CONNECT recap: Hayes warns money printing is coming in slow motion — SkimNews
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- Arthur Hayes told CONNECT attendees in Seoul that China could shift to substantial monetary easing from an 'austerity lite' stance, reviving demand for scarce assets, while separately flagging financial stress in France via BNP Paribas CDS and French bond spreads.
- R3, which built its business on the private Corda network, unveiled a May 2025 collaboration to connect institutions and their assets to Solana's public chain, with co-founder Todd McDonald arguing firms must 'go to where the customers are and where they will be.'
- Franklin Templeton has no plans to issue its own stablecoin and wants its tokenized money market funds to act as the 'yield layer,' with senior VP Chetan Karkhanis noting a June MoonPay partnership now lets eligible institutions swap between stablecoins and those funds onchain.
- SharpLink has bought both additional Ether and its own shares to boost ETH-per-share metrics, with chief development officer Michael Camarda saying institutional investors prefer buybacks (which spread ETH across fewer shares) while 'retail loves numbers' from large purchase headlines.
- Codex co-founder and CEO Haonan Li said stablecoin payment demand is growing along trade routes linking Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa to Asia, where 'manufactured goods flow from east to west and funds flow from west to east.'
- Portal Ventures general partner Catrina Wang argued banks and asset managers hold an advantage onchain because they already own the customer relationship, citing Ben Thompson's aggregation theory: 'Whoever owns the customer relationship owns the economics.'
- World Liberty Financial EVP Justin Kugel conceded that crypto's intermediaries may serve a real purpose because many users 'do not want to manage their assets themselves' and prefer the protection of centralized exchanges.
Why it matters: The conference made clear that incumbents with existing client relationships—not crypto-native upstarts—are capturing the economics of Wall Street's onchain migration, from R3 bridging Solana to Franklin Templeton's MoonPay integration to SharpLink's ETH-per-share accounting.
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