Four Pillars Research

: : [Newletter] Memecoins and Tokenized Stocks, Under One Roof (Week 29, 2026) 🗞 Major News - [Crypto] Robinhood Chain Sees Onchain Volume Surge on Memecoin Frenzy Led by CashCat - [Institution] EU Reviews Rules for Offshore Stablecoins and Tokenized Assets After MiCA 📊 Data Spotlight - Is Ethereum really a "world" computer? ✍️ Four Pillars Weekly - Ondo Perps: The Productive Capital Thesis - Cadence: Monad's Answer to MEV - Collector Crypt Has One Question Left (ft. fact-checked by CC) 🌎 Full Newsletter FP Website | Telegram (EN / KR) | X (EN / KR)

: : [Asia/Issue] Rules Narrow, Use Cases Widen (ASA News #22) Written by: ASA, Heechang [News #1] Korea Narrows Won Stablecoin Issuance Around Banks as Corporate Remittances Move First ✍️ The BOK Reaffirms Its Bank-Consortium Model, While Hyundai Tests Cross-Border Remittances and KT Prepares a Payment and Settlement Platform [News #2] Japan Enters the Dollar Stablecoin Race Through Sony Bank’s U.S. Trust Bank ✍️ Sony Bank Secures Conditional OCC Approval for Connectia Trust, Laying the Groundwork for Dollar Stablecoin Commercialization [News #3] Taiwan’s Bank and Corporate Payment Race Begins Before Stablecoin Rules Take Effect ✍️ Banks, Accounting Firms, and Fintechs Prepare Following the Virtual Asset Services Act, as Bito.ONE Recruits 10 Companies for Its First Pilot — *[ASA News] is a weekly newsletter where we share the most important news related to stablecoin in Asia. (Subscribe to the Newsletter) 📱 X Post 🌎 Full Article (Website) FP Website | Telegram (EN / KR) | X (EN / KR)

: : [Crypto/Comment] Technology’s Double-Edged Sword: Prediction Market or Manipulation Market? Written by Steve

Examining how prediction markets can be abused under the banner of innovation and proposes possible solutions.

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: : [Investment/Article] Collector Crypt Has One Question Left (ft. fact-checked by CC) Written by Ponyo - Collector Crypt is a velocity business. The gacha machines keep close to 5 cents of every dollar that passes through them and have for 15 months, through a five-folding of volume to $200.5M a month. - Every card pulled faces four doors, and the split between them is the business. Nearly everything goes straight back to the machine, with 71.8% of June volume in turbo mode. Keeps run at 1 to 2.5% of rip value, physical redemptions at 2.4 to 3.1% of GMV, and P2P marketplace trading under 1%. - The same gacha machines increasingly run under other brands. June broke the one-anchor pattern, 21 partner storefronts producing $1.18M with five above $70K each, on the roughly 6% of GMV partners represent. - The vault is the hidden second business. $23M of below-market inventory has appreciated quietly since token launch, and it ties the machine’s take, the exit spread, and the treasury to a single variable, card prices. - The token wraps all of it. A Panama foundation holds the IP, the cards, and the treasury, the float trades near 1x machine gross margin, and the same operational wallet that pays machine sellbacks has been funding CARDS buybacks for over a month, verified on-chain, while the mechanism a holder could underwrite remains undocumented. 📱 X Post 🌎 Full Article (Website) FP Website | Telegram (EN / KR) | X (EN / KR)

: : Four Pillars Joins WebX 2026 as Research Partner Four Pillars will join WebX 2026, held in Tokyo from July 13 to 14, as an official research partner. As an outcome of the partnership, Four Pillars will jointly produce an exclusive report with CoinPost and HashHub titled "Japan Crypto Market 2026," offering an in depth analysis of the Japanese market, and distribute it on site at the event. The report comprehensively covers the current state and growth trajectory of Japan's crypto market, major players and infrastructure, regulatory frameworks, comparison with global markets, and future outlook. Following its participation as the exclusive research partner for MoneyX 2026 by CoinPost, SBI, Progmat, and JPYC in February, Four Pillars will further strengthen its brand presence in the Japanese market through this partnership. 🌎 Announcement 📱 X Post 📰 News (CoinPost, Newsis, Blockmedia) FP Website | Telegram (EN / KR) | X (EN / KR)

