The Calderwyn Institute brings clarity where accelerating technologies collide with fragile human systems. We study crypto, AI, and global finance.
Joined July 2025
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A burglary cost me a hardware wallet. A separate chain of small mistakes made a seed phrase discoverable. The rest wrote itself.
Nothing in #crypto's architecture is designed to ask whether a valid signature should execute. That gap is the whole problem. open.substack.com/pub/thecal… #defi #cryptotwitter
Calderwyn Institute retweeted
.@JamesTalarico: This issue of healthcare is so personal to me. When I was a perfectly healthy 28-year-old running for the Texas House, I got diagnosed with a shocking illness.
I was a Democrat running in a Trump district, and so I had to do things a little differently, and at one point I decided to walk the entire length of my district — 25 miles — in the Texas heat.
About halfway through, I started to feel fatigued and nauseous. I ended up throwing up a few times along the walk.
I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. I went to Walgreens to pick up my first 30-day supply of insulin — it cost me $684. I didn't have that kind of money, so I put it on a credit card, and I soon learned that Texans with diabetes across the state were rationing or skipping doses. Some of them were dying because of it.
And so when I won that seat, I brought Democrats and Republicans together to take on Big Pharma, and we capped insulin copays in Texas at $25 per prescription.
Spent a while with this one. The stack framing is useful and the stranger test is a genuinely falsifiable milestone, which is more than most vision papers put on the table.Where I land differently is on the capstone. Ranking tells a buyer which agent is good, not who's answerable when the work is bad, and the paper rules adjudication out of the discovery layer without saying where it goes instead. Wrote out the argument here: thecalderwyninstitute.substa…
Circle's agent paper footnotes an empirical study of the live ERC-8004 registries.
That study found 3% to 15% of registrations have a working endpoint. It found 59% to 91% of reviewers showing coordinated Sybil behavior, depending on chain.
Reputation is the layer the whole thesis rests on. thecalderwyninstitute.substa… ethereum:0xa0b86991c6218b36c1d19d4a2e9eb0ce3606eb48
Circle's agent economy paper puts the missing layer at trusted discovery. The gap I keep coming back to is recourse.
You buy from a stranger because someone can be sued and because a card issuer will reverse the charge. This stack removes both and offers a score instead. thecalderwyninstitute.substa…
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Calderwyn Institute retweeted
🚨 TODAY: The SEC proposed new rules, “Regulation Crypto Assets,” that would create a clear and fit-for-purpose framework for certain investment contracts involving crypto assets.
Circle raised full-year guidance.
Take the token sale back out and guidance for everything else was quietly reduced.
Worth reading the filing rather than the headline. thecalderwyninstitute.substa… base:0x833589fcd6edb6e08f4c7c32d4f71b54bda02913
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Circle sold ~$242M of ARC tokens to institutions last quarter.
$180M of that is now in full-year guidance.
Arc doesn't launch until September, and the filing still describes the token as something that "would" be introduced if the network transitions. thecalderwyninstitute.substa…
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Circle handled ~7 in 10 dollars of stablecoin transaction volume in June with $USDC .
It holds about a quarter of supply.
Almost none of its revenue comes from the movement. thecalderwyninstitute.substa…
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Calderwyn Institute retweeted
Q2 results are out.
→ Arc Mainnet launches September 16.
→ Founding validators joining Circle include BlackRock, DTCC, Galaxy, Global Payments, ICE, Mastercard, MoneyGram, SBI Group, Standard Chartered, Sumitomo Corporation, and Visa.
→ We received our federal trust bank charter from the OCC to establish Circle National Trust, one of the first stablecoin issuers to hold a federal bank charter.
→ USDC captured nearly 70% of stablecoin transaction volume in June, according to Visa Onchain Analytics.
Full results: investor.circle.com
The easiest attack on any frictionless-money thesis: Stablecard settles through Visa, and Visa charges interchange.
The friction stripped out of the FX spread comes back as a merchant fee, priced into the goods.
Super-fluidity moved the rent. It didn't abolish it. open.substack.com/pub/thecal…
Under GENIUS, stablecoin issuers keep the reserve yield and can't pass it to holders.
So Western Union stops earning a toll when money moves and starts earning carry when money sits.
The rails are built for speed. The new P&L wants stillness. open.substack.com/pub/thecal…
Western Union launched a stablecoin card Tuesday.
Five days earlier it cut guidance and explained why: cash payout moving to digital means fewer profit dollars per transaction.
It shipped the product that finishes the job. open.substack.com/pub/thecal…
IBM sold Circle nearly 1,000 blockchain patents last week.
It also backs Open USD, the stablecoin built to undercut Circle’s revenue.
So IBM sold Circle the IP and funded its rival at the same time.
What Circle actually bought in July:
open.substack.com/pub/thecal… base:0x833589fcd6edb6e08f4c7c32d4f71b54bda02913
Calderwyn Institute retweeted
Circle has received final OCC approval to establish Circle National Trust, a federally chartered national trust bank.
On @NYSE, @ddisparte discusses what this milestone means for USDC infrastructure, institutional custody, and regulated stablecoins in the U.S.
The agent is the part nobody's pricing right.A person picking a dollar wallet over a peso account still has some drag on them. Habit, loyalty, inertia.An agent has none. It reads liquidity depth and settlement cost and nothing else. Passportless, optimizing to a fault. Our take on @circle's agentic economy piece open.substack.com/pub/thecal…
Circle's CEO wrote 90 pages on the agentic economy and conceded the whole thing in one line: the plumbing is "dollar-concentrated."
Frictionless money doesn't spread out. It runs to the deepest pool. Then he spends the last section arguing we can design our way out of that. Here's our take: open.substack.com/pub/thecal… base:0x833589fcd6edb6e08f4c7c32d4f71b54bda02913
Calderwyn Institute retweeted
INVESTOR ALERT: Investors should never rely solely on information from group chats in making investment decisions. Be wary of any group chat where you receive investment advice from someone you don’t know – and who may be impersonating an investment professional or government official – this is often how investment scams begin.
Learn more: ow.ly/onrj50Zbibp
#StopGovImposters
Blockworks bought pipes, not reputation: an API covering 40,000+ assets that funds, exchanges, and AI agents already build on. It also inherited the exact two-sided conflict that undid Messari. The Morningstar playbook works only with rigorous separation. open.substack.com/pub/thecal…
Bloomberg, S&P, Goldman, Gartner. Messari tried to be all four at once and built none of the moats. The bull market made the confusion affordable. The down cycle sent the invoice. open.substack.com/pub/thecal…
Messari was valued at $300M in 2022. It sold this week for a bit over $10M. A 96% haircut is not a correction. It is a verdict on a business model. New analysis: open.substack.com/pub/thecal…
