ZM Guys🌤️
How powerful, but I don't want to take my eyes off it; the 10-cent journey continues for ethereum:0xb2617246d0c6c0087f18703d576831899ca94f01 🚀🎯
So, arriving at the end of a week, some thoughts on MiCA….
I think we can firmly put one idea to bed: MiCA was never "just a paperwork exercise." Even Binance, the biggest exchange on earth, with more lawyers and compliance staff than most regulators, wasn't able to complete the licensing process in time. If an organisation operating at that scale couldn’t simply "comply and move on", we can probably retire the fairytale that everyone else should have found it easy.
The truth is thousands of firms were operating before this deadline, but only a handful made it through. Germany, France, and the Netherlands hold most of the approvals, entire countries have none. And it’s not a coincidence, and it’s not incompetence on the industry’s part either, though I’m sure we’ll hear that said. This is just what happens when a regulator asks every company to prove it can survive years of legal spend before it's allowed to keep existing. The firms that cleared MiCA aren’t building anything better; some might be, but most probably aren't. They’re the ones that could afford to pay lawyers for longer. That’s all.
Nobody running a project wants to say that part out loud, because it sounds like sour grapes from whoever didn't make the cut. But I'm not in that position, and I'll say it anyway: MiCA is going to protect users, and it's also going to hollow out the middle of this industry, the teams with real products and no war chest. What we are watching is protection and consolidation happening at the same time, and pretending otherwise is just being polite about it.
I am not saying this from the outside. We spent the better part of the last year treating this exact outcome as the baseline case for @ZIGChain, not the worst case.
We assumed early that a fractured, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction version of crypto was coming regardless of how the headlines framed it. That assumption is now just how the market works, and the projects still operating like it's optional are the ones about to find out the hard way. 🙏
Congratulations to Valdora's new CEO @WaseemMSalim ! He is a true alpha and an important part of the ecosystem. @Valdora_finance is a vital part of a sustainable economy.
Liquid staking was step one.
Now @Valdora_finance is building toward Liquid Everything. Stablecoins flow into curated vaults, positions stay composable, and all the while, the whole thing keeps earning. That's the direction capital infrastructure is heading.
@WaseemMSalim is joining as CEO to lead that next phase. This is exactly where we're headed too.
Welcome aboard
@ZIGChain@Valdora_finance@WaseemMSalim Every major blockchain started with small milestones that later became huge achievements. 50M TVL is another important step forward for ZIGChain.
Competition in stablecoins is not bad for the industry. It is probably the clearest sign that the category has fully arrived.
When a market becomes important enough, more serious players enter. We have seen this across cards, payments, cloud, exchanges and most major internet utilities. The first phase is category creation. The second phase is institutional validation. The third phase is competition around distribution, economics and user experience.
But stablecoins are not just yield sharing products or consortium logos. They are network businesses.
The real moat is liquidity, integrations, banking rails, regulation, developer infrastructure, redemption depth, institutional trust and the number of places where that stablecoin can actually move with confidence.
This is where Circle and USDC deserve real credit.
USDC is not just a digital dollar. It is an ecosystem built over years, with deep liquidity, global integrations, regulated access and institutional trust. That kind of network is not easy to replicate quickly.
The idea of sharing more economics sounds attractive, and in some structures it will make sense. But infrastructure also needs a strong economic engine behind it. Someone has to keep investing in compliance, banking, liquidity, interoperability, treasury operations and global expansion.
That is why I think Jeremy’s point matters. Stablecoins are platform businesses, liquidity creates more liquidity, integrations create more integrations& trust creates more trust.
OUSD can be good for the category, but USDC helped create the category.
And in platform markets, category creators with real network effects should never be underestimated.