The Block

Matias Antonio (Chief Investment Officer, ex-World Bank, ex-IMF) and Eric Liu (Lead Economist, PhD) have built GCP and GCI — blockchain analogues of GDP and GNI — because nobody could say what value actually runs on a chain, only what volume does. The harder half is capture: on every general-purpose L1, the value the chain makes possible does not flow through its token, and the fat-protocol thesis never explained why it should. Their answer is not taxation but a co-op — an incentive-compatible cut applications accept because protocol value is what secures them. Full episode below 👇

The Self-Custody Tradeoff One of the most distinct concepts introduced by crypto is self-custody, allowing users to hold digital assets in personal wallets without the need for a bank, broker, or exchange. Traditionally, this practice commonly relied on seed phrases or individual private keys, which are written down and stored. Self-custody is not without downsides, however. Gaining access to a user’s private keys can grant access to any assets held in the wallet. Similarly, if the user loses access to their seed phrase, the wallet may be unrecoverable. Alternatively, users can store assets on custodial platforms such as exchanges. While these platforms offer a familiar login process and enable better recovery, there is a tradeoff cost of trusting them with the users’ assets.  Traditional crypto wallets generate an individual key that controls transaction authority and proves ownership. MPC wallets distribute the signing capability across key shares held in separate environments. When the required number of shares participate in the protocol, the system produces a valid signature without needing to reconstruct the complete private key. A common 2-of-3 structure lets any two authorized participants sign while preventing any one of them from acting alone. MPC wallets also allow better recovery mechanisms compared to seed-phrase wallets. For example, shares can be rotated or reissued when a user changes devices or loses access. If a seed phrase wallet user needed to rotate to a new wallet, they would also lose the wallet's onchain address and transaction history. MPC wallets are not to be confused with multisigs. A multisig requires individual keys, and transactions carry multiple signatures, so not all applications are able to support this kind of use. MPC wallets coordinate authentication offchain while producing one ordinary signature onchain. This makes it broadly compatible with all applications.  While MPC wallets help minimize seed phrase risk, they do not eliminate it completely. Users of MPC wallets are still susceptible to phishing, malicious approvals they sign unknowingly, compromised devices, and bugs in the wallet software. Furthermore, there is additional consideration of who controls which MPC share and ultimately who can sign and recover the wallet assets.  Binance Wallet as a Case Study As decentralized applications grow, the need for secure and recoverable wallet solutions rises alongside them. This year, the growth of spot DEX trading relative to centralized trading has accelerated, with DEX volumes averaging more than $120 billion. The DEX-to-CEX ratio has risen to 33% in August, with a significant share authorized by users through self-custody wallets such as Binance Wallet.

For most of the crypto industry's history, users who deposited assets with an exchange simply trusted that the funds were there. FTX ended that complacency when it collapsed in 2022, with investigators finding that billions in customer deposits had been quietly diverted to its affiliated trading firm, leaving a shortfall of roughly $8 billion. The collapse exposed that exchange users simply had no independent way to verify whether their balances were backed at all. Proof of reserves (PoR) emerged as the industry's response. Rather than asking users to trust a private ledger, PoR draws on verifiable evidence, including onchain data, cryptographic proofs, and independent third-party audits, to show that an exchange holds enough assets to cover what it owes. The Block Research dives into Proof of Reserves and what it means for crypto exchange trust https://lnkd.in/eT-zJ2Ut

For most of the crypto industry's history, users who deposited assets with an exchange simply trusted that the funds were there. FTX ended that complacency when it collapsed in 2022, with investigators finding that billions in customer deposits had been quietly diverted to its affiliated trading firm, leaving a shortfall of roughly $8 billion. The collapse exposed that exchange users simply had no independent way to verify whether their balances were backed at all. Proof of reserves (PoR) emerged as the industry's response. Rather than asking users to trust a private ledger, PoR draws on verifiable evidence, including onchain data, cryptographic proofs, and independent third-party audits, to show that an exchange holds enough assets to cover what it owes. The Block Research dives into Proof of Reserves and what it means for crypto exchange trust https://lnkd.in/eT-zJ2Ut

