Welcome to our institutional newsletter, Crypto Long & Short. This week:
- Sylvia To on AI agents choosing denationalized money
- The headlines institutions should pay attention to by Francisco Rodrigues
- Kamino hits $90M in OnRe liquidity as $KMNO drops 16% in weekly chart
Thanks for joining us!
-Alexandra Lévis
Expert Views
Hayek predicted it, Satoshi built it, agents will use it: the stealth denationalization of money
– By Sylvie ToVice President, Bullish Capital Management
Although FA Hayek, Satoshi, and AI may seem like three unrelated topics, the next few minutes will reveal exactly how essential this triad is to our financial sovereignty and will fundamentally change your view of money as we know it.
Crypto’s cypherpunk philosophy
Amid the flashy distractions of memecoins, speculation, and NFTs, Satoshi would like us to remember the true philosophy of crypto, which is: privacy, decentralization and resistance to censorship. These ideologies did not come from central banks or policy makers. They come from the cypherpunk definition that freedom is best defended not by persuasion but by architecture.
As Vitalik Buterin recently explained in his March 2026 thread on
Money should be a product, not a decree
In 1976, Hayek argued that money should not be “legal tender” imposed on people by the state. It must be discovered, adopted and rejected through market choice, like any other product. His book Denationalization of money highlighted these characteristics of “good money”:
• Non-state emission: not decreed, not voted on, not bailable.
• Rules-based monetary policy: predictable, non-discretionary supply schedule.
• Global choice: adoption is voluntary; anyone can subscribe or unsubscribe.
• Capture resistance: no central transmitter to press, no board to replace.
• Authorization-free settlement: Transfer of value does not require institutional approval.
Sound familiar? Yes, Bitcoin.
Bitcoin belongs to a special category within this experience. Not because it is perfect today, but because it is likely the first monetary network to meet Hayek’s central requirement. This is money being introduced through a route that cannot easily be stopped. As Bitcoin undergoes price discovery, its volatility is the cost of birth and the market deciding the value of an ungoverned and credibly scarce asset in a world formed for fiat. But even in this turbulent phase, Bitcoin checks a surprising number of Hayek’s boxes.
The Trojan horse: stablecoins and the trap that lies within them
If we’re honest, stablecoins are one of the most successful use cases in crypto right now. They are fast, programmable and easy to evaluate. They cross borders with much less friction than bank transfers.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: stablecoins don’t denationalize money. They digitize the existing national currency and expand its reach. Most stablecoins do not compete with the dollar. They import the dollar.
The dollar is a tool of state policy. Being attached to it ties you to its inflation, its surveillance, its sanctions regime, its banking choke points and its regulatory priorities. Stablecoins may appear to be free because they operate on open networks, but their reference asset remains the same old sovereign instrument.
So while stablecoins can be useful, they also risk becoming the ideal bridge to tighter control. In this sense, stablecoins are not neutral. They are a competitor to decentralized currencies. If Bitcoin is denationalization, stablecoins are nationalization with a better user interface.
The real end user
This is where the story becomes more interesting and more Hayekian.
Humans are emotional, irrational, politically motivated and short-term oriented. Our monetary systems reflect this. We routinely trade long-term stability for short-term relief, then act by surprise when crises worsen.
But what happens when most of the actors in the economy are not humans?
With the meteoric rise of agentic software and applications increasingly designed for agents using frameworks such as Model Context Protocol (MCP), there is a credible near-term future where autonomous agents purchase services, data, computation, API calls, storage, inference, and specialized tools via ongoing micropayments.
Agents will care less about branding and storytelling than properties like:
• machine-readable transaction metadata
• instantaneous and programmable purpose
• composability with other systems
• low transaction overhead
• Censorship resistance (because availability is a feature)
• predictable monetary rules (because the models optimize according to them)
In other words: agents will be attracted to money that behaves like good infrastructure. A stablecoin is stable because an issuer maintains a peg. An agent might ask: What is the issuer’s failure mode? What is the political risk? What is the risk of censorship? What is the settlement risk in times of stress? Bitcoin’s value may fluctuate, but its rules are unusually readable. Its delivery is not negotiated. Its main properties do not depend on a board decision, the discretion of a regulator or the solvency of a country.
Maybe humans won’t choose the best money because we’re too enmeshed in politics, habits, and fear.
Perhaps Hayek’s “new money” was never intended for humans – at least not at first.
Perhaps the path that governments “can’t stop” is not a mass political movement.
Perhaps it is the AI agents operating at machine speed, indifferent to national identity and optimizing for reliability, who can decide the new monetary rails.
When this tipping point arrives, the denationalization of money will no longer seem like a philosophical triumph. It will be an inevitable technical outcome, driven not by ideology, but by the raw necessity of a machine.
When this tipping point arrives, the denationalization of money will no longer seem like a philosophical triumph. It will be an inevitable technical outcome, driven not by ideology, but by the raw necessity of a machine.
Headlines of the week
– By Francisco Rodrigues
Traditional financial giants, including NYSE owner ICE and Morgan Stanley, have continued to make strategic moves in crypto, while regulatory steps like Kraken guaranteeing access to the Fed signal the industry’s path toward mainstream integration.
- NYSE owner invests in crypto exchange OKX at $25 billion valuation: Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, has acquired a minority stake in crypto exchange OKX, valuing the company at $25 billion. ICE will license OKX’s crypto spot prices to launch crypto futures, while OKX will offer ICE futures and tokenized stocks to its customers.
- Morgan Stanley names Coinbase and BNY as custodians in proposed bitcoin ETF filing: The Wall Street giant updated its S-1 filing for a proposed bitcoin spot ETF, naming BNY as trustee and liquidity custodian and Coinbase Custody as crypto custodian.
- Kraken becomes the first crypto company to secure access to the Fed’s main account: The approval allows Kraken to accelerate deposits and withdrawals from large traders and institutional clients, but it is limited, with Kraken not earning interest on reserves or having access to emergency loans from the Fed.
- The central bank of Kazakhstan will invest $350 million of gold and foreign exchange reserves in digital assets: the strategy will focus on shares of high-tech infrastructure companies and cryptocurrency, as well as crypto-related index funds.
- Billions of cryptocurrencies are circulating in Iran. Analysts can’t agree whether this is a wartime panic or business as usual: When airstrikes hit Iran on February 28, Nobitex’s crypto outflows soared 873%, suggesting a “digital banking run” was underway. The reality is perhaps more complex.
Chart of the week
Kamino Hits $90M In OnRe Liquidity As $KMNO Falls 16%
Kamino’s OnRe marketplace grew 80% to nearly $90 million in 30 days, solidifying its position as the primary liquidity layer for OnRe’s on-chain reinsurance protocol. This growth allows users to bet on a real-world vertical of over $480 billion using $ONyc – a tokenized insurance asset – as collateral.
However, this fundamental scaling of RWA deviates sharply from the native token $KMNO; The KMNO/SOL pair fell 16% over six months, pressured by a broader market slowdown and 13 million monthly token unlocks (0.13% of total supply).
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Note: The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc., CoinDesk Indices or its owners and affiliates.
