: : MoneyX Field Notes: How Japan Is Building a Real Stablecoin Economy
Written by 100y, Jun, Eren, C4lvin, Ponyo

- MoneyX is a conference representing the Asian finance and fintech industry, hosted by JPYC, Progmat, TV Tokyo, SBI Group, and CoinPost. It serves as a platform to discuss key issues shaping the next generation financial ecosystem, including digital assets, stablecoins, payment infrastructure, and regulatory environments.

- Four Pillars participated in MoneyX as the exclusive research partner, and this article aims to share summaries of the sessions as well as various insights related to the Japanese market gained on site.

- Contrary to common perceptions in the global market, Japan appears to be one of the most open markets toward the transition to onchain finance. Its approach, which emphasizes compliance first and internalization strategies, as well as a coexistence model for CBDCs, deposit tokens, and stablecoins, provides valuable examples that other countries may reference.

▫️ MoneyX: Asia’s Leading Web3 Conference
▫️ Summaries and Comments on 11 Sessions and 2 Keynote Speeches
▫️ Key Insights on the Japanese Market

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: : Ethereum's Geographic Blind Spot, Lessons from Running 25K+ Validators in Asia
Written by Rejamong

- Ethereum's P2P network performance is determined not by peer count, but by the quality of mesh composition, and nodes in regions with low node density face structural disadvantages. GossipSub forms a mesh of just 6 to 12 peers per topic, and peer scoring causes high-latency nodes to fall into a vicious cycle of mesh exclusion. In node-dense regions like Europe and North America, nearby peers boost each other's scores in a virtuous cycle, while nodes in Asia, South America, and Africa can be pushed out of the mesh and remain periphery peers even with the same number of connections.

- Upcoming Ethereum roadmap changes including FOCIL, PeerDAS, and slot time reduction will further strengthen the need for geographic diversity. FOCIL's censorship resistance relies on the geographic diversity of its 17-member committee, the evolution from PeerDAS to Full DAS depends even more heavily on the geographic distribution of data columns, and shorter slot times amplify the impact of regional latency gaps.

- Running validators in non-Western regions requires more effort, but operators can contribute to the global balance of GossipSub meshes through forming regional node clusters, leveraging DVT, and engaging in governance. At the same time, major staking pools like Lido should prioritize geographic diversity in operator onboarding, and the Ethereum protocol itself must evolve to lower barriers to entry for non-Western regions. Meaningful geographic diversity requires the combined efforts of individual node operators, major staking pools and institutional stakers, and protocol designers.

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: : Affluent: Bringing Institutional Yield to Telegram's 1 Billion Users
Written by Ponyo

- Affluent targets DeFi's distribution bottleneck, embedding vault-based yield strategies directly into Telegram Wallet's native Earn tab for 1B+ users.

- The three-role vault architecture (Owner / Guardian / Manager) constrains vault managers through code-enforced whitelists, leverage caps, oracle-verified RFQ execution, and a Guardian veto layer.

- Affluent's correlation-aware risk model is technically differentiated, decomposing DeFi positions into underlying exposures and using a dual-metric system (Risk Ratio + Leverage) that prices correlated pairs more accurately than standard LTV.
V3 (Jan 2026) transitions the protocol from TON-native lending to cross-chain yield infrastructure, with the Sentora Vault bridging USDT to Euler/Morpho on Ethereum — the first of what the team envisions as a series of partnerships connecting Telegram's distribution to Ethereum's deep liquidity.

- At ~$4.7M TVL, the protocol's path to scale depends on stablecoin yield partnerships, vault manager diversification, and sustained Telegram Wallet integration, which are variables that will determine whether Affluent's architecture finds its market before the embedded yield race is decided.

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: : [Comment] EIP-8163: Securing an Extension Namespace for EVM Chains
Written by c4lvin

Monad’s proposed EIP-8163 reserves opcode 0xae on Ethereum L1 as INVALID, creating a safe extension space that lets other EVM chains innovate independently without breaking compatibility.

