There’s just boat loads of news and updates today about $ENA ( ▲ 4.17% )’s new Ethena Pay. 🚤

If you don’t know or you forgot, Ethena is a synthetic-dollar protocol built on $ETH ( ▼ 2.57% ). So, naturally, when it needed a blockchain to power its new global payment app, it chose $AVAX ( ▼ 0.33% ).

Which is kind of funny.

Ethena Pay lets users hold $USDE ( ▼ 0.03% ), earn up to 6%, send money, spend through Visa, and receive up to 5% cashback. Avalanche serves as the exclusive settlement layer for transfers, payments, and money movement underneath the app.

The irony here just gets better and better though.

Ethena built its synthetic dollar on Ethereum, spent years growing through Ethereum DeFi, then handed its consumer payment business to another network. For Ethena, the win is direct consumer distribution. USDe moves beyond exchanges, lending markets, and recursive yield machinery into something people can hold and spend.

For Avalanche, the win is larger. A major Ethereum-born protocol selected it exclusively for the part regular users may touch every day. 👍

Alkemya Metacore says it owns 7 million meters of 99.99% pure nickel wire valued at $1.64 billion, is stored under institutional custody in Switzerland, and they want to tokenize it. At the stated 0.025 mm diameter, that wire contains roughly 31 kilograms of nickel. That values it near $53.6 million per kilogram.

And to be clear, we’re not talking about tokenizing nickel itself but on the value of it’s yuge (not a typo) spool of nickel wire. They claim its value sits in the precision manufacturing, extreme purity, and potential use across defense, aerospace, semiconductors, hydrogen, and other expensive-sounding places, things, and stuffs.

Still. One hell of a spool.

Alkemya has secured $50 million and will sell additional ALKN tokens at $1 each through Bitfinex Securities. But token holders are not receiving little digital ownership slips for individual pieces of wire.

The tokens are issued by a Luxembourg partnership and provide access to a distribution waterfall: return of capital, a compounded 6% preferred return, then 80% of remaining profits.

The press release calls ALKN asset-backed. It does not clearly explain whether hodlers receive a direct lien, bankruptcy-protected claim, or liquidation rights over the nickel itself.

But, hey, I’d pay $1 to see that big spool of nickel. 💵

Dayum, Kraken is just going nuts lately. Kraken’s parent, Payward, is reportedly working on a deal that could bring $HYPE ( ▼ 2.93% )’s perpetual futures to the U.S. through Bitnomial (Payword bought them for $550 this year). 🤯

That would give American users regulated access to selected Hyperliquid markets, while handing Kraken a front-row seat to one of crypto’s largest offshore trading venues. Hyperliquid handles more than $4 billion in daily volume. Approval may still take 10-12 months. Regulators remain regulators. Calendars are their favorite product.

And Kraken already has another win developing in London.

Payward and the London Stock Exchange plan to tokenize the 100 largest London-listed companies as xStocks. Those assets would also trade around-the-clock on LSE 24. The firms will even explore native, issuer-sponsored equity tokens.

xStocks is big and getting bigger. It already has more than 200,000 holders, $40 billion in total volume, and nearly $20 billion settled on-chain. ⛓

August was a good month. $BTC ( ▼ 2.27% ) closed +25%, its strongest August since 2017 and its best month since November 2024. Forty-nine of the fifty-two other tickers I looked at closed green.

I pulled the historical monthly price action for fifty-three tickers and went looking for what the month did rather than what it looked like. And there were a lot of interesting stats/facts/observation - but three stood out.

$ZEC ( ▼ 4.17% ) closed August at 848.46. A year ago it closed at 40.34, so that's twenty-one times your money. Year to date it's +65.8%, having started January at 511.62.

Bitcoin over the same year: 108,297 down to 78,580. Off 27.4% YoY and 10.2% year to date.

August was Bitcoin's best month since November 2024 and its strongest August since 2017, which is why nobody's talking about the rest of it. The month is +25%.

