If you're reading this and still haven't signed up, click the subscribe button below!

This week our hosts Simon Taylor & Cuy Sheffield are joined by:

🎙️ Listen to the latest episode of Tokenized here.

📷 Watch on YouTube here.

Binance’s October 29 breach drained approximately $6.3 billion across ten blockchains. Simon Taylor cited roughly $2.85 billion frozen or intercepted, while the attacker retained more than 420,000 ETH and 18,270 BTC beyond stablecoin issuers’ freezing powers.

Cuy Sheffield, calling it Black October for the month’s run of exploits, saw the stablecoin freezes as in some ways a success. What issuers couldn’t freeze became every other exchange’s problem, because stolen ETH could pass through a hundred addresses in minutes before reaching them.

Pedro blamed the exchange’s security rather than the technology. Existing emerging-market users knew the risks, he said, but the next 100 million would be less forgiving. Reaching them requires institutional-grade security, segregated accounts and proof of reserves. Binance’s November 3 post-mortem traced the attack to a malware-laced coding test in a fake job interview, which is why both hosts flagged hiring as a security weakness.

Published October 29, Will Manidis and Joe Roberts’ The Commanding Heights argues that AI could generate demand for a global stablecoin dollar while displacing emerging-market labor. Its scenarios follow fictional workers in India and Argentina as AI reshapes outsourced employment.

Cuy found the essay too pessimistic and expects one-person freelance shops to grow. In his view, writing a brief, finding a freelancer and onboarding them costs more than a $1 task is worth, before traditional platforms’ payment costs enter the calculation. His proposed model pairs agents handling coordination with stablecoins making smaller cross-border payments economical.

Simon challenged whether the resulting payment model solves a problem existing products cannot.

Inference and tokens can already be bought with cards, Simon argued, so he favors stablecoins hidden behind cards or local-currency front ends. Pedro expects some freelance work to grow as Cuy describes, while agents take over other tasks. Because he sees emerging economies as more labor-intensive, he worries displacement will hurt them more.

Yellow Card, a stablecoin payments firm that has mostly operated in Africa, completed its acquisition of Brazilian virtual asset provider GoMoney in October, adding Brazilian collections and payouts, including Pix, alongside stablecoin settlement. GoMoney continues operating under Brazil’s transitional regime; full virtual-asset-service-provider authorization remains subject to central-bank review.

Pedro read the deal as validation that local payment legs still matter. Earlier, responding to the essay’s neo-dollar thesis, he argued that dollar earners must convert to local currency to spend and to satisfy regulators. His illustration sends a UPI payment from India across a blockchain middle mile to Pix in Brazil.

Pedro framed that flow as the goal the industry is working toward, rather than a live corridor. He also favors regulation, despite disagreement among peers, and praised Brazil for letting existing operators continue while authorization applications are reviewed.

That middle mile can also hide where a payment came from. Cuy recalled USDT transfers on Tron carrying Pix keys in memo fields. Participants handling a domestic leg may not know the payment began abroad, prompting Simon to point toward existing financial messaging standards.

For Simon, ISO 20022 already provides the sending and receiving currencies, the rail and the purpose. He doesn’t see why blockchains don’t support it by default. Those messages also need privacy, he stressed, because banks shouldn’t put client payment data on the public internet.

DTCC’s Tokenization Service went live October 28, allowing eligible firms to tokenize DTC-custodied U.S. securities. DTCC reported 20 signed participants. The service runs on Canton and DTCC’s private Besu network, with additional blockchain networks planned for 2027. Cuy welcomed the DTCC launch, while noting that Canton’s privacy makes adoption harder to measure through a public block explorer.

Asked whether tokenized assets matter for merchant treasuries, Pedro went straight to the cost of speed. Cross-border providers like dLocal pay out fast because they keep liquidity ready across the corridors they serve, often in local currency that needs hedging.

Pedro sees tokenized T-bills as a way to earn yield and convert assets faster, potentially putting posted collateral to work.

Cuy expects more AI-assisted breaches and wants security resourced like an offensive line. His one-year prediction is exponential growth in design demand as agents take on outsourced coding but struggle with taste. For Simon, international stablecoin payments are in their teething phase, and Brazil’s transitional rules for existing operators offer lessons for other regulators.

Thanks so much for reading the Tokenized Newsletter!

Please share this edition or share it with your colleagues if you enjoyed it!

Disclaimers