: : [Crypto/Issue] Cadence: Monad's Answer to MEV Written by c4lvin - Category Labs, the developer behind Monad, has released Cadence, a Multiple Concurrent Proposers (MCP) consensus protocol. Unlike earlier multi-proposer designs, which paid two extra communication rounds per block for a separate aggregation stage, Cadence embeds multiple proposers into consensus itself and finalizes blocks with the same three-round optimal latency as single-leader consensus. - Cadence shortens consensus through Extreme Pipelining. Because each block is handled in an independent consensus instance that makes no reference to the previous block, the block interval is fully decoupled from network latency. In a simulation with Monad mainnet's 200 validators, under a 100ms block interval, transactions were included in a proposal within an average of 50ms, with finalization taking an average of 219ms and speculative finality 167ms. - While Solana's Constellation layers a multi-proposer structure on top of the Alpenglow consensus protocol as a preprocessor, Monad's Cadence redesigns consensus from a blank slate. The difference between the two approaches ultimately comes down to whether to pay extra communication rounds. - Combining a multi-proposer structure with an encrypted mempool is an attempt to remove, at the protocol level, the very preconditions of MEV: monopoly and information asymmetry. This departs from Ethereum's path of marketizing MEV through auctions. If Cadence is actually deployed, the outlook becomes uncertain for Monad's MEV-coupled liquid staking model, which has resold the leader's ordering rights through auctions and folded the proceeds into staking yields. The excess returns of liquid staking will be restructured from private auction revenue into open fee revenue, and the arena of competition over residual ordering policy will likely shift from the protocol level to the application level. 📱 X Post 🌎 Full Article FP Website | Telegram (EN / KR) | X (EN / KR)

: : [Data/Comment] Is Ethereum really a "world" computer? Written by Rejamong

Ethereum, the 'world' computer. A look at validator distribution by type, the regional gaps, and the opportunity they leave open.

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: : [Crypto/Issue] Ondo Perps: The Productive Capital Thesis Written by Ponyo - Ondo Perps is the first derivatives platform to enable the use of tokenized equities as margin, eliminating the forced-sell problem that fragments capital across every other platform. Traders can post SPYon and QQQon directly as collateral with the spot exposure stays intact while the capital becomes productive. - The SGX enclave architecture is a deliberate trust midpoint between CEX and on-chain. Off-chain matching runs inside hardware-encrypted memory the operator cannot access, verified by an attestor network with split key material. - $1.12B in cumulative volume and $14.8M in open interest within twenty days. 📱 X Post 🌎 Full Article FP Website | Telegram (EN / KR) | X (EN / KR)

: : [Tech/Comment] What Changed in the New Ethereum Strawmap Written by Rejamong

Ethereum's long-term roadmap, the "strawmap," just got a new version. A quick look at what changed since four months ago.

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: : [Newletter] Blockchain, the Rail for Everything (Week 28, 2026) 🗞 Major News - [Institution] Robinhood, The World Is Flat - [Tech] What Does Cloudflare’s Monetization Gateway Mean? 📊 Data Spotlight - Why Emerging Markets Matter: From Crypto Cards to Headless Merchants ✍️ Four Pillars Weekly - Lido: The Most Important Protocol on Ethereum - A Six-Month Review of Cap: From Stablecoin to Credit Market - Korea is at a Turning Point - What You Missed Yesterday: Robinhood’s “New” Tokenized Stock Playbook 🌎 Full Newsletter FP Website | Telegram (EN / KR) | X (EN / KR)

