Percival Tran

Flow Traders is a publicly traded market maker. Euronext. Ticker $FLOW . They just started borrowing money through Bitcoin.

Lombard Finance built an on-chain credit strategy. Deposit $LBTC or $BTC .b as collateral. Flow Traders borrows stablecoins against it. Depositors get paid yield — in Bitcoin terms. Not some farm token. $BTC -denominated returns from a real institutional counterparty.

People don't get how weird this is. A public company is bypassing prime brokers and bank credit lines to borrow on-chain. Bitcoin holders are earning institutional yield without selling. Two years ago none of this existed.

The part that matters: moving wrapped Bitcoin across chains. $LBTC lives on one chain. $BTC .b lives on Avalanche. The credit strategy is somewhere else. Moving these around is exactly the kind of thing that's gotten people wrecked for billions.

Lombard knows this. After the LayerZero exploit they did a full security review. Made a hard call. Chainlink CCIP becomes their exclusive cross-chain infrastructure. Over a billion in Bitcoin assets. One provider picked. That's not a partnership. That's a risk committee saying "this is the only one we trust."

Chainlink already verifies $LBTC is 1:1 backed through Proof of Reserve, updating every ten minutes. Now CCIP handles the cross-chain movement. Same provider for reserves and messaging. Same security assumptions. No stitching together incompatible models from different vendors.

Public companies don't touch novel crypto infrastructure unless their risk people have spent months on it. Flow Traders going first is the tell. CCIP being the exclusive bridge after a security review is the receipt.

My Perps Tier List.

S-Tier: Variational + Ondo Perps

Simple reason. Neutral strategy. You don't need to throw money at it. Farm points without burning capital. That's the whole filter. If I can earn without bleeding, it goes in S. Everything else has to prove why it shouldn't be lower.

A-Tier: Bulk + TxFlow

Bulk is closed right now, but you can still farm through the LP pool. If you're holding Solana anyway, this is easy. Park it. Earn. No extra cost.

TxFlow is early. Open-source. No VCs. Strong team. I like it because I got in early. Whether it breaks into S depends on what they ship, but the setup is right.

B-Tier: Perpl + RiseX

Perpl is the only thing actually running on Monad. If Monad takes off, an ecosystem project needs to deliver a real airdrop, and Perpl is the most obvious candidate. Not betting on the tech. Betting on the chain needing a winner.

RiseX is borderline. Early enough that points are cheap, but it could easily slide into skip territory. Dabbling, not committing.

Skip: Bullpen, QFEX, Bullet, Pacifica, Nado, Extended

Nothing to say. Just not worth the time.

$ONDO $MON

Digital Asset just raised another $10 million from Standard Chartered and Shinhan Financial Group.

Round total: $365 million.
Valuation: flat at $2 billion.

Standard Chartered is the fifth systemically important bank on the cap table, joining BNY, BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs, and HSBC. Shinhan is South Korea's largest banking group, the second Korean heavyweight after Hanwha. These aren't tourists writing small checks for allocation. These are institutions buying into rails they intend to run their own businesses on.

The DTCC is rolling out tokenized securities on Canton in October. S&P tokenized its Treasury indices in January. Visa is running a Super Validator. Goldman and BNY settle repo on it. The cap table is not a venture portfolio. It's a consortium.

The capital is going toward expanding applications and builder funds. That's the part that gets interesting. Canton has the institutions, the pilots, the data layer. What it doesn't have yet is a thick application layer: lending protocols, AMMs, the DeFi primitives that turn infrastructure into activity. If a few thousand developers start building on the same rails Goldman settles repo on, that combination doesn't exist anywhere else.

A $2 billion flat round in a market where late-stage crypto valuations have been cut in half is not normal. These investors are not pricing for a flip. They're pricing for what happens when a meaningful slice of $250 trillion in global securities moves on-chain.

Nobody announces a flat $2B round to flex. They announce it because the names matter more than the number. When the DTCC goes live in October, the market starts paying attention.

$CC

I only write about projects that matter:

1. Chainlink - $LINK
2. Ondo Finance and their perps Ondo Perps $ONDO
3. Canton Network - $CC
4. TxFlow - soon to follow the Hyperliquid legend story
5. Robinhood - new home for tokenized stock

Others on my watchlist:

1. BlackRock BUILD, largest asset manager on earth tokenized a money market fund
2. Securitize, enterprise SaaS for tokenized securities
3. GIWA_by_Upbit, new chain for RWA by Upbit
4. NousResearch, open-source AI agents - Hermes, great honestly
5. Minara, great AI signal for trading and back-testing too
6. Figure, onchain capital markets