Bitcoin hits 8-month high as Wall Street institutions signal their preferred blockchain networks
A solo presenter on the Digital Asset News channel covers Bitcoin's latest price milestone, BlackRock's AI-and-blockchain thesis, blockchain finality speeds, and the DTCC's upcoming tokenization launch.
Summary
The host, Rob, opens by noting that Bitcoin hit an 8-month high of approximately $87,500–$88K at around 1:00 a.m. Eastern, pushing the total crypto market cap above $3.1 trillion. He then walks through a BlackRock report titled "The Machine Native Economy," which argues that AI agents require machine-native payment rails — pointing to stablecoins and blockchains as the infrastructure of choice. Rob surveys blockchain finality speeds across the top networks, highlighting Solana's upcoming Alpenglow upgrade targeting 150-millisecond finality. He also covers the CFTC chair's push for tokenization alongside the SEC's moves to open the door to on-chain stocks, noting the SEC's September 17th temporary innovation exemption for tokenized US stock trading. Rob highlights that tokenized stocks including Google and Tesla are already tradeable on the Robinhood chain via Uniswap without KYC or AML requirements — a development he frames as significant for financial inclusion. The most significant segment covers the DTCC — which processed approximately $4.7 quadrillion in transactions in 2025 — announcing a tokenization service launching in October 2026, with more than 30 major firms including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Chainlink, and Circle participating. Rob identifies Canton Network as the blockchain underpinning that service and examines its mechanics and token economics in detail.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Bitcoin hits an 8-month all-time high
The total crypto market cap is now above $3 trillion, and we can see that Bitcoin actually hit its all-time high over eight months. We just see a little bit of a dip, but I think it's worth reiterating what we talked about yesterday: it's not about where the hockey puck is right now, it's about where the hockey puck is going. Today is a pretty good day. We're going to have a little bit of a pullback — we had a pretty massive run-up, so a couple of percentage points given back is fine and pretty much par for the course. But over eight months or so, we're doing pretty good.
This morning at roughly 1:00 a.m. Eastern we hit $87K. Not too bad for a market cap that is now above $3 trillion — at that point I think it was at $3.1 trillion. A little pullback is what it is. Bitcoin is going to be fine. We all pretty much understand that for the long run, Bitcoin is one of the safest plays in the digital asset and cryptocurrency space. I'm not going to give financial advice, but you really can't go wrong with Bitcoin over time. I think we've talked about that to death.
BlackRock's "Machine Native Economy" report
What we're talking about today is expanding our horizons just a little bit — some thought experiments to see where things are going. There is a quadrillion-dollar clearing house that has essentially picked its winner, and I've got to tell you, this has come out of left field and it all happens in October. Stick with me.
First of all, BlackRock — 15.3 trillion assets under management. That's not the institution I'm primarily talking about today, but they did put out a report a couple of days ago called "The Machine Native Economy." Pretty much what they're saying is that there is a clear course for digital assets as they interact with the AI economy — more specifically, agentic agents. They talk about how large language models convert language into numerical tokens, while blockchains convert money and assets into digital tokens. If you want to interact back and forth, especially with your AI agent, as the price of transactions collapses, this is probably the way you want to go.
I don't think there's anybody out there who doesn't think that AI is essentially the future — whether that be a good future or a bad future, it is the future. BlackRock, I think, is nailing it here. Their key point: agentic commerce requires machine-native payment rails. Let me say that one more time. AI agents, agentics, commerce — requires machine-native payment rails. It is not about using PayPal. It is not about using Venmo. It is about microtransactions across a continuum, as fast as you can possibly make them.
AI agents increasingly need always-on rails — which is not the current banking system — built for high-frequency, low-value payments. Stablecoins, blockchains, and emerging protocols can provide programmable infrastructure. And point three: computers are emerging as a new and potentially large market for digital assets. The entire documentation was quite interesting about autonomous AI agents and where things are going. And again, this is not some small compute blog post — this is BlackRock, which is also leading the Bitcoin ETF. We had almost a billion dollars in inflows a couple of days ago, and then yesterday roughly $721 million. Correct me in the comment section if I'm off. There is quite a lot of money being allocated to digital assets — whether that be Bitcoin, Solana, or Ethereum — things are moving in the right direction for us in the digital asset space.
