Digital Asset News host Rob analyses a $200B crypto market pullback and highlights tokenisation, AI, and Near Protocol
A solo presenter crypto market update covering a $200 billion market cap drop, AI industry economics, tokenisation developments, and Near Protocol.
Summary
Rob, host of Digital Asset News, opens with an analysis of a roughly $200 billion drop in total crypto market cap, from approximately $3 trillion down to $2.8 trillion, triggered by hotter-than-expected CPI and PPI data. He plays a clip from Arthur Hayes arguing that AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are structurally loss-making and will require a government bailout, which Hayes claims is ultimately bullish for Bitcoin — a thesis Rob partially agrees with but pushes back on, arguing that Bitcoin is not yet widely seen as a risk-off asset and would likely fall alongside traditional markets in a recession. Rob then pivots to his core investment thesis around payments, real-world asset tokenisation, and AI agent payments, highlighting a clip from Franklin Templeton's Christopher Perkins explaining how tokenised assets can compress multi-day settlement windows to hours or seconds, lowering both margin requirements and risk simultaneously. He covers DTCC's announcement of approximately $30 trillion in assets available for tokenisation via Canton Network and Stellar, while cautioning that the full figure will not arrive on-chain at once and the anticipated launch with Circle's Arc is set for 2027. He closes with an extended look at Near Protocol, citing its post-quantum cryptography capabilities — with post-quantum account keys already live on mainnet — Bitwise's Near ETF launch, and the addition of Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz to the Near Foundation Council as signals of growing institutional and developer interest. Rob also highlights that Near Protocol co-founder Illia Polosukhin previously worked at Google and co-authored the landmark 2017 'Attention Is All You Need' transformer paper, which underpins ChatGPT and modern AI. In the Q&A section, Rob explains his near-term caution due to midterm elections, citing historical data showing the S&P 500 typically dips into midterm election day before generating a median return of 15.2% through the following June — and notes he continues dollar-cost averaging weekly regardless, using the 200-week moving average as a key buy signal.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Market Overview: $200 Billion Crypto Pullback
Rob: Another day in the crypto markets and another pullback, but there are some lessons I think we can take from this. I still think it's a pretty good day. As we take a look at the markets themselves, we can see that we've lost roughly $200 billion or so. We're at $2.8 trillion right now. We were just recently above $2.99 trillion — roughly $3 trillion. So give or take about $10 billion or so, we are down. We can see that across the board. Bitcoin is down in 24 hours. Ethereum is down. All the altcoins are down. And of course, when Bitcoin sneezes, all the altcoins catch pneumonia as they start to really tumble farther. Not all of the altcoins are going to tumble magnificently as they usually do, but over the last 24 hours we can see that there are some pretty big price changes. If we take a look at the 7-day, it's even worse. Stellar down 11%, Rain down 15%, Litecoin down 8%, and Canton down 13% — which we're going to talk about today.
So what happened? Well, as we talked about in the NFA live show this week — this is on Thursday morning — we talked about how CPI and PPI, consumer price index and producer price index, core, came in hotter than expected. Because of that, people got a little worried in the markets and they started to sell off a little bit on Thursday. Then on Friday we took an even bigger tumble. Today is Saturday, so nothing's open in the traditional markets, but that will change at some point.
We can see that over that 24-hour period on Friday there was quite a reduction. Over five days, things are going on. One month, not too bad — but that's just the S&P 500. If we take a look at the QQQ, which is more oriented toward the technology and AI sector, you can see that it actually doubled the loss of the S&P 500. The S&P 500 is a little bit safer, and over five days the QQQ is not looking too good. Over one month, still down. Six months, okay, not too bad. But you can just see that it's the same thing — there's a little more safety in the S&P 500. In the tech and AI sector specifically, people have their worries, and I think they're warranted, because I think at some point there is going to be a big blowoff top and a big pullback. That's just pretty much how it is.
Arthur Hayes on AI Economics and Bitcoin
There was a quick interview with Arthur Hayes where he talks about how AI is a waste of money. I think this is important to understand what he's talking about. Even though I disagree with the last part, there is a part that is 100% correct about the AI markets and what they're doing. Take a listen.
