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Sharplink CEO Joseph Chalom projects that AI agents will eliminate nearly a quarter of global finance fees by 2035. 

His team’s model puts the resulting investor savings at $1.4 trillion a year. Chalom, a former BlackRock executive, set out the forecast in an X post on Wednesday.

A $4 Trillion Prize and a $180 Billion Blind Spot

Chalom’s team modeled 10 financial verticals through 2035. The model puts more than $1 trillion in annual financial services revenue up for grabs by 2030. Chalom expects that figure to reach $4 trillion a year by 2035.

The model assumes agents will make financial providers compete more aggressively on fees. Consumers would then keep an extra $350 billion a year by 2030, before the figure climbs to $1.4 trillion.

Chalom also points to roughly $15 trillion that US households hold in checking, savings, and short-term deposits. Much of it earns well below money-market rates, which he says costs savers at least $180 billion a year.

“Over $1 trillion of annual global financial services revenue is going to be up for grabs by 2030, growing to $4 trillion annually by 2035. Every major bank, broker, payments firm, and digital assets company is racing to capture a share in one of the most important battles over money and value we will see in our time,” he said.

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Visa, Coinbase, and Circle Race for the Agent’s Wallet

Chalom says the contest to control these agents has already begun. He names Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, PayPal, Circle, Tether, Robinhood, Coinbase, and Binance among the contenders. 

In his view, the winner would also decide which products agents recommend and where idle cash gets swept.

“Whoever owns the infrastructure, owns the agent, and therefore the customer,” Chalom added.

BlackRock’s research paper this week made a related case, naming stablecoins as the leading candidate for agent payments. 

Chalom argues that agentic transactions will predominantly occur where stablecoins, tokenized assets, and DeFi liquidity are concentrated, with much of that activity currently centered in the  Ethereum (ETH) ecosystem. He points to Ethereum’s record of 3.6 million daily transactions in April as evidence of the network’s growing activity.

That outlook lines up with Sharplink’s balance sheet. The company held 891,714 ETH as of September 14, according to its dashboard.

Fidelity Digital Assets offered a more cautious read in August. Senior research analyst Max Wadington warned that closed systems run by tech and fintech firms could instead absorb agent activity.

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The post AI Agents Could Wipe Out $1.4 Trillion in Wall Street Fees, Sharplink CEO Says appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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Most crypto and fintech founders build their marketing for retail audiences first. That’s understandable — retail audiences are large, accessible, and respond to the energy that drives a project’s early community. But when the same founder walks into a family office meeting or pitches an institutional fund carrying materials built for someone else, the results are predictable: polite non-answers, long silences, no term sheet.

Institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals evaluate blockchain companies differently than retail participants do. They have legal teams, compliance officers, and risk committees. They care about regulatory positioning, not roadmaps. They read footnotes. Reaching them requires a different kind of marketing — one built around credibility, precision, and compliance awareness from the ground up.

Positioning: Stop Competing With the Noise

The first problem most blockchain startups have is that their positioning is indistinguishable from thousands of other projects. “Decentralized,” “trustless,” “next-generation” — these words appear on countless project websites and tell an institutional investor nothing useful. At best, they signal that the team communicates for retail traders. At worst, they raise the concern that the project can’t explain itself in plain terms.

Effective positioning for institutional audiences starts with specificity. What problem, exactly, does this company solve? For whom? What is the market size, sourced from identifiable data? What does the competitive landscape actually look like — not dismissively (“we’re better than X”), but in an honest structural analysis of where this company sits?

A family office managing $200 million doesn’t need to feel excited. It needs to see that the founding team understands the space clearly enough to place a coherent bet on itself.

The table below shows how the two audiences read the same marketing signals differently:

The implication is direct: a company can’t run one marketing program for both audiences. The signals that build retail excitement actively undermine institutional credibility.

Credibility-Building Content: Show Work, Not Vision

Institutional investors don’t respond to vision decks the way early adopters do. They respond to evidence. A content strategy targeting this audience needs to demonstrate expertise, not announce ambition.