: : [Asia/Issue] From Exploration to Design (ASA News #21) Written by: ASA, Heechang [News #1] South Korea Passes Crypto FX Act Amendment, Concerns Mount Over Scope Reaching 'Substantially Similar' Transactions ✍️ Virtual-Asset Transfer Business Registration Required, Criminal Penalties Added, but Core Rules Left to Presidential Decree (Written by: Moyed) [News #1] Bank of Korea Releases Unified Ledger Paper on the International Stage, Elevating Government Bond Tokenization and the Public Monetary System ✍️ Governor Hyun Song Shin Presents the "Unified Ledger" at the ECB's Sintra Forum: Project Hangang Expands Beyond a Stablecoin Alternative Toward Government Bond and Asset Tokenization [News #2] Taiwan Passes Its First Virtual Asset Special Act, Placing Stablecoins Under a Central Bank Consent and Licensing Regime ✍️ A Single Law Covering Full VASP Licensing, Reserve Backing, and Criminal Penalties: Issuance Now Requires Both Central Bank Consent and Supervisory Approval, with Up to 10 Years' Imprisonment for Unauthorized Activity [News #3] Hong Kong Prepares Tokenized Bond Rules, Moving the Fixed Income Market onto DLT ✍️ HKMA and the FSTB Complete Their Phase 1 Review and Find the Current Legal Framework Sufficiently Flexible, Setting the Stage to Connect Stablecoin Licensing with Tokenized Securities Infrastructure in One Market (Written by: A) — *[ASA News] is a bi-weekly newsletter where we share the most important news related to stablecoin in Asia. (Subscribe to the Newsletter) 📱 X Post 🌎 Full Article (Website) FP Website | Telegram (EN / KR) | X (EN / KR)

: : [Asia/Comment] What Asia's Stance Means for USDT and USDC Written by Eren

Stablecoin rules across Asia are drawing a clearer line between onshore and offshore issuers. So what does this mean for USDT and USDC?

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: : [Crypto/Comment] Why Cloudflare's Monetization Gateway Matters Written by Jun

Cloudflare’s Monetization Gateway treats AI bots as new web users that can be charged per request, rather than as intruders that must simply be blocked. x402 provides the payment handshake for that flow, and if OUSD is added, Cloudflare can connect edge traffic, settlement, and revenue in one stack. The core point is that as agents become a main interface to the web, the web’s business model may shift from visits to requests.

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: : [Institution/Issue] What You Missed Yesterday: Robinhood’s “New” Tokenized Stock Playbook Written by 100y - On July 1, 2026, Robinhood held an event in London called “Robinhood Presents: The World is Flat” and announced a series of major updates. The news that attracted the most attention was the mainnet launch of Robinhood Chain, but taking a closer look at the news around tokenized stocks reveals some interesting insights. - Robinhood renamed its existing service offered through its European entity, Stock Tokens, to Classic Stock Tokens, and launched a new Stock Tokens service. The two are similar in that they tokenize stocks with 1:1 backing, but they differ across every dimension, including tokenization structure, jurisdictional authorities, and regulatory frameworks. As a result, they show very different characteristics in functional terms, such as investor accessibility and onchain composability. - This article provides an in-depth analysis of how Classic Stock Tokens and Stock Tokens differ, and uses that analysis to examine the direction Robinhood aims to take. 📱 X Post 🌎 Full Article (Website) FP Website | Telegram (EN / KR) | X (EN / KR)

: : Four Pillars Joins EastPoint: Seoul 2026 as a Research Partner Four Pillars is joining EastPoint: Seoul 2026, taking place in Seoul on September 28, as an official research partner. EastPoint:Seoul is a private conference co-hosted by Hashed, Bloomingbit, and The Korea Economic Daily, bringing together institutional leaders, regulators, and Web3/AI innovators to discuss the next chapter of Korea’s digital asset and AI economy. This partnership stems from the view that the Korean market is at an inflection point, shifting from retail-led to institution-led growth. From the evolving regulatory framework around security tokens (STOs) and the Digital Asset Basic Act, to discussions on KRW stablecoins and CBDCs, these themes align closely with the areas Four Pillars has long focused on. Four Pillars aims to contribute to the event through research that interprets this transition from an institutional perspective. As the first outcome of the partnership, Four Pillars has published the research report “Korea Is at a Turning Point,” which examines why the Korean market is now entering a pivotal phase. In the lead-up to the event, Four Pillars will continue to release content that analyzes the institutionalization of Korea’s digital asset market from multiple angles. 📱 X Post 🌎 First Report FP Website | Telegram (EN / KR) | X (EN / KR)