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: : [Comment] SEC’s Nasdaq Tokenization Approval is Not as Big a Deal as You Think
Written by 100y

Contrary to what you might expect, this SEC approval doesn’t change much in the existing system. In fact, according to the SEC document, settlement of tokenized stocks is still handled by DTC, and it remains on a T+1 basis. That said, from a long-term perspective, this approval is a meaningful milestone for the crypto industry.

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: : [Issue] Lido IDVTC: A Significant Milestone Reflecting Lido's Long-Term Direction
Written by Rejamong

- Lido faces two competing challenges: decentralization and operator reliability. IDVTC is a strategic attempt to address both simultaneously by combining identity verification (ICS) with DVT.

- Lido has spent two years validating DVT adoption through SimpleDVT, and the voluntary DVT adoption observed within CSM serves as the foundation for proposing IDVTC.

- IDVTC converts DVT's risk reduction into economic incentives. Distributed validator operation lowers the risk of penalties and slashing, and that reduced risk translates into lower bond requirements and greater capital efficiency. For Lido, which pursues both structural safety and decentralization, IDVTC is a significant milestone.

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: : [Issue] One 402, Two Protocols: x402 and MPP
Written by Jun

- MPP inherits x402's 402 flow, but it is a separate protocol that redesigns sessions and settlement. If x402 is on-chain payment by request, MPP is session-based payment built on deposit, streaming, and batch settlement.

- MPP breaks down the "card versus crypto" frame through rail agnostic. Within a single task, an agent can move across stablecoins and cards, and MPP abstracts that shift at the protocol level.

- MPP and x402 differ in the depth of abstraction. MPP ties x402's components into a single layer. At the same time, it is part of Stripe's platform strategy to capture the value of agent payments within its own ecosystem.

- x402 and MPP have a complementary relationship. One is bottom-up and the other is top-down. The future of 402-based agent payments will depend on whether a flywheel emerges in which one side absorbs the other's innovations.

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: : [Issue] Reflections on the Resolv Protocol Exploit
Written by C4lvin

- On March 22, 2026, the SERVICE_ROLE key of the Resolv protocol was compromised, resulting in the unauthorized minting of approximately 80 million USR without backing. The attacker accomplished this with only about 300K USDC, securing roughly $23.8 million worth of ETH before exiting.

- What deserves more attention than the hack itself is the fact that even after the hack, Morpho's Public Allocator continued to automatically supply USDC to the affected market, providing the attacker with additional exit liquidity. Because a hardcoded oracle still valued USR at $1, borrowing against de-pegged USR continued unabated, ultimately draining an additional approximately $6.2 million in USDC from curator vaults.

- Steakhouse, which had been appointed as Resolv's risk manager, published a favorable assessment just days before the hack, stating that the protocol exhibited "institutional rigor." This assessment may have influenced other curators' decisions to expand their market exposure to Resolv. Steakhouse itself had no direct exposure to the protocol, while the vaults of other curators who referenced the assessment suffered real losses.

- The fact that it took Resolv approximately three hours to pause the protocol after becoming aware of the hack clearly exposes the limitations of a security framework centered on after-the-fact response. One-time smart contract audits alone cannot defend against operational security threats such as key compromise. It is essential to adopt continuous security frameworks that automatically pause protocols upon detecting anomalies, using real-time monitoring services and additional security layers.

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: : [Report] Hyperliquid Annual Report 2025
Written by Four Pillars (Ponyo), GLC Research

This annual report offers a comprehensive overview of Hyperliquid's 2025 milestones and financial metrics. We believe Hyperliquid represents the most mature example of value accrual this industry has produced — an exchange powering spot and perpetual trading while allocating virtually all revenue to buying back its own token, HYPE.

With its rapid growth, increasing institutionalization through DATs trading on Nasdaq, and distinctive buyback mechanism, we saw a clear need for a TradFi-style annual report that helps investors understand Hyperliquid's financial performance with the transparency and rigor they deserve.

This report is a product of the Hyperliquid Research Collective (HRC), an independent research hub created by GLC Research and Four Pillars to reduce information asymmetry around Hyperliquid. With the support of Hyperion, Hyperliquid Strategies, B-Harvest, and HypurrCollective, we are committed to producing accessible, high-quality research. We are grateful to our sponsors for making this work possible.

