BizwavemediaPersonal Finance and Crypto Updates

The total stablecoin supply has crossed the $300 billion mark in 2025. The gains are flowing almost entirely to the players who were already winning, while the much-hyped wave of bank-issued and regulatory-compliant newcomers is barely registering on the scoreboard.

Tether’s USDT remains the undisputed heavyweight, commanding roughly 58% of the entire stablecoin market. That translates to a supply figure approaching $190 billion, according to DeFiLlama’s latest data. For context, the entire stablecoin market sat around $205 billion earlier this year, meaning USDT alone is now worth nearly as much as the whole sector was just months ago.

The $100 billion surge and who captured it

The stablecoin market has added nearly $100 billion in supply over the course of 2025. Banks and fintech firms have rushed to launch stablecoins designed to comply with the GENIUS Act framework, hoping that regulatory legitimacy would be their competitive edge. The newcomers have had a harder start than many expected, failing to peel meaningful market share away from USDT or Circle’s USDC.

The World Economic Forum has recognized stablecoins as integral to transactions valued in the trillions of dollars, with a projected market cap of around $300 billion by 2026. The market hit that number ahead of schedule, reflecting the velocity of adoption in trading, settlement, and on-chain payments.

Why the GENIUS Act hasn’t been a great equalizer

The GENIUS Act was supposed to create a clear regulatory pathway that would let traditional financial institutions compete on a level playing field with crypto-native issuers. Trust in the stablecoin world is measured in liquidity depth on exchanges, in the number of trading pairs denominated in your token, and in how many DeFi protocols accept your stablecoin as collateral. USDT has spent years building that kind of structural trust. A bank-issued stablecoin launching in 2025 is essentially starting from zero on all of those dimensions.

USDC, the second-largest stablecoin issued by Circle, has carved out its own niche by leaning into transparency and US regulatory compliance. But even USDC hasn’t been able to close the gap with Tether in any meaningful way.

What this means for investors

Stablecoin growth has historically correlated with increased trading activity and capital inflows into digital assets. For Tether specifically, USDT’s market share has proven remarkably sticky despite years of scrutiny over its reserves and transparency practices. If incumbents continue capturing essentially all of the market’s growth, it suggests that the stablecoin market may be settling into a durable oligopoly structure, with USDT and USDC together accounting for the vast majority of all stablecoin supply.

Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan said Hyperliquid should be viewed less as a crypto app and more as a super app targeting the broader global asset market.

Hyperliquid is not a crypto app. It’s a super app.

It’s not targeting the $3 trillion crypto economy. It’s targeting the $600 trillion global asset market.

Investors are valuing it as one thing. It’s the other. https://t.co/DTdYf7FpGb

— Matt Hougan (@Matt_Hougan) May 19, 2026

In a Tuesday post on X, Hougan said Hyperliquid is not targeting the $3 trillion crypto economy but the roughly $600 trillion global asset market. He added that investors are valuing the project as one category when it belongs in another.

The comments come as institutional access to Hyperliquid expands through newly launched exchange-traded products. Bitwise debuted its Hyperliquid ETF on the NYSE last Friday, while 21Shares launched its own Hyperliquid ETF last week on Nasdaq.

According to SoSoValue data, Hyperliquid ETF products had surpassed $11 million in total net inflows, more than $18 million in total net assets, and over $12 million in trading volume as of Monday.

The broader Hyperliquid thesis also gained support last week after Coinbase announced it had become the official treasury deployer of USDC as an Aligned Quote Asset on Hyperliquid. Coinbase said the move expands support for onchain markets and strengthens USDC’s role as the preferred stablecoin for onchain capital markets.

That momentum is arriving as regulators appear to be warming to tokenized securities. A Bloomberg report said Monday that the SEC is preparing an innovation exemption that could allow trading of tokenized versions of stocks on crypto platforms.

The potential framework would be significant for Hyperliquid’s HIP 3 markets, where independent issuers have begun launching perpetual futures tied to stocks, commodities, and private company listings.

Those markets have already started influencing price discovery around major listings. During last week’s Cerebras IPO, traders watched Hyperliquid-linked pre-IPO perps to gauge where the stock could open.

The same dynamic is emerging around SpaceX, where a pre-IPO market tied to the company has gained traction on Hyperliquid with more than $15 million in volume and over $30 million in open interest at press time.

HYPE rallied more than 7% on Monday as traders reacted to the tokenized stock report and continued growth in Hyperliquid’s pre-IPO markets. Coinbase’s USDC announcement also helped lift the token last week. HYPE was last trading near $48, its highest level since late October 2025, according to CoinGecko data.

