a16z just dropped its annual State of Crypto report. You may have noticed, because everyone’s talking about it.

As always, it’s beautifully packaged and rich with charts. But for anyone keeping up, most takeaways won’t be news: stablecoin volumes keep climbing (and decoupling from trading), prediction markets are holding strong even post-election, and user growth continues (mostly driven by the Global South).

Still, a few details cut through the noise: public market vehicles like ETFs and DATs now hold over 10% of all BTC and ETH, Base has leapfrogged Solana to claim second place in new developer interest right after Ethereum, and: Australia leads the world in crypto web traffic per capita.

Today, we’ll also talk about:

• Codex and the new race in stablecoin infrastructure

• Coinbase acquires Echo in $375 million deal

• Ledger introduces new wallet product

Codex: Unlocking the Trillion-Dollar Onchain FX Opportunity – Interview with Co-Founder and CEO Haonan Li

New stablecoin race: As stablecoins become one of the fastest-growing assets in global finance, a new contest is emerging, not over who issues them, but where they live. Leading firms like Stripe, Circle, and Tether are now building dedicated blockchains designed specifically for stablecoin activity, with Stripe’s incubated network Tempo recently raising $500 million at a $5 billion valuation to accelerate its launch.

• Why it matters: The move toward specialization reflects a broader realization: general-purpose blockchains such as Ethereum and Tron were never designed for payments. Their variable fees, congestion, and open ledgers make them poorly suited for stablecoin settlement at scale. The next generation of stablecoin-native networks aims to fix this — offering instant finality, predictable costs, and selective privacy, the features required for real-world use cases like remittances, payroll, and corporate finance.

Codex as first mover: Among them, Codex, a stablecoin Layer-2 backed by Dragonfly Capital, Coinbase, and Circle Ventures, has emerged as one of the earliest to gain real traction. The Layer-2 surpassed $3 billion in cumulative flows last week, positioning itself as the earliest stablecoin network to combine institutional needs with onchain speed.

Interview: To understand Codex’ positioning and the broader implications of building blockchain infrastructure purpose-built for stablecoins and onchain foreign exchange, we spoke with Haonan Li, co-founder and CEO of Codex.

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On Codex’ strategic positioning and differentiation:

On what is hard about bringing global FX onchain:

On Codex' go-to-market strategy:

On how the stablecoin infrastructure market will look in the future:

Coinbase Accelerates Onchain Strategy with $375 Million Purchase of Fundraising Platform Echo

Acquisition spree: On Tuesday, Coinbase announced its $375 million acquisition of Echo, the onchain fundraising platform founded by prominent crypto figure Jordan Fish (aka Cobie). It marks the company’s eighth acquisition this year, bringing Coinbase’s total deal spending for 2025 to roughly $3.3 billion.

• Why it matters: “We believe that crypto and blockchain protocols allow you to have more open and accessible financial services. Echo gives us the components to actually do compliant fundraising onchain in a way that better connects capital and investors with investment opportunities,” noted Shan Aggarwal, Chief Business Officer at Coinbase, in an interview.

Market signals: The timing of the move also isn’t coincidental. A more crypto-friendly regulatory climate has fueled a revival of early-stage onchain fundraising this year:

• Legion, one of the leading fundraising platforms that recently partnered with Kraken to bring MiCA-compliant ICOs to millions of users, recorded a 98x oversubscription in its latest raise.

• MetaDAO, a new Solana-based ICO platform, has seen similarly strong demand, with its most recent offerings oversubscribed by 10x and 20x.

First-mover: Having launched ahead of competitors in March 2024, Echo captured much of the renewed investor appetite for early-stage onchain investments and established itself as a category-leader, facilitating 340+ fundraises that collectively raised around $200 million. The platform has hosted raises for several high-profile projects, including stablecoin issuer Ethena Labs, the Tether-backed Layer-1 network Plasma, and the forthcoming Ethereum Layer-2 MegaETH.

Vertical integration: Building on this first-mover advantage, Coinbase plans to integrate Echo deeply into its existing ecosystem, creating strong synergies with recent acquisitions such as Liquifi, the token management platform it bought in July:

• “With Liquifi and Echo, we now have an end-to-end stack that helps issuers start a company, manage their tokens, raise funds, and ultimately launch and grow,” Aggarwal said. “Our existing products — the exchange, Base, and institutional platforms — already provide access to distribution and secondary trading. Together, we can really rebuild the capital markets stack onchain.”

Rollout strategy: The next step is bringing Echo directly into Coinbase’s retail and institutional interfaces, allowing users to participate in public token offerings from their existing accounts.

• “Eventually, we want any verified Coinbase user to be able to participate in public token offerings from their existing accounts, just like they trade today,” Aggarwal said.

Building the everything exchange: The long-term ambition goes further. Coinbase plans to extend Echo’s infrastructure to tokenized securities and real-world assets, which is consistent with its longer-term vision of building an everything exchange. But first, that will require clearer regulation.

• “The next big challenge is regulation,” Aggarwal noted. “Which tokens can you actually support? Should all tokens be freely tradable? And how do you ensure compliance in a permissionless onchain environment?”

A conversation with Sebastien Badault, VP Enterprise at Ledger, who yesterday unveiled a new multisig system for the company’s corporate offering along with a new hardware wallet, the Ledger Nano Gen5.