《Wen Hongjun Stablecoin New Finance 20》One-Year Anniversary of the U.S. Genius Act! Has the crypto narrative been fully taken over by traditional finance—where is Taiwan’s strategy?

The crypto narrative in the United States has seeped into every tiny crack of traditional finance. Industry players are competing and teaming up to grab the big slice—so what about Taiwan?
(Background recap: 《温宏駿 stablecoin new finance-19》Sino-British-U.S. joint statement! The digital revival of “Europe Dollar 2.0”)
(Background supplement: 《温宏駿 stablecoin new finance-18》OUSD free competition vs bank deposit tokens—new and old forces全面開戰)

Table of contents

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• I. Three that survived, and they share one common point
  • Who’s the driver?
• II. In the second half of 2026, Financial Bro Big Star adds three new narratives
• III. Alliance brawl: a team battle the world is fighting all at once
• IV. Taiwan’s strategic position isn’t in “issuing coins,” but in “chips and compute”🔥
• Finally, celebrate the extra closing remarks of the 20th installment of Big Star

Crypto narratives have been taken over by traditional finance. The second half of 2026 is an “alliance brawl.”

First, take a look at a table. Tiger Research compiled the narrative themes that dominated the market from January to December 2025—every month gets replaced by a new theme:

• January AI Agent (ai16z, Virtuals)
• February Memecoin (Trump coin, Melania coin)
• March InfoFi (Kaito, Cookie3)
• April RWA (BlackRock, Fidelity)
• May DAT (Strategy, Bitmine)
• June Tokenization of stocks (Robinhood, xStocks)
• July Stablecoins (Tether, Circle)
• August Launchpad (Kaito, Buidlpad)
• September PerpDEX (Hyperliquid, Aster)
• October x402 (Coinbase)
• November Privacy (Zcash)
• December Prediction markets (Polymarket, Kalshi)

Twelve narratives—one per month, lively like a carousel.

But the key question is: a year has passed. Which ones still have momentum today and are continuing to develop?

🔰 The answer is clear: only three remain—tokenized stocks, stablecoins, and prediction markets.

I. Three that survived, and they share one common point

Look at those three narratives again, and you’ll notice one thing: they are all products of “traditional finance moving in to set up.”

• Tokenized stocks: behind them are existing market infrastructure like Robinhood, Nasdaq, and DTCC.
• Stablecoins: behind them are Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, Stripe, and big banks.
• Prediction markets: behind them are exchanges like Kalshi that operate under CFTC regulation, plus real investments from ICE (the parent company of the NYSE).

Now look at the ones that died: Memecoin, InfoFi, Launchpad, PerpDEX—every single one is a crypto-native self-entertainment lane.

The conclusion is kind of brutal: the entire crypto-currency narrative was officially taken over by traditional finance in 2025.

# Who’s the driver?

The shift in the Trump administration’s stance, the Genius Act giving stablecoins a lawful path, and then the Clarity Act (Digital Asset Market Structure Act) boot—this boot is now sitting on the Senate agenda, trying to push through. The White House has listed it as a priority bill, but it needs 60 votes and at least 7 Democratic senators to cross party lines in support. Before the August recess, this is the last window. Whether it passes is still unclear, but the direction is already unmistakable: Washington is moving crypto assets into the traditional finance regulatory framework, one square at a time.

Crypto-native players ran narrative experiments for a decade, and in the end, the few that proved scalable were all taken over by people in high-end suits.

II. In the second half of 2026, Financial Bro Big Star adds three new narratives

Those three above (tokenized stocks, stablecoins, prediction markets) will definitely keep booming in 2026—no suspense there.

But Big Star has to add three more. I think these are new narratives that will really start fermenting in the second half of this year:

1️⃣ Deposit tokens (a coalition of commercial banks) Banks finally figured it out: instead of being routed around by stablecoins, they should move their deposits on-chain themselves. SWIFT has already pulled together 17 globally systemically important banks’ blockchain ledgers; Japan Post Bank’s DCJPY will be opened to 120 million accounts; JPMD at JPMorgan is already running. This thread is something I wrote about in Stablecoin New Finance installment 18, so I won’t repeat it.

2️⃣ CBDC (each country pushing) The U.S. Senate killed retail-style digital dollars 85 to 5—but that’s the U.S. Europe is pushing the digital euro; China’s e-CNY is running; and the pilot for deposit tokens by the Bank of Korea is planned to distribute government subsidies of 110 trillion won. The U.S. exiting this race doesn’t mean the rest of the world exits—on the contrary. It makes other countries more urgently fill the gap.

3️⃣ Alliance brawl (central banks and regional alliances) This is the most interesting and also the most worth exploring. I’m opening a dedicated section for the third point:

III. Alliance brawl: a team battle the world is fighting all at once

In the past, when people talked about stablecoins, they were used to asking, “Which issuer will win?” After 2026, this question will become outdated—because the players are no longer companies, but alliances. And it’s not just one battle line; there are lots of alliances launching simultaneously, overlapping with each other, and jostling to occupy positions:

🌐 The seven-nation alliance led by the BIS: Project Agora, with the International Bank for Settlements bringing together seven major central banks plus a large number of regulated private institutions, to build a unified ledger for tokenized commercial bank money and wholesale central bank money. This is the “headquarters-level” layout of the old system.

