🌐 PayPal to Allow Businesses to Transact in Cryptocurrencies

Sunday is here.

Welcome back to another newsletter from us at The Merge.

Tokenisation News

🌐 Paypal Allows Businesses to Buy, Hold and Sell in Cryptocurrencies increasing functionality to millions of accounts

⚱️ HSBC Trials Quantum Computing Tech for Tokenised Gold

🇭🇰 Hong Kong Launches Phase 2 of its Digital CBDC (e-HKD) with 11 more use cases

Read Time: 7 Minutes

Global Market Overview

Real World Assets on-chain (excl stablecoins) are worth $12.41b (↑0.47% from last month).

There are 63,272 Total Asset Holders (↑4.29% from last month).

• $172.63b is in Stablecoins

• $9.05b is within Private Credit

• $2.24b is in US Treasury Debt

• $1.03b is in Commodities

• $79.9m is in Global Bonds

• $7.27m is in Stocks

The top 3 networks are 🥇Ethereum ($90.8b in Total Value Locked) 🥈Tron ($62.6b in TVL) & 🥉Binance Smart Chain ($5.01b in TVL).

Fancy taking a look for yourself? Check it out here.

So, what’s being tokenised this week?

Private Credit

Currently, there is $9.05b in active value loans & $14.75b total loan value across all protocols.

As of today, the top 3 current protocols with outstanding loans are 🥇Figure ($8.4b)🥈Maple Finance ($263m) & 🥉Centrifuge ($152m)

Top stories this week?

✨Paypal Allows Businesses to Buy, Hold and Sell in Cryptocurrencies increasing functionality to millions of accounts.

It’s their latest step to increase cryptocurrency’s utility by making increased functionality available to millions of U.S. merchants.

PYUSD, which is their dollar-denominated stablecoin & issued by Paxos, has also recently been made available on the Solana blockchain.

Stablecoins

Currently, the market cap of stablecoins is $172.63b (↓1.82% from last month.)

As of today, it makes up 0.82% (↓1.82% from last month) of all M2 Money Supply with Monthly Transfer Volume totalling $1.43 trillion (↓19.18% from last month).

The top 3 current entities are 🥇Tether ($119.3b)🥈Circle ($36.4b) &🥉Binance ($4.3b).

Top stories this week?

🪙 Ethena Labs is Launching a Stablecoin Backed by BlackRock’s BUIDL

The company that aims to build a synthetic dollar that does not rely on existing banking infrastructure is partnering with Securitize to launch UStb.

This new stablecoin intends to invest its reserves in BlackRock’s BUIDL fund.

This follows from the original success of Ethena’s existing stablecoin, USDe, which solidified its position as the 5th largest with a circulating supply of over 2 billion dollars.

🇭🇰 Hong Kong Launches Phase 2 of its Digital CBDC (e-HKD)

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) is working with 21 financial institutions for central bank digital currency and tokenized deposit through 11 different use cases, renaming the project e-HKD+.

The second phase will focus on three main themes: (1) settlement of tokenised assets, (2) programmability and (3) offline payments.

This new phase of the project will operate in its sandbox and last about a year.

🏦Abu Dhabi Bank FAB successfully pilots JPM Coin being the first mover in the Middle East

Building upon the participation in JPM’s Coin Systems through Onyx, which is J.P. Morgan’s blockchain network which enables the exchange of digital assets - the successful pilot of programmable payments opens up the possibility of a dynamic and automated funding settlement solution between the pair.

Commodities

Currently, the market cap of commodities is $1.03b (↑7.31% from last month).

As of today, the Monthly Transfer Volume totals $123.08m (↓23.19% from last month) with 57.1k addresses that are current holders.

The top 3 current entities are 🥇Paxos ($508.8m)🥈Tether ($501m) &🥉Comtech Gold ($12.1m).

Top stories this week?

⚱️ HSBC Trials Quantum Technology for Tokenised Gold

Following on from its successes earlier this year making tokenised gold available to retail Hong Kong clients supporting fractionalised ownership, as well as late last year allowing trading of tokenised gold that is stored in its London vaults - HSBC has recently shared its work to secure gold through Quantinuum.

Although Quantum Computing is believed to be at least a decade away, there is a risk it could arrive a lot sooner which would leave banks’ cryptography vulnerable - with the Bank of International Settlements (BIS) launching Project Leap to investigate.

HSBC released a paper which outlines the quantum gold tokenisation trials.

Bonds

Currently, the total value of bonds is $79.91m (↑2.19% from last week).

As of today, the Average Yield to Maturity is 3.65% with 2.42 years in Weighted Average Maturity. There is a total of 300 Holders (↓6.67% from last week).

The top 3 current entities are 🥇Spiko ($57.99m)🥈 Backed Finance ($20.82m)🥉 OpenTrade ($1.10m).

Top stories this week?

🌠 HSBC has issued a HK$1 Billion Digital Bond using Orion DLT

This is the first digital note listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX) by a Hong Kong company, whilst also being the first English law digital bond issue in Hong Kong.

They used a similar setup to the sovereign $756 million digital bond issuance earlier this year also utilising HSBC Orion DLT - their digital asset platform for tokenisation.

Stocks

Currently, the total value of stocks is $7.27m (↑17.52% from last month).

As of today, the Monthly Transfer Volume totals $502.8k (↓66.1% from last month) with 105 Active Addresses and 783 Current Holders.

The top 3 current entities are 🥇Coinbase Global ($3.81m)🥈iShares Core S&P 500 ($1.61m) &🥉Nvidia ($1.29m).

Top stories this week?

🍀 Plume Network to Tokenise $1.25 Billion of Solar Farms and Credit

Plume Network has announced plans to tokenise about $1.25 billion worth of real-world assets, and in the process, offer holders a chance to earn yield, the company said in a statement.

The goal is to tokenize assets including "solar farms, private credit, Medicaid-backed invoices, [and] mineral rights"

This will include: $500 million worth of private credit fund Credbull, $300 million of Plural Energy solar farms, some oil and gas mineral rights and $120 million worth of Medicaid claims.

Weekly Resource List

🌐 RWA.xyz: On-Chain RWA Analytics

Explore tokenised real-world assets and the investors, issuers and service providers participating in public blockchains. View protocol statistics, industry aggregate metrics, and the issuers all in one place (link)

🔎 Santiment: Crypto Intelligence Tool

A behaviour analytics platform for crypto, sourcing on-chain, social and development information on thousands of coins, including market signals. For RWA’s insights check out this (link) 

💳 Coinbase Wallet: The Crypto Wallet of Choice

You’ve more than likely heard and probably used Coinbase, so no introduction is needed. This is by far one of the easiest and non-crypto native wallets to be picked up and used by anyone. They even have a ‘Simple Mode’ for beginners. (link) 

As always, thanks for reading.

Hit reply and let us know what you found most helpful this week —we’d love to hear from you.

See you next Sunday,

Merge