clearest institutional endorsements it could possibly get.
“BVNK isn’t some early-stage startup with a clever idea and no customers. It’s already processing around $30 billion in annualized payment volume, and that figure grew more than double year over year. Mastercard is buying proven infrastructure with real transaction volume behind it, not a concept.
“For years, traditional payments companies treated stablecoins with suspicion. What we’re watching now is the opposite. Mastercard chose to buy this capability outright rather than partner or build it internally, and that tells you how seriously it takes the competitive threat of standing still.”
“This technology is already sitting inside some of the biggest names in global payments. Mastercard isn’t betting on future adoption. It’s buying into adoption that has already happened.
“Cross-border B2B payments, remittances, settlement and treasury flows are the areas Mastercard is targeting here. These are unglamorous but enormous markets, and traditional rails moving money through them have stayed slow and expensive for years. Stablecoin infrastructure fixes that problem directly, and that’s where the real commercial value sits.”
“Mastercard’s move is likely to push other incumbents to make similar decisions quickly, because nobody wants to be the payments giant left without this capability. Digital currency infrastructure is no longer a fringe allocation for investors comfortable with high risk.
“It’s becoming a core part of how global payments actually function, backed by companies with decades of credibility and enormous balance sheets. Investors who wait until this becomes obvious to everyone will likely have missed the point at which real value gets created.”
– Nigel Green, CEO, deVere Group
Coldcard hack
“Coldcard was already considered a serious, security-first device. The failure here, as per current information, was in seed entropy generation, not some software bug. So the takeaway isn’t that ‘air-gapped is dead,’ it’s that no single point of failure — hardware, firmware, or entropy source should be trusted blindly.
“We always advise users with serious holdings to set up multisig function across independent hardware from different vendors. It is really the only defensible answer now, ideally paired with geographically distributed key storage. Anyone relying on one device, one seed, one vendor’s RNG implementation just realized why that’s a bad bet.”
– Slava Demchuk, CEO, AMLBot
The attackers may have stolen more than $100 million in Bitcoin, but can they realistically monetize those funds given how closely these addresses are being tracked?
“Not at anything close to face value. These are the most heavily surveilled UTXOs in Bitcoin’s history: dormant for years, then moved in a burst, which is exactly the kind of signature that makes clustering trivial.
“Bitcoin can’t be frozen, but every regulated on-ramp can refuse these coins. That leaves mixers, cross-chain bridges, OTC desks in weak jurisdictions, and peer-to-peer channels, all of which cost real money and introduce counterparty risk. They’ll extract a fraction, over years, with heavy leakage. $100M on-chain is not $100M in the bank.”
If even an air-gapped wallet can fail due to weak entropy, what should now be considered the gold standard for protecting large Bitcoin holdings?
“Air-gapping didn’t fail. People confused an air gap with a cryptographic guarantee. An air gap stops key exfiltration; it does nothing about a key that was weak the moment it was born.
“The real failure was single-vendor monoculture: one firmware, one RNG, one point of failure. The standard for serious holdings is heterogeneous multisig, with signers from different manufacturers and different entropy sources, plus user-supplied entropy such as 50 or more independent dice rolls and a strong passphrase.”
Beyond fixing the immediate vulnerability, what long-term changes should hardware wallet companies make to rebuild user trust?
“The uncomfortable part is that open source didn’t save anyone here. Coldcard’s firmware is public and reproducibly buildable, and the flaw still survived five years in the open. Publishing code is the floor, not the ceiling.
“What’s missing is incentive. Nobody was paid to stare at seed generation, the one function where a silent failure costs everything. That means funded bug bounties priced against the value being protected, recurring third-party audits scoped narrowly at entropy and key derivation rather than the whole codebase, and continuous adversarial testing where researchers actively try to break generation, instead of waiting for someone to notice on-chain.
“And a device that can’t prove its hardware RNG is live should refuse to generate a key rather than quietly fall back to software.”
– Leone Parise, co-founder and CTO, Trace Finance
“A wallet has one job at setup, which is to pick a number nobody can guess. That number has to come from real noise or real randomness. This firmware took it from software instead, and software cannot invent randomness. It follows a formula, so anyone who works out the formula can regenerate every key it ever produced.
“The reason nobody noticed for five years is that the wallets worked. A guessable seed still writes out 24 valid words, still passes the checksum, still funds and spends normally. Nothing looks wrong from the outside, and there is no alert for a number that was too easy to pick.
“Updating firmware does not repair a seed already generated. Anyone who set up a device in that period needs a new seed on a device they trust.”
– Gonçalo Magalhães, head of security, Immunefi
Crypto markets
“Cardone Capital’s purchase of 350 Bitcoin is significant not because of the size of the investment, but because of who is making it. We’re seeing a clear shift from technology companies being the primary institutional buyers to businesses in traditional industries—including real estate—adding Bitcoin to their balance sheets. That signals growing confidence that digital assets are becoming a permanent part of corporate finance rather than a speculative experiment.
“For the real estate industry, this is particularly noteworthy. Real estate has historically been viewed as one of the most effective inflation hedges, while Bitcoin is increasingly being viewed by institutions as a digital store of value. Cardone Capital’s decision suggests these two asset classes are becoming complementary rather than competing investments. I expect more real estate firms to begin allocating a portion of their treasury reserves to Bitcoin as they look to diversify their balance sheets and protect purchasing power.
“From my perspective as the founder of CryptEscrow, the more important story isn’t simply that real estate companies are buying Bitcoin—it’s that they’re becoming comfortable operating in a digital asset ecosystem. Once a company holds Bitcoin on its balance sheet, it becomes much easier to envision accepting digital assets from investors, using cryptocurrency in capital raises, or facilitating property purchases involving crypto. We’ve already helped complete multimillion-dollar real estate transactions using cryptocurrency while ensuring sellers receive U.S. dollars through the traditional closing process. As institutional familiarity grows, I believe those types of transactions will become increasingly common.
“That said, companies should avoid treating Bitcoin as a replacement for disciplined treasury management. Bitcoin remains a volatile asset, and corporate allocations should be appropriately sized based on liquidity needs, risk tolerance and investment horizon. The companies that succeed will be those that view Bitcoin as one component of a broader capital allocation strategy—not as a short-term speculative trade.
“The broader takeaway is that the conversation has evolved. A few years ago, institutions were debating whether Bitcoin belonged on a corporate balance sheet. Today, we’re seeing real estate investment firms actually making those allocations.
“The next stage is integrating digital assets into everyday business operations. In real estate, that means not only holding Bitcoin as a treasury asset, but also enabling investors and buyers to use their digital wealth to acquire real-world assets through compliant, secure and familiar closing processes.”
– John Ioannou, founder, CryptEscrow