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Tempo Stablecoin Advisory
The Obstacle is the Way
Web3 Dinner Club: June (LDN)
The Aave Bailout
Novel Labs
Brand spice
Chefs Note
Tuesday, 28th April
Chef’s Welcome
This is The Menu.
The UK Web3 operator’s weekly briefing:
What founders, investors, and builders are actually discussing behind closed doors.
In this issue:
Stablecoins quietly becoming treasury infrastructure, not just “crypto payments.”
Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is the Way as a mental stack for operating under pressure.
Aave’s $200M‑plus rescue and what “DeFi United” signals about systemic risk in lending.
Tokenised collateral as the boring, high‑opportunity upgrade to capital‑markets plumbing.
Underneath it all is the same question:
How do we build rails — financial and personal — that hold when things break?
Signal, served weekly.
Partner Pairing
Novel Labs
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.
Amuse-bouche
What Are Stablecoins?
Stablecoins are digital currencies designed to hold a stable value, usually pegged to a traditional asset like the US dollar, a basket of assets, or a commodity.
Most stablecoins are backed by reserves (cash, Treasuries, or other collateral) and sit under the same kind of governance and compliance frameworks you’d expect from a financial product.
The core innovation isn’t just the “value stability” — it’s that they can be embedded into workflows, APIs, and smart contracts rather than just sitting in bank accounts.
Key traits of stablecoins:
Stability (relative to an anchor): Usually pegged 1:1 to a fiat currency or a basket of assets.
Programmability: Can be held, transferred, and locked inside onchain contracts, enabling automated flows and yield strategies.
Global and 24/7: Operate outside traditional banking hours and across borders, often with fast finality.
Regulated / structured: Many are issued by regulated entities with clear redemption and reserve policies.
Firms use stablecoins for:
Settlement and liquidity: Moving cash-like value between accounts, exchanges, and protocols in minutes.
Treasury and balance-sheet management: Holding reserves, meeting liquidity needs, and managing cross-border flows.
Payments and onchain rails: Enabling payroll, supplier payments, and payouts without traditional correspondent banking.
Access to onchain strategies: Serving as the base asset for yield, lending, and DeFi products within controlled environments.
Stablecoins aren’t just digital dollars.
They’re financial infrastructure that can be coded into the stack.
Starter
Stablecoins are becoming treasury infrastructure, not just payment rails.
Stripe‑backed payments‑first blockchain Tempo just launched a dedicated stablecoin advisory unit to help businesses and financial institutions identify use cases and embed stablecoins into their payment and treasury workflows.
The move is a signal that the conversation is no longer “if” companies will use stablecoins, but “how” they plug them into balance‑sheet and liquidity management.
Tempo’s advisory includes:
Use‑case design: Helping firms decide where stablecoins add real value, whether in payroll, cross‑border settlement, tokenised deposits, or 24/7 payment rails.
Forward‑deployed engineers: Tempo will embed engineers inside client teams to build stablecoin‑enabled flows, not just hand over a generic API.
Payment‑layer integration: Its blockchain is already being used by companies like DoorDash, Fifth Third Bank, and Visa to run payment operations on a stablecoin‑first stack.
In effect, stablecoins are evolving from “crypto FX” experiments into structural plumbing: the default layer for moving money faster, cheaper, and programmatically, while still sitting inside regulated, institution‑grade rails.
If Tempo’s playbook spreads, the next question for treasurers won’t be “Is this risky?” It will be: “Which stack gives me the cleanest, most compliant, onchain‑ready treasury layer?”
And tempo isn’t starting from zero.
Industry adoption
DoorDash is working with Stripe-backed Tempo blockchain to bring stablecoin-powered payouts to its global marketplace.
Stripe, Coastal Bank and Latin American fintech ARQ are also beginning to run parts of their payment operations on stablecoin rails with Tempo.
Stripe, a payments giant that processes nearly $2 trillion in payment flows annually, is increasingly betting on stablecoins and blockchain becoming a core layer for global money movement.
Main
Book Review:
The Obstacle Is the Way — Ryan Holiday
Most founder advice treats problems as things to avoid.
Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle Is the Way treats them as the raw material of progress.
The core idea is simple: what blocks the path becomes the path, especially in fast‑moving, high‑risk environments like Web3.
Holiday builds the book around the Stoic triad: perception, action, will.
A mental stack that pairs well with the execution‑obsessed DNA of your typical founder or operator.
Holiday blends historical vignettes (Marcus Aurelius, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, etc.) with practical exercises to show how to reframe set‑backs, pressure, and noise into infrastructure.
The questions are familiar to anyone who has run a startup:
How do you keep executing when the room is panicked?
How do you turn a “market‑breaking” moment into a forcing function for better product, better incentives, better protocol behaviour?
Ideas that stick for founders
Perception as an operating layer
The obstacle rarely changes; what changes is how you see it.