🇺🇸 The U.S. dollar camp: the OUSD alliance + a joint statement between the U.S. and the U.K. with more than 140 companies spanning banks, payments, tech, and crypto. Plus the U.S.-U.K. joint statement on digital asset cooperation—meaning the Anglo bloc is gathering along the same line.

🇪🇺 The euro camp: the euro stablecoin alliance formed by 37 banks under Qivalis. I said in installment 19 that it’s more like a bankers’ club than a market.

🇨🇳 China: CIPS + mBridge cross-border payment system for RMB plus the multilateral central bank digital currency bridge. It doesn’t go through public chains or private channels; it goes through sovereignty-to-sovereignty settlement pipelines. (Non-U.S.-style settlement system: Iran and Russia??)

🇯🇵 Japan: Project Pax, centered on Progmat and Mitsubishi UFJ, wants to run cross-border stablecoin settlement using existing SWIFT messaging rails. Japan’s strategy is very Japanese—not overturning the table, but modifying the existing table.

🇰🇷 South Korea: Project Han River—deposit tokens from the Bank of Korea and a wholesale CBDC plan. In phase two, it directly ties to real-world scenarios funded by government subsidies. It also plans to extend to tokenization of government bonds and cross-border settlement, and connect with Agora.

🇸🇬 Singapore: Project Guardian led by the MAS, focusing on asset tokenization and institutional-grade DeFi, pulling in a lot of international big banks for pilots. Singapore’s usual playbook: don’t fight for issuance rights—fight for standard-setting and hub position.

🇦🇺 Australia: Project Acacia, the Reserve Bank of Australia’s wholesale CBDC and tokenized settlement trial.

I just learned a whole bunch of terms at once…..! So what about Taiwan?

Should Taiwan also call one Project—珍奶? Or Project—雞排?🤣

—Of course, that line is my “pai-style” humor, but the question underneath isn’t funny at all:

✅ When central banks, banks, and payment giants around the world are all forming teams—naming their own alliances and fighting for a seat at the same table—where is Taiwan positioned right now?

As it happens, yesterday former Executive Yuan premier Chen Chong also wrote an article calling for attention; at this moment, why has Taiwan’s globally most important tech industry suddenly disappeared without a sound?……

IV. Taiwan’s strategic position isn’t in “issuing coins,” but in “chips and compute”🔥

This is something Financial Bro Big Star has been talking about for a long time.

If Taiwan’s approach is “others have stablecoins, so we should also have a Taiwan stablecoin,” then we lose at the starting line. Because the ceiling of a Taiwan stablecoin is the international demand for the Taiwan dollar itself—and honestly, that demand isn’t that big.

✅ Taiwan’s real leverage has never been currency; it’s semiconductors and compute.

In the global AI computation supply chain, key links are in Taiwan’s hands. In the chip, packaging, and server manufacturing chain, Taiwan’s voice on that link is stronger than any regional currency alliance. And compute is being rapidly financialized. Coincidentally, at the end of this month, I will also publish an article in the August issue of 『Taiwan Banker Magazine』 on the topic of compute debt and financialization—how it turns from a “cost item for buying equipment” into a commodity with price discovery, a futures market, and can be sliced into GPU-Hours to be priced and traded. CME is already doing compute futures—this is absolutely not something to imagine.

So the direction that Hayek (Hayek) Technology has always advocated is: “an Asia compute OPEC alliance + a stablecoin settlement layer.”

The logic for real action is simple and has three layers:

First layer: make compute into a measurable commodity. Whoever has how many GPUs, how many MW of electricity, and how many GPU-Hours were actually run—everything is measurable and auditable. This is a concrete advantage Taiwan already has.

Second layer: commodityize and tokenize compute. GPU-Hour becomes an asset that can be traded, used as collateral, and used as a financing underlying. This layer determines whether compute can become a financial asset, not just equipment depreciation.

Third layer: use stablecoins for settlement and clearing. Cross-border buying and selling of compute cannot wait for T+2, and it can’t tolerate foreign exchange frictions across countries. It inherently needs a 24/7, programmable, borderless settlement layer—which is exactly the most convincing use case for stablecoins, far more meaningful than retail payments.

In other words: Taiwan doesn’t need to fight to “have its currency used.” Taiwan should fight for “who prices and settles the world’s compute.”

When Asian compute suppliers—Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and capital from the Middle East—can form a coordination mechanism similar to OPEC, and jointly decide the pricing power for compute and jointly use a set of settlement infrastructure, then Taiwan isn’t merely a contract manufacturing node within someone else’s architecture anymore. Taiwan becomes a co-designer of that architecture.

That’s the only irreplaceable position Taiwan has a chance to get in this alliance brawl.

Finally, celebrate the extra closing remarks of the 20th installment of Big Star

In 2025, the crypto narrative was taken over by traditional finance. In 2026, traditional finance is splitting into a bunch of competing alliances. And what all alliances are really trying to抢 is never “coins,” but rather dominance in settlement (I’ve explained this N times in the first few installments).

If Taiwan only wants to issue a Taiwan stablecoin, that’s asking for a seat at someone else’s table. But if Taiwan has thought clearly that what it holds is the chips and compute the whole world lacks, then we’re not here to ask for a seat—we are the side that has the qualification to issue the cards (don’t think too hard and end up imagining an online dealer waitress issuing cards…. 🫠).

Project 珍奶 or Project 雞排—either name is fine. It doesn’t matter. But at that table, we need to confirm first that we can sit there.

Starting now, everyone is welcome to pass the baton with Project names……👇