Trump's Stablecoin Plan—Is Europe Ready?

MetaMarkets is hosted by Jan Philipp Fritsche, co-founder of Bermuda, a compliant privacy solution. Strategic Director at Oak Security, a Web3 cybersecurity firm pioneering research on economic and systemic risks in decentralized systems. https://www.linkedin.com/in/janf/ The Guest Ivo Jeník leads work on frontier regulatory architecture, tokenization, open finance, and AML/CFT at CGAP, an innovation lab for inclusive finance hosted at the World Bank. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivo-jen%C3%ADk-31884847/ Financial innovation is often discussed from the perspective of developed markets: faster settlement, cheaper transactions, new asset classes and new ways to move money. For CGAP, the question starts somewhere else. Can new financial infrastructure actually improve the lives of people who remain underserved by the traditional financial system? In this episode of MetaMarkets, Jan is joined by Ivo Jeník to discuss CGAP, the World Bank, financial inclusion and the role that technologies such as tokenization and open finance could play in building a more accessible financial system. Ivo begins with what CGAP actually is. Hosted at the World Bank, CGAP is a research organization whose mandate is to advance financial inclusion. Its work focuses particularly on people living on low incomes and in low-income countries, asking how access to useful financial services can improve their lives and economic opportunities. Research is only part of the job. CGAP experiments with innovation, works in policy and regulatory spaces and tries to identify where changes in technology, market structure or regulation can meaningfully expand access to finance. That perspective changes the way emerging technologies are evaluated. Tokenization is interesting not simply because assets can be represented on a blockchain, but because new infrastructure may change who can access financial products, how cheaply those products can be delivered and which intermediaries are required along the way. The important question is not whether a technology is novel. It is whether it solves a real problem for people who are currently poorly served. Jan and Ivo explore the gap between the promise of open financial infrastructure and the realities of regulation, identity and compliance. Access to finance requires some way of establishing who a person is, while financial institutions and regulators still need systems capable of dealing with fraud, money laundering and financial crime. That creates a recurring tension between openness and permissionlessness on one side and the need for trusted financial relationships on the other. The conversation also looks at the architecture behind regulation itself. New technology often arrives faster than the legal categories designed to govern it. Regulators can respond by forcing new products into existing frameworks or by reconsidering which activities, risks and actors actually need to be regulated. For emerging markets in particular, getting that architecture right matters because regulation that is too expensive or complex can exclude exactly the users financial inclusion initiatives are supposed to reach. Open finance introduces another dimension. Giving individuals greater control over their financial data can increase competition and allow new providers to build services around customers who may previously have had little choice. But access to data alone does not guarantee inclusion. Infrastructure, incentives, consumer protection and viable business models still determine whether those services reach people who need them. Throughout the discussion, Ivo brings the conversation back to outcomes. Financial inclusion is not simply about giving somebody an account, a wallet or access to a new technology. The objective is for financial services to help people improve their lives and economic situation. That makes experimentation important, but it also makes evidence important. Technologies that appear transformative in the

MetaMarkets hosted by Jan Philipp Fritsche, co-founder of Bermuda, a compliant privacy solution. Strategic Director at Oak Security, a Web3 cybersecurity firm pioneering research on economic and systemic risks in decentralized systems. https://www.linkedin.com/in/janf/ The Guest Peter Kerstens, Adviser for Technological Innovation, Digital Transformation and Cybersecurity at the European Commission's Directorate-General for Financial Stability, Financial Services and Capital Markets Union. He led the Commission's Fintech Action Plan and Digital Finance Strategy. In Brussels he is known as the father of MiCA and DORA. https://www.linkedin.com/in/pkerstens/ In August, attackers spent days inside the Berlin state network and left with six terabytes of data. Internal documents, personal records and reportedly a file full of passwords. Their price for silence was 30 Bitcoin, about 2 million euros. Berlin refused to pay. Peter Kerstens has heard this story many times before, and he finds a ransom demand in Bitcoin a strange choice for anyone who wants to stay hidden. In his words, "who says that criminals are smart?" In this episode of MetaMarkets, Jan is joined by Peter