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 🚨 Gotcha!

Blockchains, when implemented correctly, transcend borders. And US authorities can’t seem to stand it.

All anyone ever really needs to use crypto is a halfway decent device and an internet connection. Even by satellite. 

To the blockchain itself, your location or nationality isn’t a factor. Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana don’t care if you’re signing transactions from a cafe in Belize, a WeWork in New York or the mountains of Nepal. 

But your IP address — and thus your approximate location — is logged when you use most services built on top of those blockchains. MetaMask collects user IP addresses when using its default relay Infura, for instance, which caused a big fuss when it was found in its privacy policy in 2022.

Uniswap Labs says it does not retain personal information, including IP addresses, but the data is still transmitted to its servers whenever you visit its website. 

It’s part of how the internet works, and it allows Uniswap and MetaMask front-ends to geoblock visitors from OFAC-sanctioned jurisdictions. The law states that giving crypto access to users based in those countries would constitute sanctions evasion and even terrorism financing. 

It’s also how Polymarket can restrict US users from accessing its platform. If their website’s backend detects an IP address from a local service provider, they’ll be shown an unclosable popup telling them to scram.

Most crypto apps and services do the same or risk a visit from a three-letter agency.

FBI agents reportedly confiscated Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan’s phone and devices on Wednesday over concerns that US-based users were skirting Polymarket’s geoblock, which has been in place since a CFTC penalty in 2022.

At this point, the geoblock is one of the last “gotcha” tactics from regulators. Of course, geoblocks aren’t completely effective. A basic VPN gets around them, so it’s entirely imaginable that US-based users indeed gambled on the US election via Polymarket.

That’s how Binance was stung by the US government this time last year — knowingly allowing users from the US, as well as sanctioned countries including Iran, to trade on the platform. Binance settled for a combined $4.4 billion over the charges.

Authorities stated that Binance executed more than 1.67 million trades between US persons and users in sanctioned locations across five years. Polymarket handled more than 12 million trades in October alone. 

How many of those trades included someone in the US? Who knows, and over a long enough timeline, that question will become practically unanswerable.

Anyone from any jurisdiction in the world can, hypothetically, code their own transactions and interact with these smart contracts directly, or at least, fork an app and run the instance themselves without the geoblocking functionality.

After all, there is no need for VPNs to avoid geoblocks if you trade on Uniswap via the command line. 

Perhaps blockchain-enabled AI agents that handle our crypto for us directly will be the answer.

Apparently, for US-based crypto entrepreneurs like Coplan, they can’t come soon enough.

— David Canellis

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• Polymarket open interest is down more than 70% since the election, currently $165 million from $569 million.

• The most traded markets are now related to sports: Super Bowl 2025 alongside the Champions and Premier Leagues.

• Memecoins are running free: PEPE, BRETT, WIF and POPCAT are rallying between 41% and 26% over the past day.

• BTC fell just shy of an all-time high against the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 yesterday. Current price: $91,000, nearly 3% below its USD price record.

• ETH’s deflationary streak continues and is now almost net-negative for the week.

🕺 Makin’ moves

Franklin Templeton is launching its Benji tokenization platform on the Ethereum network, marking its fifth launch this year after Aptos, Avalanche, Arbitrum and Base. It was previously only available on Stellar and Polygon.

“The launch of our Benji platform on the Ethereum network represents an important milestone in our ongoing efforts to develop new and innovative blockchain solutions for our clients,” Franklin Templeton’s Sandy Kaul exclusively told us. 

“We look forward to further exploring ways in which we can utilize the network’s Ethereum Virtual Machine and smart contract functionality to unlock new capabilities for our tokenized funds.”

According to rwa.xyz data, tokenized treasuries have jumped nearly 2% in the last seven days, boosting their total market cap to over $2.37 billion. Franklin’s onchain market fund sits at $409 million. 

Franklin’s is the third largest fund after BlackRock’s BUIDL and Ondo’s USDY. 

And perhaps there’s something in the water, because BUIDL is also expanding to different chains, now available on Aptos, Optimism’s OP Mainnet, Polygon, Arbitrum and Avalanche. 

I asked Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo if the expansion is a sign of maturity, given that BUIDL is one of the newest funds in the space. Franklin’s, for example, has been around since 2021 and was the first registered money market fund to use blockchain technology to record transactions. 

BlackRock’s bullish stride into crypto otherwise really started this year, with the launch of the bitcoin ETFs in January and then BUIDL shortly after. 

Domingo said that this is “just the beginning” for the fund and that it plans to roll out more features. He told me that this is also the first time that Securitize has issued the same asset on multiple chains versus picking one chain and issuing the asset there. 

“So for us, there's been a major change in the way we run our infrastructure on top of the different blockchains, so it's encouraging,” he said.

No question about it, the tokenized fund space is heating up.

— Katherine Ross

• Galaxy’s Mike Novogratz said the chances of a strategic bitcoin reserve under President-elect Donald Trump are low, but bitcoin could top $500,000 if it happens. 

• Jito experienced a “system-wide outage” on Wednesday which impacted the bundles that process multiple transactions in one go.

• The UK is set to introduce legislation around staking and stablecoins.

• DeFi Technologies announced the upcoming launch of CoreFi Strategy which will allow people to gain exposure to bitcoin in a similar strategy to MicroStrategy.

• 57% of institutional respondents to a Sygnum survey said that they plan to boost allocations to crypto.

Q: Is Wall Street winning the battle for the RWA sector?

I think that’s a pretty easy “yes” at this point. And it makes sense!

This is a space where firms can spread their wings and succeed. There’s regulatory pressure all around crypto (for now), but firms like Franklin Templeton sought out the SEC and got a thumbs up before launching, so they’re able to safely work in the industry. 

The reality is that these funds make a lot of sense for TradFi institutions, and we’re seeing that in the appetite displayed for them. BlackRock’s BUIDL, for example, is pretty much only available for high-net-worth individuals or institutions due to the investment minimum (which sits at $5 million).

These funds are fascinating to track because of the appetite. The proof is in the pudding that Wall Street — and TradFi in general — is getting increasingly eager to be in crypto. Let ‘em cook, I say. 

— Katherine Ross

That depends. Are stablecoins “real-world assets”?

If you agree that they are, then the crypto natives still dominate. Crypto natives are responsible for a huge majority of global stablecoin supplies, including Tether, Circle, Sky (formerly Maker), Frax, Ethena and more.

There’s about $13 billion in tokenized real-world assets that aren’t stablecoins on blockchains right now, compared to more than $180 billion in stablecoins.

For scale, those five stablecoin issuers have minted more than $13 billion in fresh supply in the past three months alone. 

Wall Street might have taken the Tether/Circle playbook and run with it, but it’s still the challenger around here.

— David Canellis