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Empire’s Jason Yanowitz thinks that total value locked (TVL) will become crypto’s version of assets under management (AUM). 

To his point, it really is just a jawdropping number designed to make you take the TradFi firm more seriously, though there’s generally a reason for a firm to accrue a multi-billion dollar AUM. Or trillion, depending on the firm. 

He thinks that TVL will look great on paper but doesn’t show what you’re doing with those assets, and it makes sense. 

But crypto’s not as mature as TradFi yet, and we’re going to need metrics like TVL to gauge the space. Anyway, that’s my lukewarm take of the day.

Meanwhile:

• ETH’s sitting around $1,800 this morning, a slight decline over the past day. BTC’s holding on to $82,000.

• In the past 30 days, there’ve been 121 fundraises announced according to TIE Terminal data.

• DeFi’s TVL is at $87.9 billion, a 9% decline over the past seven days per Blockworks Research.

💰 Show me the money

Mesh CEO Bam Azizi won’t be going back to the normal way of raising venture capital. And by that I mean, he won’t be waiting on a wire transfer to settle in Mesh’s bank account. 

Instead, he prefers to receive it in stablecoins.

Earlier this week, Mesh announced that it raised $82 million in a Series B led by Paradigm. The money was then sent over to Mesh using PayPal’s stablecoin PYUSD using his own firm’s technology. 

Pretty fitting if you ask me, given that PayPal Ventures participated in their Series A.

Binance recently announced that Abu Dhabi’s MGX also sent over its investment via stablecoins though the sum was just a smidge bigger — a cool $2 billion. 

“It kind of makes sense,” Azizi told me. Why wait a week or so for a wire transfer when you can immediately settle with stablecoins. Perhaps both Azizi and Binance will be trendsetters here.

Any further raises Azizi does will also be stablecoin-exclusive 

“I’m tired of calling banks and manually confirming,” he griped. “Is it the 1990s? Come on, you can do better.”

Azizi told me the round happened rather quickly — a matter of weeks instead of months. He sent out an update to investors he was talking to back in January, and then suddenly, he was preparing data to finalize the firm's newest round. 

(Azizi even admitted that he had even pushed back on some of the initial terms “to buy some time” and then they were ready to finalize the funding.)

Mesh last raised $22 million in a Series A back in 2023, so it’s not a surprise that their business update — coming on the heels of the success around stablecoins — would pick up interest from VCs like Consensys, QuantumLight, Paradigm, etc. 

Oh, wait, let me back up a second: Mesh is a crypto payments firm. Azizi’s goal is to simplify payments so that they pass the “Grandma test” — which should be pretty obvious, but basically just means that anyone can make payments with crypto. 

The firm’s been working to develop itself as a bridge for roughly five years now, with a special focus on stablecoins starting around two years ago. 

Mesh takes an agnostic approach to the space. They don’t have direct interaction with consumers, not like some of the firms we’ve spoken to in this newsletter, but their technology instead connects the networks and allows the consumer to then make a payment.

“That's how we stand out: by building that network versus competing with all these players, they are competing with each other. We think you want to be the connection layer, connecting and bridging all the gaps between these two,” he explained.

As Mesh solves for the payments experience, the belief is that folks will start actually using crypto for payments rather than sitting on a portfolio of memecoins.

“Last year, we had $27 trillion in transactions on stablecoins. That's more than Visa and Mastercard combined. And if that's not enough plus 7% on top. So if you combine these two numbers, our projection is at some point you will have more crypto holders than credit card holders,” Azizi told me.

Mesh will use the freshly raised $82 million to expand globally, which means not only going to new markets but also hiring in those areas. 

After all, “you have to be global from the get-go,” Azizi told me.

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• Maybe President Donald Trump is just what the crypto industry needs to change its global reputation, or at least that’s what Binance CEO Richard Teng thinks.

• Ouch: One crypto trader swapped $733K for a mere $19K thanks to a potential sandwich attack.

• Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, said at a Cantor Fitzgerald conference that his firm’s “been through hell.” He was cheered on by attendees.

👀 Where’d the buyers go?

Bitcoin’s had some strong sell-side pressure since the start of the year. 

I know, not shocking, but bear with me, yeah?

Glassnode tracked bitcoin’s cyclical behavior, finding that the latest “distribution phase” (aka selling) started back in January. 

The Accumulation Trend Score, which “measures the relative change in aggregate onchain balances” is still signalling that there’ll be more sell-side pressure. Unfortunately, the score is also warped by the moves of larger entities. 

Prior to late February, there was a pattern of adding to bitcoin positions in the $95,000 to $98,000 range but that fell off as liquidity conditions changed (thanks macro). 

Now the accumulation range sits between $78,000 and $92,000, which Glassnode labeled as weak. 

So it’s starting to look like we’re not getting as many folks interested in buying the dip right now. 

“Using the cost-basis of Short-Term Holders, we can see that market momentum and capital flows have turned negative, signalling a decline in demand strength, and investor uncertainty is affecting sentiment and confidence,” Glassnode wrote. 

Reading into this: I’m not all that surprised, especially given the headlines around a potential US recession and some weaker-than-we-wanted economic data. 

And I know what you’re thinking: “investing in bitcoin diversifies your portfolio away from the macro of it all!” 

You’re not wrong. But you’re also not entirely right. Glassnode’s note that a lot of this is coming from bigger entities means that the institutions who are getting exposure to bitcoin will also be more likely to offload it as a risk asset when the environment becomes a bit too risk-on. 

We’re just not there yet in the whole “bitcoin’s digital gold” argument. But hey, we’re making strides every single cycle.

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ZKsync is accelerating institutional blockchain adoption and the rise of tokenization. Institutions choose ZKsync to move tokenized assets securely across enterprises while preserving privacy and governance. With gasless transactions, seamless onboarding, and scalable ZK infrastructure, enterprises can transfer financial products and data privately using ZK Stack — an open-source, trustless blockchain platform designed for speed, low costs, security, and interoperability without sacrificing control.

Learn more at ZKsync.io/empire.

On our minds: VCs betting big