Kerstens, the European Commission adviser behind both the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation and the Digital Operational Resilience Act. The conversation runs from cyber resilience and AI to the origin story of MiCA, the bank-friendly design of its stablecoin rules, the yield debate, DeFi and the MiCA consultation that is open until the end of September. Kerstens opens with a cybersecurity truism. There are two kinds of organizations, those that have been breached and those that will be. Five or six days of undetected access in Berlin is fast by the standards of the data. Average detection times run 60 to 80 days, and the median is often 180. That is why DORA treats resilience as a life cycle of prevention, detection, isolation, recovery and repair. He also explains why finance got its own rulebook while everyone else, including public administration, got NIS2. Finance is the most attacked sector, the most cyber mature one and the most harmonized in its supervision. Applying DORA standards across the whole economy would overwhelm most other sectors. For crypto there is a catch that many firms miss. Anyone covered by MiCA is also covered by DORA, and Kerstens keeps meeting firms that celebrate MiCA compliance and forget the DORA half. Protocols outside MiCA sit outside DORA too, and that is exactly where the bridge and smart contract exploits keep happening. His message to builders is that what you build "should not only be cool, it should also be secure." On AI, Kerstens is blunt. Attackers use the most capable models available and skip the question of authorization. Legitimate firms face restrictions. His personal view is that the best defense against an AI-enabled attack is AI, and that rules should never stop financial entities from using the best tools on the market. DORA already points in that direction. Jan pushes further and asks whether uncensored models should be legally available to everyone. Kerstens points to the AI Act and to geopolitics, since very few frontier models are built in Europe. He calls for serious European investment in models, compute and data centers, and he expects any attempt to shield European industry from foreign AI to fail. Then comes the origin story. Kerstens first heard of Bitcoin in 2017, was fascinated by the technology and watched the ICO wave raise venture-scale money through token sales. Much of it was fraudulent. Some of it was a new way to fund innovation. The framework that later became MiCA started in 2018 as an attempt to enable that, at a time when most policymakers saw only money laundering and speculation. Libra arrived in 2019 as the catalyst. A basket currency backed by a company with billions of users turned crypto from too small to care about into something impossible to ignore, and the G20 declared

MetaMarkets hosted byJan Philipp Fritsche, co-founder of Bermuda, a compliant privacy solution. Strategic Director at Oak Security, a Web3 cybersecurity firm pioneering research on economic and systemic risks in decentralized systems. https://www.linkedin.com/in/janf/ The Guest Sid Powell — Co-founder and CEO of Maple Finance, one of the largest on-chain asset managers, with around $4.5B in AUM and roughly $22B in loans originated since launch. A former institutional banker from a securitization desk in Australia. In December, he declared "DeFi is dead." Since then, Maple's AUM is up 81%. So what actually died, and what's growing? In this episode of MetaMarkets, Jan is joined by Sid Powell of Maple Finance to unpack how institutional lending really works on-chain, and why it looks less like crypto and more like shadow banking. Sid's core distinction is that Maple isn't a bank. Banks take deposits and receive a government subsidy in the form of FDIC insurance, which is why they're so heavily regulated. Maple sits closer to the non-bank credit players like Ares, Apollo, and Blackstone: it doesn't take deposits; it takes investor funds and lends them out, primarily to trading firms and exchanges, with collateral backed by large-cap crypto like BTC, ETH, Solana, and XRP. That framing explains how Maple differs from the crypto-native lenders it's usually lumped in with. As Sid puts it, Aave and Morpho are really competing with each other to be infrastructure: algorithmic, smart-contract-based, minimal humans in the loop. Maple is vertically integrated, running its own vaults, pricing loans, setting credit limits, and handling margin calls and liquidations directly. Invoking Peter Thiel's "competition is for losers," Sid describes carving out a deliberate niche: institutional borrowers who can keep their collateral in triparty custody (Anchorage, BitGo, Zodia, Coinbase Custody) rather than wrapping it into a smart contract. That single design choice avoids the capital-gains event of wrapping, sidesteps smart-contract hack risk, and replaces the brutal 5% DeFi liquidation penalty with a "white-glove" margin call. On the "DeFi is dead" provocation, Sid is precise about what he means: what's died is the 2021-style model of niche products marketed with wallet connections, looped smart-contract risk, and token incentives. What's replacing it is the "DeFi mullet" — slick Web2 