Beyond the numbers, this report serves as a written record of a defining chapter in Hyperliquid's story. An eleven-person team generating nearly $1 billion in free cash flow is something that deserves to be documented, not just measured. We hope this first annual report captures the scale and significance of what was built during a truly remarkable year.

Hyperliquid.

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: : [Report] MoneyX Report - Building the Next Financial Infrastructure
Written by Four Pillars (Heechang), Moyed

- On February 27th, MoneyX, the first stablecoin-focused conference in Japan, was held in Tokyo. Organized by the WebX Executive Committee and produced by SBI Holdings, JPYC, Progmat, and CoinPost, MoneyX is a cross-disciplinary forum spanning policy, industry, and society to explore what may be the most fundamental question for japan: “What should money look like in the 21st century?”

- Japan has traditionally been considered a slow mover in the digital era. A country where cash reigned supreme, where fax machines persisted in offices well into the 2020s. But this perception misses something important. When Japan moves, it moves with institutional depth and regulatory precision that few countries can match. And in stablecoins, Japan has been quietly making progress for years.

- In June 2023, Japan became one of the first major economies in the world to establish a comprehensive legal framework for stablecoins, amending the Payment Services Act to define fiat-backed stablecoins as "Electronic Payment Instruments" and restricting issuance to licensed banks, trust companies, and fund transfer service providers. While the US debated. While Europe implemented MiCA in stages. Japan acted.

- We spend it, borrow it, save it, send it, and build our lives around it. Yet the infrastructure underlying money has barely evolved in decades. Settlements still take days. Cross-border transfers still cost too much. Financial access still depends on where you were born. Stablecoins represent a chance to fix this. That was what MoneyX is about.

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: : [Issue] Buyback, Fee Switch, or Reinvest?
Written by Ponyo

- The right capital return mechanism depends on what kind of asset your token is. Buyback, fee switch, and reinvestment are each correct for different quadrants of a liveness/revenue 2x2 matrix.

- Buybacks work for tokens that compound with protocol growth; tokens that don't need committed distribution.

- Fee switch signals commitment and attracts stable capital, because the yield IS the thesis.

- Ethereum proves you need both axes. Maximum liveness (gas, staking, collateral) but L2s captured 95% of the economics. Liveness alone doesn’t translate to value capture.

- JUP is an interesting case study because it’s actively trying to change quadrants. Zero emissions, ASR, Offerbook, Lend, prediction markets are all liveness-building moves.

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: : [Newsletter] Stablecoin Rail Competition Is Taking Shape [FP Weekly 12]

🗞 Major News

- [Crypto] SEC and CFTC Officially Classify 16 Crypto Assets as 'Digital Commodities'
- [Institution] Mastercard to Acquire Stablecoin Infrastructure Firm BVNK for Up to $1.8B
- [Tech] Tempo, the Stripe and Paradigm-Incubated Payments Blockchain, Launches Mainnet

📊 Data Spotlight

- Stablecoins Are Already at Card Network Scale: Payment Giants Are Now Buying Orchestration Infrastructure
- HyperEVM Stablecoins Surge: Liquidity Inflows Expand After the Shift to Native USDC

✍️ Four Pillars Weekly

- One 402, Two Protocols: x402 and MPP
- Ethereum's Geographic Blind Spot, Lessons from Running 25K+ Validators in Asia
- Debunking Pump.fun’s Revenue Manipulation FUD
- $MORPHO: The Apollo Pump Is Your Exit
- MoneyX Field Notes: How Japan Is Building a Real Stablecoin Economy
- Lido IDVTC: A Significant Milestone Reflecting Lido's Long-Term Direction
- Inside Sui's Major Execution Layer Upgrade
- Crypto Regulation Is Getting Real in Australia
- EIP-8163: An Extension Namespace That Secures Both EVM Compatibility and Chain Autonomy
- SEC’s Nasdaq Tokenization Approval Is Not as Big a Deal as You Think

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: : [Issue] Japan, Money, and MoneyX
Written by Heechang

- Despite being known as cash-dependent, Japan went from 13% to over 42% cashless in a decade. Stablecoins are next, backed by a comprehensive legal framework enacted in 2023, which was ahead of most major economies.

