Fireblocks Launches Earn
The Little Prince
Web3 Dinner Club: April (LDN)
Tether + Drift
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:

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.

Fireblocks is an infrastructure layer many institutions use to securely move, store, and manage digital assets.

Think of it as the operating system behind institutional crypto.

Banks, fintechs, exchanges, hedge funds, and crypto-native firms use Fireblocks to custody assets, move stablecoins, connect to exchanges, manage treasury operations, and access on-chain products without exposing themselves to the operational risks of handling private keys directly.

Fireblocks is built around MPC (Multi-Party Computation) technology.

Instead of storing a private key in one place, Fireblocks splits it into multiple encrypted pieces across different devices and environments. That removes the single point of failure that has historically made crypto custody so risky.

Key parts of the platform include:

Fireblocks just made a move that’s easy to miss, but hard to ignore if you’re watching where “institutional DeFi” is actually going.

They’ve launched Earn: a new feature that lets Fireblocks customers access on-chain lending directly inside the Fireblocks platform starting with Aave markets and curated Morpho Vault strategies.

The headline isn’t “DeFi yield.” It’s DeFi yield with institutional guardrails.

Fireblocks is effectively turning DeFi lending into a familiar enterprise workflow:

No new wallet UX.
No separate DeFi ops stack.
Same governance and policy layer institutions already use.

Fireblocks is clear on one important point: yield is produced by the underlying protocols, not Fireblocks and it’s variable, not guaranteed.

Aave is the “default” lending layer in DeFi for a reason: it’s widely deployed across major chains and has deep liquidity.

Earn plugs institutions into that liquidity without them needing to operate the DeFi plumbing directly.

If you believe stablecoins are becoming payments middleware, this is the next step: stablecoin treasuries becoming productive by default but inside controlled, auditable environments.

Where Aave is permissionless markets, Morpho Vaults are closer to “managed products” curated strategies with defined collateral parameters and ongoing risk management.

Fireblocks is leaning into a very TradFi idea: institutions don’t navigate markets alone they use credentialed managers and frameworks.

Earn launches with a curated vault from Sentora, deploying PayPal’s PYUSD into Morpho lending markets against a selected set of collateral types
(e.g., BTC-linked positions, liquid staking tokens, yield-bearing stablecoin derivatives).

This isn’t about retail chasing yield.

It’s a sign that the next wave of adoption looks like this:

DeFi protocols stay on-chain.

Institutions access them through familiar enterprise rails.

If this works, DeFi becomes less “a destination” and more a backend plugged into custody, treasury operations, and embedded wallets.

Does this kind of product accelerate institutional adoption or does it just concentrate risk behind cleaner UX?

What becomes the moat: governance, distribution, or risk controls?

Bit of a different one this week, and one to read with the children as well as by yourself.

The Little Prince is one of those books you can finish in an hour and think about for years. On the surface it’s a gentle fable: a pilot crashes in the desert and meets a boy from a tiny asteroid.

Underneath, it’s a sharp critique of how grown-ups mistake numbers for meaning, and how easily we lose curiosity, relationships, and purpose.

It’s a surprisingly good founder book.

Adults in the story only care about what they can count. Founders do this too: CAC, churn, runway, ARR, engagement.

Metrics matter, but the reminder is: numbers are a map, not the territory. Build for the metric instead of the human and you can end up with a “successful” product nobody loves.

Track the numbers, but don’t let them replace taste.

The famous line still lands. The most important things aren’t easily measured: trust, responsibility, loyalty, time invested.

For founders, think: culture, reputation, partner trust, community belief — the stuff that doesn’t show up neatly in dashboards but decides whether you survive.

Invest in what compounds quietly.

The fox’s lesson is simple: to create a bond is to take responsibility.

Founders often want growth without obligation. The book pushes back: if people choose you, you owe them clarity, care, and reliability.

Attention creates responsibility.

The Prince only understands the value of his rose later, because of the time he gave it. That’s the founder journey: build, doubt, compare, leave, return with deeper understanding.

What you build becomes valuable partly because you stayed long enough to earn the insight.

Read The Little Prince when you feel yourself becoming too “adult” about your work, obsessed with the deck, the metrics, the competition. It’s a reset: curiosity over cynicism, meaning over noise, relationships over ego.

If you’re building something real, you’re responsible for what you tame.

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.

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.

After Drift’s $285m exploit on April 1, the comeback plan now has a heavyweight behind it:

Tether is backing a structured recovery and relaunch package worth up to ~$150m, including up to $127.5m from Tether.

The interesting part isn’t just the cheque, it’s the structure.

Instead of a one-off bailout, the recovery is designed to be revenue-linked: as Drift trading restarts, platform revenues contribute to restoring user balances, with capital support layered in over time.

Translation: the recovery is tied to actual usage, not promises.

And then there’s the strategic move: Drift plans to switch its settlement asset from USDC to USDT, bringing ~128,000 users onto USDT-based trading and positioning USDT as the primary settlement rail on one of Solana’s biggest perp venues.

W3DC takeaway:
Stablecoins aren’t just “liquidity.”

They’re becoming crisis infrastructure, and this is Tether signaling it wants to be the default settlement layer when things break and when things rebuild.

After-dinner question:
Is this the future of DeFi resilience, big stablecoin issuers acting like “lenders of last resort”… or does it concentrate too much power in one rail?

This GFMA report reads like a coordinated memo from capital markets insiders: tokenised deposits, deposit tokens, wCBDCs and regulated stablecoins are being treated as plumbing upgrades, not crypto experiments.

The value proposition is brutally practical: use digital money to enable atomic delivery-versus-payment, intraday/programmable margin, and more automated repo/collateral workflows, shifting parts of markets from batch windows to near-real-time execution.

The punchline is also clear: tokenised bank money is the near-term favourite, wCBDCs are still largely pilot-led, and stablecoins have “always-on” advantages but need far more clarity on capital/margin treatment, accounting, insolvency and cross-border recognition before they can scale deep into institutional workflows.

The next 18 months are framed as a critical window, the jurisdictions and firms that lock in legal certainty + interoperability standards first will shape how capital markets settle in the future.

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