GM, frens! ☕️

Imagine someone offered you a bet. If you're right, the payoff is enormous. If you're wrong, you've lost very little. Would you take it?

A 17th century philosopher named Blaise Pascal built an entire argument around that question. He used it to talk about faith but the idea reaches much further than religion. Sometimes you don't have perfect proof, only a possibility that carries enough upside to make the bet worthwhile, while waiting for absolute certainty can end up being the biggest risk of all 🤥 

Maybe that's true more often than we'd like to admit. Starting a company. Moving to another country. Backing an idea everyone else thinks is crazy. None of those decisions come with guarantees.

Our industry has always been one of those bets. Nobody could promise it would get here, and nobody can promise where it'll be in another ten years. But if you believe the upside is big enough, waiting until everything is proven might mean arriving after the opportunity has already passed 💸 

Here’s what we’re discussing this week:

• 🪙 OpenUSD and what's behind the hype

• 🌎️ “World War” World Network vs a new prediction market called World

• 🤜 Ethereum gets a new institutional push

• 🛟 Loopring shuts down its DEX after years of falling adoption

Below is how $WALLET is trading right now.

Our Discord is open if you're still betting on a different future 🤠 

OpenUSD and what's behind the hype

Stablecoins are suddenly the most hyped part of crypto again, which is funny considering they are literally designed to not move.

The new name getting everyone’s attention is Open USD, or OUSD. It comes from Open Standard, a new stablecoin initiative backed by more than 140 companies across payments, finance, crypto and tech 📱 

The partner list is the main reason people started talking: Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, BlackRock, American Express, BNY, Standard Chartered, Ripple, Google, Shopify, IBM and plenty more.

• OUSD is supposed to be a dollar stablecoin built for businesses that want to move money at scale. Open Standard says companies will be able to mint and redeem it with no fees and no volume limits.

• The bigger difference is the business model: most of the yield from the reserves backing OUSD is supposed to be shared with participating partners, after a small management fee 💰️ 

• Most stablecoin issuers make money from the reserves backing their tokens. Users hold the stablecoin, the issuer holds cash and Treasuries, and the issuer earns the interest. Circle does this with USDC. Tether does this with USDT. It is a very simple yet profitable business, especially when rates are high, which explains why everyone suddenly became extremely passionate about “digital dollars” 🤔 

So OpenUSD is trying to change who gets paid.

Instead of one issuer keeping most of the reserve income, OUSD wants to give partners a reason to push the stablecoin inside their own products. If you are a payment company, wallet, exchange or fintech app, the proposal behind it is basically: help grow this stablecoin and share in the economics.

That is why Circle’s stock got hit when the news dropped. Investors immediately saw the threat to USDC’s model. If big distribution partners can earn more from pushing OUSD, then USDC has to defend its position with more than just being early 💵 

Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire did not exactly sit there smiling through it 👇️ 

• He argued that stablecoins are network effect businesses, meaning liquidity, integrations, trust and real usage matter more than a big partner list on day one 🤨 

• He also criticized consortium backed products, saying their track record at reaching scale has been pretty bad. His main point was that giving away too much reserve income can starve the infrastructure that needs to support the stablecoin long term.

It’s true, a list of famous names does not automatically create adoption, especially in crypto, as we’ve all pretty much have seen this game done (and fail) before. Putting BlackRock, Visa and Coinbase in the same sentence is powerful marketing, but it still does not prove people will use OUSD for payments, trading, treasury flows or DeFi.

At the same time, if OUSD was meaningless, there would be no need for a public defense.

It looks like the stablecoin market is slowly moving from “who can issue the token” to “who controls distribution” - exchanges, wallets, payment processors, banks and fintech platforms decide where users hold, spend, swap and redeem digital dollars. And that is the market OUSD is trying to enter 🪙 

The timing was also impeccable (or planned beforehand) 👇️ 

• In EU, MiCA has pushed USDT off regulated exchanges, which gave Circle some opening with USDC and EURC 💵 

• BNY is also adding support for institutional clients to store, transfer, mint and burn USDC. So Circle is not exactly sitting in a weak position. It has regulation, institutions and a massive existing network behind it.

