Menu #4 - When TradFi Starts Moving Onchain

Hyperliquid
Atomic habits
Web3 Dinner Club: April (LDN)
Mastercard BVNK
Novel Labs
Brand spice
Chefs Note

This is The Menu.

The UK Web3 operator’s weekly briefing —
what founders, investors, and builders are actually discussing behind closed doors.

This week the theme is simple:

Where traditional systems begin bending toward onchain rails.

In this issue:

• Hyperliquid and the S&P go onchain
• A founder lesson from Atomic Habits
• Mastercard acquires BVNK
• Builders as the new growth engine
• ARK’s Big Ideas report

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.

Hyperliquid is a decentralised crypto exchange focused on fast, on-chain trading of perpetual futures (perps) as well as spot.

In simple terms:
• It lets you trade crypto with leverage (long/short)
• Uses a real order book (like Binance, not AMMs)
• Runs on its own blockchain for speed
• Everything is fully on-chain and transparent

Why it matters:

It’s one of the first platforms where:

DeFi that actually feels like a centralised exchange

One-line summary:

Hyperliquid = Binance UX, rebuilt fully onchain.

A real “TradFi meets onchain” milestone landed this week.

S&P Dow Jones Indices has licensed the S&P 500 to Trade[XYZ] so it can offer the first officially licensed S&P 500 perpetual futures contract, trading 24/7 on Hyperliquid.

Why this matters isn’t access.
It’s legitimacy.

It’s this shift: We are moving from “synthetic tracking” to official data rails

Crypto has had plenty of S&P “lookalikes.”
This is different:

→ licensed data
→ institutional-grade pricing

This isn’t synthetic exposure.
This is benchmarks moving onchain with permission.

This brings real mainstream equity exposure into a DeFi-style venue, but it also introduces the usual perpetual futures realities: leverage, liquidity dynamics outside normal hours, and potential price dislocations vs. the underlying market.

This isn’t “tokenised stocks are here.” It’s official: benchmarks are starting to license themselves into on-chain liquidity venues. That’s a different kind of signal.

Does onchain S&P become:

What this means (UK builders):
If benchmarks are being licensed onchain,
expect regulated platforms to follow.

The race won’t be innovation.
It’ll be compliance + distribution.

👉 Read the full article: S&P Dow Jones Indices Licenses S&P 500® to Trade[XYZ] for Perpetual Contracts on Hyperliquid

Most founders don’t fail from lack of ambition.
They fail from inconsistent systems.

I worked through James Clear’s Atomic Habits Workbook properly, ink pen out, honest thoughtful answers, and enough forced repetition to aim at making the systems stick.

It’s not a motivational read. It’s is actually a practical manual requires practice and discipline, but after all that’s what any “change” is about.

The workbook format I found matters more because it forces you to stop agreeing in theory and start designing your habits in real life: prompts, exercises, and simple trackers that should turn “good intentions” into your plan.

Identity-based change (the real shift)
It keeps coming back to: act like the kind of person you want to be.

Not “I want to get fit,” but “I’m someone who doesn’t miss workouts.”
It sounds simple, but writing it down and building small proof around it works.

Habits that survive bad days
The workbook pushes you to define the minimum version of a habit that still counts, so you stay consistent even when motivation is low.

Environment design is the cheat code
The most useful exercises are about cues: what you see, what’s within reach, what’s frictionless.

Less “be disciplined,” more “make the right thing the default.” But you need to be disciplined.

If you already know the book well, some sections can feel repetitive. But then again repetition is part of the method.

Consistency isn’t willpower. It’s design.

If you want to change your habits in a way that’s calm, structured, and, above all else, realistic, then I really think this is worth doing.

It turns habits from a personality problem into a design problem, and that’s what is making it work for me.

Most networking events optimise for volume.

Not signal.

Too many conversations that go nowhere.

This is designed differently.

The Web3 Dinner Club is a curated, seated dinner for founders, investors, and operators building in crypto, AI, and frontier tech in the UK.

One table (or two). No noise. Just people worth knowing.

