Empire

Brett Harrison × Andrawes Bahou

An approximately $1 trillion compute market still trades through calls, texts, Slack, and WhatsApp, while roughly 500 GPU-service providers and opaque brokerage chains create heterogeneous supply and “phantom power” without a standard forward curve.Architect is pursuing dated futures and options, with billing-system benchmarks, as CFTC reviews index reliability, but 20–25% financing costs expose unresolved credit risk.

Jason Yanowitz × Adrian Cachinero Vasiljevic × Luca Prosperi

DeFi’s 20–30 bps rates on prime BTC/ETH vaults reflect on-chain capital oversupply and brutal borrower liquidation, rather than a broken market, while Prosperi’s model puts the perfect-world floor at 40–45 bps over risk-free.Morpho V2’s fixed-term markets could build a term structure, but hacks, operational risk, and blockchain finality leave the all-in fair spread unresolved, with Prosperi estimating potentially a couple hundred basis points over SOFR.

Jason Yanowitz × Charles Cascarilla

Stablecoins are moving from crypto speculation toward regulated financial infrastructure, while Paxos’s white-label volume grew from about $1 billion to $6 billion and USDG reached around $1.8 billion across about 130 institutions.If GENIUS removes ambiguity, competition centers on liquidity, utility and regulation, while Paxos’s “very likely” IPO has no firm timing.