Arthur Hayes: "AI is a waste of money in most cases. Anthropic — the leak of their S-1 showed that for every $1 of revenue it costs them $2. That's a bad business. And if you think about the end customer for all of AI, Western AI is either Anthropic, OpenAI, or SpaceX. Not one of those companies makes money. The market is saying we are not willing to pay you a price commensurate with the amount of money it costs you to deliver this service. Yet these companies continue — they raise debt, they raise equity, they essentially have an implicit government backstop from the US government, and that's allowed them to continue wasting money.
Now that pretty much everyone has recognised this, I think everyone is now calculating how big the bailout is going to be. And that's the perfect time for crypto. This is why the bigger the bubble grows, the bigger the bailout will be, and the higher Bitcoin goes. We've long passed the point of everyone recognising that none of this makes any money.
If it did make money, it'd be a different story. I could say, okay, yes, this is going to suck up capital because you're making a positive return on capital to provide these AI tokens to people — let's do as much of it as possible. But that's obviously not the case. We are wasting money, and Bitcoin is there to show us that we're wasting money."
Rob: The first part is true. This is the reason why Anthropic has come out, why Sam Altman has come out, and they've said, look, if the government doesn't step in and protect us, everything's going to be destroyed by AI. And I think to myself — aren't you putting out that product? Why would the government have to step in because you are putting out a product that is just too advanced and you need to slow it down a little bit? Whatever. I understand now why it's not so much about worrying about generalisation — maybe they are — but it really comes down to: protect us, because just like Arthur said, they need a bailout at some point because right now they are losing money. They're hemorrhaging money, but it is a pretty good service. On that part I totally agree, and it makes a lot of sense when you see these founders come out and say, "Hey, we need protection, especially from the government."
But on the flip side, where Hayes says this is a great thing for Bitcoin because the numbers will go up — I don't think Bitcoin is going to do too great in a recession. It will probably take a tumble like traditional markets. I know people will say, "But Rob, Bitcoin is a hedge against inflation." And Bitcoin was actually created after the 2007–08 big recession to prepare ourselves against these huge banks that were failing. Just like "too big to fail" — that's exactly what Bitcoin was made for. At this point, I believe in Bitcoin, you believe in Bitcoin, but the masses out there don't see Bitcoin as a risk-off asset yet. And altcoins are even worse. So as he talks about this, I just don't see that as traditional markets crash, Bitcoin will start to absorb all of that. I think people will get into treasuries and safer things because they just don't trust it. Let me know what you think about that in the comments section.
JP Morgan's Contrasting View on AI
For every negative, maybe there's a positive side — we have to give both sides. This is from CNBC. JP Morgan's Steven Parker talks about how there's actually a very healthy stage in AI and how JP Morgan sees things. Take a listen.
Steven Parker: "We're entering a very healthy stage in this next chapter of the AI story. For a long time, it was a rising tide lifts all boats — it didn't matter how quality a company it was, it didn't matter the return. Now investors are getting more selective. What you're seeing is a little bit of weakness in the more speculative parts of the AI infrastructure. Ultimately, I think that's a healthy thing. What's important is we still think that the capex boom that's causing this AI earnings super cycle is still very well supported and is going to continue to play out."
Rob: My favourite word — super cycle. I leave it up to you to decide where things are going. AI, I think, is a massive step forward for technology. I don't believe it'll wipe out every single job out there. I think there'll be some hardships, but the ones that actually accept it, use it, and are able to cultivate it for their employees will make their businesses grow even bigger. Let me know what you think about that in the comments section.
The Tokenisation Thesis: Franklin Templeton and DTCC
That takes care of the broad scope of things. Let's break down to the thesis. My thesis is pretty simple — I think you guys share it with me — which is that the next big play for digital assets and crypto, especially for the narrative, is going to be payments, tokenisation of real-world assets, and AI agent payments.
This is Franklin Templeton — Christopher Perkins, head of Franklin Crypto — sitting down to talk about tokenisation of real-world assets and how it can expedite things. I think this is where people are missing the point. Take a listen.