The content formats that carry real weight with institutional readers are specific:

• Audited white papers — written to a technical standard, with methodology documented and findings signed off by an independent auditor, not internal team members
• Cited research reports — market analysis, protocol assessments, or competitive reviews thorough enough that other practitioners reference them
• Trade press bylines — published in Bloomberg, the Financial Times, Reuters, The Block, or CoinDesk’s institutional coverage, not consumer crypto outlets
• Legal and regulatory memos — brief, factual documents that show the company understands its jurisdictional exposure and has addressed it
• Team credential materials — structured backgrounds for key hires that surface relevant prior roles: exchange positions, regulatory agency experience, institutional fund management

Leadership credibility is a separate lever. Institutional investors diligence people before they diligence protocols. A CIO who previously ran a prime brokerage desk, or a general counsel who came from a regulatory agency — these are marketing assets. They belong in investor materials, not buried in an about page.

Working with a specialist in blockchain marketing, such as ICODA, often makes sense at this stage because the content standards for institutional audiences differ in kind, not just degree. A generalist agency experienced in SaaS or e-commerce campaigns doesn’t know why a tokenomics paper needs an independent auditor’s sign-off — or why a hedge fund’s compliance officer will kill a deal if the company’s website carries “not financial advice” disclaimers in the footer while the homepage talks about guaranteed yields.

Compliance-Aware Messaging: The Rules Are Part of the Product

This is where most blockchain startups underestimate the problem. Securities law, AML obligations, investor accreditation requirements, and jurisdiction-specific disclosure rules create a constraint landscape that effective institutional marketing has to be built inside — not layered onto afterward.

These are the messaging mistakes that most commonly damage credibility with institutional audiences — and in some cases create direct legal exposure:

• Implying returns — any language that suggests historical performance will repeat, or that a yield is predictable, is both a compliance violation and a red flag for legal teams
• Skipping risk sections — pitch decks or one-pagers that omit regulatory risk, counterparty risk, or liquidity risk read as either naïve or deliberately evasive
• Using general solicitation channels for restricted offerings — an email campaign or social post promoting a Regulation D private placement to an unqualified audience can void the exemption entirely
• Inconsistent disclaimers — “not financial advice” in the footer while the homepage describes projected returns signals to compliance reviewers that the team doesn’t understand what the disclaimer actually requires

None of this means messaging has to be evasive. It means it has to be precise. There’s a difference between “our protocol returned 340% to early participants” (a liability) and “here is an independent analysis of how the protocol performed under the following conditions” (a reference document). The second version tells the same story with more substance and less exposure.

Institutional-grade messaging also addresses risk directly. Retail marketing tends to minimize or avoid risk language. Institutional investors expect it. A pitch deck that doesn’t acknowledge regulatory risk, counterparty risk, and liquidity risk reads as either naïve or evasive. A risk section isn’t a weakness — it demonstrates that the team has a mature view of its own business.

The Underlying Issue

The gap between retail crypto marketing and institutional crypto marketing isn’t a matter of tone or production quality. It’s a structural difference in what the audience values, what they’re allowed to respond to, and what professional consequences they face if they back a company that turns out to have operated carelessly.

Institutional capital markets run on reputation and referrals. A firm that impresses a family office once gets introduced to three others. A firm that wastes their time doesn’t get a second meeting.

The companies that close institutional rounds aren’t always the ones with the best technology. They’re the ones that understood who they were talking to and built everything — content, positioning, legal review, distribution channels — around that understanding. That’s not a niche marketing problem. It’s a business problem that marketing is responsible for solving.

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The post Why Blockchain Startups Need Different Marketing for Institutional Investors appeared first on CryptoPotato.

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Polymarket traders are pricing an 18% implied probability that the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait betting odds meet the platform’s definition of “effectively closed” before December 31, 2026, based on the market’s live pricing as of its September 24 update.

The contract does not require any government or naval authority to declare the waterway shut; it resolves Yes only if IMF PortWatch records a seven-day moving average of 10 or fewer ship arrivals on any date before the deadline.

That distinction matters more than the headline number. Shipping through the strait has collapsed by most measures on record, but collapse and the contract’s specific data trigger are not the same thing.

Also, nothing in the available reporting confirms that the seven-day threshold has actually been crossed. Polymarket has run into this same verification gap before on Houthi-linked contracts, where ground-truth confirmation lags the market’s appetite for a clean binary answer.

Bitcoin (BTC)

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Bab Al Mandeb Strait Betting Odds: What Does the Shipping Data Actually Show?