- Japan's three megabanks are building stablecoin infrastructure through Progmat, JPYC launched the first legally recognized yen stablecoin in 2025, and SBI Holdings plans to launch its own L1 aimed at institutional trading.

- Stablecoins represent a shift from institutional trust (banks) to programmable trust - money that settles instantly, runs 24/7, and integrates with smart contracts and tokenized assets.

- MoneyX is the convergence point. Produced by SBI, JPYC, Progmat, and CoinPost, the conference unites megabank executives, regulators, and builders to align Japan's stablecoin strategy amid global competition from the US, EU, and Asia.

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: : [Comment] Staking as a Purpose-Driven Capital Flow: The Case of Lido Impact Staking
Written by Jay

LIS was initially introduced as a pilot through a grant from the Lido DAO, in collaboration with ecosystem contributors such as Launchnodes. Over roughly a year of operation, it has steadily evolved—expanding both its structural design and participation base.
…
While conventional philanthropy typically relies on “one-off capital outflows”, LIS instead generates a “perpetual funding stream” derived from Ethereum staking yields via Lido.
…
LIS can be understood as a concrete example of transforming staking into a purpose-driven capital flow. As Lido continues to build on its scale and influence, and as similar models become repeatable on standardized assets such as stETH, staked capital may evolve into a generalized capital routing mechanism—one that can be leveraged by a wide range of DAOs and institutions.

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: : Japan's Stablecoin Vision: Building the Next Financial Infrastructure
Written by Moyed

- Japan is building regulated stablecoin infrastructure at scale. The three megabanks, MUFG, SMBC, and Mizuho, are collaborating on a shared issuance platform targeting ¥1 trillion in stablecoins by 2028. Circle's USDC became the first foreign stablecoin approved for Japanese exchanges. A Tokyo startup beat the banks to market with the country's first licensed yen stablecoin. And a parallel system of tokenized bank deposits is already live, settling environmental certificates and preparing to handle security token trades.

- This article maps the infrastructure taking shape. Part 1 covers the regulatory foundation: the 2023 stablecoin framework that defines who can issue, how reserves must be held, and what licenses intermediaries need. plus the security token rules enabling ¥168 billion in tokenized assets.

- Part 2 examines the key initiatives: the megabank consortium and its cross-border settlement projects, SBI Holdings' multi-pronged distribution strategy spanning USDC, RLUSD, and a forthcoming yen stablecoin, the securities firms building tokenization platforms, JPYC's journey from prepaid workaround to regulated issuer, and DCJPY's tokenized deposit network now onboarding Japan Post Bank's 120 million account holders.

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: : [Comment] NYSE/Securitize & Nasdaq/Kraken: Same Vision, Different Playbooks?
Written by 100y

Two days ago, news dropped that the NYSE signed an MOU with Securitize around tokenized securities.

Since it’s only an MOU, the details are still pretty limited. But from what I can see, this move points in a very different direction compared to the recent tokenized equities collaboration between Nasdaq and Kraken.

That difference is worth unpacking.

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: : [Comment] Constellation: Dismantling the Leader Monopoly
Written by C4lvin

Yesterday, Anza, the core client developer behind Solana, unveiled Constellation. The one-line summary is "multiple proposers submit transactions simultaneously to ensure fairness," but the scope of what that single line touches spans block production architecture, fee economics, censorship resistance mechanisms, and the MEV market structure as a whole.

Here is a detailed look at what changes, based on the whitepaper and the published spec.

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: : Web3 Business Playbook: Mastercard
Written by Eren

- In March 2026, Mastercard acquired stablecoin infrastructure company BVNK for up to $1.8B. This is the largest stablecoin infrastructure M&A deal to date, surpassing Stripe's $1.1B acquisition of Bridge.

- In 2025, stablecoin transfer volume reached $33T, roughly twice Visa's annual processing volume ($16.7T). While most of this is still trading settlement, cross-border remittances and B2B payments are expanding at a CAGR of 72%. Traditional card networks find their rationale for entering crypto in the need to absorb this payment flow.

