🌶️ Hot take Friday

Are you ready for Hot Take Friday?

Robinhood’s CEO confirmed to me that he is indeed cryptopilled, and wants everything to be tokenized. 

That means more RWAs could be on the roadmap. Will Robinhood try to tokenize all the TradFi instruments it currently offers, plus other parts of its app? That would be massive for the future of consumer crypto.

Robinhood is much more likely to be a first mover compared to the big banks — and may set the new standard for what’s possible in the US market. 

This week, Ava Labs Chief Strategy Officer Luigi D’Onorio DeMeo said during an X Space that “banks are going to be the last to move” in crypto because they’re highly regulated and have the least amount of incentives to adopt the tech.

DeMeo emphasized that stablecoin adoption is currently taking place outside of the US (much less so within its borders) and predicts US banks “will be late” to adopt crypto payments and stablecoins.

He suggested that banks may try tokenizing deposits to avoid losing customers.

Unlike banks, Robinhood is incentivized to tokenize everything so it can ultimately offer its traders the ability to buy or sell any financial instrument or idea their heart desires at any time, long after the market closes.

Tokenization opens up the possibility of more international choices at any hour of the day or night, which would inevitably be a big plus for Robinhood’s bottom line.

— Kate Irwin

• Coinbase One Amex card launches for US consumers

  • Good for crypto/bad for crypto? 👍

  • My hot take: This card, first announced back in June, is partly a loyalty product to keep Coinbase One subscribers hanging onto their monthly memberships and get new signups. But it is a competitive card. Having an Amex comes with a unique set of perks that’ll appeal to the status-chasing crypto jetset crowd, and earning 2-4% BTC back on all purchases with no cap is a critical benefit too. For card nerds: This one weighs about the same as the 17g Amex Platinum card.

  • Coinbase says early users of the card have already spent over $100 million in purchases, with an average of $3,000 spent per month per card. That means cardholders are getting an average of $60-$120 worth of BTC per month. This more than pays for the $5 a month “Basic” plan (or $50 annually) or the $30 a month standard Coinbase One subscription required to get the card.

  • Coinbase also promises an extra $200 worth of BTC if you spend at least $3,000 in the first three months of having the card (those who spend less get less, but there’s a $50 minimum BTC bonus).

  • Coinbase is seen by many as a trusted “premium” American company, as is Amex, so the collab here makes a lot of sense even if Amex doesn’t align with crypto’s cypherpunk ideals. The reality is that even if Coinbase clings (or performatively clings) to cypherpunk ideals, those ideals don’t align with corporate capitalism and Coinbase making the most money possible. 

  • I bring this up because CT has been debating, again, whether crypto has lost its way, departing from bitcoin’s core values for the sake of mass adoption. Jack Dorsey recently declared that bitcoin “is not crypto” (classic maxi take), presumably because much of “crypto” is centralized, permissioned or otherwise controlled by groups of people or companies. Coinbase is part of that, as is Dorsey’s own Block.

  • The reality is, everyone in this industry is a hypocrite to some extent. But that doesn’t mean the industry shouldn’t move forward at all. Maybe such purity tests aren’t helpful or productive. Or, maybe the industry can take smaller actions to support its founding ideals.

  • Ben Shen, senior director of product at Coinbase, told me via email: “The Coinbase One Card embodies the transformative power of crypto, both symbolically — with its design inspired by the Bitcoin genesis block — and tangibly, with each purchase helping users earn the best performing asset of the past decade.”

  • So maybe it doesn’t matter if crypto products are centralized, as long as consumers leverage those products to ultimately accumulate more bitcoin. 

• Farcaster acquires Clanker

  • Good for crypto/bad for crypto? 👍

  • Farcaster just did a li’l logo update and announced that it’s snagged Clanker, the AI trading agent and token launchpad that uses Base and Arbitrum. CLANKER is up 140% in the past day since the news.

  • My hot take: This is great for Farcaster. It aligns with its crypto-native focus and open ethos, and will probably drive more users to Farcaster.  

  • Some builders are hyped about it. Tim Reilly, who’s behind the AI sports app Bracky and whose Bracky token was launched via Clanker, sees it as a way to level up his app.

• Coinbase CLO advocates for federal CEX regulation, no DeFi regulation

  • Good for crypto/bad for crypto? 🤷‍♀️

  • I was not expecting Paul Grewal to call for federal regulation over state-based regulation, but here we are. The CLO argued on Thursday that sports markets (betting and prediction markets) should be overseen by a single federal authority instead of “an uneven patchwork of 50 state gaming commissions.”

  • In a separate post, he also said centralized exchanges should be regulated at the federal level, and that DeFi products should not be regulated.

  • My hot take: Putting my thinking hat on here — is he afraid of a Mamdani win? Trump would certainly be more favorable to Coinbase for New York access. Blanket federal regulation in the way Grewal is suggesting could allow Coinbase to essentially go over the heads of state regulators as Trump uses, well, the Trump card. Not sure how Nevada would feel about that!

  • Other big crypto players, like Mike Novogratz, are trying to remind America that crypto shouldn’t be a partisan issue. I of course agree with this take, because it will make the industry resilient in the future.

  • Grewal’s statements are what’s best for Coinbase’s financial future. A single set of rules and regulations around gambling, betting, prediction markets and crypto at the federal level would certainly make setting up shop in America easier for crypto companies. But that would also be a MAJOR change, and I’m not sure such a shakeup is going to happen anytime soon.

  • On the DeFi point, I largely agree: It doesn’t make sense trying to regulate or ban DeFi (or open-source) products. But this stance is ultimately part of the Tornado Cash debate around how to stop financial crimes. Jury’s still out on whether there’s a path forward where we can have our decentralized cake and eat it without fraud, too.

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