The Drop #49

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🔥 Tokenized gold: a market ready to explode?

🟩 "Seeing Tether buy 25 tons of gold per quarter is not a systemic shock"

💰 Bitstack raises $15 million

📈 Ethereum achieves processing capacity comparable to Visa

🇪🇺 Brussels wants its European SEC

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🔥 Tokenized gold: a market ready to explode?

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Driven by a historic 50% surge in prices in 2025, gold tokenization is witnessing a battle between crypto giants Tether and Paxos, who dominate the market despite divergent transparency standards, against industrial players like Switzerland's MKS Pamp betting on vertical integration (refining and storage) to build credibility for their offering. While this digitization aims to transform the yellow metal into a stable "super-collateral" for decentralized finance (DeFi), it remains for now a niche solution: large institutional investors, who already have access to efficient gold lending markets, don't yet see it as a structural imperative, leaving blockchain to prove itself on industrial security and traceability. Read our investigation.

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🟩 Benjamin Louvet: "Seeing Tether buy 25 tons of gold per quarter is not a systemic shock"

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For Benjamin Louvet (Ofi Invest AM), gold's surge is explained not so much by geopolitics as by a structural breakdown of confidence in the dollar (freezing of Russian assets) and the unsustainability of U.S. debt, which forces the maintenance of low real interest rates. While emerging market central banks are massively accumulating the metal — with China likely holding double its official reserves — the expert downplays Tether's impact: its purchases of 25 tons per quarter support prices but don't constitute a systemic shock, as the stablecoin giant's holdings remain modest on a sovereign scale. As for tokenization, Benjamin Louvet considers it useful for private investors or DeFi, but superfluous for major institutions who already monetize their gold through gold lending, while remaining highly skeptical about Bitcoin integration into central bank reserves, which he paradoxically perceives as a risk of political capture of the asset. Read the interview.

💰 Bitstack raises $15 million

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French startup Bitstack reaches a major milestone in the convergence between traditional finance and digital assets by closing a $15 million Series A round, marked by the strategic entry of insurer AG2R La Mondiale into its capital. This partnership, which includes no exclusivity clause, validates the thesis of Bitcoin as a wealth diversification instrument and allows the institutional investor to reach a younger clientele. With €300 million in assets under management for 300,000 clients, Bitstack is using this capital to transform its model: beyond round-up savings, the company is targeting European expansion under the MiCA regime and transforming itself into a neo-bank (French IBAN, Visa card with cashback) to capture salary flows, with the long-term ambition of distributing loans backed by bitcoin without giving in to the temptation of diversifying into other crypto-assets. Read the interview with its CEO Alexandre Roubaud.

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📈 With Fusaka, Ethereum achieves processing capacity comparable to Visa

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Deployed on Wednesday, the "Fusaka" upgrade marks an industrial breakthrough for Ethereum, which now targets a theoretical capacity of 100,000 transactions per second, thus exceeding Visa network processing standards. By leveraging PeerDAS technology, which drastically optimizes data validation without saturating bandwidth, this infrastructure overhaul promises to reduce Layer 2 network costs by 40 to 60% while facilitating integration with mobile standards (FaceID). For investors, however, an immediate bullish shock on ETH's price should not be anticipated, given the absence of a new supply reduction mechanism; this is above all a long-term fundamental catalyst that, by neutralizing the speed advantage of competitors like Solana, reinforces Ethereum's status as a universal settlement layer for global finance. Read our analysis.

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🇪🇺 Brussels wants its European SEC

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Inspired by the American SEC model, the European Commission is pushing for a radical centralization of financial supervision by entrusting Esma with direct control of market infrastructures and, crucially, crypto platforms. This institutional crackdown aims to plug the gaps in the MiCA regulation, whose fragmented implementation has allowed certain jurisdictions like Malta to offer European passports to questionable players, much to the dismay of stricter regulators like the AMF. But this financial federalism is deeply divisive: while Paris sees it as the sine qua non condition for an efficient single market, Luxembourg and Germany are dragging their feet, fearing that Parisian hyper-centralization disconnected from local realities would stifle the competitiveness of their asset management industries, raising the question of Esma's operational capacity to absorb such a burden without prior internal reform.