Bitcoin miners have spent years being valued on a single metric: how much hash rate they control. Bernstein thinks that framework is outdated. The firm sees miners sitting on something far more valuable than the ability to solve cryptographic puzzles, namely the power infrastructure that AI companies are desperately scrambling to secure.

The thesis centers on an estimated $90 billion wave of AI infrastructure investment. Miners who locked down grid capacity and built out high-density cooling systems for their rigs are now positioned to rent that exact same infrastructure to hyperscalers and AI firms willing to pay a premium for it.

The picks and the logic

Bernstein issued Outperform ratings on four names: IREN, Riot Platforms, CleanSpark, and Core Scientific. Among those, IREN got the spotlight treatment as the firm’s top pick, with a price target of $75.

These companies already control what’s hardest to get in today’s AI arms race: permitted sites, energized substations, and cooling capable of handling dense GPU clusters.

Core Scientific already demonstrated this model when it struck a multi-billion-dollar deal with CoreWeave to host AI workloads at its facilities. That agreement essentially served as proof of concept for the entire sector, showing that the colocation playbook could work for miners willing to diversify their revenue streams.

Why miners, specifically

Bernstein’s framing redefines these companies. Instead of viewing them purely as digital-asset producers whose fortunes rise and fall with Bitcoin’s price, the firm is positioning them as energy-infrastructure businesses. That’s a meaningful distinction because it implies a more stable, recurring revenue base from long-term AI hosting contracts, layered on top of whatever Bitcoin mining continues to generate.

In the US, connecting a new large-load facility to the electrical grid involves utility approval timelines that can stretch for years. Miners who already completed that process own a resource that money alone can’t buy quickly.

Execution risk is real

Not every miner with a substation and some fans is going to successfully pivot into an AI infrastructure company. The transition requires substantial capital expenditure. GPU-ready data centers need different networking, different power distribution, and different cooling architectures than ASIC mining rigs.

Bernstein’s call acknowledges this variability. Not all four companies are at the same stage of readiness, and execution success will differ across the sector. IREN’s position as the top pick suggests the firm sees it as furthest along in bridging that gap, but the $75 price target still represents a bet on future delivery rather than current results.

For investors watching this space, the key metric to track isn’t hash rate anymore. It’s contracted megawatts allocated to AI versus mining, the credit quality of hosting counterparties, and the capital required to retrofit existing sites.

Redis, the company synonymous with the caching layer that prevented web applications from buckling under traffic, is making a sharp pivot deeper into AI infrastructure. On Monday, it launched Iris, a context and memory platform purpose-built for AI agents, targeting what it sees as a fundamental mismatch between how agents consume data and how most retrieval systems were designed to serve it.

The core thesis is straightforward: AI agents make orders of magnitude more data requests than human users, but most retrieval pipelines were built for the human-scale problem. Iris is Redis’ attempt to close that gap before it becomes the bottleneck that stalls enterprise AI adoption.

What Iris actually does

LLMs are inherently stateless. Every interaction starts from scratch unless something external provides continuity. That external something is what Iris is designed to be.

The platform sits between an AI agent and the data it needs to act. It consolidates three capabilities that enterprises have typically had to stitch together from separate tools: a Context Retriever, Agent Memory, and Data Integration.

The Context Retriever handles real-time data fetching, pulling in both structured and unstructured information so an agent can ground its responses in current facts rather than whatever its training data happened to include. Agent Memory provides both short-term and long-term persistence, meaning an agent can recall what happened in prior sessions, track evolving user preferences, or maintain state across multi-step workflows. The Data Integration layer, which Redis calls RDI, acts as a real-time data loader that keeps the underlying information fresh.

Why this matters for AI infrastructure

Iris also arrives alongside a new Flex SSD-based version of Redis, which suggests the company is thinking about cost efficiency alongside performance. Running everything in-memory is fast but expensive. An SSD tier could make it feasible for enterprises to maintain larger context windows and longer agent memories without blowing up their infrastructure budgets.

Solana has now led every other blockchain, Layer 1 and Layer 2 combined, in tokenized stock trading volume for 50 consecutive weeks.

The chain’s dominance in tokenized stocks is, for all practical purposes, the dominance of a single product.

The xStocks effect

Backed Finance launched its xStocks platform on June 30, and the impact was immediate. Since that launch, Solana has captured over 95% of all tokenized stock trading volume happening on-chain. Not 95% of Solana-native volume. 95% of the entire market across every blockchain.

The platform currently offers 60 tokenized assets, split between 55 individual stocks and 5 ETFs. These are on-chain representations of traditional equities, meaning traders can buy and sell synthetic versions of popular stocks without leaving the blockchain ecosystem.

