Menu #27: Always On

This is The Menu: the weekly briefing from the Web3 Dinner Club.

What the market is saying and how the best builders and investors are making sense of it.

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.

A conversion spread is the small difference between an asset’s market price and the price you receive when a provider converts it.

For example, if Bitcoin is trading at £80,000 but your card provider sells it at an effective price of £79,600 to complete a purchase, the £400 gap is part of the cost of conversion.

A card can advertise “zero transaction fees” and still charge a spread.

That does not automatically make it bad; it just means you should look beyond the headline.

Last week, we looked at the basic idea behind crypto cards: a payment card that turns a crypto or stablecoin balance into something you can spend wherever Visa or Mastercard is accepted.

You tap to pay. The merchant receives pounds, euros or dollars. Somewhere in the background, the card provider converts the asset you chose to spend.

Simple enough.

But the more interesting story is where these cards are heading.

The first generation of crypto cards was mostly a novelty. Buy a coffee with Bitcoin. Earn a small amount of cashback in a token. Prove that crypto could be used outside an exchange.

The next generation is trying to become something bigger: a money layer that sits across bank money, stablecoins, crypto assets, cards, rewards and eventually tokenised assets.

The card is simply the most familiar interface.

Traditionally, financial life has been fragmented.

You have a bank account for pounds.
Perhaps a travel card for euros and dollars.
An investment account for shares.
A crypto exchange for Bitcoin or Ethereum.
A wallet for stablecoins.
And possibly a separate app for rewards or savings.

Crypto-card providers are attempting to bring some of those balances closer together.

Kraken’s Krak Card is a good example. Its US launch allows eligible customers to spend from more than 600 cash and crypto assets through a Visa debit card, with automatic conversion at the point of purchase and cashback of up to 2% in dollars.

That does not mean consumers suddenly want to spend 600 currencies.

It means the boundary between “money”, “crypto” and “investments” is becoming more flexible. A user may hold pounds for bills, USDC for international transfers and Bitcoin as a long-term holding and a small balance for day-to-day spending; experiences are all accessed through one app and one payment card.

The question is no longer simply: can I spend crypto?

It is, 'Which balance should I spend, and what happens when I do?'

For most people, spending volatile crypto assets every day remains a strange proposition.

If you buy lunch with Bitcoin and the price rises sharply afterwards, that lunch can become an unexpectedly expensive meal. In many jurisdictions, selling or spending crypto may also create a taxable event.

Stablecoins are different.

A dollar- or pound-linked stablecoin is designed to act more like money people already understand. That makes it potentially more useful for cards, international payments, contractor income, travel spending and business settlements.

A card-linked balance could make that flow much simpler: receive USDC, keep some for international payments, convert some into local currency when needed and spend through the existing card network.

The card does not replace the banking system. It makes the bridge between on-chain money and existing payment networks less visible.

The market is beginning to split into three broad approaches.

None is automatically best.

A person who wants simple everyday spending may choose a custodial card. Someone more comfortable with wallets may value self-custody.

A sophisticated user may borrow against collateral but should understand that borrowing against a volatile asset can turn a simple purchase into a risk-management exercise.

The sensible choice is not the card with the highest cashback.

It is the one whose custody, conversion, fees and risk profile you understand.

Crypto cards are increasingly marketed through cashback percentages, premium metal tiers and token rewards.

That is understandable. It is also where people should slow down.

A 5% reward paid in a platform token may not be worth 5% by the time it unlocks. A “zero fee” card may still make money through FX charges or the conversion spread between the asset’s market price and the rate you receive at checkout.

Before choosing a crypto card, look past the cashback headline.

Who holds your assets? What gets sold first? What do conversion, FX and ATM costs really add up to? Are rewards cash-like and immediately usable—or locked in a volatile token? And what happens if the provider has an outage, freezes your account or closes?

The rails may be new. The consumer-finance questions are not.

The long-term opportunity is not a world where everyone buys groceries with Bitcoin.

It is a world where the type of money behind a payment becomes less important to the person making it.

A business might hold stablecoins for cross-border payroll, tokenised money-market funds for short-term liquidity and local fiat for expenses. A consumer may hold traditional currency, rewards, stablecoins and investments in separate “pots”, with rules that decide which balance is used for each kind of purchase.

The card becomes the familiar front door to a more complicated financial system.

Over time, we may see cards linked to tokenised deposits, on-chain credit, real-time FX, automated savings, programmable spending limits and digital identity checks. Most users may never use the term “Web3”. They will simply expect money to move faster, settle more cleanly and work wherever they are.

That is the likely destination.

Not crypto replacing cards.

Not blockchain replacing banks overnight.

But traditional payment experiences are quietly gaining new rails underneath them.

The future of crypto cards is not that they look more like crypto. It is that they become so useful that nobody needs to think about crypto at all.

Work has changed. The old model, hire people, expect loyalty, keep them visible in an office and replace them when they leave, is becoming less effective and more expensive.

In The Retention Revolution, Erica Keswin argues that businesses should stop treating employees as a static “talent pool” and start treating careers as a flowing river: people will join, leave, develop, change direction and, in some cases, return.

