GM, frens! ☕️

Funny thing about progress.. it never feels like progress while you’re in it, isn’t it?

It feels invisible. Only later do you look back and realize everything changed while you weren’t paying attention 🤔 

Anyway here’s what we’ve been watching this week:

• 🪙 “The year of tokenization” - Ethereum tightens its grip on RWAs

• 🤖 AI fueling crypto crime

• 🔥 Ambire’s smarter safeguards: arming users against scams

• 🪨 Ripple’s XRP flips BlackRock

• 🫣 Big tech wants your blockchain: Google’s Universal Ledger

The W3oF Degen Portfolio is hanging on, though it’s clearly overdue for that long promised makeover 👇️

Pull up in the Discord if you have opinions 🙃 

“The year of tokenization” - Ethereum tightens its grip on RWAs

Real world assets are the new gold mine, and Ethereum is standing right in the middle of it.

Tokenization platform Securitize has gone all in, calling Ethereum the default home for what could be a multi trillion dollar market 🤯 

• Numbers don’t lie: $7.5B in tokenized RWAs, $5.3B in Treasuries, and a 72% share of the entire pie sit directly on Ethereum 😲 

• Add in L2s like Arbitrum, Optimism, Mantle and Polygon, and ETH commands nearly 85% of all assets minted by Securitize.

And this isn’t from degens, this comes from Wall Street. BlackRock, Apollo, VanEck, Hamilton Lane - all their tokenized funds are anchored on Ethereum rails ⚓️ 

• BlackRock’s BUIDL fund alone has pushed past $2.4B, making it the single largest tokenized Treasury in existence. Apollo’s private credit, VanEck’s Treasuries, and Hamilton Lane’s vehicles are just more bricks in the wall.

• Securitize itself has minted over $3.36B in tokenized assets, most of them Ethereum native. That puts it ahead of every other provider, with five separate RWA products clearing the $100M mark, unheard of for a space still considered “early”.

Why Ethereum?

The infrastructure 👇️ 

• ETH brings deep liquidity pools, DeFi composability, and programmable standards (ERC-1400, ERC-3643) that institutions can actually use.

• Daily dividend payouts instead of quarterly, rapid settlement instead of legacy lag, and regulatory-ready wrappers that traditional finance can plug into without rewriting the book.

Carlos Domingo, CEO of Securitize, framed 2025 as the year “RWAs found real onchain utility”. The lightbulb moment for asset managers is simple: faster cycles, fractional access, and better capital efficiency than their dusty offchain models 🧠 

The scale of the bet

RWA.xyz data pegs the tokenization market at $26.5B already.

That’s just the warm-up. Securitize argues that even a 1% slice of the $20T+ opportunity in Treasuries and credit would unlock $200B in on-chain value.

The logic is brutal in its simplicity: capital flows where it can move fastest and most securely, and right now that road is paved in Ethereum blocks.

Other chains are trying.

Solana, Avalanche, and private blockchains whisper about “efficiency” and “enterprise partnerships.” But institutions aren’t chasing memes, they’re deploying capital 🤌 

Ethereum’s consistency, security, and sheer gravity in DeFi makes it the path of least resistance.

• That doesn’t just cement ETH as the base layer for RWAs. It flips the old metas: instead of memeing “ultrasound money” or fighting with Solana over shitcoins and fees, Ethereum is now becoming the plumbing of global finance 💰️ 💰️ 

Securitize’s bet is less a gamble and more a recognition of reality: the rails have already been built, the liquidity is already here, and the incumbents are already plugged in.

And that’s the real story, crypto’s “maturity upgrade” isn’t a dream. It’s here, it’s Ethereum, and it’s being priced in ⌚️ 

AI fueling crypto crime

It was only a matter of time.

Give criminals a tool that can write code, analyze data, and mimic persuasion and they’ll stop asking it to code trading bots and start asking it to write ransom notes 🥷 

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now warning that its model is being twisted into the newest engine of crypto crime. These days, ““vibe”” hackers are running extortion rings demanding payouts that stretch from $75K to over $500K a pop 🫣 

Ransom-as-a-Service

Ransomware and hacking used to demand actual technical chops.

You needed encryption skills, persistence exploits, maybe you even needed to have something that others didn’t like a zero day 🤓 

But now all you need is AI 🤖 

• According to Anthropic’s threat intel team, hackers are using AI not just for scripting malware, but for the entire package - stuff like reconnaissance, drafting psychological ransom notes, calculating payment amounts, and even managing negotiations 🤦‍♂️ 

Victims range from hospitals to churches, with attackers demanding crypto because, of course, it remains the cleanest exit strategy. At least 17 organizations were hit by one group alone.

Crypto crime gets an upgrade

Industrialized crime, scaled by AI..

Chainalysis had already forecast 2025 as a record breaking year for crypto scams not that long ago. Anthropic just confirmed why: AI lowers the barrier to entry.