Ripple being part of the OUSD partner list also started some discussions 👀 

Ripple already has RLUSD, so its involvement here is more about being close to stablecoin infrastructure at any cost rather than anything else.

Still, it shows how wide the race is getting. Ripple, Coinbase, Stripe, Visa, Mastercard, banks, exchanges and asset managers all want to be near the stablecoin flow now.

If partners can earn from distribution, they may have a reason to push a new stablecoin more aggressively. If businesses can mint and redeem without fees or volume limits, that may matter for large scale payment flows. If governance really is shared and not controlled by one issuer, that may appeal to companies that do not want to depend fully on Circle or Tether 💲 

For now, it is one of the more interesting stablecoin launches because it shows where the fight is going 🥊 

Stables are no longer seem to be just about issuing the safest dollar token. They are becoming a battle over distribution, reserve income and who gets paid when digital dollars become normal business infrastructure.

“World War” - World Network vs a new prediction market called World

Naming a crypto project is apparently still impossible to some 😶 

A new Solana based prediction market called World launched this week, and almost immediately ran into a very different crypto company with almost the same name: World Network (of Worldcoin), the eyeball scanning identity project tied to Sam Altman 👁️ 

The result was messy, petty and very… crypto.

• World’s website was flagged by Cloudflare for “suspected phishing” after World Network filed a complaint claiming the new prediction market was impersonating its brand and trying to collect user data. Anyone visiting World’s landing page was met with a large warning saying the site had been reported for potential phishing 🟥 

• World Network’s complaint framed it as a brand impersonation issue. The company argued that World’s website was a fraudulent phishing site using the World brand, with a fake email notification page allegedly designed to harvest user credentials. It also said this could put users at risk through compromised personal information and possible financial losses 🔒️ 

World did not exactly respond like a normal project would.

Instead, the project posted what looked like Cloudflare’s email on X and mocked World Network for reporting them. The message basically said the world was big enough for both of them, then ended with a line about not scanning its users’ eyeballs 🙄 

Cloudflare has been moving further into crypto adjacent territory itself recently. The company recently announced x402, a system for charging tiny payments for protected web resources like pages, datasets, APIs and AI tools. So while Cloudflare is trying to build internet payment infrastructure, it is also being pulled into disputes between crypto projects fighting over names 🤡 

This also shows the downside of picking the most common possible name and trying to own it across the industry. “World” is general enough to sound powerful, but also wide enough that someone else was eventually going to use it.

Ethereum gets a new institutional push

Ethereum has never had one clean front door for institutions.

That is part of its strength, but also part of the headache. The network, or rather, the ecosystem is not one company. It has the base layer, L2s, wallets, DeFi protocols, tokenization projects, stablecoin infrastructure and a long list of independent teams all building in different directions.

For users and builders, that openness is the point. It’s basically one of the reasons crypto still exists outside of a failed ICO boom and a BTC price pump from 2019 💹 

But for banks, asset managers, enterprises and governments, it can be harder to navigate. A serious institution looking at the ecosystem has to figure out who to speak with, what parts of the ecosystem matter, what the actual use cases are and how to separate real infrastructure from noise.

That seems to be the gap Ethereum Institutional is trying to fill 👇️ 

• “Ethereum Institutional”, a new independent nonprofit was created to help accelerate institutional adoption of Ethereum. It is meant to act as a neutral point of contact for large organizations exploring Ethereum, its L2 ecosystems, stablecoins, tokenized assets, onchain markets and the app layer 🤓 

• The organization was founded by members of the former Ethereum Foundation Enterprise team: David Walsh, Matthew Dawson and Marius Smith. It also has backing from names already involved in the institutional Ethereum push, including BitMine, SharpLink and Consensys CEO Joseph Lubin.

The goal itself is not to turn Ethereum into a company or create one official voice for the whole ecosystem. That would miss the point. Ethereum’s value is that it remains open, neutral and not controlled by a single vendor.

But institutions still need a way into the conversation 👴 

• Ethereum Institutional is aiming to provide that by focusing on engagement, market intelligence, ETH marketing, requirements discovery and events. In plain terms, it wants to help institutions understand what Ethereum can do, what they need from the ecosystem and how Ethereum infrastructure can fit into real financial use cases.