Now, if you’re looking for fundamental reasons for Zcash’s outperformance, there’s a bunch you could pick from - but all of them are post initial pamp in late 2025. But most recent drive could be related to the new whole ‘the shielded pool might have been printing fake monies for years’ which turned out to be a nothing burger. 🍔

Not to a new high. Back to its own best monthly close. 😶

I ran all the tickers against their own record monthly close and tossed out the first three-ish or so months of listings from pre-2018 because of crazy untraded ranges. The result is a median gap of 1,208%. Twenty-eight of the 53 need more than a 10x. Five need more than 50x.

Worst of the bunch: $SAND ( ▼ 1.97% ) needs +17,686%. $EGLD ( ▲ 2.98% ) +9,571%. $HNT ( ▼ 8.43% ) +5,979%. $DOT ( ▲ 2.63% ) +4,993%. $APE ( ▲ 0.92% ) +4,807%.

A crypto I used to love but now it’s giving me the same feeling in my stomach as a whole sleeve of Oreo’s with milk at 0200, $SCRT ( ▼ 9.44% ), nominally needs +11,000%, but that one's a technicality worth knowing about. Governance voted on August 19 to mint 1.079 billion new tokens against an existing 362 million. The mint executed on the 21st, holders were diluted to a quarter of the network, and the money funds community operations now that SCRT Labs has stopped maintaining the chain.

Per-token price fell 66.7% in August.

49 of 53 closed August green. 25 of them are still more than 90% below their record close. $CRV ( ▲ 8.22% ) was up 62% and is 99% underwater. $MINA ( ▲ 5.32% ) up 64%, 98% underwater. 🌊

Equal-weight basket of all 52 alts: +27.2%. Bitcoin: +25.0%. 🤔

Median alt: +19.1%. 20 of 52 beat Bitcoin. 32 didn't.

Pull out the four biggest gainers - $HNT ( ▼ 8.43% ), ZEC, $STX ( ▲ 1.55% ), $MINA ( ▲ 5.32% ) - and the mean drops to +19.4%. The entire outperformance of a fifty-two coin group came from four of them.

Spread between best and worst was 319 points across thirty-one days. HNT +252.7% at one end, on a Texas network deal and a short squeeze that liquidated $1.6 million against $196,000 of longs.

September, for whatever it's worth: 306 completed ticker-Septembers sit in this dataset. 41% of them closed green, median -2.9%. 🔢

Twenty-one financial institutions, including $GS ( ▼ 1.8% ), $BAC ( ▲ 0.08% ), $C ( ▲ 0.7% ), and $DB ( ▼ 1.2% ), plan to launch a dollar stablecoin in 2027. The group also wants euro and other G7 versions, placing it against Qivalis, a separate 37-member consortium preparing its own euro stablecoin. 🤔

The problem is demand. Tether already has more than $180 billion circulating. Societe Generale launched a bank-backed dollar token last year and has managed just $12.5 million. That is less a financial revolution and more a car dealership.

Still, the stablecoin assembly line continues. Banks, exchanges, fintechs, governments, corporations, and the local bowling league all need one now. Have we reached peak stablecoin with dozens of issuers solving the problem of dollars being insufficiently dollar-shaped? 🤷

$ONT ( ▲ 2.42% ) scheduled Mainnet v3.1.2 to activate at block 20,800,000, estimated for August 21. The release included security optimizations and required every node operator to upgrade beforehand.

Ten days after that estimated date, Ontology stopped producing blocks at 20,770,893 - still 29,107 blocks short of activation. Then the explanation got worse. What began as a potential security concern became confirmed malicious activity. Ontology paused the Mainnet, froze every onchain transaction, and began preparing another network upgrade.

The team says user assets remain safu. Fair enough. They also cannot move, settle, bridge, or do anything normally associated with owning blockchain assets.

Ontology still has not explained the attack vector, the affected component(s), or whether the missed v3.1.2 activation is related. ⚠

Email me, Jonathan Morgan, feedback; I’d love to hear from you. 📧
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