51 Insights – What's next in digital asset, AI and business.

Hey, it’s Marc One number stopped me this week: tokenized equities just hit an all-time high of $3.86B in monthly volume, up 145% in a month, while SOL, the chain settling 95% of it, trades at December 2023 prices. What strikes me most: Usage is exploding, and the value is flowing to the plumbing rather than the tokens. For ten years this industry priced tokens as the prize and licenses as overhea...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “If you gave people the choice between full reserve banking and fractional banking, they’d take full reserve banking in a minute.” The person building it is Scott Shay , who has founded four banks the traditional way, including Signature Bank , and created Signet, the first 24/7 payment system inside...

Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team, The Fed is hawkish, cheap money is gone, and ETH just printed its 2026 low. This is the part of the cycle where everything built on crypto is supposed to fold. Instead, look at the week: 140 companies, incl. Visa, Google, BlackRock, launched a shared stablecoin and knocked Circle down 16%. Robinhood, Securitize and Ondo put the stock market on-chain. And over in AI, P...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “Take it from somebody who spent 15,000 hours trying to kill Bitcoin.” Global debt now sits at roughly $350 trillion , propping up some $900 trillion of assets. By Jeff Booth’s math, it can never be repaid . Six years after The Price of Tomorrow predicted that technology-driven deflation would collid...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “Blockchain doesn’t solve all problems. It solves some problems really, really well.” JP Morgan has quietly moved $3T in cumulative notional value through its private blockchain, settles roughly $5B every day, and just became the largest global systemically important bank (G-SIB) to launch a tokenize...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “I’m not a fan of stablecoins being co-opted by the cards world. I’m not a fan of cards on the front end of stablecoins because then the stablecoin is just another account feeding the legacy beast. This is not the intended future.” Tony McLaughlin spent two decades at Citigroup as managing director o...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “Any asset that has annualized volatility four times greater than the stock market is not a safe haven asset. So we’re done right there.” I just spent an hour with Cam Harvey. Economist and Duke finance professor. He advises Man Group with $325B in AUM. His 1986 yield curve model has called every US...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ Brent Johnson has spent roughly 25 years in financial markets, and he has one of the cleanest frameworks afor thinking about the dollar. Back in 2018, when the "de-dollarization" narrative was just starting to simmer, he stepped onto the global stage with a theory that sounded almost arrogant at the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ In January 2026, Sidney Powell went on record with CoinDesk and said a high-profile on-chain credit default was coming. Three months later, Aave, one of the largest crypto lending platforms in the world, found itself sitting on up to $230M it might never get back, following the Kelp cascade. [ Read C...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ Robert Leshner is one of the rare founders who built one of DeFi’s defining protocols, Compound , in 2017 and then walked away from it to do something harder. His pitch was simple: The crypto-native market is capped at $2T. The real prize is the $700T of stocks, bonds, real estate, and private credit...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ In 2025, Eddie Fishman , a former State Department and Treasury official who helped design the sanctions against Russia after the 2014 annexation of Crimea , wrote the playbook on economic warfare, Chokepoints . It not only became a New York Times Bestseller, but a blueprint of what would follow. So...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ I watched the DTCC’s CTO go on stage and say one sentence that reframed everything I thought about blockchain scalability. He said it was real. The “it” was a live demo. 2 million transactions per second (that’s roughly 100,000 times Ethereum’s throughput). Running on a network of Raspberry Pis. Buil...

Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ The man who co-wrote HTTP/2, the protocol loading this page right now, just IPO’d a crypto bank. Priced at $18 in January, trading at ~$10 today. And he doesn’t care. Mike Belshe started BitGo in 2013 and spent 13 years doing the boring work nobody wanted to do: multi-sig wallets, cold storage, SOC audits, trust company licenses in seven jurisdictions. While every other crypto fi...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ An SEC Commissioner just apologized to the crypto industry. On the record. To us. “The regulatory approach made your lives a lot more difficult. I’ve talked to people who really were hurt. I do apologize for that.” That’s Hester Peirce, who spent eight years as the SEC’s lone crypto dissenter and now...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ We sat down with Michael Blaugrund , the man bridging the world’s most important equity market, the NYSE, on-chain. The platform goes live later in 2026. It’s the biggest change to capital market since electronic trading. “Irrespective of where crypto asset prices are, the infrastructure momentum at...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ There's a chart making the rounds right now. Gold at $5,400. Bitcoin at $66,000. One is at an all-time high. The other is down 47% from its October peak of ~$126,000. Same "store of value" thesis that the crypto community sold to investors over the last 5 years. Wildly different outcomes. We sat down...

Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ The world is broken. Trust in nearly all institutions is lost. The complex systems we rely on for our survival are daunting and unwieldy. We are in the dying stages of an 80-year monetary regime and debt supercycle. The conclusion is clear: the current system is unsustainable. The answer is decentralization. That’s Joseph Lubin , Co-founder of Ethereum and CEO of Consensys . Whil...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “The idea of general purpose blockchains or blockchains where all block space is worth the same is going to go away. Within a year, maybe two years, you can guarantee they’re pretty much identical. In that world, we recognized a need to differentiate ourselves again.” That’s Marc Boiron , the CEO of...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “Everyone has a boss. The central bank’s boss is a devil known as inflation. When inflation is tame, they can tune the economy and bail out the system. But when price pressure stays steady, the central bank gets constrained. That’s the environment crypto sits in today.” That’s Garrick Hileman , one o...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ "We think the space now moves to a growth phase where the underlying build-out is largely done and value really shifts to the applications that sit on top.” That’s Richard Galvin , Executive Chairman and Chief Investment Officer at Digital Asset Capital Management (DACM), describing the most compelli...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “Capitalism is the superior system broadly. But when left unchecked, it has a lot of problems. And the reason communism and socialism have become more popular is because most people in the world are not participating in the capitalist system.” That’s Yat Siu , Co-founder and Executive Chairman of Ani...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “The $400 trillion market is any asset that is recorded on an antiquated ledger... If we go to $2 trillion in the next five or 10 years, that would be a very good outcome for everybody.” That’s Carlos Domingo , CEO and co-founder of tokenization pioneer Securitize . And he clears up a big myth: “Toke...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “Zero is crazy because it means you’re just completely against the market... The starting point is about 2% of the size of the equity market and that should be the neutral starting point.” That’s Matt Hougan , CIO of Bitwise Asset Management , on Bitcoin allocation. His point isn’t that one needs to...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “Fiat needs to move 24/7. And that’s what blockchains are built for.” That’s Sveinn Valfells, co-founder of Monerium , one of Europe’s oldest and largest stablecoin players – and one of the few people in Europe who’s not just talking about on-chain finance but actually building the regulatory-complia...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.51insights.xyz Hi, it’s Marc. ✌️ “We’ve now got the single most powerful factor in all of investing that’s ever existed… Everything is tied to this debasement of currency.” That’s Raoul Pal , CEO of Real Vision and one of the most respected macro thinkers in the world, explaining why the entire financial system has converged on a si...