Blockchain finality speeds: who wins the AI agent race
So the question is: which ones are the winners? You have to look at some of the fastest networks out there. You're welcome to tell me about your altcoin and how fast it actually is. I'm sure someone's going to say ICP — Internet Computer Protocol — is the fastest. Or Cheetah is the fastest. Or Wing Bang Boom is the fastest. That may be true, and I'd love to hear which ones are faster.
But as far as finality goes, Solana is pretty quick — and it's about to get quicker. This is from Solana developers: something called Alpenglow is coming. It looks like they had this over at GitHub and they're testing it right now. Currently, the finality time — the time it takes for transactions to become essentially irreversible — was 12.8 seconds. For my bank, for most vendors out there, that's blazing fast. But it's not fast enough for what we just looked at with BlackRock talking about AI agents. They need it quicker. The developers said, "Fine, let's do this." They've been working on it for quite some time, and the target finality is going to be 150 milliseconds.
Now I'm thinking: is there anything else that's quicker out there? Yes. In the top 50, here's what you've got — and I did not know this. Taking it from real-time data over the last 24 hours for finality:
TON — which used to be Telegram, now it's TON — has a finality of 0.4 seconds. That's blazingly quick. Now, as far as centralization versus decentralization, that's a separate conversation, because Bitcoin is the most decentralized. But because of that, its finality time is 65.5 minutes.
Then you've got Binance at 0.7 seconds. We can talk about centralization versus decentralization — Binance is not that decentralized. I think it's a couple of servers underneath CZ's bed going, "Yep, those look good."
Stellar — pretty good one — 4 seconds. I did not know it was that quick.
Avalanche, which we've been talking about recently — and of course there was the Avalanche conference going on, I think it actually wrapped up yesterday — you see Avalanche at 6.5 seconds.
Solana at 8.3 seconds — and this is all about to go to 150 milliseconds. Pretty amazing.
Tron — one of my favorites — kind of a laggard at 57 seconds. Almost a minute. That's not great.
Here's where it really gets bad: Ethereum is 15.9 minutes for finality. That's not going to cut it. I just saw a blog post where Vitalik Buterin is saying he wants to reduce this to under a couple of minutes, but I'm thinking that's still kind of slow. I don't know if that's going to work out.
Monero — of course you're looking for privacy — 21.8 minutes. Litecoin, 30 minutes. And Bitcoin, 65.5 minutes.
So again, agents are going to pick the fastest ones, and these are essentially your winners.
Tokenization of real-world assets: the other dominant narrative
But it's not just AI agents. There's another narrative I think is going to dominate the discussion into this bull run — if this is truly the bull run of bull runs — and that is the tokenization of assets.
Canada's big six banks are exploring tokenized deposit systems to modernize payments. It'll be great to see them actually do that, because any bank that can be forward-thinking and say, "We should probably modernize these payments because things are pretty slow" — and let's not forget, we keep banker hours, so on the weekend, good luck — if you've got the six banks exploring this, that sounds pretty good.
But the thing you have to ask yourself is: if these are talking about payments, what kind of rails would they use? If it's a bank, they might want a closed-off system. But there's so much volume and so much liquidity sloshing around in the decentralized, permissionless space that they're going to have to do double duty — permissioned and permissionless.
For that, you probably want to take a look at what Visa is tracking. We've talked about this many times — Visa's onchain analytics, link in the description. As far as stablecoin transaction count, the two big projects in the space are USDC and USDT — Tether and Circle's USDC. Just this month alone — September 2026 — you can see the stablecoin transaction count: Tron is leading the way, then Binance, Solana, Polygon, and Ethereum. Stellar is also making its way in there — need to be aware of that.
Looking at cumulative metrics over the last 12 months: same story — Binance, Ethereum, Solana, Tron. How about three months? Same ones. How about a month? 28 billion — same ones. So Binance, Solana, Tron — these are the ones I think are some of the winners.
The SEC, CFTC, and tokenized stock trading
The CFTC is moving forward because Congress couldn't get its act together on the clarity legislation. The CFTC chair is pushing for tokenization as the SEC opens the door to on-chain stocks. Officials at the SEC have also promoted the development of tokenized markets. We're going to keep hearing this again and again: tokenization of real-world assets, tokenization of equities, and so on.
On September 17th, the SEC granted a temporary innovation exemption for tokenized US stock trading. Let me say that one more time: for tokenized US stock trading.