Houthi forces seized Yemen’s Red Sea coastline, the port of Mokha, Perim (Mayun) Island, and the Hanish Islands in mid-September, putting the group in control of both shores flanking the strait. No government or maritime authority has declared Bab el-Mandeb closed, but the traffic figures reported since then are stark and inconsistent across time windows.

Anadolu Agency reported on September 17 that only four vessels transited the strait in the preceding 24 hours, against a roughly 33-vessel daily norm, an 88% decline, with oil and chemical tanker traffic down 91% and container ship traffic down 86%.

Six days earlier, the same outlet cited Kpler data putting daily transits at around 26 to 27 vessels, a steep drop from the roughly 70-vessel pre-crisis baseline but nowhere near the four-vessel reading that followed.

Those two figures are not contradictory. They’re different windows capturing different moments in a fast-moving blockade. A single 24-hour count of four vessels is not a seven-day moving average, and a seven-day average sitting anywhere from 15 to 27 vessels a day.

Have Your Say on the Al Mandeb Strait Closure on Polymarket

The Houthi Claim and the Contract’s Blind Spot

The Houthis maintain they are enforcing a targeted embargo on Saudi-linked shipping while asserting safe passage for other vessels, a claim attributed to the group and not independently verified in the available reporting.

International statements have emphasized freedom of navigation under UNCLOS, but assurances of safe passage from a party controlling both shores of the strait carry obvious credibility limits that the PortWatch data trigger sidesteps entirely.

That’s the core tension embedded in this market. Geopolitical risk around Bab el-Mandeb is plainly elevated, with rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope, rising insurance premiums, and the broader Iran-linked regional conflict all pressuring the corridor.

But the Polymarket contract pays out only on a narrow statistical condition, not on the broader sense that the route has become commercially unusable. Polymarket has drawn this same line before on other geopolitical contracts, where the news cycle outran the specific resolution language written into the market.

Bab Al Mandeb Strait Scenarios Into Year-End

If the IMF PortWatch seven-day average shows 10 or fewer arrivals on a qualifying date before December 31, the Yes side resolves immediately, meaning one bad week could settle the contract.

If arrivals stay in the mid-teens to mid-20s, uncertainty remains without triggering resolution, despite the high war-risk premiums shippers face. Restoring daily counts above 10 would likely reduce the 18% price, though historical reactions to data prints aren’t specified.

The key takeaway for traders is to understand resolution criteria before interpreting headline probabilities, since the 18% price reflects contract specifics rather than the broader situation at Bab el-Mandeb.

Never Miss a Swing Again: Use AI Copy Trading Bots From CryptoHopper

The post Bab Al-Mandeb Strait Betting Odds Hit 18% as Price Hinges on a Data Trigger appeared first on Cryptonews.

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SpaceX stock fell more than 4% on September 23, one day before a lockup expiration freed about 328 million shares for trading.

The selling pressure comes ahead of Starship Flight 14, the rocket’s first planned trip into Earth orbit and its first revenue-generating mission.

Starship Flight 14 Targets Orbit With Paying Cargo

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said on September 24 that the company is preparing for a Monday launch, which falls on September 28. By then, the launch tower’s mechanical arms had already stacked Ship 41 on top of Super Heavy Booster 21.

Until now, every Starship test stayed on a suborbital path by design. This time, the fully assembled 124-meter rocket aims for an orbit roughly 275 kilometers above Earth, SpaceX says. The flight should last nearly 10 hours and circle the planet about six times.

Moreover, the ship will carry 26 Starlink V3 satellites instead of dummy mass. Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen described the flight as the vehicle’s first revenue-generating mission.

However, SpaceX will not try a tower catch. Both stages are expendable, so the booster will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico. Meanwhile, SpaceX plans a deorbit burn that brings the ship down in the Pacific west of Chile.

Why SpaceX Stock Faces Selling Pressure

News of the orbital attempt first lifted shares above $150 in mid-September. Since then, fresh supply has weighed on SpaceX stock. The company releases insider shares in stages rather than all at once, and the first tranche unlocked in August.

The previous tranche unlocked on September 9, and the stock fell 3.9% that day.

Still, the expiration does not force anyone to sell. Instead, the real impact depends on how many insiders cash out. Further tranches are scheduled through June 2027.

On the fundamental side, Wall Street treats Flight 14 as a key proof point. Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas holds a Buy rating and a $300 price target, implying about 99% upside. In his view, the market underprices SpaceX’s AI and orbital computing plans.