fintech UI at the front, DeFi rails at the back. His example is Robinhood's Earn program: the user just taps a button, while money flows into a Morpho vault, lending against credit assets like Maple's Syrup USDG. The on-chain advantages remain real: lending and liquidating at 2am on a Sunday, zero marginal cost to serve a client in Seoul or London or New York, and a head start on the two secular trends of stablecoin adoption and tokenized assets. The episode's sharpest exchange is on privacy. Where the previous guest from Optimism named privacy and compliance as the two biggest blockers to enterprise adoption, Sid takes the other side: privacy is an overstated problem he only ever hears from people building or invested in privacy-focused chains, never from an actual customer willing to accept lower yield or pay higher fees for it. Compliance, he agrees, matters, and he points to the Clarity Act as the thing genuinely holding institutions back from investing in tokens this year. Jan, building a compliant privacy tool himself, pushes back, and the two find the real dividing line: not privacy for its own sake, but compliant privacy. The conversation closes on how the KelpDAO exploit that saddled Aave with bad debt in April barely touched Maple (KYC'd borrowers, isolated protocol instances, collateral in qualified custody, positions unwound within 48 hours), the order in which institutions are actually arriving on-chain (trading firms, then shadow banks and private credit, now regular banks starting Bitcoin-backed lending), and why sluggish, compressing yield

Jan Philipp Fritsche, co-founder of Bermuda, a compliant privacy solution. Strategic Director at Oak Security, a Web3 cybersecurity firm pioneering research on economic and systemic risks in decentralized systems. https://www.linkedin.com/in/janf/ The Guest Kyle Jenke — Newly appointed COO, and former Chief Business Officer at Optimism, where he leads the enterprise business behind the OP Stack, the infrastructure powering chains for Base, Kraken, Upbit, and others. Two years ago Optimism was about cheap transactions for retail. Today, roughly 15% of all crypto transactions run on the OP Stack. What changed? In this episode of MetaMarkets, Jan is joined by Kyle Jenke of Optimism to unpack one of the more consequential shifts in the industry: the pivot from retail scaling to enterprise infrastructure. Kyle's framing starts with convergence. Fintechs like Revolut and Robinhood are adding crypto, crypto firms like Coinbase are adding equities, and traditional banks are adding both. Everyone is now competing for the same user and the same share of wallet, and Kyle's thesis is that the winners will be decided by three things: product differentiation, regulatory arbitrage, and trust with the customer — all of which push back down to the blockchain infrastructure itself. That's the logic behind the "own vs rent" distinction that runs through the episode. Small companies want liquidity, so they deploy on existing chains. Large enterprises want ownership and control, over security incidents, over compliance, over privacy. Kyle walks through real examples: Upbit, which runs its own sequencer through a self-managed deployment because Korean regulatory compliance demands that level of control; BitPanda, launching a chain focused on MiCA and DORA compliance; and Mitsui, the 150-year-old Japanese conglomerate putting a precious-metals fund on a public chain specifically for global distribution. The counterintuitive theme: institutions increasingly want the benefits of a public chain that settles to Ethereum, rather than retreating to a private one — if the privacy and compliance pieces can be solved. And that's the crux. Kyle is blunt that the two things every enterprise customer asks about, in every conversation, are privacy and compliance, in that order. He frames both as a massive greenfield opportunity for builders, and argues the real unlock is letting institutions run public chains with the right privacy controls (through products like Privacy Boost) plus embedded compliance like KYC and sanctions screening at the chain level. Jan and Kyle dig into which verticals move first — crypto exchanges and fintechs fastest, financial institutions slowest but largest — why the payments giants lag (regulatory scrutiny), and how job postings at big institutions are a surprisingly bullish adoption signal. The conversation closes on a take that Jan loves: Kyle's pick for the most underrated thing Optimism shipped isn't a headline feature, it's enterprise SLAs and guarantees — a 15-minute incident response time and three-nines uptime. In an industry that under-invests in safeguards and circuit breakers, guarantees are a quiet but important signal of maturity. And on what's coming, Kyle's most memorable answer is tokenised chicken farms, financing for farmers, which he insists isn't as extreme as it sounds. The takeaway is a reframing. The token market may be down 90%, but the infrastructure market is booming. Enterprises are paying real money for real products, and the next phase of crypto adoption may arrive not through wallets and tokens, but through the back door of institutions quietly owning their own chains.

