What’s Circle’s End Game, Robinhood Launches A Chain & Venice Raises $65M

Goldman Sachs held its largest-ever crypto conference this year with 1,300 attendees, double capacity and up from a few hundred at its first event. The mood was described as the most bullish institutional non-crypto-native conference one speaker had ever attended, with excitement around tokenization, stablecoins, and crypto infrastructure at all-time highs. Michael Saylor's presentation was the worst received, drawing significant skepticism over financial engineering at MicroStrategy and recent market weakness. MicroStrategy released guidelines requiring at least 12 months of cash to cover STRK dividends and overcollateralization using a separate Bitcoin bucket. One speaker predicted MicroStrategy will eventually have to eliminate STRK preferred stock or allow it to trade at a steep discount, and characterized Saylor as unwilling to make hard choices and kicking difficult decisions into the future.

Stripe launched OpenUSD, a new stablecoin consortium run by Zach Abrams, who founded Bridge, which Stripe previously acquired. The earned-by-default principle means partners receive all reserve earnings less a small management fee, with no minting or redemption fees and no artificial volume limits. The partner list includes Visa, Mastercard, AmEx, Discover, BlackRock, Google, Shopify, Coinbase, Solana, Base, Cloudflare, and roughly a dozen others. Circle stock fell approximately 17.5 percent on the day of the announcement and was trading around 60 to 65 dollars at recording, down from 125 dollars in less than two months. One speaker calculated that 50 basis points on 10 billion dollars of stablecoin supply generates only around 50 million dollars annually for the open standard, far short of covering Circle-level operating costs of 500 to 600 million dollars per year.

Speakers disagreed on how threatening OpenUSD actually is to Circle. One argued yield sharing was already being done by USDG on Paxos, Agora with AUSD, and Circle through distribution deals before OpenUSD launched, making the initiative less novel than presented. The head of stablecoins at Ramp said OpenUSD is not targeting on-chain liquidity but instead targeting interoperability with payment service providers, banks, and payment facilitators, while USDC remains the backbone of on-chain activity including Hyperliquid, Uniswap, Aave, and Morpho. Banks were identified as a larger competitive threat to Circle than Stripe because the biggest stablecoin use cases are Treasury management, capital markets, and clearing, which banks dominate. One speaker said Circle should be acquisitive to expand capabilities but noted its lower stock price makes acquisitions harder now, and called the stock a wait-and-see situation rather than a clear long or short.

Cloudflare, which handles roughly 20 to 21 percent of all HTTP requests on the internet, announced a monetization gateway allowing any website, dataset, API, or MCP tool behind Cloudflare to charge per request with settlement in stablecoins over the X402 open protocol. This means millions of websites can enable pay-per-request stablecoin settlement without any knowledge of crypto infrastructure. Cloudflare reported that for the first time the majority of its traffic was agentic, though actual transaction volumes for agentic payments remain very small. Stablecoins were described as better suited for agent-to-agent micro transactions than for human-controlled or larger transactions, and one speaker predicted all card settlement will eventually migrate to stablecoins, though agentic payment dollar volume is expected to grow very slowly even as transaction counts rise.

Robinhood launched the public mainnet of Robinhood Chain, an L2 built on Arbitrum, featuring tokenized stocks including Nvidia, Apple, and Google available in 120 countries, along with Uniswap AMM integration, Morpho lending, Chainlink as oracle, and agentic AI trading for US users. Hood stock rose approximately 8 to 9 percent on launch day and was up 20 percent over the prior five days. The chain launched with 90 days of zero gas fees, and multiple chains competed to be the underlying infrastructure with incentives likely paid to secure that relationship. The scarce and sought-after position is placement inside the Robinhood wallet, not mere deployment on the chain, with many DeFi founders offering large sums to be featured there. Robinhood is adding 20 million dollars in LIT token incentives for wallet users, and the earned product inside the wallet yields 7 percent, with a significant portion coming from Morpho token incentives.

Venice, described as Eric Vorhees' second act, raised 65 million dollars at a 1 billion dollar valuation in its first and only outside fundraise. Venice is a permissionless and censorship-resistant AI platform that launched its token from essentially day one, and the token has performed well over recent months. The company's stated model uses subscription revenue to buy back the token, and it raised equity capital to build a data center without diluting token holders. The company is the largest holder of its own token by a significant margin, which one speaker noted has historically gone poorly for token holders across many chains. Eric publicly disclosed deal terms including the option Dragonfly and other investors had to purchase VVV tokens, reasoning that transparency was both the right approach and most likely to allow the token to continue trading fairly. The CLARITY Act currently has only roughly 40 to 45 percent likelihood of passing according to Polymarket, and without it detailed governance and capital return to token holders in the US remains legally impaired, a structural problem speakers said the industry needs to solve.