Over the past 30 days, tokenized stock trading volume has exceeded $70 million. Daily volumes have fluctuated between $570K and $6.1M.

Why Solana, and does it matter?

Solana’s technical architecture gives it natural advantages for something like tokenized stock trading. Fast finality, low transaction costs, and high throughput make it practical to execute the kind of frequent, smaller trades that retail users tend to favor.

It’s worth noting that tokenized stock products face a different regulatory calculus than, say, tokenized US Treasuries. Securities laws in most jurisdictions are clear about who can offer stock-like products and under what conditions. The long-term viability of platforms like xStocks will depend heavily on how regulators choose to engage with them.

What this means for investors

When 95% of a market’s volume comes from a single platform, you’re not really looking at a market. You’re looking at a product. If xStocks were to face a regulatory challenge, a technical failure, or simply lose user interest, Solana’s tokenized stock dominance would evaporate overnight.

Liquidity is the most immediate concern. Daily volumes swinging from $570K to $6.1M suggest that on many days, executing larger trades could be difficult without meaningful price impact.

Hedge funds now have 19% of their equity market exposure parked in semiconductor stocks. That is the highest allocation on record, and prior semiconductor exposure levels hovered around 7.5%. The current figure represents more than a doubling of conviction in a single sector.

From panic selling to record buying

In late March 2025, hedge funds were dumping global technology stocks at the fastest clip in six months. The semiconductor sector bore the brunt of that selling pressure, with US tech stocks accounting for roughly 75% of global net selling during the downturn.

Nvidia, AMD, and Tesla were among the most popular short targets during that stretch.

Why semiconductors, and why now

TSMC holds a commanding position in advanced chip manufacturing, producing the most sophisticated processors that power AI workloads globally. SK Hynix controls a dominant share of the high-bandwidth memory market, which has become the bottleneck component in AI data center buildouts.

Asia has become a critical theater for hedge fund semiconductor trades, with vehicles like the Global X Asia Semiconductor ETF serving as popular instruments for gaining exposure to the region’s chip ecosystem. The supply chain for advanced semiconductors runs overwhelmingly through Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan.

What this means for investors

A 19% allocation to a single sector is an enormous concentration bet. The same managers who just pushed semiconductor exposure to record highs were shorting Nvidia and AMD barely a month earlier.

A jump from roughly 7.5% to 19% means capital was pulled from other sectors. Any shock to the AI narrative, whether from regulatory action, a demand slowdown, or geopolitical disruption to Asian supply chains, would ripple through hedge fund portfolios with outsized force.

Goldman Sachs just told us exactly what it thinks about the altcoin ETF experiment. The answer, based on its latest regulatory filing, is “no thanks.”

The bank’s Q1 2026 Form 13F shows a complete liquidation of all XRP and Solana-related ETF positions, holdings that had collectively peaked at roughly $154 million in Q4 2025. Meanwhile, Goldman kept its Bitcoin ETF allocation largely intact at around $700 million, maintaining positions in funds run by BlackRock and Fidelity.

The altcoin exit

Goldman’s XRP ETF holdings went from $154 million combined with Solana to exactly zero. Not reduced. Not trimmed. Liquidated.

Ethereum didn’t fare much better. The bank slashed its ETH ETF exposure by approximately 70%, leaving a $114 million stake where a much larger position once sat.

These liquidations happened during a period when XRP and Solana ETFs were still relatively new products, having only launched in late 2025.

Bitcoin stays, and it’s not even close

Goldman’s Bitcoin ETF exposure sits between $715 million and $720 million, representing only about a 10% reduction from prior levels.

The contrast is striking. Bitcoin gets a gentle trim. Ethereum gets cut by 70%. XRP and Solana get zeroed out entirely.

The equity play tells the rest of the story

Goldman boosted its stake in Circle by 249% and its position in Galaxy Digital by 205%. Coinbase also received increased investment.

Circle issues USDC, the stablecoin that underpins huge swaths of DeFi and institutional settlement. Galaxy Digital operates across trading, asset management, and mining. Coinbase is the largest US-based exchange.

The 249% increase in Circle is particularly notable given the stablecoin regulatory landscape. As governments worldwide move to formalize stablecoin frameworks, Circle’s USDC is positioned as the compliant, institutionally friendly option.

The Ethereum reduction is perhaps the most interesting signal. A 70% cut from Goldman suggests that even Ethereum’s institutional thesis is weakening relative to Bitcoin. If this becomes a pattern across other major institutions’ upcoming 13F filings, the liquidity dynamics for altcoin ETFs could shift meaningfully, as products need assets under management to survive.