- Mastercard's crypto business is unfolding across three axes that cover the full spectrum of payment flows. First, it leverages its existing network of 150M merchant locations as a touchpoint for stablecoin payments through crypto wallet-linked cards. Second, it is building tokenized deposit settlement infrastructure for banks and institutions through its proprietary permissioned blockchain, Multi-Token Network (MTN). Third, through the BVNK acquisition, it secures public blockchain-based commercial payment infrastructure (stablecoin-to-fiat conversion, cross-border payouts, enterprise wallets).

- The BVNK acquisition cannot be explained by technology alone. This deal brought in a license network spanning 130 countries, fiat banking partnerships, and an already-validated enterprise client base (Worldpay, Deel, Flywire, etc.) all at once. It shows that in the stablecoin infrastructure market, the moat is formed not only by the technology stack but also by the bundle of country-specific licenses and compliance.

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: : [Comment] Walrus MemWal: Putting AI Agent Memory on Decentralized Storage
Written by C4lvin

Agent memory has recently surfaced as a critical infrastructure concern. For an agent to move beyond one-off prompt responses and become a persistently operating system, it needs to retain conversation history, learned skills, reasoning traces, and workflow outputs across sessions.

The way most developers address this today is by cobbling together existing infrastructure. Session state goes into Redis, files into S3, embeddings into a vector database. Each piece works in isolation, but none was designed to treat agent memory as a system primitive. The result is memory scattered across multiple systems, difficult to verify, and hard to keep consistent over time.

Dedicated solutions that put this problem front and center already exist. Mem0 has raised $24M, was selected as the official memory provider for the AWS Agent SDK, and offers a dual-storage architecture combining vector embeddings with a graph database. Letta (formerly MemGPT) takes an OS-metaphor approach where the LLM itself manages memory. Other competitors include LangMem, Zep, MemMachine, and more.

But these solutions share a common premise: the memory data ultimately lives on centralized infrastructure (AWS, GCP, self-hosted servers). In scenarios where agents make autonomous decisions and move real assets, having to trust a third party for the provenance and integrity of that memory can become a structural limitation.

MemWal starts from this observation and designs a structure where agent memory is stored on Walrus's decentralized storage while ownership and access control are managed on-chain through Sui.

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: : Four Pillars will participate as an operating partner of Ethereum Korea, a “practical consortium” joined by leading builders and companies in Korea.

Ethereum, throughout its long history, has set numerous precedents within the industry and remains the largest blockchain ecosystem that most closely aligns with the core ideals of decentralization. However, due to the inherently decentralized nature of its community, it has historically been challenging to mobilize coordinated, initiative-driven efforts. This has been particularly evident in Korea, where meaningful Ethereum-led initiatives have been relatively absent in recent years.

In response to this gap, Four Pillars has joined forces with leading teams such as Nonce Classic, DSRV, Radius, Undefined Labs, and Krypto Planet—organizations that not only represent Korea but also exert meaningful influence globally. Together, we are launching Ethereum Korea as a “practical consortium” that goes beyond a nominal alliance to drive real, coordinated action.

As a research-driven organization with a broad and engaged readership, Four Pillars will focus on identifying and analyzing meaningful developments within the Ethereum ecosystem. At a time when institutional capital is increasingly entering the blockchain space, we aim to provide in-depth insights into Ethereum’s differentiated strengths and structural advantages, and actively share these perspectives with the broader market.

We look forward to your continued interest and support for both Ethereum Korea and Four Pillars.

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: : [Issue] SDEV Bought $76M of SKY. Here's How I'd Underwrite It
Written by Ponyo

- SDEV’s $134M capital raise decomposes to $76M in external capital, 943.6M SKY from the Foundation, and roughly 30% of typical governance polling turnout.

- Sky runs a $12.57B lending business that flipped positive. Annualizing the two-month run rate gives ~$166M in earnings (~10x P/E), normalizing over six months gives ~$110M (~15x P/E).

- Governance cut the buyback by 87.5%, emissions by 16.2%, and SSR by 25bp in three weeks. The same actions that narrowed the pipe to tokenholders accelerated surplus accumulation by ~$96M per year.

- The math for SKY stakers and non-stakers diverges.

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