Timestamps:
(00:00) - Geopolitics, oil, and market volatility
(11:09) - Crypto market structure: CFTC/SEC clarity and the Clarity Act
(22:19) - Stablecoin surge: Stripe MPP, and MasterCard/BVNK
(37:12) - Kraken's frozen IPO and the crypto exchange landscape
(43:41) - Institutional digital asset adoption: EY/Coinbase survey
(49:44) - Building Bitcoin-native financial companies
(53:44) - AI meets capital: OpenAI/Anthropic PE deals and robotics investment
(1:00:58) - AI agents, Walmart dynamic pricing, and surveillance risk
(1:05:57) - Building in the new economy and The Stables
On this week's Final Settlement, Michael, Liam, and Brian opened with a week that was genuinely hard to read: the Iran conflict pushed oil toward $175, the bond market started pricing in a 2026 rate hike, and United CEO Scott Kirby publicly said his airline is planning for oil to stay above $100 through end of 2027. Beneath the geopolitical noise, the regulatory machine kept moving: the SEC and CFTC jointly classified 16 crypto assets as digital commodities, the Clarity Act looks closer than ever, and the S&P 500 licensed perpetual 24/7 trading on Hyperliquid. Meanwhile, MasterCard agreed to pay $1.8 billion for BVNK, and Bezos is seeking $100 billion to transform manufacturing with AI.
Geopolitics Are Repricing the Macro Backdrop:
The Iran conflict is not just a headline risk. It is a slow-moving inflation event with real knock-on effects for every business trying to plan into next year, and the market is starting to price it that way.
United CEO Scott Kirby publicly stated the airline is planning for oil at $175 a barrel and does not expect it to fall below $100 through end of 2027. The infrastructure destruction in the region takes months or years to rebuild, meaning the supply constraint is not a short-term disruption but a structural shift with lasting implications for petrochemicals, fertilizer, and the cost of goods broadly.
The bond market is now pricing in a rate hike for 2026. Even if a geopolitical off-ramp materializes in the near term, inflation from oil flows through to petrochemicals, fertilizer, and food. The damage is already in the pipeline even if the war ends tomorrow.
The US unsanctioned both Russian and Iranian oil in the same week, a telling signal that the administration is deeply concerned about where inflation lands heading into a midterm election cycle. Liam noted that for a country that spent years supporting Ukraine, the pivot is jarring and says everything about the priority set right now.
Settlements through the Strait are shifting toward yuan and the broader BRICS dynamic is not abstract anymore. Michael argued this is the petrodollar system fraying in real time, and that the practical lesson for businesses and individuals is the same: reduce counterparty risk across supply chains, energy inputs, and money.
The base case is still that markets pull back from the brink. There is only so long before the disruption tips into a global financial collapse, and that serves nobody, including the administration. But as Brian noted, there are actual bombs flying this time. The off-ramp is harder to find and the tail risks are materially fatter than in prior episodes of Trump-driven volatility.
Headcount Is a Liability, Not a Badge of Honor
The AI-driven layoff cycle is accelerating, and public markets are rewarding companies that cut aggressively — signaling that bloat is now an existential risk.
90,000 jobs have been cut in 2026 already, and we’re barely past the two-month mark.
Meta announced 20% layoffs, framing it partly as needing to redirect spend toward AI infrastructure rather than purely an efficiency play.
Block cut 40% of its workforce, and the stock jumped on the news. The team that built Cash App had been running lean and flat for 12–24 months, getting ahead of where the market was heading.
Meta is simultaneously paying $100 million signing bonuses to high-agency individual contributors, massive dispersion between the value of top talent and the declining value of middle management.
The Regulatory Pieces Are Finally Snapping Into Place:
The CFTC and SEC jointly classified 16 crypto assets as digital commodities on March 17, in a 68-page interpretation. It is less dramatic than it sounds, but more consequential than most people realize.
The ruling moves Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, XRP, Dogecoin, and 11 other assets into the commodity classification under CFTC jurisdiction, removing years of legal ambiguity. The practical effect is that institutions like Morgan Stanley and Fidelity now have the regulatory certainty they need to offer these products to clients. They have been waiting for exactly this.