Over the past 3 years:

• 25+ dinners
• 230+ curated members
• Outcomes → hires, partnerships, capital

This isn’t about “meeting people.”

It’s about getting in the right rooms consistently.

We keep this intentionally small.
Not everyone gets a seat.

Proudly Sponsored by Novel Labs.

This isn’t Mastercard entering crypto.
It’s Mastercard defending its position in the payments stack.

Mastercard has agreed to acquire BVNK, a UK-based stablecoin infrastructure provider, in a deal worth up to $1.8bn (including $300m contingent payments). The stated goal is straightforward: connect on-chain payment rails (stablecoins and tokenised deposits) with Mastercard’s fiat network so banks and fintechs can offer digital-currency payment options without rebuilding their entire stack.

BVNK, founded in 2021, provides infrastructure for sending/receiving payments across major blockchains in 130+ countries, positioning it as “middleware” between crypto rails and traditional finance.

This is less about Mastercard “going crypto” and more about Mastercard protecting the center of the payments map. Stablecoins are increasingly being used for cross-border remittances, payouts, and B2B flows, areas where speed and cost matter and where stablecoins can be competitive. Mastercard is effectively buying the capability rather than building it from scratch.

It also underlines a shift in how the market is now being described: stablecoin infrastructure is becoming core orchestration, not a niche feature. Simon Taylor (Fintech Brainfood) has framed stablecoin orchestration as a “three horse race” among Bridge (Stripe), BVNK, and ZeroHash, suggesting this layer is consolidating fast.

What this means (UK fintechs):
If you’re not thinking about stablecoins as infrastructure yet,
you’re already behind.

ElevenLabs just launched ElevenHacks.

Not one hackathon.
Eleven. Back-to-back.

$240k+ prize pool
Weekly challenges
Rotating sponsors
Compounding leaderboard
Final “mystery prize”

Sponsors include:
→ Stripe
→ Cloudflare
→ Cursor
→ Replit

This isn’t about hackathons.
It’s about distribution.

Specifically: turning builders into your growth loop.

Each week:

But the real mechanic is the leaderboard.

You don’t just show up.
You stay. You compete. You level up.

It’s hackathons…
designed like a live service game.

“launch and hope developers show up”

to:
“engineer a system they don’t want to leave.”

Most communities today are:

→ Discord
→ vibes
→ low signal

The next generation will look like:

leaderboards, incentives, continuous play

Don’t ask:
“How do we get users?”

Ask:
“How do we make them stay, compete, and come back next week?”

ARK’s Big Ideas 2026 report makes a useful point that’s easy to miss when you follow tech in silos: the biggest platforms aren’t advancing independently anymore, they’re becoming interdependent.

Their framing: five major innovation platforms, AI, public blockchains, robotics, energy storage, and multiomics, are increasingly catalysing each other, where progress in one unlocks capability in another.

A few “this is getting real” examples they point to:

W3DC takeaway: we’re moving from “one breakthrough” stories to stacked breakthroughs. The winners may not be the best single tech, but the teams who can compose across rails: compute + energy + data + payments + automation.

Does the ‘moat’ shift from having an idea to owning a pipeline?

data → model → action → payment → audit trail.

Integration becomes strategy?

TOKEN2049 Dubai has been postponed to 2027.

Not a minor delay.
A full removal from the 2026 calendar.

The reason: rising geopolitical instability in the region → impacting safety, travel, and logistics. (Reuters)

This was meant to be:

Now it’s gone.

This isn’t just an event cancellation.

It’s a liquidity event for attention.

All that:

now needs somewhere else to go

The obvious beneficiaries:

Not because they’re better.

But because:
they’re next on the calendar + geographically stable

Short term:

You’ll likely see:

the same people… just compressed

Dubai has been:

→ neutral ground
→ easy travel hub
→ “everyone shows up” energy

Remove that…

And the ecosystem fragments again:

Events aren’t just events.

They’re coordination points for the industry.

When one disappears:

👉 attention doesn’t vanish
👉 it reallocates

If the calendar compresses…
Do the remaining events become more valuable, or just more crowded?

Until next time