Christopher Perkins: "In traditional markets, we have to hold on to a lot of collateral — in derivatives, like seven days of collateral or ten days of collateral depending on the type of derivative. Why? Because you have to reserve at least three days for long weekends because the markets are closed. You don't know what happens over the weekends. And lately, what have we seen with markets? Weekends are crazy. That's when the geopolitics happen. So you have to figure in the error — I have a three-day weekend coming up, I have to hold the whole three days because the markets are closed. By leveraging the power of tokenisation, you can start settling in more real time, bringing that three days down to hours or seconds or whatever you want to do. Now you're actually able to lower the margin while lowering the risk — that never happens. And that's what things like tokenised assets and tokenised money markets can do."
Rob: Lower the margin, lower the risk. I just don't see why we can't get that moving forward. One of the problems, of course, is we don't have correct legislation moving forward — that's what clarity was supposed to do. But hopefully the CFTC, the SEC, and the OCC can step in, which they've already started to do, and give us some clear guidance. Regardless, businesses are going to build on this. They're going to take advantage of it. This is where innovation comes from. Franklin Templeton is on board. Makes a lot of sense.
Canton Network and DTCC's $30 Trillion Tokenisation Announcement
We talked about this two or three weeks ago — Canton and DTCC. Here's a little update. DTCC today released new details of its tokenisation service, outlining approximately $30 trillion in assets available for tokenisation.
Now let me be frank with everybody real quick. All $30 trillion isn't coming on-chain. When people say those numbers, it sounds great, it sounds awesome, but you're not getting $30 trillion. It's going to start slow, it's going to ramp up, and then maybe we'll get to a good healthy percentage of that — but $30 trillion isn't coming on all at once. I just want to make sure everybody knows that. If you're thinking, "Wow, $30 trillion, I've got to put my entire life savings into this" — easy.
Canton Network and DTCC's private Hyperledger network are designed for launch with Stellar and Circle's Arc. Circle also does USDC stablecoins. The launch is anticipated in 2027. The service supports 25 securities across US equities, ETFs, and treasuries, backed one-to-one by assets held at DTC. They're doing better than banks right now. Tokenised securities will retain their existing CUSIPs, rights, and investor protections while enabling 24/7 peer-to-peer transfers between registered wallets on the same blockchain.
That was a story we covered roughly three weeks ago, and it was kind of a buy-the-rumour, sell-the-news type of thing — and it did play out that way. As a reminder, what they were talking about — DTCC is a premier post-trade market infrastructure. The real number is $4 quadrillion, $728 trillion. That is the total value of transactions processed by DTCC in 2025. Again, you're not getting four quadrillion on one chain. This is just what it is.
It's going to be more than 30 firms, which it looks like they've launched. This is going to be on Canton, and everybody's excited. How's Canton doing today? Not too bad in 24 hours — it's at 10 cents — but over 7 days, not too good. Down 12%. Over 30 days, down 4% — pretty good. Three months, down 19%. One year, down 23%. But the maximum — and you have to remember, Canton is a fairly new project. It was released pretty much towards the all-time tippity top of the last cycle, around November 9th, 2025. Roughly a month previously was when we topped out Bitcoin on November 6th, 2025, at around $126,000. So their timing couldn't have been worse, but you were able to buy low and we'll see how it all works out. It launched at roughly 12–13 cents. Today it's roughly 10–11 cents. Not too bad, but not where we want to be. We'll see.
Near Protocol: Post-Quantum, Privacy, and Institutional Interest
Bitcoin is always a very safe play — we all know that, and I think a lot of us put a lot into it. But we're always looking for the winners. I got to tell you, I liked Near before and I had some and I sold it. Had a good real estate opportunity, had to take it — you take your profits. But Near can do some pretty good things.
This is Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise. He states: "I study a lot of crypto projects. Many sound great on the surface and get less interesting the deeper you dig. Near is the opposite." I'm not going to go over all of it — I've linked an article in the description which lists everything Near is essentially doing. But there is one interesting thing about Bitwise. First of all, they have an ETP or ETF with Near — they just rolled this out a couple of weeks ago. Of course, Matt is a little bit skewed toward Near, but I found it interesting to take a look at what Bitwise has launched. They don't launch losers.