A clean orbit and satellite deployment would give Starship its first commercial proof. Until then, SpaceX stock looks caught between launch progress and a growing pool of tradable shares.

The post Why Did SpaceX Stock Fall 4% Days Before Starship's Biggest Flight? appeared first on BeInCrypto.

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NEAR crypto and Ondo Finance have launched access to tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs on near.com, opening with 20 assets including Nvidia, Tesla, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, SPY and QQQ.

Eligible users fund their accounts with stablecoins or other supported crypto from more than 30 networks, with NEAR Intents acting as the cross-chain distribution layer that can eventually route these tokenized securities to connected wallets, applications, and DeFi protocols.

The launch is a distribution story before it is an asset-count story. Ondo’s broader tokenized stocks platform already lists more than 100 stocks and ETFs, according to Ondo’s own documentation, but NEAR’s initial rollout exposes only a fifth of that catalog through Near.com.

NEAR Crypto and the Multichain Route to Ondo Stocks

Near.com functions as the initial user-facing surface for this integration, while NEAR Intents is positioned separately as the cross-chain routing layer, according to the launch material from Ondo Finance.

That distinction matters: near.com is where users open accounts and trade, while NEAR Intents is the plumbing intended to eventually let other wallets and DeFi protocols surface the same real-world assets to their own users.

Ondo’s own documentation describes the broader Ondo Stocks platform as offering more than 100 tokenized stocks and ETFs, spanning individual equities, indexes such as QQQ and SPY, and fixed-income ETFs like TLT, TIP and AGG.

The 20-asset NEAR selection is a subset of that catalog, not a replacement, and Ondo has said the full app at app.ondo.finance remains the reference point for the complete list.

Purchases run through USDon, a stablecoin Ondo says is backed 1:1 by a U.S. dollar held in an Ondo Stocks brokerage account. When a user buys with a different stablecoin, the platform atomically swaps it into USDon before executing the tokenized stock purchase.

It then reverses the process on redemption, a mechanic Ondo’s documentation frames as designed to keep the buy-and-sell flow instant rather than dependent on settlement windows.

How Users Access the Initial Offering

The reported flow is straightforward: an eligible near.com user deposits stablecoins or other supported crypto from any of the more than 30 connected networks, then swaps directly into an available tokenized stock or ETF in a single transaction.

That collapses what would normally be a multi-step bridging-and-onboarding process into one action inside the near.com interface. The current selection is capped at 20 assets, not the full Ondo catalog, and the source material doesn’t publish a complete list beyond the named examples.

Traders looking for a specific ticker outside that initial set should check current availability directly rather than assume parity with Ondo’s broader 100-plus offering.

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Why Distribution, Not Asset Count, Is the Main Change

The more consequential piece of this launch is the routing layer, not the ticker list. NEAR Intents is a cross-chain distribution mechanism that can push Ondo’s tokenized equities to wallets, applications, and DeFi protocols beyond near.com itself, meaning the 20-asset figure is a starting point for a pipe built to widen, not a ceiling.

Ondo currently restricts its tokenized securities to names trading on the NYSE and NASDAQ, though its documentation leaves room to expand to other countries’ exchanges over time.

Other issuers are pursuing distribution through different rails; Robinhood’s tokenized-stock push on its own chain is a useful comparison point for how competing platforms are structuring access, though the mechanics differ enough that a direct read-across isn’t warranted here.

What are the Eligibility and Jurisdiction Limits for the Near Crypto Ondo Stocks?

None of this is available to US persons. Ondo’s documentation states plainly that Ondo Stocks products are offered only to organizations and individuals outside the United States and other prohibited jurisdictions, subject to its own eligibility criteria, and that the products are not accessible in certain regions at all.

These are tokenized exposures to NYSE and NASDAQ-listed securities, not shares held in a conventional brokerage account, and regulators are still working out how to treat that distinction across jurisdictions.

The broader US regulatory posture toward tokenized equities remains unsettled, and nothing in this launch changes that for US-based traders.

Discover: The Best Token Presales This Bullrun

The post NEAR Crypto Tokenized Stock Launch Puts Distribution Ahead of Scale appeared first on Cryptonews.

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IBM’s beta link lets banks instruct tokenized deposit transfers on Swift’s ledger using existing payment messages and compliance processes.

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