Clarity Act passage looks increasingly likely. The bill passed the House in July 2025 and cleared the Senate Agriculture Committee in January 2026. With the CFTC and SEC now aligned, Michael and Brian see this as the last major gate before the institutional Bitcoin machine really turns on.
The stablecoin yield piece also looks close to resolution: yield can be passed through to clients, just not on a one-to-one basis. Michael called it a workable middle ground because it gives institutions something competitive to offer without triggering deposit-equivalent treatment.
The S&P 500 licensed perpetual 24/7 trading on Hyperliquid. A year ago that sentence would have seemed absurd. Today the majority of volume on Hyperliquid is traditional assets like oil and copper, not crypto tokens. The blockchain rails are being used for traditional finance, not the other way around.
Two thirds of institutional investors in the EY/Coinbase survey prefer their first digital asset exposure through ETFs, with 81% preferring a registered vehicle. The on-ramp the market will actually use is not a crypto exchange. It is the brokerage they already have.
Stablecoin Infrastructure M&A Is Accelerating
The headline is MasterCard acquiring BVNK for $1.8 billion. The subtext is that there are not enough legitimately built stablecoin infrastructure companies to go around, and every major payment network knows it.
MasterCard agreed to pay up to $1.8 billion for BVNK, which processes more than $30 billion annually across 130-plus countries. BVNK was previously in acquisition talks with Coinbase at roughly $2 billion before that deal fell through. For context, Stripe paid $1.1 billion for Bridge. Prices for stablecoin infrastructure are going up fast.
Michael made a pointed observation: MasterCard is not primarily buying the technology or the clients. It is buying the team. There are very few people who have built at scale in this space and understand where it is going, and both MasterCard and Stripe are acquiring that knowledge as much as anything else.
Stripe launched its Machine Payments Protocol (MPP) this week, a multi-path payments layer that lets any asset including USDC and BTC via LightSpark settle natively through HTTP pages. It is built for agentic commerce: the refrigerator that auto-orders milk and settles programmatically, before a human touches anything.
A gold-backed stablecoin from tokenization platform Veo is coming, generating yield through a spot/futures cash-and-carry structure on Hyperliquid. Michael sees this as an early signal of what free banking looks like on-chain: coins backed not just by treasuries but eventually by gold, Bitcoin, and other hard assets. Tether has been quietly building toward this for years.
Kraken froze its multi-billion dollar IPO plans, citing difficult market conditions, but the timing coincides with the departure of its CFO. Liam noted Kraken reported $2.2 billion in revenue and over $500 million in adjusted EBITDA in 2025. Michael was blunt: losing your CFO in the middle of a public listing is not generally a good sign.
AI and Robotics Capital Is Concentrating Fast:
Two deals this week show just how large the capital commitments are getting, and one story shows what happens when that much AI power gets pointed at the prices you pay every day.
Jeff Bezos is seeking $100 billion for a fund called Project Prometheus to acquire manufacturing companies in aerospace, chipmaking, and defense and transform them with AI. The focus is not humanoid robots. It is the unglamorous middle layer: wheeled delivery systems, stair-climbing robots, and warehouse automation that is technically much closer to production than the bipedal demos. Amazon separately acquired River, a stair-climbing delivery robot company, the same week.
OpenAI is in talks with TPG and Bain Capital for a $10 billion joint venture, and Anthropic is in similar discussions with Blackstone. The model is AI firm plus PE as a packaged change management product for enterprises that cannot figure out how to deploy these tools on their own. OpenAI is also reportedly offering 17.5% guaranteed minimum returns to attract PE capital, a structure you typically only offer when you have to.
Cloudflare's CEO projected that AI agent traffic will surpass human web traffic by 2027, with bots capable of hitting websites a thousand times more frequently than humans. Walmart filed a patent the same week for AI tools that adjust prices dynamically based on demand and elasticity in real time. Michael's read: it looks like a convenience feature but it is effectively private surveillance infrastructure, and it is coming whether anyone pays attention or not.
A Musk collaboration between XAI, SpaceX, and Tesla is building a chip manufacturing facility in East Austin near the Tesla plant. Michael noted that the density of serious capital and serious founders concentrated in Texas right now is not a coincidence.
Quote of the week
"We're still in the very earliest stages of where the digital asset and Bitcoin space is going. And we've just really barely started to scratch the surface." — Liam Nelson, Early Riders
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