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

Circle's stock fell 17.5 percent on the day the OpenUSD announcement was made and was trading around 60 to 65 dollars at time of recording, down from 125 dollars, roughly cut in half in less than two months. OpenUSD is effectively Stripe's initiative, run by Zach Abrams who founded Bridge, which Stripe acquired. The open stablecoin standard launched with a large partner list including Visa, Stripe, MasterCard, AmEx, BlackRock, Google, Coinbase, Solana, and roughly 150 others, built around three principles: built for scale, earned by default, and govern collaboratively. The earned-by-default principle means partners receive all reserve earnings less a small management fee, with no mint or redeem fees and no artificial volume limits.

Circle's adjusted operating expenses, stripping out IPO costs, were approximately 500 to 600 million dollars annually. Speakers calculated that 50 basis points on 10 billion dollars of stablecoin supply generates only around 50 million dollars per year in revenue, which is insufficient to cover that cost base. One reason for Circle's high operating expenses is that it is trying to convert an issuance company into a payments company and build surrounding ecosystem tooling, whereas Stripe already has that infrastructure and can warehouse much of the cost outside the open standard. Speakers predicted Stripe and Tempo will subsidize much of the open standard's operating expenses by absorbing costs as the largest shareholders.

Speakers noted that banks represent a greater competitive threat to Circle than Stripe does, because the larger stablecoin use cases are Treasury management, capital markets, and clearing, which banks dominate, while Stripe's payments use case is comparatively smaller. USDC remains the backbone of on-chain activity including Hyperliquid trades, Uniswap trades, and Aave and Morpho deposits, giving Circle a meaningful headstart on the institutional side along with significant on-chain liquidity advantages. The head of stablecoins at Ramp said OpenUSD is not targeting on-chain liquidity but rather interoperability with payment service providers, banks, and technology companies. Speakers also flagged that if the regulatory environment turns negative heading into midterms, many of the roughly 150 consortium companies would walk away from their stablecoin commitments, and noted there is no example of a consortium of this size that has ever been successful.

Cloudflare, which handles approximately 20 to 21 percent of all HTTP requests on the internet and processes around 100 million requests per second, 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. Cloudflare reported that for the first time the majority of internet traffic was agentic, based on data from roughly two to three weeks before the episode. Cards can handle most agent transactions for enterprise or user-controlled use cases, but stablecoins are seen as better suited for free-flowing agent-to-agent micropayments. Despite enthusiasm around agentic commerce and X402, actual transaction volumes remain very small and speakers expect growth to be slower than the market anticipates.

Robinhood launched the public mainnet of its L2, called Robinhood Chain, built on Arbitrum, offering tokenized stocks including Nvidia, Apple, and Google available in 120 countries, with 90 days of zero gas fees. Hood stock rose approximately 8 to 9 percent on the day of the announcement and was up around 20 percent over the prior five days. The chain uses Chainlink as its oracle and integrates Uniswap AMM and Morpho lending, with 20 million dollars in LIT token incentives specifically for wallet users. Speakers described Robinhood Chain as the first instance where application founders are approaching a chain operator seeking to pay for prominent wallet placement, reversing the prior dynamic where chains paid applications to join. Speakers predicted that more trades at exchanges like Robinhood and Coinbase will settle on chain rather than on private order books, and that Robinhood, Coinbase, and Kraken will likely incubate or acquire decentralized exchanges to own more of the stack.

Venice, described as a permissionless and censorship-resistant AI platform and Eric Vorhees' second act, raised 65 million dollars at a one billion dollar valuation in a Series A characterized as its first and only outside fundraise. Venice fair launched its token from essentially day one, bootstrapped to significant scale before taking outside capital, but ran into exponentially growing compute costs that forced a choice between diluting token holders or adopting a dual equity-and-token structure. The token model involves buying back the token using revenue from subscriptions, and staking the token returns another token representing pre-purchased compute power, functioning as a hedge on future compute costs. The dual structure generated controversy, including a viral video from Venice co-founder Mike criticizing it. Speakers noted that the absence of a passed CLARITY Act, which Polymarket showed at roughly 40 to 45 percent likelihood of passing, impairs founders' ability to do detailed governance and capital return to token holders in the US, and one speaker cautioned that claiming 2026 will bring token-equity regulatory clarity reflects naivety about the actual regulatory situation.

Michael Saylor's presentation at the Goldman crypto conference, which drew 1,300 attendees and was described as the most bullish institutional non-crypto-native conference ever attended, was the worst-received conversation at the event. Significant skepticism was directed at him over financial engineering at MicroStrategy, with STRK characterized as greedy and a bad idea.