• David Walsh described the missing piece as a credible, independent counterpart that institutions can actually call. Not someone pitching one product, but a group representing Ethereum as a whole 🤔 

Ethereum’s serious use cases are also gaining more dominance. Stablecoins are one of the biggest practical uses in crypto. Tokenization is moving from talk into live products. Onchain markets are getting more sophisticated. Layer-2s are giving applications cheaper execution while still connecting back to Ethereum’s settlement layer.

So the institutional question is no longer just “should we look at crypto?”

It’s “which infrastructure can support the next version of financial markets?” now 👛 

Ethereum clearly wants to be one of the main answers.

• The Ethereum Foundation is also working from another angle. It recently published “Ethereum Basics for Governments and Institutions,” a non-technical guide meant to explain Ethereum’s mechanics, governance model and role as credibly neutral public infrastructure 🥸 

That kind of material matters because institutions do not only need hype. They need explainers, risk frameworks, basic education and enough clarity to understand why Ethereum is different from a normal corporate platform.

It also follows the launch of Etherealize, another group focused on connecting Ethereum with institutional capital markets. Together, these efforts show that Ethereum is becoming more serious about how it presents itself to the traditional financial world.

Loopring shuts down its DEX after years of falling adoption

Being early in crypto does not always mean you get to stay important.

Loopring is a good example of that. The project was one of earliest zero knowledge rollups, helped prove that zk could be used for scaling and raised $45 million through an ICO back in 2017. For a while, it was one of those names people mentioned when talking about the actual future of finance 🤔 

Now its decentralized exchange and AMM are shutting down.

• Loopring announced that it is closing its DEX, ending all trading services and halting the relayer immediately. The team said it will calculate final user balances, publish them, then distribute funds directly to users’ Ethereum wallets in batches while covering gas fees ⛽️ 

• The reason was painfully direct: Loopring never reached meaningful adoption.

• The team said it lacked a virtual machine, composability and real world payment use cases. In other words, it became harder to compete with newer scaling systems that give developers more room to build, connect apps and create actual activity 🫥 

That is the rough part of crypto infrastructure. A project can be technically important and still lose the market.

Loopring helped push the idea of zk-rollups forward, but the rest of the ecosystem kept evolving. Modern zkEVM projects like zkSync, Scroll and Starknet offered more flexible environments for smart contracts. Loopring’s specialized design started to look more limited in comparison 🤷‍♂️ 

The team basically admitted that too. They said they were “engineers at heart,” not business operators, and that they failed to develop the business side, partnerships and adoption needed to keep the ecosystem growing.

That is not rare in crypto. Some teams can build clever technology. Far fewer can turn it into something people use every day. Also, very few admit they were wrong 😢 

Loopring had moments that looked much bigger at the time. Its 2021 partnership with GameStop to power the company’s NFT platform was one of them. During that cycle, anything connected to NFTs, gaming and Ethereum scaling could catch serious attention. Loopring’s TVL eventually peaked around $760 million in November 2021 😳 

But the hype did not last.

Loopring’s TVL was around $5 million before it closed, down almost 99% from that peak. Its token, LRC, also collapsed from an all-time high of $3.75 to around $0.01.

The team had already shut down wallet services in July 2025, citing scaling challenges. The DEX closure now feels like the final step in the same direction rather than a sudden surprise.

Loopring is not the only project closing in this market. More than 60 big crypto projects and protocols have already stopped in 2026. The market is much less forgiving now. Users are fewer and old narratives do not carry projects forever.

The old game was easier. Raise money, build something impressive, attach yourself to a hot narrative and wait for the cycle to lift everything 💰️ 

That does not work as well when users actually have choices anymore.

Other worthy reads

“robotics VC funding just hit a record. here are 10 companies to know.” by frontrun:

CG’s TradFi on Crypto Exchanges Report:

“Obfuscation: building the final boss of cryptography” by Vitalik:

MEMES

That's all for now, frens.

We'll meet in a week! And remember, the market conditions are temporary, but our commitment to building a better Web3 is here to stay. Thanks for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you back next week. Cheers!

Yours, The 🔥 Team

Brought to you by Ambire: The Only Web3 Wallet That You’ll Need!