A Circle Update & How JPM, PayPal, and PNC Are Hijacking Crypto’s Best Idea

Inside the quiet institutional takeover of Circle & stablecoins, the new financial rail war, and why programmable money might not be won by crypto at all.

I’ve held crypto since 2011. Not just watched it, owned it. BTC, ETH, XRP, they’ve made up between 5% and 10% of my liquid portfolio at different points, right alongside gold. And while the gains have been nice, the real value has come from living through the chaos. Riding the storms that come with the crypto community and learning.

Learning who’s using it, where the rails actually work, and how little most pundits understand unless they’ve been through a 50% drawdown themselves. After that, a 5% hit in bank stocks doesn’t even register.

This post is not for the crypto evangelists. It’s for the institutional thinkers; bank investors, bankers, bank boards, operators. People asking: “What are we supposed to do with all this stablecoin noise?” Because behind the headlines, there’s a quiet shift happening, a rewiring of financial infrastructure led by firms like JPMorgan, PayPal, and PNC. And almost no one is connecting the dots correctly.

If you want the real story, not the hype, not the doom charts, but the institutional moves that matter, read on. This is the collision of TradFi and DeFi, and the tells are already there. You just need to know where to look and they will have a huge impact on the future of banking.

Stablecoins Volumes Aren’t What They Say They Are

I love it when I quietly do homework on a topic, a stock, a concept and almost without fail, the next day I run into someone who has just read the recent headlines about (insert topic here), and feels the need to parrot without understanding some soundbytes as if they’ve discovered the holy grail. Waxing eloquently about surface level knowledge versus actual deep understanding with relentless enthusiasm. If I like you, I’ll tell you where you’re wrong. Most of the time by asking second and third level questions you can’t answer. But if I don’t, I’ll likely just smile and nod and move on. And I would be a very very wealthy human if I had $1 for every time people do that to me with stablecoins lately.

Stablecoins are sweeping like wildfire on CNBC and across bank board rooms. And for good reason, in theory they could disrupt a lot of things. Payments. Deposits. Escrow. Factoring. And anything in between. Interchange fees to zero??? Non-interest bearing deposits … all gone??? Yes those are theoretically possible, but as you’ll see highly unlikely outcomes.

So allow me to drop two big picture, sobering stats for you about this disruptor technology to frame the conversation.