They've got the Bitwise Bitcoin ETF, Ethereum ETF, Solana staking ETF, Hyperliquid ETF — that was a good one — XRP ETF, Chainlink ETF, Avalanche ETF, Near ETF, and for some reason, Dogecoin. I can't figure that one out. Someone's going to have to help me with that one. How many of you don't own any of those in your portfolio? I would be hard-pressed to find more than 1% of my audience who say, "No, I don't have any of those."
They've also got the Bitwise 10 Crypto Index ETF. Here are some more winners: Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana, Zcash — that was a pretty good one, I'll admit I missed that one — Hyperliquid, Chainlink, Cardano, Stellar, and Uniswap. Those are some winning teams right there. And then they also have the Bitwise Crypto Industry Innovators ETF. Some pretty big winners recently: Strategy, Coinbase, Circle, Bitmine, Securitize, Figure, Hyperliquid Strategies, Hut 8, Mara, and CleanSpark for Bitcoin mining operations, and the ones that actually pivoted to AI. Bitwise picks some good ones. Maybe take a look at the people that do a boatload of research — maybe those are the ones to pay attention to. To say you should go all in is foolhardy — they could collapse like everything else — but things are looking pretty good.
One of the things I want to highlight is what was called "bunker mode." It was one of the research leads at Ethereum — correct me in the comments — who laid this out. They talked about bunker mode because Bitcoin was going to need it, since with AI you can use a public address to work your way into the private address and take over the keys. That's the whole thesis, and people were flipping out about it. But like I've said, if it was an issue caused by people, it can be fixed by people.
What's interesting is that Near did not need bunker mode and has had post-quantum account keys on mainnet since July 20th. Here is the founder, Illia, saying: "We designed Near with quantum in mind in 2018." This guy has been on top of it for quite some time.
I want you to listen to this because we talk about privacy — that's the whole reason why Zcash went up like crazy, and it's also why Midnight has gone up like crazy. Take a listen to this first minute. This is Illia Polosukhin as he talks about post-quantum on the Near Protocol.
Illia Polosukhin: "I wanted to talk about privacy and post-quantum and what we're doing on Near. I kind of used this slide yesterday at Token. I'm calling this the catch-up cycle — everything that was working before, like Zcash, like Near, is starting to actually pick up and get usage and adoption because the ideas were there but they weren't there yet for the market, and the market is now catching up. For Near specifically, we went from being a sharded layer one — something we were building as an easy blockchain — to now being a fully integrated privacy stack across AI, across blockchain, really connecting liquidity across different ecosystems as well."
Rob: I like that — especially ecosystems, especially payments, especially AI. I've linked the article. It's long but it's good, covering all the things Near is actually doing. And there are some things that just passed right over me.
Another interesting thing I saw: as far as privacy for the Near Protocol, your Solana can earn yield in a dozen places, all of them public — until now. Live on near.com: Solana yield from a confidential account. The vault gets your deposit, it never gets your address. No lockup, swaps, or sends. I was like, that's pretty good, because we keep hearing about wrench attacks — thugs getting our information, especially knowing which wallets have how much crypto in them. Imagine if you could keep that confidential.
So I took a look at this and I thought about Near and Solana together. My thesis — and we've been talking about this for years — is that the next big play for crypto will be the grouping of different projects that come together and become like a super project. All 10,000 cryptos out there will just die because they're not good enough anyway. Then you have all those developers and people looking for somewhere to go, and they'll gravitate toward the big groupings or mergers or acquisitions of talent into specific projects.