The key message is simple:

Keeping good people is far better than constantly trying to find new ones.

That does not mean preventing every resignation. It means building the kind of relationships that make people want to stay and leave well enough that they may one day come back as an employee, customer, partner or advocate.

Keswin challenges several outdated assumptions:

For founders and leaders, the relevance is obvious. Recruitment is costly, slow and uncertain. Retention protects institutional knowledge, strengthens culture and reduces the hidden cost of constantly re-onboarding people into the same business.

The best teams are not built through perks or slogans. They are built through clarity, flexibility, good management, meaningful development and genuine relationships.

W3DC: Do not just ask how to hire great people.

Ask what would make them choose to stay, and whether they would want to come back if they left.

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.

Last week, we wrote about crypto ETFs: crypto in a suit.

They make Bitcoin and other digital assets easier to access through a familiar broking account. No exchange login, no seed phrase, no wallet setup. For many people, that is exactly the point.

But there is a catch.

Bitcoin trades 24 hours a day, seven days a week. ETFs do not.

A US-listed Bitcoin ETF generally trades during stock-market hours: Monday to Friday, roughly 9:30am to 4pm New York time. Bitcoin continues moving across global crypto markets while the ETF is closed.

That difference creates the weekend problem.

Imagine you own a Bitcoin ETF on Friday afternoon. The market closes. Then, over the weekend, a major regulatory announcement, geopolitical event, large liquidation or security story moves Bitcoin sharply.

If you own Bitcoin directly, you can decide whether to act. You can buy, sell, transfer or simply watch the market in real time.

If you own an ETF, you cannot trade the ETF until the market reopens.

On Monday morning, the ETF price has to catch up with everything that happened while Wall Street was closed. That can create a sharp opening gap, up or down.

This does not make crypto ETFs bad. It just makes them different.

An ETF gives you convenience, regulated market access and familiar account infrastructure.

Direct ownership gives you 24/7 access and the ability to use the asset on-chain.

The arrival of ETFs has brought more institutional money into crypto, but it has also made the market more dependent on traditional trading hours.

Research and market data suggest Bitcoin liquidity is now more concentrated during US weekday sessions, while weekends can be thinner and more volatile. One analysis found that average BTC–USDT bid-ask spreads widened from 0.012% on weekdays to 0.028% at weekends as ETF activity concentrated liquidity during the week.

That can sound technical, but the practical point is simple:

When fewer buyers and sellers are active, a smaller order can move the price more than it would during a busy trading session.

The ETF has not stopped Bitcoin being a 24/7 asset.

It has created a second way to own Bitcoin that still operates on a 9-to-5 timetable.

A crypto ETF is not Bitcoin in a wallet.

It is a traditional investment product designed to track Bitcoin’s price.

For someone who wants simple, long-term exposure, that may be exactly right.

But if you assume an ETF gives you the same flexibility as holding the asset directly, the weekend is where the difference becomes obvious.

Crypto trades all weekend. Your ETF does not.

The latest ARK Invest and Glassnode paper offers a useful correction to one of crypto’s laziest debates: which chain is best?

Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana are not competing to do exactly the same job. The real question is, 'Best for what?'

Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana are not trying to do the same job.

Each makes different compromises between decentralisation, security, speed, cost and programmability.

Bitcoin is optimised for monetary durability and independent verification. Its simpler design makes it comparatively accessible for users who want to run infrastructure and check the network themselves.

Ethereum sits in the middle: more complex, but built for programmable money, smart contracts and a huge ecosystem of applications.

Solana prioritises speed, low fees and high throughput. That makes it attractive for consumer-scale payments and trading, but the hardware required to run a validator is far higher, creating a greater barrier to direct participation. Production validator setups can require enterprise-grade processors, 256GB or more of memory, fast storage and high-bandwidth connectivity.

None of this makes one network “good” and another “bad”.

It makes them different tools.

The useful question is not, “Is it decentralised?” It is:

Crypto is becoming less like one broad bet on “blockchain” and more like a set of infrastructure choices.

W3DC: mature markets are not built on slogans or hype. They are built on trade-offs people understand.

Crypto markets run on numbers, but they also run on emotion.

The Fear & Greed Index tries to turn that emotion into a simple score from 0 to 100:

The best-known version is largely Bitcoin-focused. It combines signals including market volatility, price momentum and trading volume; social-media activity; Bitcoin’s share of the wider crypto market; and Google search trends.

Volatility and momentum each account for roughly 25% of the calculation, so it is not simply measuring what people are posting online.

The appeal is obvious: it gives a quick read on whether the market feels panicked, calm or euphoric.

But it should be treated as a temperature check, not a trading instruction.

“Extreme fear” does not mean prices cannot fall further. “Extreme greed” does not mean the market must crash tomorrow. Crypto can remain fearful or greedy for much longer than people expect, and the index is primarily designed around Bitcoin, not every token or individual project. Social data can also be noisy, gamed or distorted by the algorithm.

The useful way to use it is as a prompt to slow down:

W3DC: The Fear & Greed Index does not tell you what will happen next. It tells you how emotional the market is right now, and in crypto, that is often worth knowing.

Until next time