HUGE! COINBASE CITIBANK STABLECOINS, GOLDMAN SACHS $100 BILLION CRYPTO, & CHAINLINK CCIP 2.0!

Tony Edward (0:05)

Hey everybody, welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast, your home for cryptocurrency news and interviews. I'm your host Tony Edward. On your way in, please hit that subscribe button, as well as the thumbs up button and leave a comment below. If you're listening on a podcast platform such as Apple or Spotify, be sure to follow and leave a five-star rating. You'll be joining over 80,000 listeners who already are subscribed. And also on YouTube, we're approaching 200,000 subscribers, so make sure you're subscribed wherever you're watching or listening. All right, folks, we have huge TradFi and institutional crypto adoption news. First up, Coinbase and Citibank are further strengthening their partnership. Today, Coinbase announced we're bringing stablecoins into the banking system with Citibank. That means instant stablecoin acceptance for institutions all on bank-grade regulated infrastructure. The next step for stablecoins becoming everyday money. This is very powerful, folks, because Citibank is a huge on-ramp. I don't think I need to explain how big they are. They're one of the largest banks. So imagine stablecoins running through the Citibank rails and it makes its way to the end customer. And now it's TBD what that's going to look like. But regardless, we've talked a lot about it that many people will be using stablecoins and they won't even know it because stablecoins are going to be powering their payments and it's going to be faster and cheaper with the instant settlement and much more. So this is incredible. Now Citibank and Coinbase already have a partnership. Many of you may recall going back to last year, they formed a partnership to launch crypto trading and custody and all these different things. And now they're expanding that to stablecoins. So let me give you some more details. Coinbase will use Citi's virtual account wallet to power its virtual accounts, allowing customers to accept, hold and pay fiat while automatically converting incoming funds into stablecoins. Separately, Citi's institutional clients will be able to accept stablecoin payments through its Spring by Citi platform, with Coinbase handling the stablecoin payment rails and automatically converting digital assets into fiat for settlement.

Huge! So we've been talking about the theme of the convergence of TradFi and crypto, and eventually, guys, maybe 5 years from now or 10 years from now, this will all be one market. It won't be the digital asset crypto market, the stock market, the TradFi market. It will just be all one market, everything running on blockchain rails. As I've been saying for years, the future capital markets, economies and governments will all run on blockchain rails. And we're seeing the biggest institutions in the world, stock exchanges, banks, the largest asset managers and payment companies are all headed in the same direction, building with blockchain tech, adopting crypto in different ways, tokenizing, launching custody and trading, and much more. So this is incredible, folks. So the initiatives are launching first in the US and are designed to give businesses bank account-like functionality while enabling stablecoin payments without requiring merchants to directly hold or manage digital assets. So the on and off ramps being built, guys, the infrastructure being set up for the adoption of these different crypto and digital assets. Now you can imagine their competitors are going to look to do the same thing. They'll probably come knocking on Coinbase's door or go to their competitors or look to build something similar because no one wants to get left behind and game theory is certainly playing out here. So this is really, really great news. Now, speaking of banks, Goldman Sachs brings $100 billion treasury fund into crypto's institutional plumbing. This is interesting. We know Goldman Sachs is already dipping their toes in crypto. They got a crypto trading desk. They've talked about doing things with tokenization and much more. So let me give you the details here. Goldman Sachs is putting one of its largest treasury funds within reach of digital asset firms without creating a tokenized version of it. The bank's roughly $100 billion treasury fund, FTIXX, is getting a new distribution channel aimed at institutional crypto firms. The fund will be offered through LINQ, a settlement network used by digital asset companies with trades handled by SEC-registered broker-dealer TZero Securities. I actually interviewed someone from TZero Securities earlier this year. So, it is the first outside fund offered on LINQ, which previously had just one investment product on the network. It also takes a different route from much of Wall Street's push into blockchain-based funds. BlackRock built Biddle as a tokenized fund, while Franklin Templeton offers tokenized shares of its money market fund through Benji. Goldman Sachs FTIXX remains the same traditional fund with LINQ giving digital asset firms another place to access it.