Menu #13: When Crypto Gets Serious

FCA Crypto Regime
Zero To One
Web3 Dinner Club: 25th June
Tokenised US assets
Brand spice
Chef’s Note

This is The Menu: the UK Web3 operator’s weekly briefing.

What founders, investors, and builders are actually discussing behind closed doors.

The industry is starting to look less like a series of disconnected experiments and more like a system finding its shape.

In this issue:

Signal, served weekly.

This month’s dinner is proudly sponsored by Novel Labs.

A multi-award-winning London storytelling studio building the brands of the future in AI, blockchain, and emerging technologies.

Best known for the $100m expansion to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, The Mutant Cartel World.

If you’re a startup or scale-up building a brand and looking for real go-to-market impact from those who have repeatedly built unicorns and category kings as VCs and founders... ask for an intro at the table.

A tokenised asset is a real-world asset represented on a blockchain as a digital token. That token can stand for ownership, a claim, or a share in something like a fund, bond, property, or private market instrument.

The point is not novelty for its own sake. It is to make assets easier to move, divide, settle, and track, often with less friction than in traditional financial systems.

In practice, tokenisation can mean a lot of different things.

At the simple end, it is a digital wrapper around an existing asset.

At the more ambitious end, it is a way to rebuild how issuance, custody, settlement, and transfer work from the ground up.

One-line summary: tokenisation is what happens when finance stops living entirely inside spreadsheets and starts living on programmable rails.

For years, UK crypto regulation lived in the gap between threat and promise.

That gap is now closing.

From 11 May 2026, firms can request pre-application meetings with the FCA, with the first sessions starting in July, ahead of the new cryptoasset regime expected in October 2027.

The UK is moving from vague intention to a visible regulatory pathway. The industry is no longer guessing whether a regime will arrive — it is now being told how to prepare for it.

Crypto firms do not build around abstract policy language. They build around deadlines, requirements, and the shape of the process. Once a regulator starts accepting pre-application meetings, the market begins to organise itself around compliance rather than speculation.

There is also a broader signal here.

The FCA is not treating crypto as a one-off exception or a political nuisance. It is folding it into the same kind of structured authorisation process that serious financial activity usually faces. That is a much more mature posture than the cycle of bans, warnings, and hand-wringing that has defined crypto regulation in other places.

For founders and operators, the message is simple: the UK crypto market is entering its professionalisation phase. The firms that survive this next stage will not just be the loudest or the fastest. They will be the ones with real operations, clear controls, and the patience to get through the gate properly.

W3DC takeaway
The most important regulatory moves are often the least dramatic. A public timetable, a formal entry process, and a regulator willing to engage are the signs that a market is becoming durable rather than merely active.

We’re starting to run out of book reviews, which probably means we should be reading more, given this is only Issue 13.

So this week, we’re borrowing someone else’s view and looking at one of the most argued-over startup books of the last decade: Zero to One by Peter Thiel.

Love him or hate him, Thiel is a polarising figure. But as co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, first outside investor in Facebook, and early backer of companies like SpaceX and LinkedIn, his views are hard to ignore.

The core idea is simple: real progress doesn’t come from copying what already exists and making it slightly better. That’s going from 1 to n. Real innovation means creating something new, going from 0 to 1.

The book’s best question is still:

“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

For founders, that’s useful. It forces you out of consensus thinking and into first principles. If your startup sounds like everyone else’s, that may be the problem.

Thiel’s most famous argument is that founders should avoid competition and build monopolies by dominating a small niche first. There’s truth in that. Great companies often start by owning a very specific market before expanding.

But the criticism is fair too.

The book can feel overly neat, too idealised, and sometimes dismissive of the messy reality of building. Competition isn’t always “for losers”. It can sharpen products, prove demand, and force discipline.

Read Zero to One because it makes you think harder.

Don’t treat it as scripture.

Its value is not in giving you a perfect startup playbook. It is in forcing one uncomfortable question:

Are you building something genuinely new, or just another version of what already exists?

A curated, seated dinner for a small group of builders working in crypto, AI, and frontier tech.

One table. No pitches. No panels. No ego contests.

Just the kind of conversation that doesn't show up in your LinkedIn feed.

The relationships that move capital, talent, and ideas in Web3 don't start at conferences.

They start at a handful of dinners with the same people, repeated over time.

Seats are limited by design.

Proudly sponsored by Novel Labs.

The number is starting to get impossible to ignore. Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook said U.S. tokenised assets have doubled over the past year to around $25 billion, a scale that suggests tokenisation is moving from pilot programs into actual market structure.

That is exactly the kind of trajectory BCG is pointing to in this week’s Digestif: not a token-price story, but a plumbing story. The point was never that every asset would move onchain overnight. It was that the categories with real balance-sheet usefulness — custody, settlement, collateral, and liquidity management — would start compounding first.

The Anchorage Digital and J.P. Morgan move on Solana reinforces that thesis. Anchorage says it is exploring “cashless” stablecoin reserves that would rely on yield-bearing, low-risk tokenised instruments, while engaging with J.P. Morgan Asset Management on a tokenised instrument solution to support that framework.

