Wall Street is moving onchain. The question for broker-dealers isn’t whether the rails will change. It’s what they’ll own when they do. Execution. Custody. Settlement. Distribution. Customer access. The onchain opportunity is growing:

This week, the Division of Trading and Markets staff issued a statement and is interested in your comment regarding the affiliation between registered national securities exchanges trading security futures and introducing broker-dealers. To learn more:

Ripple's RLUSD is coming to Coinbase! @Coinbase is listing @Ripple’s $RLUSD stablecoin on its retail application, order book network, and Coinbase Prime custody platform. This will enable users to convert USD to any USD-backed stablecoins 1:1. This listing enables multi-chain clearing on @XRP Ledger, @Ethereum, and @Base. Ripple will also add balance sheet liquidity on Base to increase on-chain market depth and liquidity. This partnership allows RLUSD to be listed on one of the largest US-regulated institutional broker-dealers, with a circulating supply of $2.4 billion.

Ondo Finance tokenized stocks land on Jumper across four chains More than 450 tokenized US stocks and ETFs from @Ondo are now live on @jumperapp, the cross-chain trading app launched by @lifiprotocol. Users can access them on Ethereum, Solana, BNB Chain, and HyperEVM. Each token is backed by real shares held with US-registered broker-dealers. LIFI first opened Ondo’s stocks to its partner apps in June.

The SEC’s Regulation Crypto Assets will create needed pathways for digital securities primary issuance, but regulated secondary markets will remain impossible without the agency rescinding Rule 611, the Order Protection Rule. More on this rule and its relevance to crypto: Rule 611 under SEC Regulation NMS prevents any venue for US equities or equity options from matching trades at a worse price than a protected quote on another venue. A protected quote is a round-lot firm order at top-of-book on a lit national securities exchange. Before 611 was established, floor brokers with access to quotations on multiple exchanges could provide inferior pricing to clients. The rule accelerated the migration to fully automated execution and led to today’s competitive ecosystem of 17 lit equities exchanges, 18 lit options exchanges, and over 80 darkpool ATSs and single dealer platforms. Major market participants have grown more critical of 611 in recent years. To comply with order routing rules, exchanges and broker-dealers pay market data and connectivity fees to the growing list of NMS exchanges. Large orders that can’t be filled on one exchange get broken up slowly and suffer price impact before routing is complete. The protections are less needed in an environment where HFTs already maintain price equilibria between exchanges through arbitrage. The new proposal for SEC Regulation Crypto Assets would create a safe harbor for primary issuance of digital securities, but doesn’t address how secondary markets can develop in light of the Order Protection Rule. An ATS or on-chain venue listing a token could not comply with the rule without NMS venues listing the asset, establishing a canonical NBBO, and facilitating on/off-chain hybrid routing. The SEC proposed rescinding the Order Protection Rule in June. Doing so would provide a clearer path for digital securities trading, but introduce significant disruption and unknown impact on equity and equity options markets.

The Clarity Act. The incompetence of DC will not stop innovation. Next time you hear Senators complain about the rules, remember they had a chance to set them and true to form they could not achieve a consensus to put the USA on the front foot. Now regulators will set the rules of the game. The SEC is about to flip the script: crypto tokens will no longer be treated as securities once a project becomes decentralized. This "Regulation Crypto" overhaul includes a four-year safe harbor and allows startups to raise $75M without full registration. SEC plans crypto rule changes for exchanges and broker dealers in 2026 regulatory agenda

