Swift, Visa, Amazon · launching our new analysis pages — Sun 4 Oct

Good evening! Apologies for a late Digest this Sunday: a trip abroad and the work on our new Analysis pages pushed it into the evening.

This was a week of plumbing. At Sibos, banks got the connections they need to go onchain without rebuilding what they have. New issuers launched dollar stablecoins on the same day, and AI's compute moved closer to the financial system, financed by lenders and investors rather than the tech companies alone.

Bitcoin closed its best third quarter since 2017, and AI agents got both money and their first rules. Five threads ran through the week's Daily editions; here they are in one read, whether you followed every day or none.

We have also opened Analysis on kaupr.io, one page for our recurring market analysis:

💎 Trendline — weekly technical analysis of bitcoin by Venkat Hrushikesa Varri, starting today

💎 Outlooks — Nordic and European analysts on where the market stands

💎 Kaupr Weekly — our podcast on the longer lines in onchain finance, also as articles

More at the end.

— Morten

Swift's ledger went into use. Most of the 17 first-mover banks have now used Swift's blockchain ledger for round-the-clock payments, Swift said at Sibos in Miami. It also wants consumers to send money abroad with a phone number or email, through Bizum, Pix and PayID. Kaupr reported in July how Swift, long on the sidelines, began building the ledger.

The banks keep their keys. Chainlink is building a connection to the ledger in which banks sign transactions themselves and tokenised deposits stay on their own balance sheets. Security routines and approval processes stay as they are. Chainlink has not said which banks will use it, or when.

Existing systems can be reused. IBM and Oracle want to connect banks' current systems to the ledger through ISO 20022, the message standard banks already use. IBM's solution is in beta and can run in the bank's own data centre. For a bank, joining becomes a supplier decision rather than a rebuild.

The banks control transfers between chains. Chainlink's CCIP 2.0 lets banks and issuers add their own verification and compliance checks, such as sanctions screening, when tokenised assets move between blockchains. ANZ, Fidelity International and Sygnum are launch partners, and the standard secures more than $84 billion.

Wall Street builds alongside. Morgan Stanley opened a lab to test stablecoins, tokenisation and DeFi vaults away from its core systems. WisdomTree's tokenised funds passed $1.2 billion across 15 funds on eight blockchains. Ledger and Kraken's parent Payward brought tokenised stocks to hardware wallets.

The question at Sibos was no longer whether banks go onchain, but who builds the connections, and how much of their existing setup they can keep.

The distributors became owners. Open USD went live on Wednesday on Ethereum, Solana, Base and Tempo, with Coinbase, Mastercard, Shopify, Stripe and Visa as founding partners holding equal stakes. They have committed more than $1 billion for liquidity, and most of the equity will go to partners over four to five years according to how much they grow its use.

Europe got a dollar under MiCA. The same day, German issuer AllUnity launched USDAU, a dollar e-money token under MiCA, alongside its euro, Swiss franc and Swedish krona tokens. Its business account now converts between all four in real time, with Banking Circle holding the reserves.

Circle gained ground. Binance bought $100 million of Circle shares and signed a five-year deal to promote USDC, which stands at about $74 billion against Tether's $140 billion. Tether and Circle are both bringing their stablecoins to bitcoin, and the Circle Foundation is funding stablecoin aid payments for UNDP and the World Food Programme.

Three ways to win the dollar onchain were tested in one week: hand ownership to the distributors, offer several currencies under one licence, or win the largest exchange as a partner.

The quarter closed at the top. Bitcoin rose 43% in the third quarter and closed July, August and September in the green for the first time on record. Before this year, every green August since 2013 had been followed by a red September. The year is still about 4% negative, and the price a third below its record.

The ETFs carried it, then slowed. US spot bitcoin ETFs took in $2.4 billion in the week to 25 September, turning 2026 positive after a $5.8 billion hole in July. Inflows ran for nine straight days before Wednesday's $149 million outflow, and the quarter ended at $6.34 billion, the best of the year.