That matters because it shows where the market is actually going. The most important use cases are not speculative toys or branding exercises; they are the boring parts of finance where yield, liquidity, and redemption mechanics have to work at institutional scale.

The deeper signal is that tokenisation is no longer being framed as a future possibility. It is becoming a present-tense operating model for banks, asset managers, and stablecoin issuers that want better capital efficiency and cleaner settlement rails.

W3DC takeaway
BCG piece argues that tokenised real-world assets were the long-term infrastructure play. This week’s numbers suggest the market is already pricing that transition into motion — faster than the narrative cycle can keep up.

BCG’s new flagship report is not really about crypto prices, tokens, or another round of “blockchain will change everything".

It is about something more important: what happens when money, assets, and settlement become programmable — and banks have to decide whether they are still the infrastructure or just users of someone else’s.

The report’s central message is sharp: digital assets should now be treated as a strategic infrastructure transition for banks, not a side innovation project. The task for leadership is not to predict the single winning rail but to stay relevant and in control as settlement, custody, payments, and assets move onto programmable systems.

BCG splits the digital asset world into three very different categories:

That gap matters. Crypto is where the revenue is today — trading, custody, derivatives, staking. But BCG argues the more structurally important category for banks is tokenised real-world assets, because that is where issuance, settlement, collateral, custody, servicing, and capital markets plumbing could be rebuilt.

The report’s most striking forecast is that, in a progressive scenario, digital RWAs could reach roughly 16% of global investable assets by 2035 — potentially heading toward an $88 trillion market.

One of the more useful clarifications is on stablecoins. BCG says the stablecoin story is often misunderstood.

Roughly 65% of stablecoin supply is still linked to crypto trading and DeFi activity. Around 25% is store-of-value demand, particularly dollar exposure in emerging markets. Only around 10% is currently tied to real-economy payments — although that part is growing quickly.

So the story is not “stablecoins have already replaced payments.”
It is stablecoins have proved the crypto-native cash leg and are now pushing toward treasury, settlement, and cross-border use cases.

That is a very different, and more credible, framing.

BCG’s warning to banks is blunt. If digital assets scale quickly, the pressure hits transaction banking, net interest income, post-trade economics, and client relationships. In one rapid digital expansion scenario, banks could face 10% smaller balance sheets, 14% lower revenues, and 30% lower profits by 2035 compared with a no-digital-assets case.

But the report is not doom-mongering. It also says the opportunity is large — especially in asset management, trading, custody, collateral mobility, cross-border treasury, and bank-grade digital asset platforms.

The key shift is where value moves: away from pure intermediation and toward interface, orchestration, and infrastructure.

BCG’s most founder-relevant point is simple: tokenisation in search of a problem is a waste of time.

The report’s practical guidance is to focus on use cases where economics and relevance are clear: cross-border treasury, programmable liquidity, tokenised funds, repo/collateral mobility, and selective crypto services for existing clients. It also argues that banks should build the “control plane” first: custody, key management, AML tooling, contract governance, reporting, partner frameworks, and exit paths.

That is the boring bit. It is also the bit that decides whether anything scales.

This is one of the better “big picture” digital asset reports because it avoids the easy trap of treating crypto, stablecoins, and tokenised RWAs as one thing.

They are not.

Crypto is the revenue pool today.
Stablecoins are the live test of programmable money.
Tokenised RWAs are the long-term infrastructure play.

The big question is not whether digital assets matter. It is who controls the new rails when they do.

Question for the room:
Are banks going to shape the next digital asset stack — or will they end up renting access to it from the platforms that moved first?

HYPE hitting a new all-time high above $62 has been packaged neatly as an “institutional arrival” story: spot ETFs, Wall Street attention, and Hyperliquid’s fully diluted valuation briefly overtaking Solana.

But the more interesting story sits underneath the headline.

Hyperliquid has a built-in buyer: the Assistance Fund. A huge share of protocol trading fees reportedly flows into this fund, which then buys HYPE on the open market. In simple terms, Hyperliquid’s own revenue becomes a continuous bid for its own token.

That matters because the buyback is not a press release or a board decision. It is part of the system. As long as trading volume remains strong, the protocol keeps generating fees, and those fees keep supporting HYPE.

The business underneath is genuinely impressive. Hyperliquid has become one of the dominant venues for on-chain perpetual futures, with real trading activity and real fee revenue. This is not just token inflation pretending to be traction.

But the risk is just as clear: the flywheel works both ways.

If trading volume falls, the buyback shrinks. And if more token supply unlocks into the market at the same time, the mechanism has to absorb more selling pressure with less firepower.

W3DC takeaway: HYPE may be one of crypto’s strongest revenue-backed token stories, but it is also a very concentrated bet on one thing: Hyperliquid trading volumes continue to grow. The price is not just a verdict from the market. It is partly a reflection of the mechanism buying it.

Until next time