Ethereum settled $14.3 trillion in stablecoins last year. Mastercard settled $7.8 trillion. (Declan Fox, Linea/ConsenSys, main stage.)

JP Morgan has processed over $3 trillion on an internal blockchain rail called Blockchain Deposit Accounts. They then built JPMD, a deposit token on Base, because institutional clients wanted public chain exposure but couldn’t hold significant stablecoin liquidity on their balance sheets. (Stable Summit fireside.)

Apollo ($900 billion AUM) is buying up to 9% of Morpho’s governance tokens. Christine Moy, partner at Apollo and previously head of JP Morgan’s blockchain group, said on stage that DeFi borrower rates are materially cheaper than CeFi rates. (Centrifuge RWA Summit.)

Three independent speakers (Paxos, xStocks, the Cash Leg Dilemma panel) reached the same conclusion without coordinating: institutions don’t want atomic settlement. They’ve spent decades building systems around T+1 delay. Money market funds and the DTCC exist as insurance for that delay. Asynchronous access to liquidity at predictable costs matters more than instant atomicity.

Tony McLaughlin spent 30 years at Citi. He now runs Ubyx. His diagnosis: stablecoin economics are inverted. Issuers pay for acceptance. Circle paid Coinbase $900 million. Binance, $60 million. Credit card networks get paid 1.5% by acceptors. The full payments TAM is $2.5 trillion, and stablecoins can’t reach it without a mutualised acceptance network.

A 12-bank European consortium called Qivalis is launching a euro stablecoin on Ethereum mainnet after this summer. 200 million+ customers across the founding banks. Independent e-money institute in Amsterdam. Their head of strategy reframed euro stablecoins as a dollarisation alternative for the rest of the world, not European payment infrastructure, and called DeFi’s 99% USD concentration a “taco trade” risk.

90% of real-world assets on chain are receipts, not ownership. (Romain Menetrier, Dowgo.) The EU’s DLT Pilot Regime changes this: the blockchain becomes the legal source of truth. Six companies approved. Cap going from €6 billion to €100 billion per company, extending to any financial instrument.

BlackRock’s BUIDL charges 50 basis points. Five times a normal money market fund fee. Galaxy Digital is launching its own tokenised MMF with State Street and a MiCA-regulated euro stablecoin with DWS (Deutsche Bank’s asset manager) and Flow Traders. Galaxy is also the second-largest crypto lender after Tether. (Anya Nova, main stage.)

Three models of tokenised equities: primary issuance (the token is the security), custodial (a digital twin with legal claim on the underlying), and synthetic (price tracking, no ownership). Most of what trades on weekends is synthetic. Kraken and NASDAQ just announced primary issuance with the same CUSIP. The token is literally the equity. (Centrifuge RWA Summit panel.)

The JP Morgan and Franklin Templeton fireside at Stable Summit gave the clearest framing of digital money I heard all week. Stablecoins are M2 (private company money). They find finality in commercial bank money (M1), which finds finality in central bank money (M0). The cake layers hold. Franklin Templeton has 100+ people working only on digital assets across four global funds. Their take on why treasurers haven’t moved yet: they understand the product, they understand blockchain, they know what they want. The only thing missing is integration.

Multiple speakers at Stable Summit landed in the same place: most yield-bearing stablecoins aren’t stablecoins. They’re vaults with a stablecoin label. The strategy can change over time without the holder noticing. What you bought two years ago isn’t what you hold today.

Wojtek (Accountable): “Worse than unsecured lending.” With unsecured lending you sign a master loan agreement and your principal is legally protected. With yield-bearing stablecoins, “you don’t know if they can return your money. That depends on if the strategy will be profitable.” DeFi re-invented unsecured lending and stripped out the legal recourse.

PayPal spent roughly $25 million in incentives over two years to push PYUSD past $1 billion. Couldn’t. PYUSD was live inside the PayPal app, one of the largest payment apps on earth. Distribution alone doesn’t solve stablecoin adoption.

Stani Kulechov (Aave): “We have not yet gotten to 10x better than what happens off-chain.” The CEO of the largest lending protocol telling the room the bar for institutional behaviour change hasn’t been cleared.

Christine Moy (Apollo) on why Apollo is on chain now: “The world that is currently on chain has grown big enough to be meaningful enough to build at least a kernel of a real business.” A firm that manages $900 billion doesn’t deploy meaningful capital to kernels.

Cyril (Aladdin DAO) on the “risk curator” label: “If you see ‘risk curator,’ you’ll think all of these are safe. They might be curating the risk to be extremely high risk. Nowhere on this DeFi app do you see information about the actual risk being curated.” The label is marketing, not disclosure.

Tony McLaughlin on the biggest structural blocker for institutional public-chain adoption: “If a bank wants to use AWS, it sends Amazon a third-party risk management questionnaire. If it wants to use Ethereum, where does it send the questionnaire?” No regulator has answered this. No bank can move at scale until one does.

Sil (Highly) on the ECB: “Either the ECB moves fast enough that we can get central bank money on different chains, or you have to have a Circle.” No sign the ECB wants to move. On-chain settlement of European securities stays legally impossible until further notice.

Paul Frambot (Morpho): “Every fintech thinks of the chain as a backend, shared with their competitor.” The DeFi mullet works at the distributor level. Nobody on stage talked about what happens when your backend provider and your largest competitor are the same protocol.

Santiago Santos on DeFi credit: “I want to see Oaktree come on. We’re still not there.” Oaktree is Howard Marks’ firm, $200 billion AUM, the gold standard for institutional credit underwriting. The firms that have come on chain so far — Apollo, Franklin, BlackRock — are asset managers. Not underwriters. DeFi has flow without credit expertise.