Here's the crazy thing. Uniswap over the last 30 days has done some pretty miraculous things — up 115% over a month. But on the date of that announcement, roughly September 17th — well, actually the 16th, because everybody's got an insider — you went from about six dollars and shot all the way up to almost $11. You almost doubled in roughly seven days. Not too bad.
I didn't really think too much of it until I re-downloaded Uniswap and was playing around with it. Did you know that on the Robinhood chain you can buy tokenized stocks right now? You can buy Google, you can buy Tesla, you can buy whatever else you want — and on Uniswap you don't need KYC or AML. If we can push this forward, this will be a pretty big thing, especially for people who don't have access to banks, KYC, or AML, and who want to be a part of it.
The DTCC: a quadrillion-dollar institution enters tokenization
Now here's the big one: the DTCC. The DTCC is essentially a clearing house — global and massive. Here are some numbers. Anybody want to take a shot at this? Four quadrillion, 728 trillion, 495 million, 680,000. That's the value of transactions processed by the DTCC in 2025. They do a lot of volume.
Wouldn't it be great if they could get into some crypto and digital assets? Well, good news — they have. I think this is going to happen in October. "DTCC turns tokenization a reality: US trades successfully processed using DTCC tokenized assets." This was from July 15th. Back then I heard about it and thought, "Yeah, see if it actually happens — maybe in three years." But no. This event marks a major milestone ahead of the DTCC tokenized service, which will launch in October 2026. And apparently they are going to do it.
Just to give you a sense of the scale: DTCC is the premier post-trade market infrastructure, standardizing the processing of financial transactions — treasuries, equities, metals, you name it. $114 trillion in assets safeguarded. BlackRock has $15.3 trillion — that's not too bad. $114 trillion is not too bad at all. They do $11.4 trillion of government securities settlements every single day. There are 5,600 client firms across 95 countries.
And like I said, they're launching the DTCC tokenization service with more than 30 different firms. Who are those firms? Multiple market participants, blockchain networks, exchanges, issuers, and applications — including Alpaca, Betterment, Bitco, Bank and Trust, BlackRock, Chainlink — maybe something to look at — Circle (USDC), Citadel Securities, CME Group, Digital Asset Holdings (the creator of Canton Network), Fireblocks, Flow Traders, FTSE Russell, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Linux Foundation, S&P, Dow Jones, Vanguard — it's all there. They're all going to do it. It's going to launch in October.
How Canton Network works
Canton is saying they're one of the participating networks — the tokenized service is launching on Canton. So the question you might ask yourself is: how does Canton actually work?
I've got to tell you, it's kind of hard to keep all these things straight, but let me try. There are five areas of how Canton actually works, and this is going to be one of the big ones. Institutions like it because Canton can do two things: it can be private and public, depending on who is in charge or who is taking that over as the institution.
Here's what it's for. It's a public layer-one for institutions. Privacy is the default, but you can make it open to the public if you want — it depends on which parties are the modulators.
Multi-step trades settle all or nothing. If one leg fails, the whole deal fails. So it all has to be all-or-nothing. Sounds like a pretty good thing — that way you hopefully avoid hacks.
It's a network of networks. Each app keeps its own private data. The global synchronizer connects them without broadcasting. Smart contracts run on DAML, and super-validators secure the shared layer.
It comes back to the validator — who determines if this is private or public. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most of the banks are going to do the private actions, maybe not so public. But again, there's so much liquidity sloshing around in the public sector that they have to do both at some point, for some of these validators.
It's not a stablecoin. I know I've had discussions with people on the channel where they say, "Rob, you don't understand — it's going to stay within a range and they're going to keep it stable." Well, it's not like that. It actually has price appreciation potential. I believe it's in the top 30. They do burn and they do mint. Fees are paid in Canton — those get destroyed — then they mint more for validators, and apps earn for the work. Fees are priced in dollars and paid by burning Canton.
Can the price go up? Yes. Canton trades freely. Moreover, usage can burn more coins than are committed, which can tighten supply. Demand to hold it can actually lift the price. But will it stay flat? This is the big thing — partly by design, the way it's built attracts utility, not hype. That's a bit of a problem for us as investors, because that's essentially where we go for returns. Remember what I've always said: there are two things that move the market — three parts speculation and a little bit of utility. With Canton, they're saying, "No, we're going to go for most utility and a little bit of speculation." It's a bit of a reversal. But as you can see, if they're partnering up with the DTCC and its $114 trillion, I think their utility is actually set. We'll see where it goes.
