CEO Notes
Hey, it’s Marc, Crypto promised to kill the middleman. The middleman just hired crypto instead. Nasdaq and Kraken are turning every Nasdaq-listed stock into a blockchain token, same CUSIP, same rules, just faster. Through Kraken’s xStocks, NASDAQ has access to 68% of the tokenized equities market with $25B+
CEO Notes
Reports
In February 2025 Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1B. A few months later, in March 2025, MoonPay acquired Iron, a German stablecoin infrastructure company, for a reported $100M+.
CEO Notes
Hey, it’s Marc, Name one major institution that launched tokenized funds on a private blockchain and stayed there. You can’t. BlackRock moved to Ethereum. Franklin Templeton moved to Ethereum. JPMorgan moved to Ethereum. Last week, BNP Paribas joined them as the first and largest European bank. And they
CEO Notes
CEO Notes
Hey, it’s Marc, I keep asking bank executives the same question: when does an AI agent make its first real purchase inside your system? On March 2, Santander answered it. An AI agent completed a live, end-to-end payment on real rails, no human at checkout. The $5 trillion checkout
Podcast
Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ We sat down with Michael Blaugrund, the man bridging the world’s most important equity market, the NYSE, on-chain. The platform goes live later in 2026. It’s the biggest change to capital market since electronic trading. “Irrespective of where crypto asset prices are, the infrastructure
CEO Notes
In 2021, U.S. regulators killed Facebook’s Diem stablecoin project with a phone call. No law, no court order, just the Fed’s General Counsel Mark Van Der Weide dialling Diem’s CEO Stuart Leve and its banking partners with a message that landed like a cease-and-desist. Fast forward
Podcast
Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ There's a chart making the rounds right now. Gold at $5,400. Bitcoin at $66,000. One is at an all-time high. The other is down 47% from its October peak of ~$126,000. Same "store of value" thesis that the crypto
51 Insights - Weekly Briefing
Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team. Welcome back to your weekly briefing. The US stablecoin regulation is maturing. The OCC just proposed new rules to put guardrails around stablecoins (digital money tied to the U.S. dollar), following the GENIUS Act that passed last year. The rules cover
Reports
Today we’re publishing our 2026 Outlook: The End of Crypto Ambiguity
CEO Notes
Hey, it’s Marc! For over 15 years, Stripe processed payments. It needed banks to hold the money. It needed card networks to move it. It needed partners for everything. That just changed. Now, Stripe owns a bank. Kind of. On February 17, 2026, the OCC conditionally approved Bridge, Stripe’