- Crypto is starting to look a lot like Wall Street.
- Industry-native firms are merging their services with traditional finance.
- Binance and Taoshi are two firms to make moves like that this week.
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Hi, Eric here.
It’s about to get harder to see where crypto ends and traditional finance starts.
On Thursday, Binance, the crypto industry’s largest exchange by trading volume, announced a new tokenisation mashup with the almost 80-year-old Wall Street stalwart, Franklin Templeton.
“There is a significant market opportunity as traditional and crypto markets merge,” a Binance spokesperson told me as the crypto exchange announced a partnership with Franklin Templeton to use blockchain rails to make capital markets more efficient.
There are significant market opportunities indeed.
Anyone watching crypto wires lately is likely to reach that conclusion. They’ve been jam-packed with news, reports and announcements on how a wave of big players are making moves to marry the two sectors.
Take Taoshi. On Thursday, the crypto firm unveiled a new decentralised exchange this week to tap into the $7.5 trillion foreign exchange market. Getting even a fraction of that market would translate into a huge windfall.
Or consider stablecoins. Even before US President Donald Trump rubber-stamped the Genius Act into law in July, both industry native firms and Wall Street heavyweights have ramped up their efforts to launch stablecoins or to integrate dollar-pegged tokens into their services.
Players like Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo are most likely exploring doing so because they can see the dollar signs painted on the wall.
Crypto investment firm Keyrock and payments infrastructure firm Bitso predict that stablecoins will account for $1 out of every $8 cross-border payment transaction made by 2030, pushing stablecoin payment volumes as high as $1 trillion.
Then there’s Kraken and Robinhood launching tokenised stock trading across their platforms, Stripe developing its own layer 1 blockchain, called Tempo, and the Nasdaq pushing to launch trading of tokenised securities.
There is no end to the examples of the marriage of crypto and traditional finance.
EasyJet founder launches Bitcoin-trading app. ‘It’s about financial empowerment’
Budget airline easyJet’s founder is elbowing into crypto with the launch of the easyBitcoin app this month.
Stripe’s Tempo blockchain ‘doomed to fail,’ says Libra co-creator
US fintech giant Stripe is pitching its new blockchain, Tempo, as a revolution in global payments, but not everyone is convinced that it will be a success, Lance Datskolou reported.
Taoshi taps Bittensor to bring $7.5tn forex market to DeFi with new exchange
On Thursday, Taoshi became the latest DeFi firm to attempt to blend the worlds of digital assets and international finance by launching 0xMarkets, a decentralised exchange, Tim Craig reported.
Post of the Week
Speaking in Paris at the OECD’s inaugural roundtable on global financial markets, US Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul Atkins declared that “crypto’s time has come” and vowed to end years of antagonism from the regulator.
We will make sure the next chapter of financial innovation is written right here in America.
— Paul Atkins (@SECPaulSAtkins) August 4, 2025
Watch highlights from my speech launching Project Crypto at @A1Policy. pic.twitter.com/euqY9samPt