: : [Asia/Issue] Korea is at a Turning Point Written by Heechang - Korea's fast-moving, speed-driven culture made it an early crypto hotbed, producing the 2017 kimchi premium, the 2021 NFT mania, and the painful 2022 Terra/Luna collapse before the market began to mature. - Retail trading rebounded powerfully to roughly $77.5B in H2 2024 with close to 20% of the population invested, though liquidity has recently rotated toward a booming equities market. - The market is now institutionalizing as clearer laws recognize tokenized securities, the Bank of Korea's CBDC pilot and private won stablecoins move toward coexistence, and major banks and platforms race to build the payments stack. - Korea has long been restless and risk-seeking, always looking toward whatever comes next. That same restlessness once produced chaos in its crypto market, and now it is producing structure. 📱 X Post 🌎 Full Article (Website) FP Website | Telegram (EN / KR) | X (EN / KR)

: : [Investment/Article] Collector Crypt Has a Margin Problem Written by Ponyo - CC’s net margin fell from 11.2% in Q3 2025 to 5.6% in Q2 2026 while GMV grew 4.7x, as volume migrated toward the $250, $1,000, and $2,500 packs where CC retains less per dollar than in smaller tiers. - The $2,500 Mythic tier captured 36.7% of June GMV within thirteen days of launch, while spend per depositor rose sharply from October 2025 to June 2026, showing that growth has been driven by larger tickets and heavier wallet activity, not just broader user growth. - Physical redemptions consumed 41.6% of May pre-burn net revenue. In observable onchain data, 75 user wallets redeemed cards out of ~6k June depositors, with the top four user redeemers accounting for 47.1% of user burns. - In our scenario model, CC’s economics turn negative when two of three pressures appear together: inventory replacement cost moves toward market price, redemption rates rise above 9%, or high-tier buyback rates remain near 93%. - Partner revenue totals $1.83M all-time, with most of it tied to Moonbirds. The broader API and distribution strategy has not yet proven recurring, inventory-light revenue, because publicly verifiable integrations still appear to rely on CC for the card, vault, fulfillment, and buyback layer. 📱 X Post 🌎 Full Article (Website) FP Website | Telegram (EN / KR) | X (EN / KR)

: : [Crypto/Comment] Why Emerging Markets Matter: From Crypto Cards to Headless Merchants Written by Jun

RedotPay drove crypto card growth by targeting emerging markets, and to stay competitive in agentic payments, crypto should likewise target headless merchants, an ownerless emerging market, rather than the consumer payments incumbents already control.

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: : [Crypto/Issue] A Six-Month Review of Cap: From Stablecoin to Credit Market Written by c4lvin - The core challenges that lingered at Cap six months ago, namely its heavy reliance on self-delegation and low capital utilization, have now been resolved to a meaningful degree. EtherFi and Bedrock have each stepped into independent underwriter roles backed by ETH and BTC collateral, moving the system away from self-delegation, and reserve utilization, which sat at just 5.3% in December 2025, climbed to roughly 60% by the end of the first quarter of 2026. The 100 million dollar revolving credit facility extended to Susquehanna Crypto also signaled that institutional borrowing has begun to move beyond the pilot stage. - The number of registered underwriters grew from 12 to 22 and borrowers from 18 to 30, yet it remains unconfirmed whether an independent credit market, in which different underwriters price different borrowers differently, is actually functioning. It is still untested in practice how far operators' real strategies and legal agreements can be publicly verified, and whether the slashing and repayment paths will work as intended in the event of a large default. - In terms of metrics, the borrowing utilization rate and the composition of yield sources now matter more than total value locked. TVL stands at around 250 million dollars, below its previous peak, but borrowed capital has grown substantially compared with before. The yield on stcUSD has also fallen from about 8.6% in December 2025 to the low 5% range today, yet its relative standing against comparable products has actually improved. 📱 X Post 🌎 Full Article (Website) FP Website | Telegram (EN / KR) | X (EN / KR)

: : [Investment/Comment] They Sold MSTR Again, But I Stopped Shorting MSTR Written by 100y

Strategy sold MSTR again, but today’s announcement could mark a major turning point.

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