You don’t need to know how data works, you just need to know how to ask the chatbot to do it for you in the right way ⛏️ 

And criminals aren’t stopping at ransom notes. Claude has reportedly been used by North Korean IT operatives to forge identities and infiltrate U.S. crypto firms, land fake dev jobs, and funnel salaries back to Pyongyang 🫠 

The overlap with sanctioned activity and laundering via stablecoins is impossible to ignore.

Regulators will be drooling over this one 👇️ 

An AI powered cybercrime wave that cashes out in crypto… That’s catnip every “crypto is funding terrorism” politician 😑 

Crypto already had a reputation problem with hacks and rugpulls. AI is turning those problems into a scalable business model, so for now, there’s no other option for the community but to harden itself 🫡 

Ambire’s smarter safeguards: arming users against scams

Talking about scams…. Ambire has been constanly rolling out new wallet defenses: phishing protection, transaction simulation, clear insights, and warnings for sharp balance drops 🛠️ 

In practice, that means fewer blind spots when signing transactions and more confidence that what you approve is exactly what you expect.

With hidden scams still everywhere, Ambire’s approach turns security into something you can actually see 👀 

It’s a simple idea, but it makes a big difference: clarity, safety, control 🤝 

Ripple’s XRP flips BlackRock

Crypto has always promised to eat TradFi’s lunch, but nobody expected the dessert course to come this fast.

XRP’s market cap has pumped to $162B, leapfrogging BlackRock’s $154B and officially knocking the world’s biggest asset manager off the leaderboard.

That puts XRP ahead of names like Coca-Cola, Disney, and Nike. Brands that built entire centuries of cultural relevance, now sitting below a token. Kinda. In a way. But either way, some call it clown market absurdity, but it’s happening.

• Back when Trump’s inauguration was looming, markets frontran his pro crypto agenda, massively pumping some of the coins 🍊 

• XRP, long the butt of maximalist jokes and the punching bag of SEC became the surprise beneficiary 👇️ 

Onchain data showed XRP breaking $2.80 for the first time in a month, with 24-hour spikes north of 9% and wallets in the 1M-10M XRP range stacking 37% more coins since November. Accumulation along with the hype fueled the flippening 💵 

That’s $3.8B in added XRP gobbled up in just two months. The “army” meme might actually be morphing into institutional flow.

Of course, BlackRock isn’t crying… but it’s still a reputational gut punch. BlackRock spent decades building the aura of being the allocator of global capital. Now one altcoin with a cult fanbase and a habit of underwhelming court appearances has sprinted past it in valuation.

And did Ripple become “bigger” than BlackRock? Of course not. Market cap math in crypto is a cruel optical illusion 🤓 

But the signal is undeniable: capital is sloshing into coins at such scale that even legacy giants are getting dwarfed on the scoreboard.

Google’s Universal Ledger: neutral rails or another big tech honeypot?

This week, Rich Widmann, Google Cloud’s head of Web3, unveiled plans for the Google Cloud Universal Ledger (GCUL) - an L1 pitched as the “neutral infrastructure” for financial institutions.

On paper, the sell is straightforward: a blockchain without tribal baggage. Stripe is busy testing “Tempo” Circle is pushing “Arc,” and Google wants to be the middle ground.

The pitch is that big names won’t use each other’s rails.. but they might all trust Google 🤔 

Neutrality, of course, is a loaded word when it comes from Mountain View. This is the same firm that sunset half its product line after promising long term support. Ask anyone who built on Google Reader, Stadia, or half a dozen “strategic bets” 🤦‍♂️ Crypto devs are even more passionate and definitely don’t forget.

• According to Google, GCUL is already piloting settlement with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), the same behemoth running BTC futures volume at TradFi scale.

• If it works, GCUL could become a core piece of plumbing for collateral, margin, and payments. Exactly the financial backbone most chains have never been able to lock down 🤷‍♂️ 

The timing is no accident. Like we discussed above, RWAs and tokenized settlements are turning into a trillion dollar gold rush, with Ethereum hosting 72% of the market, and TradFi realizing that blockchains are better back offices than Swift.

On one hand, it’s bullish that a tech giant with endless resources is throwing real weight behind blockchain rails 🪙 

It validates what crypto has been screaming for a decade: the infrastructure meta matters 🧠 

On the other hand, the sector should remember that open, neutral, programmable money wasn’t supposed to depend on a company that makes most of its cash from milking ads 🙄 

Google can build its ledger, CME can test it, and institutions will onboard. But if crypto’s future narrows to “Wall Street on Ethereum” versus “Wall Street on Google Cloud” then all we’ve done is swap a decentralized system for a centralized middleman.

Other worthy reads

“Prediction Markets Landscape” by Connor King:

“Programmable Privacy: The Next Multi-Billion Dollar Infrastructure Layer” by A1 Research:

Takeaways from WebX Asia, by Haseeb:

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!