Welcome back. It’s a short week for our US readers, but we’ll have a special July Fourth edition going out on Friday, so keep an eye on your inbox. 

For today, Ben talked to a major TradFi player about what’s next for financial markets. Casey unpacks the latest labor report. Spoiler: It’s pretty bleak. Here goes:

Word on Wall Street

After catching up with Franklin Templeton innovation head Sandy Kaul, her message was clear: We’re due for a financial market infrastructure overhaul, and it’ll happen quicker than you might think.

“I think our entire product suite will be onchain at some point in the future,” she told me. “It is simply what is the migration path to getting there.”

That sort of statement holds more weight considering her position at a fund giant that manages roughly $1.5 trillion (yes, trillion with a “t”) in assets. 

It’s a straightforward concept: Financial institutions, central banks, corporations (what have you) work on account-based systems (i.e. with checking, savings, brokerage, retirement sleeves). These organizations will move to wallet-based systems on top of blockchains for efficiency and other benefits. 

Bullish estimates that the ~$240 billion stablecoin market will increase 10x over the next several years (give or take, depending who you ask) might even be conservative, Kaul argued. But she made clear that it won’t be the crypto-native players driving this growth.

“I think banks are going to realize their future is going to be wallet-based, and they’ll begin to issue their own stablecoins and different versions of tokenized cash in an effort to remain competitive,” she said. “That is where trillions and trillions of dollars of deposits sit, so I think that it will grow very, very quickly.” 

As stablecoins (checking account equivalents) become “a foundational piece of financial infrastructure,” Kaul explained, tokenized money market funds (acting like savings accounts) will take off in tandem. 

That sounds familiar.

Franklin Templeton launched its OnChain US Government Money Fund in 2021, and its AUM sits around $750 million. But as Kaul mentioned, that’s just a start.  

We’ll see more illiquid, difficult-to-process assets (like CLOs and private credit) go onchain to create operational efficiencies. And then we’ll see more liquid public equities and ETFs become tokenized (ultimately in a less convoluted way than some of the “wrapped workarounds” currently available, Kaul said). 

“And if you move an ETF onchain, in essence you almost eliminate the need for the ETF wrapper over time,” Kaul noted. “Because the smart contract does all the work that the ETF wrapper does today.”

When I asked her what could stand in the way of this progress, she noted that the traditional way of doing KYC/AML screening of clients conflicts with the idea of a fully permissionless ecosystem. 

Kaul added: “I think the final answer is going to sit somewhere in between.”

I’ll stop there for now. More excerpts from my Q&A with Kaul will hit Blockworks.co in due time.

— Ben Strack

There was one vote that determined the fate of President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” and it was that of Vice President JD Vance. 

Senators were 50-50 before Vance stepped in as the tiebreaker. The bill now heads to the House. 

It’s unpopular for a number of reasons: Some Republicans think it doesn’t cut spending enough. Other GOP members say the bill doesn’t allocate enough resources to border security. Most Democrats believe the legislation cuts social programs by too much.

June’s ADP employment report was a remarkable miss. 

Analysts expected the private sector to add 100,000 positions. In reality, private payrolls lost 33,000. 

It’s the first negative print since March 2023, although the figure has declined every month since March 2025. 

Stocks initially opened lower Wednesday but rebounded later on President Trump’s announcement that the US had penned a trade agreement with Vietnam, fueling optimism that other deals will be struck before the July 9 deadline. 

Odds of a 25bps interest rate cut later this month increased to 23.8%, up from 20.7% yesterday. Fed Chair Powell has said time and time again that it’s the data that will determine the timing of the next cut. 

Tomorrow, we’ll get the weekly initial jobless claims and the June employment report from the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. For initial claims, analysts project 240,000 first-time filers for the week ended June 28. If the figure comes in as expected, it’ll be especially positive for the labor market; signs of increased layoffs will be negative for markets. 

The BLS report is expected to show the economy added 110,000 nonfarm payrolls. Unemployment is projected to come in a hair higher at 4.3% vs. 4.2% in May. 

Here’s hoping those prints come in more in-line with expectations, but we won’t hold our breath. As a reminder: US markets have an abbreviated trading day on Thursday and will be closed on Friday for the July Fourth holiday.

— Casey Wagner