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Happy Friday, folks! FG’s authors will be at Permissionless next week, and Ben’s pre-conference chat with an event speaker sheds light on at least one topic industry execs will address. 

Casey has the economic data you might’ve missed this week, and why it matters. Here we go:

Stablecoins are ‘tip of the iceberg’

We’re just days away from Permissionless. Meaning industry leaders will willingly venture toward a Brooklyn heat wave for the greater good of meaningful conversations.

The topic of rebooting the global financial system seems to qualify. That’s the title of a panel I’ll be moderating next Thursday, and Ondo Finance CEO Nathan Allman will be among those on stage with me. 

I caught up with Allman earlier this week. He noted Circle’s successful IPO, which he said has created “even more of a buzz” around the space and what’s next. (CRCL stock has surged since the Senate’s GENIUS Act passage, jumping another 24% on Friday, as of 1:25 pm ET.)

“I think it’s the tip of the iceberg,” Allman said of stablecoins. “We’re going to see, in a lot of ways, the exact same playbook being run for other large, liquid assets.”

He’s talking about tokenized exposure to Treasurys (i.e. Ondo’s USDY or BlackRock’s BUIDL), for example, as well as stocks, bonds and ETFs. (Invesco recently signaled — after hiring a digital assets head — it would be exploring initiatives to possibly tokenize its funds).

There’ve been plenty of attempts to tokenize private markets too. Allman told me that while working at Goldman Sachs (2019-21), his team spent time exploring tokenization for syndicated loans, which can take weeks to settle.

“But in reality there’s a lot of general automation and digitization and standardization of documentation that has to be done before tokenization really is the limiting factor of accessibility,” the Ondo CEO said. “So I think that work is being done around a lot of these other asset classes in parallel.”

Put another way, tokenizing illiquid asset classes doesn’t make them liquid, Allman added. And liquidity is obviously important. 

He acknowledged that firms like BlackRock and Apollo Global Management are focused on creating more liquidity around private asset classes, and that will help allow for broader tokenization adoption there in the future. 

Apollo started offering tokenized access to its Diversified Credit Fund in January. Christine Moy, the firm’s head of digital asset strategy, is set to join Allman on next week’s panel; I’m looking forward to hearing her take on all of this. 

Back to what Allman considers to be “the low-hanging fruit” — the very liquid, large US securities — he said he left his latest meeting with the SEC feeling optimistic. That is, in the sense that there could be a path to offer these (via Ondo’s soon-to-launch Global Markets platform) in the US at some point.

The bottom line, Allman said: The projections of tokenization growth (in the $ trillions) won’t hold the same significance as it gets normalized — in both permissioned and permissionless environments.

“The vast, vast majority of regulated financial assets will settle on blockchain rails in the future,” he noted. “That’s not a crazy prediction.”

My full Q&A with Allman will hit Blockworks.co on Monday. And Casey, Felix and I will be on the ground at Permissionless Tuesday to Thursday, so there’s more where this came from. 

To those joining us, travel safe! For anyone on the fence, my sales colleagues want you to know tickets are still available.

— Ben Strack

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Welcome back. It was a shortened trading week for US markets, but economic data reports and the Fed decision gave investors plenty to think about. 

Plus, the world is watching the White House as President Trump weighs US involvement in the Middle East. Here’s a recap: 

• Both housing starts and building permits fell in May to five-year lows. Housing starts came in around 1.3 million, down 9.8% from April and 4.6% from May 2024. Building permits were roughly 1.4 million — a 2% decline from April and down 1% from a year ago. Continued higher interest rates and tariffs have both potential buyers and builders waiting on the sidelines, analysts said. 

• Initial jobless claims for the week ended June 14 came in right around projections (245,000 vs. 246,000). This is also a decrease of 5,000 claims from the week prior. Summer does tend to be a more volatile period for initial claims data, so keep that in mind for the coming weeks. While this data doesn’t paint a negative picture, we’re also watching the four-week moving average for initial claims. This figure came in at 245,500 last week, about 5,000 higher than expected. 

• Finally, the headline economic event of the week was, of course, the Fed decision. The central bank left rates unchanged and FOMC members’ median projection for the end of the year also stayed the same — indicating they expect two 25bps cuts before 2026. We know that outgoing Fed chairs tend to spend their final year in charge taking a more hawkish stance, so “higher for longer” may be in the cards. Powell on Wednesday said there’re many scenarios (in terms of economic data) that could get us to 50bps lower. But when asked when, exactly, we might encounter one of those scenarios, Powell was tight-lipped.

— Casey Wagner