Spent some time at the @Bloomberg @crypto studio talking about what comes next for tokenized US stocks. I’ll be sharing a few clips on @Bitget Stock 2.0, 24/7 liquidity, market makers, and whether crypto exchanges could become the next generation of broker-dealers Stay tuned.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The podcast is Odds on Open (21.8K subscribers), a show devoted entirely to hedge funds and quant trading. The host says they narrowed to that niche about 14 months ago and it is now the top-ranked hedge fund podcast. This 56-minute episode, posted October 1, features Yoshi Yokokawa. Yoshi is co-founder and CEO of Alpaca, and a former Lehman Brothers trader. He grew up between Japan and the US. At 11 or 12 he failed Japan's junior high entrance exam, an experience he describes as the defining trauma of his life: told that failing meant his life was over, he concluded he could never win the conventional game and would have to survive on shortcuts and asymmetric paths ever since. He moved to the US in 10th grade, later went through Y Combinator, and founded Alpaca out of a specific frustration: in 2018 there was no usable one-click trading API, and just obtaining API documentation required application paperwork, which he saw as manufactured exclusivity. Alpaca now runs two businesses: (1) brokerage infrastructure sold B2B2C, with hundreds of institutions and broker-dealers across 50 countries building investing apps on its rails; and (2) a direct API that lets individuals deploy their own capital programmatically. The company also provides the custody layer underneath tokenized equities issued by firms like xStocks and Kraken. His stated mission is open financial services for everyone on the planet, driven by his own experience of being locked out of US apps like Robinhood and Spotify while living in Japan. The episode's headline claim, and the video's title: "AI and agents will not give you edge." Below is where the actual signal is. 1. ON ALPHA: EDGE IS CREATED, NOT FOUND, AND EXECUTION IS THE SECOND HALF Asked directly whether edge exists for a retail quant in modern liquid markets, Yoshi's answer: "Yes, when you create one." His framing is that retail vs pro is the wrong categorization. People on Alpaca's platform do find edges and keep making money with them. The edge exists when you create it; if you cannot create it, you don't have one. But he immediately adds the part most people skip: having an edge does not mean you will be successful. Having an edge is step one. Step two is executing and following through on it, and that is a completely different skill set. Human behavior does not change: greed and fear are permanent. Some people will never succeed even with an amazing edge because they cannot bring themselves to execute it. He describes disciplined execution as an extreme profession in itself, using a boxing analogy borrowed from Ben Horowitz's writing: holding a fighting stance is deeply unnatural for a human animal, and so is continuing to execute a strategy through a stretch where it statistically should work but isn't. "The odds may [be the] same as gambling, right? You believe in the statistics, logically it should work, but most of the life it doesn't, it may come back, but who knows. That's so unnatural." The pattern he sees among the retail systematic traders who actually survive on Alpaca's platform: they run agents that execute repetitively, and when market dynamics change they fully stop trading, pause, improve or fine-tune for the new regime, and come back. Regime awareness plus the discipline to stand down is the differentiator, not the model. 2. AI'S REAL ROLE: COMPRESSION OF R&D, NOT CREATION OF ALPHA This is the nuance behind the provocative title. Yoshi is not saying AI is useless in trading. He says LLMs hugely reduce the resources and time required for the trial-and-error R&D process of hunting for edge: coding, optimization, constant fine-tuning as market trends change. Automating that means you can run far more iterations. The path to finding an edge gets shorter. What AI does not do is hand you the edge. "It's not going to be okay if I use AI and agents I can find an edge." The framing he recommends: use AI to shorten the iteration cycle so you can do more trial and error and arrive at better edges yourself. This is also his answer to the obvious challenge: if AI grants no edge, why are Jane Street, Citadel Securities, and the pod shops spending exorbitant sums on compute and data centers? Because they are already professionals at executing. They create the intelligence, the agents, the rules, and the edge-finding process, and they operate with tight discipline. Compute amplifies an existing execution machine; it does not conjure one. Amateurs, in his view, mostly cannot execute with that discipline at all. Investment translation: be deeply skeptical of "AI hedge fund" as a standalone pitch. The alpha was never in the model weights. It is in the research process that generates the edge and the operational discipline that extracts it. 3. THE DATA POINT: RETAIL SYSTEMATIZATION IS EXPLODING WHETHER OR NOT EDGE IS DEMOCRATIZED Alpaca's monthly active developers grew from roughly 20,000 to over 80,000 in six months, a 4x. Yoshi calls it explosive. Geographically it is still concentrated in the US, partly because entity formation is frictionless there. Entity account openings are rising fast, which is blurring the retail vs institutional distinction: one person spinning up an LLC through Stripe Atlas shows up as an institutional entity account. His read on the cultural driver: money-making and job creation are becoming radically individualized (YouTubers, TikTokers, agents), and trading is the purest expression of it. The host adds the Korea example: strong job security plus unreachable housing prices makes punting nearly a free option, which is why Korean retail volume is structurally high. Yoshi counters with the classic Mrs. Watanabe story: Japanese housewives trading dollar-yen on massive leverage once moved the market. The distinction that matters: Korea-style growth is mostly click-to-trade retail volume. The automated/systematic cohort is a different and newer phenomenon, and it is the one growing 4x in six months on Alpaca. 4. STRUCTURAL: THE COMING WAVE OF MICRO-FUNDS Yoshi tracks Y Combinator batches as an alumnus. Eighteen months ago he never saw hedge fund startups apply. Now every batch has AI hedge funds. The definition is blurring (is money from friends and family a hedge fund?), but the direction is clear: the cost of running an institution, custodians, support systems, infrastructure, is collapsing toward zero, so the number of entities calling themselves funds will be far larger in ten years. For markets, that means two things. First, fee and distribution pressure on traditional asset managers from below. Second, a coming wave of small, fast-iterating quant capacity, which means more crowded short-horizon trades and faster decay of simple edges. The moat shifts further toward execution infrastructure and regime discipline, which circles back to his core thesis. He also notes the forward infrastructure implication: if solo operators and agents proliferate, every financial service needs an agent-ready layer (APIs, MCP interfaces). His conversation with Vlad of Robinhood touched on exactly this. B2C trading apps will need agentic layers because the user base is becoming one-person businesses. 5. TOKENIZED EQUITIES: THE QUIET CUSTODY PLAY Alpaca is not distributing tokenized stocks. It provides the custody of the underlying securities that firms like xStocks, Kraken, and Binance tokenize. Pure infrastructure positioning: "we don't plan to compete with anyone... like air or water or gas. It should be like utility." Whether or not the tokenized equity narrative sustains, the custody and brokerage rails are being built now, and Alpaca is placing itself one layer below the competition, the same AWS-style logic as the rest of the business. 6. ON CAREER DEFENSIBILITY (LESS TRADABLE, STILL INTERESTING) Asked what skill sets survive model commoditization, Yoshi rejects the premise and goes one level deeper: ask what the objective is before optimizing the career. His own answer: do what you feel is right, not what you think is right. "Enjoy" is a trap word; the test is whether you find it genuinely, curiously funny, because only then will you do it for the thousands of hours required to become the expert without burning out. Longevity in one domain is itself the edge. The host's counter, which Yoshi half-accepts: defensibility helps you sleep at night. Yoshi's closing line, informed by starting his career at Lehman: "nothing is going to last forever... embrace risk, embrace uncertainty and relax," because once that becomes routine, it becomes normal life. CAVEATS Yoshi sells brokerage infrastructure, so "more participants, more trading, execution is everything" is also his sales pitch. The 80K developer figure is self-reported and unaudited. And the "AI grants no edge" thesis is conveniently flattering to an API business whose customers are humans hunting edge. Discount accordingly, but the core logic survives the discount: in the transcript he repeatedly argues against his own commercial interest in AI hype, which is worth something.