When I see stuff like this, I say, "This is pretty big." Helius CEO Mert Mumtaz joins the Near Foundation Council. If you don't know Mert, he's all over X — sometimes annoying, sometimes funny. Since he was mostly on Solana, I found it interesting that he's now on Near. Solana infrastructure leader and privacy advocate joins Near Foundation's governing body to help bring privacy to on-chain markets. Helius will continue to lead the buildout of the infrastructure that teams including Phantom, Jupiter, Coinbase, and Bitwise use to build on Solana — from RPC nodes, data streaming, transaction delivery, to validators. As things start to merge — and I'm not saying Solana is going to take over Near or Near is going to take over Solana — you start to see an adjunct of ideas and people coming together, and then all of a sudden: why don't we work together more? That could be a pretty big thing.
And lastly, before we get out of here — as a reminder, Near could do some pretty big things. The talk about a 40x is pretty ridiculous, but if you take a look at the market cap of Near at $6.6 billion, Ethereum is at $307 billion. I still think that chain is kind of clunky, but Wall Street seems to pick it. For Near to do a 40x to around $30–32, it would still not exceed the market cap of Ethereum today — and that's in a bear market.
One more thing. Illia used to work for Google and co-authored a Google paper in 2017 called "Attention Is All You Need," which talks about transformers. The "T" in ChatGPT — that's what they use and base it on. So Illia, who I've interviewed a couple of times, could be the next catalyst for something reasonably good.
Q&A and Market Outlook
Rob: Let's get into a little Q&A and I'll answer your questions.
Watcher Goo asks: "What do you mean it lost $200 billion?" I'm not saying it lost like, "Hey, where did my $200 billion go?" I'm saying we were at $3 trillion, now we're at $2.8 trillion. Roughly $200 billion loss in market cap.
On the question of whether I'm bullish or bearish short-term — honestly, I am not too bullish in the short term. Remember, we've got about two and a half weeks before we hit the midterms, and those are usually some pretty crappy days historically speaking. Midterm elections are essentially in between the presidential elections. During that time, it's when we start to see who we're going to vote in for different seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives, which makes up Congress. Not all those seats are up — senators, I believe it's every six years, correct me in the comments; House, I think it's every four. During that time, the market doesn't like it because we don't like ambiguity. We don't like the uncertainty of what could potentially happen. Will the incumbent party retain their dominance in Congress, or is it going to be split down the middle and are we going to have a lame duck president?
It looks like the House is going to fall to Democrats — Republicans are on their way out on that one. The next big question is whether the Senate flips as well. If you have the entire Congress — both the House and the Senate — flip Democrat, and you have a Republican president, now you've got a lot of things that will never get passed unless you start doing a bunch of executive orders, which a lot of presidents like. The reason I'm bearish is because of that, and also this nice little chart — credit to Seth CL. Since 1942, buying the S&P 500 on midterm election day generates a median return of plus 15.2% through June 30th of the following year. Roughly six to seven months. What does that mean? It means usually we go a little bit lower and then we start to get out of it, because the traditional markets go, "Okay, here's who we got, here's what their history is, here's where I think we're going to go for legislation in Congress. Makes a lot of sense. Let's move forward." So in the near term, I'm not too bullish just because of the midterms — but I could be wrong. Historically speaking, that's usually what happens.
On the question of whether I invest in Bitcoin miners — I don't personally, but I had Andy on, and if you just search for Digital Asset News Andy, or find my friend Andy's YouTube channel, he's got some solid recommendations for what normal people like us can do for Bitcoin mining.
On the four-year cycle discussion — Ben did say a couple of times that dollar-cost averaging specifically into Q3 of the midterm year seemed to work out okay. The problem was people started to think that Q4 had to, had to, had to go down and be a lower low. Every time I go against the four-year cycles I get burned, but I'm like, maybe this time is different. As a reminder, what I always said as time went on: the 200-week moving average. For me, this is just the time to execute the plan. We're now at 0.2, which I bought last year at 0.3. I doubled up, quadrupled up. We were right between the 200-week moving average just yesterday. If you just waited for the moving average and bought — that's a pretty good time. You don't have to wait for it, but in the long run it's probably a pretty good investment. I'm dollar-cost averaging, buying every Monday on Cash App, and I'm pretty glad I did. I bought at the 200-week moving average, buying here at around $59,000–$59,200 somewhere around there. It's not a bad thing.