14th June 2025 > > Bank of America & Coinbase.

tl;dr

Stablecoins are destined to be the beating heart of TradFi. Coinbase might become the beating heart of CryptoFi.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

A full five days of inflows to the spot BTC ETFs this week to the tune of $1.4bn is good to see.

Current events in the Middle East are weighing on risk assets, though perhaps not to the degree one might expect. That’s probably because of the frequent examples of wholesale market manipulation by Western Governments that we have seen every time there have been problems in the world since the turn of the century. When you know that central banks, on the command of their political masters, will always resort to printing fiat to compensate for their own total lack of agency, the conclusion has to be that you need to keep hold of your hard assets, no matter the circumstances.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Bank of America & stablecoins

The successful IPO of Circle last week, which closed at $108.81 yesterday, nearly three times the issue price, demonstrates keen investor appetite for the burgeoning stablecoin industry. Stablecoins are destined to grow in size and number, especially once the GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins) has made it through both houses. It is likely that in a year or two’s time, we will look back and say that stablecoins became the first mass use case for cryptos, which is desperately ironic.

Last week, Bank of America announced at a conference (hosted by Morgan Stanley, strangely enough) that it too is developing its own stablecoin. CEO Brian Moynihan explains:

“We're working with the industry, working individually. We have this pretty well understood … but the problem before was it wasn't clear we were allowed to do it under the banking regulations, and there was a lot of mystery about that.”

It isn’t hard to imagine a future in which settlement systems both within a country’s borders, and international payments, are based on blockchain stablecoins, rather than simply a digital representation of a fictional amount of dollars temporarily recorded in a bank’s ledger. A dollar stablecoin in your wallet is as real as a dollar bill in your pocket. It is also more productive, more secure, and as easy to use as the tap and pay function you currently enjoy with your credit or debit card on your phone.

The costs of sending money abroad (or to home, for the world’s poor and scattered diaspora) will become negligible, giving real, tangible benefit for some of our most dispossessed, a moral good that can only be enabled by cryptos.

There will be a range of stablecoins created by a range of different financial institutions, only some of which will be successful. During that phase of creative destruction, the very best functionality for stablecoins will emerge. This is a key space for the wholesale adoption of cryptos. It is most important for the crypto industry that we get this one right.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Coinbase

We love a bit of Coinbase action here at CC Towers.

Absent a Gerald Ratner type event, Coinbase has a very good shot at staying at the very heart of the crypto revolution, with ever-increasing functionality over and above being simply a centralised cryptocurrency exchange. The custodial business is only ever set to grow as evidenced by the spot BTC ETF inflows, and provides a very transparent and stable income stream. Its layer-1, Base, goes from strength to strength, though the strategy for monetising that footfall has not yet been made clear. The recent purchase of Deribit catapults Coinbase into a commanding position within the retail crypto derivatives market, a most juicy proposition.

On the back of these developments, the CC Treasury’s fund of publicly listed crypto-related holdings, on the advice of the Investment Committee, recently pivoted into almost entirely just Coinbase and Strategy, with the intention of adding Circle at some point, on any material pullback. I’ll let you know how that is getting on in the months and years ahead.

Hardly pausing to take breath, Coinbase has announced an extension of its integration of DeFi into its front end, which began with Morpho (https://www.curiouscryptos.com/post/11th-april-2025-mullets-scammers).

The idea is a simple one – you use the Coinbase front end with which we are all familiar, to take advantage of the exciting world of DeFi. With a centralised entity as your port of entry, your access is granted by the use of a login name, password, and 2FA in one form or another. Coinbase will then allow you to interact with DeFi platforms (starting with Aerodrome, but presumably the list will become ever longer) without ever having to set up your own decentralised wallet. That process, and the safe storage of your private keys, is all the responsibility of Coinbase.

Maxis won’t like it, but never forget one of life’s inviolable truths. If a Maxi doesn’t approve, it’s probably an idea with legs.

You are going to hear a lot more about the DeFi mullet in 2025 and 2026.