Bitcoin Capitalism — my keynote from @BTCPrague 2026. Digital Capital is the foundation for Digital Credit, Digital Money, Digital Yield, Digital Equity, and a universe of Bitcoin-backed products and services. Timestamps: 01:37 - The Four Bitcoin Ideologies and the case for Bitcoin Capitalism 03:29 - Bitcoin as Digital Capital: thousand-year capital with a half-life of infinity 06:12 - Bitcoin network snapshot and ~68% dominance 07:41 - What is money? The Austrian view, the conventional investor view, and “Bitcoin is money, everything else is credit” 09:21 - Digital Money and Digital Credit: bitcoin-backed products for fiat-facing investors 11:28 - Digital Credit: an ~$11–12B asset class that was zero 12 months ago 14:54 - Bitcoin’s opportunity: $1T of bitcoin vs. $1,000T of global capital 15:43 - The 10-dimensional model for reaching stranded capital 16:44 - 1) Asset types: commodities, equities, credit, derivatives, real estate, money, and tokens 18:07 - 2) Capital functions: store of value, appreciation, income, collateral, and payments 19:29 - 3) Custody: self-custody, banks, custodians, broker-dealers, prime brokers, and exchanges 20:34 - 4) Jurisdictions: 664,000 legal and regulatory environments for capital 22:03 - 5) Distribution networks: banks, exchanges, payment networks, and $156T controlled by wealth advisors 23:13 - 6) Account forms: retirement accounts, brokerage accounts, insurance policies, treasuries, and trusts 24:51 - 7) Risk: market, currency, duration, regulatory, credit, technical, security, theft, and counterparty risk 26:03 - 8) Liquidity: transforming $350T of illiquid capital with liquid digital assets 28:02 - 9) Investors: banks control ~$200T and need compliant bitcoin-backed products 30:09 - 10) Product characteristics: fixed rate, floating rate, leverage, callability, fees, and structure 30:45 - The 10x10 matrix for channeling global capital into Bitcoin 31:19 - How $10–20T of capital could expand Bitcoin into a $100T network, moving from $70K to $700K to $7M per bitcoin 32:10 - Bitcoin Capitalism as a Darwinian market: winners, challengers, failures, and 1,400 companies tracked by Strategy 34:53 - Existing bitcoin-backed products: @Trezor, @Unchained, @Fidelity, @Fold_app, @Tando_me, @Relai_app, @CashApp, @HodlHodl, @AnchorWatch, @Meanwhile, $IBIT, $STRC, and $MSTR 40:03 - Digital Capital, Digital Credit, Digital Money, and Digital Yield competing with traditional capital markets 41:03 - Digital Money and Digital Yield: better stablecoins and higher-yield bitcoin-backed products 47:27 - 3 ways to participate: savers, investors, and innovators 49:19 - The aluminum airplane analogy: people buy the product, not the commodity underneath 52:29 - Build a ₿ridge to connect $BTC to the global capital markets 53:42 - 10,000 products, 10,000 needs, and 100,000 corporate efforts to change the world