GM to all of you nutcases. It’s Crypto Nutshell #977 bringin‘ the news… 🥜

We're the crypto newsletter that's more cocksure than a pilot buzzing the control tower seconds after being told twice not to… ✈️🗼

What we’ve cooked up for you today…

What’s in the Crypto Nutshell Portfolio?

BREAKING: Binance takes $100M stake in Circle under expanded USDC deal

The world's biggest crypto exchange just bought a piece of the company behind the world's second-biggest stablecoin.

Binance took a $100 million stake in Circle this week, picking up about 1.24 million shares at $80.84 each in a private placement.

(Circle is the company behind USDC, the dollar-pegged token that trails only Tether's USDT.)

It's locked in for two years and can't sell, though it keeps its voting rights.

The equity is only half the deal.

Alongside the stake, the two signed a five-year agreement for Binance to promote USDC across its platform.

And Circle is paying for the privilege, handing Binance a monthly fee tied to how much USDC sits in its wallet infrastructure.

Binance buys a slice of Circle, and Circle pays Binance to sell more USDC.

This is the third version of that partnership in under two years, and each one ties them closer.

Issuing a stablecoin is the easy part, and getting people to use it is the hard one.

The biggest place any stablecoin gets used is a crypto exchange, and Binance is the largest of those by a wide margin.

So Circle is renting the busiest storefront in the market to push USDC ahead of Tether.

For Binance, it's a paycheck for reach it already has, plus upside if Circle's stock climbs back (it's still down about a third on the year).

For Circle, it's a bet that buying distribution beats waiting for traders to pick USDC on their own.

Circle can't own Binance's users, so it's renting them by the month.

That crowd is the real prize in the stablecoin race. 🚀

Some stocks are built for a quarter… others for a lifetime.

Our 7 Stocks to Buy and Hold Forever report reveals companies with the strength to deliver year after year - through recessions, rate hikes, and even the next crash.

One is a tech leader with a 15% payout ratio - leaving decades of room for dividend growth.

Another is a utility that’s paid every quarter for 96 years straight.

And that’s not all - we’ve included 5 more companies that treat payouts as high priority.

These are the stocks that anchor portfolios and keep paying.

You can download this report for free as of today, but it won’t be free forever.

This is your chance to see all 7 names and tickers - from a consumer staples powerhouse with 20 years of outperformance to a healthcare leader with 61 years of payout hikes.

Claim Your Free Copy Today

Raoul Pal thinks almost everyone is picturing tokenization far too small.

He's a former Goldman Sachs macro trader and the founder of Real Vision.

Here's what he posted:

When people hear tokenization, they picture trading Apple stock on a Sunday, instant settlement, markets that never close.

(Tokenizing an asset just means recording it on a blockchain instead of inside a broker's or a bank's private ledger.)

Pal's point is that the Sunday-stock version is the smallest part of it.

Once an asset lives on-chain, it settles in seconds, trades at any hour, and moves without the stack of middlemen sitting between you and a stock or a bond today.

Shares and bonds go first because they're the easy ones, but the same rails can carry property, private credit, funds, whole companies.

His bigger claim is that the entire economy gets rebuilt around this, well beyond the trading of it.

Half this week's headlines are the same migration wearing different clothes: Binance buying into a stablecoin issuer, the SEC floating tokenized stock venues, banks testing tokenized deposits.

They're all finance moving onto the rails crypto already built, and Bitcoin and Ethereum are the base layer it settles back to.

The tokenized stock trading on a Sunday is the first brick in a much bigger build. 🧱

Today we'll be taking a look at the overall stablecoin supply.

Stablecoins are the backbone of crypto liquidity, used for seamless trading and instant cross-border transactions.

The chart below tracks the aggregate change in the total stablecoin market cap.

$262.54 billion in stablecoins now sit on-chain. (Two weeks ago: $262.96 billion)

Down $0.42 billion in a fortnight, the first red print after two green ones.

Those two green prints, $1.37 billion and $1.34 billion, had clawed back almost everything the summer drain took out.

This one hands a sliver of it back.

Stablecoin supply shrinks when coins are redeemed for dollars and pulled off-chain, so a small contraction means a little capital stepped out rather than in.

The move is minor, about 0.16% of the pool, so this is a pause in the refill, not a reversal of it.

The pool still sits roughly $0.9 billion above where it was a month ago, before the two green prints landed.

After two fortnights of fresh money arriving, this one saw a trickle leave. 💵

Bitcoin ETFs Take Nearly $1B in a Day as Average Holder Returns to Profit. The funds pulled in more on Monday than across the whole of the prior week, which was their weakest net inflow on record.

SoFi begins stablecoin settlement on Mastercard network for program expected to exceed $25 billion in annualized volume. Its SoFiUSD stablecoin now settles card transactions live on Mastercard's network.

Canada's 'Big Six' banks to launch interbank tokenized deposit initiative. The country's largest lenders will first test moving tokenized commercial deposits between themselves before linking to wider digital asset systems.

Zcash gets first European ETP following US ETF launch. 21Shares listed physically backed Zcash and Ether.fi products on Euronext exchanges in Paris and Amsterdam, widening issuer offerings beyond the majors.

Want to get even smarter? Check these out.

p.s. all completely FREE (one click subscribe link)

Select your answer below and you’ll be redirected to the results page. (answer explanation can be found after “Meme Corner”)

Because what would the crypto world be without its share of memes?

Trivia Answer: Approval from multiple private keys, not just one 🥳

A multisignature wallet needs several keys to sign off a transaction, say two of three, so a single stolen key can't drain it. It's the standard for treasuries and custody.

Advertise with Crypto Nutshell to get your product or brand in front of the crème de la crème of crypto investors. Crypto Nutshell readers are high-income earners who are always looking for unique or interesting offers.

Get in touch today.😎

We read every comment submitted in this poll and love to hear what you guys have to say. 😁 (bonus points for suggestions 🍪)

DISCLAIMER: The content of this newsletter is not financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice. Please be careful and do your own research.