Insights

Notes on where institutional money is going.

February 2026InsightNeutrality as a strategy: why we'll never ask you onto our chainA neutral layer that connects what an institution already runs beats a proprietary network it has to defend. The institution stays the principal; the connecting layer has no chain of its own to protect.

September 2025InsightSettlement finality is the question your risk team will ask firstA database row flipping from "pending" to "settled" is not settlement. Risk officers know the difference, and they will press on it before they ask about anything else.

May 2025InsightThe Travel Rule, on-chain: what supervisors actually expectFATF Recommendation 16 was written for wire transfers and retrofitted onto digital assets. Here is what the rule requires, where on-chain transfers break its assumptions, and what an examiner will ask you to show.

January 2025InsightTokenized deposits vs. stablecoins: a false choiceBanks are framing on-chain money as a contest between tokenized deposits and stablecoins. The harder problem is moving value between them, across networks and compliance regimes, without leaving the regulated perimeter.

October 2024Insight"Compliant by design" actually means something: here's whatThe phrase has been worn smooth by vendor decks. Used precisely, it describes one architectural decision: where the control sits relative to the transaction. This is the line between a control that prevents and a report that records.

July 2024InsightInteroperability is the missing piece, not the featureEvery bank is building its own island of on-chain money. The hard part was never minting the deposit token; it is moving value between institutions that each run a different stack, and closed networks quietly recreate the fragmentation they were built to fix.

April 2024InsightTokenized deposits, explained for the people who hold the depositsA bank deposit is a liability you owe your customer. A tokenized deposit is that same liability, programmable and settleable on a ledger. That one distinction is why the largest banks treat it differently from a stablecoin.

January 2024InsightWhy every bank is building an islandAlmost every major institution now has a stablecoin pilot, a tokenized-deposit program, or a custody build underway. Most of them work. Almost none work with each other, and that gap, not the technology, is the problem worth solving.