The readings split. Citi raised its 12-month target to $113,000, citing resumed ETF inflows. Bitwise's Nordic director Marco Poblete told Kaupr TV the recovery only convinces once buyers stay through a difficult week. River argued the price has risen on thin supply rather than new demand.

The numbers agree on the quarter. They do not agree on what it means for the next one.

The bill is enormous. Bain says the AI industry needs $6 trillion a year in revenue by 2031 to justify data-centre spending. Inference, running trained models, now accounts for two-thirds of compute demand, and Grayscale points to power and grid connections as the hardest bottleneck.

Lenders stepped in. Neocloud General Compute is deploying Cerebras chips backed by a $400 million debt facility, and the companies say lenders increasingly fund such hardware purchases, so providers need not carry the chips on their own balance sheets.

Investors take over the chips. Amazon wants to move about $8 billion of Nvidia chips into a vehicle funded by outside investors and lease them back, the Financial Times reports. Inference provider Modal Labs, led by Swedish CEO Erik Bernhardsson, is close to a $15.75 billion valuation.

Compute became tradable. BlackRock envisions standardised compute contracts that could be tokenised, pledged as collateral and settled onchain. Venice AI already lets users stake its token for a share of inference capacity and mint DIEM, a tradable compute credit.

AI's build-out is moving from tech companies' own balance sheets into the financial system, where it can be lent against, owned by investors and, in time, traded onchain.

The agents got money. Automated traffic online overtook human traffic in May, Cloudflare's founders write, and they want sites paid when agents use their content. Robinhood now lets AI agents trade for customers in dedicated accounts, and Block has added bitcoin to x402 for agent payments. An agent's wallet still works like an open credential: whoever holds the key can spend it all.

The controls came the same week. Alphabet, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, SpaceXAI and Nvidia signed a voluntary safety commitment at the White House, covering independent audits and board oversight. Nvidia launched an open platform that can quarantine an agent within milliseconds, with Citi and JPMorgan collaborating on the technology.

The rules so far are voluntary and technical. The money agents can move is already real.

Northcrypto, GreenMerc's MiCA-licensed platform, turned an operating profit in July and August after the group cut SEK 4.8 million a year in costs.

Kraken's parent Payward says it is about to buy a bank in Europe; Bloomberg reported in July that it planned to buy a Lithuanian bank.

Galaxy Digital put $100 million of Sky's yield-bearing stablecoin sUSDS in its treasury, the first listed company to do so.

Among altcoins, Midnight rose 86% in a week as smart contracts near, Stacks jumped as Muneeb Ali returned as CEO, and Evernorth heads for Nasdaq on 8 October as the largest listed XRP treasury.

📈 New on kaupr.io: Analysis

Analysis brings together Kaupr's recurring market analysis: technical analysis, analysts' views on the week ahead, and the longer lines in onchain finance.

Trendline — weekly technical analysis of Bitcoin and the crypto market by Venkat Hrushikesa Varri, every Monday. First edition: Has the Structure Finally Shifted? Venkat on why Bitcoin's structure is improving, and why $87,500 is the level to watch.

Outlooks — market analysts from Nordic and European research houses and asset managers on where the market stands and what they are watching next.

Kaupr Weekly — Morten Myrstad's podcast on the longer lines in onchain finance, also published as an article. There is no new episode this week; earlier episodes are on the Analysis page.

👉 Explore Analysis →

📅 This coming Wednesday: How to invest in the tokenization trends

Kaupr and Virtune go live online on Wednesday 7 October, 11:00–12:30 CET. Virtune's CEO and co-founder Christopher Kock and Chief Sales Officer Andreas Severin discuss what is driving tokenization, which platforms the financial industry is building on, and how investors can gain exposure through regulated ETPs. Moderated by Morten Myrstad.

👉 Register for the event → · Read about Kaupr Events →

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Thank you for reading Kaupr Digest. Wishing you a good evening — Kaupr Daily is back on Monday morning.

Best regards Morten Myrstad Founder & Editor