Menu #19: Crypto Becomes Practical

Robinhood
Getting Naked
Web3 Dinner Club: 16th July
Bitcoin Strategic Reserve
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.

The dinner club 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.

Robinhood is a financial app that lets people buy, sell and hold investments from their phone.

It started by making stock trading feel simple and accessible, especially with commission-free trading, fractional shares and an easy mobile app.

Simply put:

Robinhood is a brokerage platform for everyday investors.

People use it to trade:

Stocks, ETFs, Options, Crypto and increasingly other financial products

The bigger point now is that Robinhood is no longer just a simple trading app.

It is trying to become a broader financial platform, covering trading, crypto, banking, tokenised assets and market infrastructure.

So the simple explanation is:

Robinhood began as an app that made investing easier for ordinary people. Now it is trying to build more of the financial system behind that access.

Robinhood first became famous as the app that made stock trading feel simple.

No commission trading, a clean mobile interface, fractional shares, options, and
Crypto.

A product that made markets feel accessible to a generation that had grown up with smartphones, not stockbrokers.

Its original promise was simple: democratise finance.

But Robinhood now looks like it is trying to become something much bigger than a brokerage app.

It is building a financial stack.

Over the past year, Robinhood has moved aggressively across crypto, private markets, prediction markets, banking, tokenisation and market infrastructure.

The Bitstamp acquisition gave Robinhood a global crypto exchange, with licenses and registrations across multiple markets.

Its partnership with Susquehanna created Rothera, a CFTC-regulated exchange and clearinghouse designed for futures, derivatives and prediction markets.

Robinhood Banking has already gathered billions in deposits, with a notable share of customers using direct deposit.

Robinhood Ventures Fund has given retail investors exposure to private companies, including OpenAI.

Robinhood Chain has gone live, alongside tokenised stocks trading 24/7 for eligible non-US users.

And Robinhood has also been tapped, alongside BNY, to support Trump Accounts, the new U.S. savings programme giving eligible children born between 2025 and 2028 an initial $1,000 government contribution.

Taken individually, each of these moves looks like product expansion.

Taken together, they look like strategy.

Robinhood is no longer only giving people access to markets.

It is trying to own more of the rails underneath that access.

Brokerage, crypto exchange, clearing, prediction markets, private market exposure, banking, tokenised assets, and blockchain infrastructure.

That is the interesting part.

Crypto exchanges showed the power of vertical integration: trading, custody, wallets, market data, tokens and settlement all under one roof.

Robinhood appears to be taking that idea and moving it inside the regulatory perimeter.

Licensed where needed. Retail-first where possible. Globally, where crypto rails allow it.

Vlad Tenev’s recent comments on memecoins got the headlines.

But the memecoin debate may be the sideshow.

The bigger story is that Robinhood seems to believe the future of crypto is not another million speculative tokens.

It is real-world assets, 24/7 markets, tokenised securities, private market access and financial products that feel easier, faster and more connected than legacy platforms.

That makes Robinhood one of the more interesting companies to watch in digital assets.

Not because it is trying to look like a crypto company.

But because it is using crypto infrastructure to make a brokerage, exchange, bank and market-structure business feel like one integrated platform.

Five years ago, the comparison was probably Schwab.

In five years, it may be closer to ICE, Nasdaq or a consumer-facing market infrastructure company that does not quite have an old-world equivalent.

W3DC:

Robinhood’s real story is not memecoins. It is market structure.

The company that made trading feel simple is now trying to rebuild more of the machinery behind trading.

And crypto may be the rail that lets it take that model global.

Getting Naked is part founder memoir and part start-up survival guide.

It tells the story of Naked Boxer Briefs, a company that went from a small country town in Abbotsford to Nasdaq, celebrity endorsements, more than $17 million raised, and shelves in major department stores including Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s.

On the surface, it is a business story.

How to start, raise money, build a brand, hire, operate, and grow.

But when you dig deeper.

The book looks honestly at the personal cost of entrepreneurship. The pressure. The sacrifices. The effect on family, mental health, identity and balance.

This shifts left from the usual all-to-clean start-up advice!

Raise money, build a team, scale the brand and then exit.

Real life is messier.

Getting Naked appears to be a reminder that building a business is not only about ambition. It is also about staying intact while you do it.

W3DC:

Try to keep it simple: a strong brand matters, operations matter, and capital matters.

But you as the founder matter too.

If you lose yourself while building the company, the cost may be higher than the cap table suggests.

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.

In March 2025, President Trump signed an executive order to create a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

The idea was simple enough.

Instead of selling Bitcoin seized by the U.S. government through criminal or civil forfeiture cases, the government would hold it as a national reserve asset.

Alongside it, the order also created a U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile for other seized digital assets.

In plain English:

Bitcoin would be treated differently from other crypto assets.

