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This week Simon Taylor & Pet Berisha are joined by:

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ICE and Trade[XYZ] plan a U.S. market for 24/7 perpetual futures built on Hyperliquid, subject to CFTC approval. Trade[XYZ] reports over $650 billion in existing-market volume in just over a year.

Pet Berisha noted that 19 months earlier, Hyperliquid had delisted JELLYJELLY, a meme coin, after a squeeze on a $6 million short. People were calling the venue “13 dudes in a spreadsheet.” His question was how it got from there to an ICE deal.

Charlie You distinguishes Hyperliquid’s technology from the markets built on it. Under the agreement, ICE would operate the regulated markets and Trade[XYZ] would design the contracts, so responsibility for what gets listed sits with them rather than Hyperliquid. Chuk Okpalugo expects separate U.S. books for regulatory reasons, so liquidity has to be rebuilt with regulated participants. For Chuk, this year’s regulatory alignment creates an opening after years of offshore perps trading, and ICE brings the capital, brand and futures brokers to distribute them. Charlie expects 24/7 trading to push CME and other futures exchanges into round-the-clock markets.

Google Cloud is developing MPC-based crypto custody technology for financial institutions. The service is in private preview, with commercial availability planned for early 2027.

For banks already using Google, Charlie sees a way to add digital-asset infrastructure without putting another security-sensitive vendor through procurement. Simon places that opportunity within banks’ wider migration of core systems to the cloud, which he sees as Google’s way through procurement.

That procurement advantage doesn’t settle Simon’s concern about resilience. On 20 October, a power failure in Google Cloud’s London region disrupted Revolut’s cards, transfers and app sign-in for hours. For Simon, an existing relationship can make infrastructure easier to buy without establishing that it’s the safest choice.

SoFi is rolling out SOFIE, its tokenized bank deposit, to U.S. SoFi Crypto members through November. It offers a variable 4.40% APY, as of 20 October, and converts one-for-one into SoFiUSD. Eligible SOFIE deposits carry FDIC protection within standard limits; SoFiUSD does not.

Simon sees the pairing as a model other banks could copy. SoFi can continue attracting deposits to fund lending while giving customers access to stablecoin transfers beyond the bank’s own systems.

For Charlie, the adoption opportunity sits with customers who already use SoFi as their primary bank but aren’t crypto users. Loan refinancing and savings have brought them into the app; stablecoins would reach them through a banking relationship they already trust. Charlie’s attempt to settle up with a friend ran into Venmo and Zelle limits, then a $25 wire fee, before he resorted to begging for stablecoins.

Chuk sees more immediate value in learning from a production deployment and presumes same-ledger swaps bring efficiencies customers won’t see. Pet’s adoption concern comes before the first payment, because customers outside crypto need a reason to hold stablecoin balances in the first place.

Yield-seeking deposits would demonstrate demand for SOFIE. Repeat payments beyond SoFi would provide stronger evidence for Charlie’s broader stablecoin-adoption case.

HSBC launched RedCoin, a Hong Kong dollar stablecoin, inside its PayMe app on 23 October, with wallet activation over subsequent days for PayMe’s roughly 3.3 million users and access to more than 100,000 merchants, per HSBC.

Chuk’s objection is a single-validator deployment confined to PayMe and separate from existing HSBC accounts, although he credits the learning involved. Simon recalls Cash App and Robinhood’s closed-loop Bitcoin beginnings and suspects PayMe’s separate modern infrastructure could support wider HSBC deployment.

Asked about non-dollar demand, Charlie says the data shows dollar stablecoins gaining share, while euro stablecoins fell from roughly 1% or 2% at their peak to tens of basis points. He treats RedCoin as a local payments experiment.

HSBC says wholesale, corporate and institutional uses come next.

For Chuk, SoFi and HSBC illustrate a sequence of commercial choices.

Simon’s test is the yield. A branded coin could work like a deposit, letting a platform collect yield as a quasi narrow bank. If an existing stablecoin passes that yield through instead, he sees little reason to put your own name on it.

Chuk wants to stop checking whether a friend can receive ACH before paying them, and credits Cash App with getting closest.

If interoperability gets solved, Chuk’s logic leaves platforms able to earn yield without their own coin, while consumer firms weigh a branding payoff they can’t yet measure.

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