Across crypto's largest venues, the fundamentals of execution, including pricing, depth, latency, and fees, are converging. These remain critical to the business and a precondition for competing at scale, but as they standardize across the top platforms, they become harder to differentiate on. Alongside them, ecosystem breadth is becoming an increasingly important axis of competition: the ability to consolidate trading, yield, payments, wallets, tokenized assets, and onchain access into a single interface, and to compete on the depth of the overall user relationship rather than on execution alone. Nine years after launch, Binance has grown from a crypto exchange into a broader multi-asset platform.That shift is reflected not only in product breadth, but also in scale The platform serves more than 320 million registered users and intermediates roughly a third of global centralized exchange volume, with median daily spot turnover near $16 billion, several times that of its closest competitor. That scale extends into derivatives. Binance accounted for 42.5% of global futures volume over the past 12 months, more than double the share of OKX, its closest competitor, and well ahead of Bybit, Gate.io, and Bitget. Binance's lead further extends beyond trading volume into the funds it holds on behalf of users. This measure reflects the value of crypto assets held in each platform's disclosed proof of reserves wallets. As of June 1, 2026, Binance held $153 billion in reserves, accounting for 56.5% of the assets held across the six platforms shown. For a platform of this size with scale across global markets, the larger opportunity lies in capturing more of the lifecycle of a user's capital, from the first fiat deposit through yield, spending, and self-custody, rather than in isolated trading activity. The Binance SuperApp Thesis https://lnkd.in/g8sMVuFk

Excited be speaking at the Blockchain Futurist Conference this July 21-22nd, 2026 in Toronto! It’s the largest and longest running web3 event in Canada. Tokenization and RWAs are quickly shifting how we think about capital markets within organizations. With the RWA market cap approaching $90 billion, more companies are exploring ways to gain exposure to the onchain economy. Regulatory progress and accelerating institutional adoption have created significant momentum in 2026, bringing a new sense of urgency to organizations at every level. Steve W. Chung Steven Zheng

The US government used a Richard Branson phrase against CZ in court. He says he only used 'I would rather ask for forgiveness than for permission' once or twice in internal communication. "If I built a platform now, I would just block all US users..."

Before he went to prison, lawyers warned Binance Co-Founder Changpeng Zhao about extortion. He was the wealthiest inmate in American history — but he didn't have any problems. "Once you're in a group, the group does offer some protection..."

THE BLOCK: FBI Director Kash Patel disclosed a six-figure Strategy stock purchase about six months after buying the shares, NOTUS reported. The STOCK Act requires covered officials to disclose such trades within 45 days.

Freshly published research from The Block 🤓 . Stock trading activities are moving to crypto venues, and the numbers are massive. Binance just surpassed $1b AUM for equities trading on its platform. 📈 Weekly equity derivative volumes on CEXs hit a record $11.6B in June 2026, supercharged by Binance's sweeping stock trading expansion against the backdrop of SpaceX's historic IPO. Crypto venues that offer access to TradFi equities solve massive pain points for traditional brokerages. Crypto assets and stocks are consolidated in a single app and can be used as cross-margined collateral 24/7/365. To scale this infrastructure, Binance employs a powerful three-pronged execution architecture to offer access to over 7,000 equities and ETFs. - Traditional Offchain Routing - Tokenized Onchain Equities - Synthetic Equity Derivatives For crypto platforms, adding support for TradFi equities acts as a capital retention strategy and a structural market-cycle hedge. With >80% of Binance's stock trading volume driven by emerging markets, we are witnessing the realization of a borderless financial super-app. For more details about how equity trading benefits crypto platforms, dive into the full analysis here: https://lnkd.in/ea4TWB8r