BTC would be held as a strategic reserve.
Other digital assets would be managed separately.
Any future Bitcoin purchases would need to be budget neutral and not add costs for taxpayers.

On paper, that is a big moment.

It signals that the U.S. government sees Bitcoin not just as an asset to dispose of but as something that may have strategic value.

But the plan has stalled.

Why?

Because an executive order can announce the policy, but it does not automatically solve the legal and operational questions.

Who has the authority to run it?
Should it sit inside Treasury or Commerce?
Can seized Bitcoin be held indefinitely?
What rules apply to custody, accounting and disposal?
What happens when assets are tied to victims, court orders or law enforcement needs?

That is the real story.

The headline is

America wants a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

The harder reality is

Government machinery has to work out how to legally build and manage one.

For Web3, this is a useful reminder.

Recognition is one thing.
Implementation is another.

The announcement is not the architecture.

Even from the White House.

It is a security report. Gold is the example.

The bigger point is that if real-world assets are going to move across digital rails, the security around those rails needs to be ready for the future.

HSBC frames asset tokenisation as the digital representation of assets on a distributed ledger. In plain English, that means assets such as gold, bonds or funds can be represented as tokens and transferred across computer networks.

That matters because the network is no longer just carrying data.

It is carrying value.

HSBC has already been active here. The report says the bank was the first global bank to offer tokenised physical gold to institutional investors using DLT and later launched the HSBC Gold Token for retail investors in Hong Kong SAR. Both use HSBC’s Orion digital assets platform.

The new part is the quantum angle.

Today’s financial systems rely on cryptography. That cryptography is currently strong against normal computers. But powerful future quantum computers could threaten some of the public-key systems used to secure digital assets and financial infrastructure.

HSBC is not saying that threat has arrived.

It is saying serious financial institutions need to prepare before it does.

Working with Quantinuum, HSBC tested post-quantum cryptography on a gold tokenisation platform. The proof of concept involved an asset manager buying 4 million HSBC Gold Tokens, representing 10 gold bars with a notional value of $9.2 million, and moving those tokens from HSBC’s private Orion Gold DLT to a public permissioned distributed ledger run by the asset manager.

The important part is how HSBC approached the problem.

Rather than rebuilding the whole distributed ledger from scratch, it used a post-quantum secure VPN layer to protect communication between the ledgers.

That sounds technical, but the idea is simple.

Upgrade the security around the system first.

Do it in a way that works with existing infrastructure.

Avoid slowing the system down.

Prepare for a future quantum threat without waiting for the perfect end-state architecture.

The report says this approach is cost-effective and can protect existing production DLT in the short and medium term without needing to rearchitect the ledger itself.

That is probably the most practical message in the whole report.

Tokenisation is often sold as a story about access, liquidity and efficiency.

But HSBC is reminding the market that if tokenised assets are going to become serious financial infrastructure, security cannot be an afterthought.

Gold tokens are useful because people understand gold.

But the real story is broader.

If tokenised gold can move safely across ledgers, the same questions will apply to tokenised bonds, funds, private assets, settlement instruments and other forms of digital value.

How are they secured?

Who controls the infrastructure?

Can they interoperate?

What happens when today’s cryptography becomes tomorrow’s weakness?

W3DC:

HSBC’s report is not saying tokenisation is coming.

It is saying tokenisation is already moving into institutional finance, and the next challenge is making it secure enough to last.

The important shift is this:

Financial networks are no longer just moving information; they are moving value.

And once that happens, cybersecurity becomes part of market infrastructure.

For a long time, Strategy’s Bitcoin story was simple.

Raise capital. Buy Bitcoin. Hold Bitcoin.

That made the company one of the clearest institutional demand stories in crypto.

But the latest filing complicates the narrative.

Strategy sold 3,588 BTC last week for around $216 million, reducing its holdings to 843,775 BTC.

The company says the proceeds will be used to fund distributions on its preferred stock and rebuild part of its U.S. dollar reserve.

This is not really about the size of the sale, as relative to Strategy’s total Bitcoin holdings, it is small.

The more important point is symbolic.

Strategy has spent years building a brand around accumulation.

Bitcoin as a treasury strategy, as corporate identity, and as complete conviction.

So when the company starts selling BTC to support the financing structure around that strategy, the market pays attention.

This does not mean the thesis has failed, but it does show the trade-off.

A brand built on permanent demand can start to look different when that demand becomes conditional on capital markets, preferred distributions and liquidity management.

Strategy is still one of the largest Bitcoin holders in the world.

The interest is shifting.

It is no longer only, "How much Bitcoin does Strategy own?”

It is also "How expensive is it to keep owning it?”

W3DC:

Strategy remains one of Bitcoin’s biggest corporate stories.

But the brand has moved from pure accumulation to balance-sheet management.

That is a different story to the one Saylor was selling!

Until next time