As a reminder, Canton started off strong but has been pretty much range-bound. It launched — wow — towards the beginning of the bear market, November 9th, 2025, roughly one month after the big pullback in Bitcoin. It was at 13 cents, went down to 6 cents, and then from December to February went from 6 cents to 18 cents. That's roughly a 3x — not too bad. Now it's around 11 cents, but again, there is a launch in October for the DTCC service, so we'll see how it all goes.
Just bringing that to everybody's attention. We talked a lot about altcoins, and I know people say, "Altcoins are trash, they're not going to do anything." I think there's room for that argument. But again, it's all about doing your due diligence and finding the right ones. I'm starting to see some winners here, and I'm starting to see which ones TradFi is choosing. We'll see if it all plays out.
Live Q&A
Rob: Marco says Canton is a closed group mainly for banks. Well, as far as "closed" goes — like we said, it depends on the validator whether they want to do it private or public. It just depends. And there's a lot of public liquidity sloshing around out there — maybe they want to keep some things public. Depends on the validator themselves.
And yes, banks need to upgrade. They really are slow, clunky, and expensive. To get anything done is just an act of God. They need to upgrade quickly. Either they're going to come on board or they're going to get left behind. I just don't see how banks can keep going as they are. I know people say, "Well, it's a cabal and they own everything and they'll just muscle their way in." I heard the same thing about distribution centers. I heard the same thing about taxi services. I heard the same thing about delivery. You know where I'm going with this. Uber crushed taxi services. Distribution centers got crushed by Amazon. I think banks can get crushed by this unless they figure out a way to adapt. And if you want to see how bad banks are doing, look at the number of physical bank branches closing down — there just aren't enough customers. People are going online. They want things quicker and faster. They know it can be done.
Kidra says, "Rob, P50 is a useless metric. The graph you showed is meaningless in a performance context." Well, send me which metric would be the best one to show and we can figure out which one has the best finality or at least a decent representation. I think it gives us a ballpark figure. And I'm going to guess, Kidra, that you're going to tell me about your altcoin that beats all of these. Let me know what it is, because every time I put up something about finality, everybody says, "Why don't you talk about this? Why don't you talk about my altcoin?" You don't want my opinion — you want your opinion to come out of my mouth. So tell me what it is.
Ben's Chair says: "For the TA nerds, Bitcoin is about to close a quarterly bullish engulfing candle — first time ever." I'm sure someone's going to do a video about that. Sounds good.
Someone asks: "Now are we comparing speed to safety?" Well, yes. The thing is, these institutions, these Wall Street and TradFi players, want things that are fast, safe, and cheap. That's why I don't think they're going to pick a lot of the newer projects anytime soon — because if they lose their clients' money, everything goes out the window. It takes a lifetime to build trust and only seconds to lose it. So it's not just about being the fastest and cheapest. That's not how it works.
If you were around in the '80s and '90s when businesses started deciding which computer operating system to use, they said, "Well, Microsoft kind of sucks, but it works. Pete at his company bought it and then other guys in the corporation got into it, so let's just use that one — that way I won't get fired." That's pretty much how it works.
Someone asks about SUI. I think it's great technology. Hopefully it'll run up, but again it comes down to great stories and speculation.
Panza says I've been good — yeah, I got a lucky call on Bitcoin, said $54K bottom, which was pretty close. Closer than most people, I'll tell you that.
Someone asks what the Bitcoin price prediction for the month was. No, it was just that we've reached an all-time high for Bitcoin over the last eight months. We hit roughly $87,500–$88K, which is pretty good. $87,580 as of 1:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time. I'll take it. Price predictions are worthless anyway — they're fun, but they're all worthless.
Someone says not all banks are on the same side — there's infighting within the system. Someone's got to win. Someone's going to have to speak up and say, "You know what, maybe we should move into this next generation." Because if I can send an email to anybody instantaneously across the world, why can't I send payments? Also, the loan process is a pain, and fractional reserve lending is a whole other conversation.
Someone mentions a new study: anyone who has or has had COVID is three to four times more likely to experience myocardial infarction, stroke, etc., and they're seeing more pulmonary embolisms lately. That's a bummer. Spike proteins — that's a big issue. I believe there's a blood test you can get to check your absolute spike protein levels and go from there. Welcome to Digital Asset Healthcare — we talk about your heart health. And let's just leave it there.