5 retained episodes matching “source:"51 Insights"”.
Showing 1-5 of 5.
In this episode of 51 Insights, Marc Baumann speaks with Scott Melker about Bitcoin as a “liquidation sale,” why most tokens never needed to exist, zombie layer-ones, Robinhood’s chain bet, the Clarity Act, and crypto as a parallel financial system for...
Hey, it’s Marc. Twenty-one firms committed to a stablecoin venture before disclosing its ownership, reserves or chain. Robinhood put $34.6B through its own network without disclosing what the company earns from it. Both moves reveal the week’s real bet: defend the customer relationship first, prove the margin later. The economics are still being written. 📚 Boardroom Reads * FSB Chair’s letter to G20 finance ministers (FSB, Aug 31). Frontier AI can change the speed, scale and economics of financial cyber risk. * Pushing the monetary frontier (BIS, Aug 28). The official case for tokenized deposits as the wholesale core, with stablecoins in specialized roles. * Jackson Hole: Exploring the Financial Frontier (New York Fed, Sep 3). A framework for judging payment innovation by intermediation, competition and the public risk it creates. * Tokenization Snapshot 2026 (Centrifuge, Sep 2). A char
Hey, it’s Marc, I keep coming back to one uncomfortable thought from this week: Friction may be one of banking’s most valuable assets. Banks make money because deposits sit still. Now 3,283 banks want to mak e those deposits programmable, while AI is getting good enough to manage money without us. The Dallas Fed ran the numbers: make deposits just 1 0% more rate-sensitive and banks could lose roughly $700 billion of capacity to hold long-term assets. That’s the paradox nobody talks about. We’re building the fastest financial system in history on top of a banking model that depends on money moving slowly. And this week, both sides accelerated. In today’s issue: * bitcoin clears $80K after its best week since March 2023, * Nvidia prints a $96B quarter, state bankers associations draft a blockchain for their 3,283 member banks, * and the Trump family’s planned crypto trust bank reveals a 49
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “Waiting and seeing is not a strategy.” A senior partner and global banking lead at BCG just put a number on the thing every bank CEO is nervous about: up to 15% of bank revenue and 30% of profits at risk by 2035. But the opportunity is bigger than the threat. His name is Christian Schmid, Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG, where he leads the global banking business. He is the lead author of BCG’s biggest ever digital assets report, The Future of Digital Assets. He calls the whole shift the iPhone of money, and he thinks the real fight is not stablecoins versus deposits. It is who owns the screen the customer taps. About Christian Schmid: Christian Schmid is a Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG, based in Zurich, where he leads the firm’s global commercial banking, capital markets and invest
I spoke with a bank executive this week about where the attention is going. “AI is the only focus.” That captures the mood. Crypto is in a bear market. The excitement has moved elsewhere. But here’s one number that stopped me this week: 80 seconds. That’s how long it took some of the world’s biggest banks to settle a cross-border payment in the BIS Project Agorá test. But what settled wasn’t a stablecoin. It was tokenized central bank reserves and bank deposits. Here’s what matters, though: Banks aren’t chasing speed; they’re defending the deposit. When money settles in a stablecoin, it leaves the balance sheet, and deposits are what fund the lending business. A tokenized deposit is the same dollar, still on the bank’s books, now programmable. This week’s signals at a glance: * The world’s biggest banks settled cross-border payments in 80 seconds * BNY is moving $8.6 trillion of fund rec
31 active series.