Holiday argues that the first step is not to “fix” the situation but to name it clearly and decide what to optimise for — survival, growth, or long‑term position.Action as small, repeatable units
The book is full of “do the next right thing” thinking: short experiments, constrained bets, and micro‑moves that change the game even when the overall environment is against you.
For founders, that’s a clean mental model for how to act when the data is noisy, the timelines are crowded, and the market is volatile.Will as the backbone of the system
Will, in Holiday’s framing, isn’t motivation. It’s the ability to keep the right rhythm when the market, the regulators, or your team is against you.
For Web3 builders, that’s the layer between “alpha leak” and “actual execution”: showing up, making decisions, shipping, even when no one is watching.
The bit you’ll probably dislike (but need)
The tone is direct, unsentimental, and a bit relentless — it doesn’t care about “vibes.”
Some readers find it too stoic, too “hard‑mindset,” but for founders in the right rooms, that’s the point: emotion is regulated, not eliminated.
Best for:
Founders who want a repeatable mental model for surviving crunch time.
Operators who read the current cycle and want to treat volatility as infrastructure, not just as noise.
Anyone in the room who’s had the “everything is on fire” week and wants to turn that week into the next product layer.
Special
Web3 Dinner Club: June 25th (LDN)
This is 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 real conversation and the kind of signal that doesn’t show up in your LinkedIn feed.
The benefit is simple:
You stop just “meeting people” and start getting into the right rooms consistently.
You trade generic networking for trusted intros, repeatable relationships, and the kind of trust that moves capital, talent, and ideas.
You leave the dinner with fewer cards and more clarity — about what’s actually happening, who to talk to next, and how to win the next round of your game.
Not everyone gets a seat.
We keep it small precisely because anything that matters in Web3 — funding, partnerships, hires, and strategic advantage.
Starts with a handful of conversations you keep having with the same people.
Proudly Sponsored by Novel Labs.
Dessert
The Aave bailout:
“DeFi United” as lender‑of‑last‑resort
Aave, the largest DeFi lending protocol, has just weathered a $200–230M bad‑debt crisis and a coordinated industry‑led rescue that looks an awful lot like a formal bailout — but via a “DeFi‑United” club, not a central bank.
The core problem was a KelpDAO‑linked bridge exploit that minted roughly 116,500 rsETH tokens that were never backed by real ETH. These tokens were used as collateral on Aave, backing roughly $200–230M of loans. When the vulnerability surfaced, the collateral evaporated, triggering a $10B run on deposits as lenders pulled out in panic.
In response, Aave and its core ecosystem players launched “DeFi United”, a recovery fund designed to:
Recapitalize rsETH collateral.
Absorb the bad debt so normal lending can resume.
Restore confidence in Aave‑backed wETH / rsETH markets.
So far, the rescue has raised about $160M of the targeted $200M:
55,000 ETH (~$127M) from Mantle and the Aave DAO.
5,000 ETH (~$11.7M) from Aave founder Stani Kulechov.
Additional commitments from BGD Labs, Lido, Ether.fi, Ethena, and others.
$20M in USDT pledged by Justin Sun and HTX as a liquidity backstop.
This isn’t just a technical bugfix; it’s a governance‑driven capital backstop for a protocol that is effectively “too big to fail” in DeFi. For operators, it’s a reminder that even “decentralized” lending still carries concentrated counterparty and exploit risk — and that the new layer of infrastructure might be DAO‑backed bailouts, not just smart contracts.
Digestif
Brand spice
📚 A report we’ve read:
Tokenised collateral:
The unsexy upgrade that could unlock billions?
If you want one stat to remember from this Nasdaq x ValueExchange report: more than half of global financial institutions surveyed expect to be actively managing live tokenised collateral by the end of 2026.
The “why” is brutally practical.
Today’s collateral engine runs with so much friction that firms pay an “operational tax” to move cash and securities around, and a lot of that cost is self-inflicted because nobody fully trusts delivery.
The report highlights:
Operational costs can make up 57% of an OTC derivatives transaction and 50% of a securities financing transaction.
70% of respondents face significant issues in settlement matching and delivery every day.
The industry’s workaround is over-posting and posting early, leaving ~25% of collateral earning no return.
Tokenisation’s promise isn’t “blockchain magic.” It’s certainty of delivery, and that certainty creates a domino effect: fewer failed settlements, less manual exception handling, less buffer collateral, and better utilisation.
The report pegs this as a real P&L story: a Tier 1 firm (>$100bn AUM) could mobilise $4.8bn of idle collateral and lift annual interest earnings by ~$346m.
The realism is the best part. Adoption won’t arrive in one giant migration, it’ll happen “one line at a time” inside eligibility schedules and collateral agreements. And the near-term focus is exactly what you’d expect: cash, money market funds, and high-quality liquid assets, not the exotic illiquid stuff.
Tokenised collateral is about turning idle capital into working capital, not inventing a new asset class.
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Until next time
Views expressed here are for informational purposes only and aren’t financial advice.