The HostJan Philipp Fritsche — Strategic Director at Oak Security, a Web3 cybersecurity firm pioneering research on economic and systemic risks in decentralized systems. Co-Founder of Bermuda. https://www.linkedin.com/in/janf/ The Guest Friederike Ernst — Co-founder of Gnosis, one of Ethereum's oldest companies, and an advocate of the Ethereum Economic Zone. Gnosis has built Safe, CowSwap, and Gnosis Pay, and continues to push the ecosystem's R&D frontier.https://x.com/tw_tter To solve scalability, Ethereum broke composability. Can it get both back? In this episode of MetaMarkets, Jan is joined by Friederike Ernst of Gnosis to unpack the Ethereum Economic Zone (EEZ), introduced at ETHCC this year, and what it means for the fragmented world of L2s. The starting point is a history lesson. In 2015 there was one Ethereum, and everything composed with everything: oracles, stablecoins, prediction markets, and DEXs all plugged seamlessly into one another. Success brought congestion, fees spiked to $50 or $100 a transaction, and the ecosystem scaled via L2s. Fees came down, but the different zones stopped being able to talk to each other in the same block. As Friederike puts it, crossing between them became like international travel: passport, border, delay. The EEZ's fix is real-time proving. Using zero-knowledge proofs to enforce atomic transactions across chains, two operations become entangled so that either both happen or neither does, no waiting for finality on one side and then the other. It's the difference between traveling between countries and simply picking up a telephone to call into a smart contract on another chain and use the answer in the same block. Friederike walks through why "within the same block" matters, why Ethereum's 12-second heartbeat sets the ceiling, and how Gnosis Chain, the first chain migrating in, will drop to two-second blocks with five Gnosis-only blocks between each Ethereum-composing one. A large part of the conversation is a genuinely clear explanation of the plumbing: why this is being led by Gnosis and Jordi Baylina's ZisK rather than the Ethereum Foundation (which is funding it), and the pivotal and under-appreciated role of block builders. Jan and Friederike detour into MEV and how modern Ethereum blocks are actually built, because the EEZ depends on it: with more than 80% of block-building capacity already committed, the cross-chain "dance" gets abstracted away from users entirely. Apps like Aave, Safe, CowSwap, Spark, and Monerium can opt into new business logic, such as borrowing against your global collateral across all EEZ chains rather than the assets on a single chain. The strategic payoff is specialization. Today's L2 landscape is full of "mini-Ethereums" fighting for relevance by offering a cheaper but worse version of the same thing. In the EEZ, a chain can do one thing extremely well, an oracle-only chain that lets you pay Ethereum gas only for the data points you actually use, or a privacy-first identity chain where your documents never leave the chain and only a proof of your age, funds, or reputation is passed along. Going between them stops feeling like cross-chain at all. The final act turns philosophical, and it's the most provocative stretch. Friederike makes the case that retail may not belong on Ethereum mainnet at all: censorship resistance means no recourse, so a fat-fingered or phished transaction is simply gone. The EEZ lets zones offer safety nets, delayed large transfers, a call before you wire $20,000 abroad, refusing to process obvious hacks like an infinite mint, without compromising the neutral base layer. She frames a future of chains with different characters: the CCTV-everywhere "Singapores," the permissive "Switzerlands," the privacy-adamant "European Unions," with users free to move between them rather than being forced to swim in Ethereum's shark-infested waters. Jan connects it to a familiar theme: code is law at the base layer, with a seco