Welcome to our institutional newsletter, Crypto Long & Short. This week:
- Sylvia To on AI agents choosing denationalized money
- Top headlines that institutions should pay attention to by Francisco Rodrigues
- Kamino Reaches $90M In OnRe Liquidity While $KMNO Falls 16% On Weekly Chart
Thanks for joining us!
-Alexandra Levis
Expert Perspectives
Hayek predicted it, Satoshi built it, agents will use it: the stealthy denationalization of money
– By silvia avice president of Bullish Capital Management
While FA Hayek, Satoshi, and AI may seem like three unrelated topics, the next few minutes will reveal exactly how critical this triad is to our financial sovereignty and will fundamentally change your view on money as we know it.
The cypherpunk spirit of Crypto
Amid flashy distractions of memecoins, speculation, and NFTs, Satoshi would want us to remember the true spirit of cryptocurrencies, namely: privacy, decentralization and censorship resistance. These ideologies did not come from central banks or policy makers. They come from the cypherpunk definition that the best way to defend freedom is not through persuasion but through architecture.
As Vitalik Buterin recently expressed in his March 2026 thread on
Money should be a product, not a decree.
In 1976, Hayek argued that money should not be “legal tender” imposed by the state on people. It must be discovered, adopted and discarded through market choice like any other product. your book Denationalization of money He described these characteristics of “good money”:
• Non-state emissions: not decreed, not voted, not redeemable.
• Rules-based monetary policy: predictable, non-discretionary supply schedule.
• Global choice: adoption is voluntary; Anyone can choose to participate or not.
• Resistance to capture: there is no central issuer to pressure, nor a board of directors to replace.
• Permissionless settlement: Transfer of value does not require institutional approval.
Sound familiar? Yes, Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is in a special category within that experiment. Not because it is perfect today, but because it is plausibly the first monetary network that meets Hayek’s central requirement. This is money introduced through some means that cannot be easily stopped. As Bitcoin discovers its prices, its volatility is the cost of birth and the market decides how much an ungoverned and credibly scarce asset is worth in a fiat-trained world. But even in that turbulent phase, Bitcoin meets a surprising number of Hayek’s requirements.
The Trojan horse: stablecoins and the trap they contain
If we’re honest, stablecoins are currently one of the most successful use cases for cryptocurrencies. They are fast, programmable and easy to set the price. They cross borders with much less friction than bank transfers.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: stablecoins don’t denationalize money. They digitize existing national money and expand its reach. Most stablecoins do not compete with the dollar. They import the dollar.
The dollar is a tool of state policy. Linking it ties you to its inflation, its surveillance, its sanctions regime, its banking bottlenecks and its regulatory priorities. Stablecoins may seem like freedom because they move on open networks, but their reference asset is still the same old sovereign instrument.
So while stablecoins can be useful, they also risk becoming the perfect bridge to tighter control. In that sense, stablecoins are not neutral. They are a competitor to decentralized currencies. If bitcoin is a denationalization, stablecoins are a nationalization with a better user interface.
The real end user
This is where the story becomes more interesting and more Hayekian.
Human beings are emotional, irrational, politically driven and short-term oriented. Our monetary systems reflect that. We routinely trade long-term stability for short-term relief and then act surprised when crises worsen.
But what happens when the majority of participants in the economy are not human?
With the meteoric rise of agent software and the increasing design of agent applications using frameworks like Model Context Protocol (MCP), there is a credible near-term future in which autonomous agents purchase services, data, compute, API calls, storage, inference, and specialized tools through ongoing micropayments.
Agents will care less about branding and narratives and more about properties like:
• machine-readable transaction metadata
• instant and programmable purpose
• composability with other systems
• low transaction overheads
• censorship resistance (because uptime is a feature)
• predictable monetary rules (because models optimize against them)
In other words: agents will gravitate toward money that behaves like good infrastructure. A stablecoin is stable because an issuer maintains a peg. An agent might ask: What is the issuer’s failure mode? What is the policy risk? What is the risk of censorship? What is the risk of liquidation under stress? Bitcoin’s value may fluctuate, but its rule set is unusually readable. Its issue is not negotiated. Its fundamental properties do not depend on the decision of a board of directors, the discretion of a regulator or the solvency of a nation.
Perhaps we humans don’t choose the best money because we are too entangled in politics, custom, and fear.
Perhaps Hayek’s “new money” was never intended for humans, at least not at the beginning.
Perhaps the path that governments “cannot stop” is not a mass political movement.
Perhaps it is AI agents operating at machine speed, indifferent to national identity, optimizing reliability, who can decide the new monetary rails.
When that tipping point comes, the denationalization of money will not feel like a philosophical triumph. It will be an inevitable result of engineering, driven not by ideology, but by pure machine necessity.
When that tipping point comes, the denationalization of money will not feel like a philosophical triumph. It will be an inevitable result of engineering, driven not by ideology, but by pure machine necessity.
Headlines of the week
– By francisco rodrigues
Traditional financial giants including NYSE owner ICE and Morgan Stanley have continued to make strategic moves in the crypto space, while regulatory milestones like Kraken granting access to the Fed point the industry’s path toward widespread integration.
- NYSE Owner Invests in Crypto Exchange OKX at $25 Billion Valuation: Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, acquired a minority stake in cryptocurrency exchange OKX, valuing the company at $25 billion. ICE will license OKX cryptocurrency spot prices to launch cryptocurrency futures, while OKX will offer ICE futures and tokenized stocks to its clients.
- Morgan Stanley names Coinbase and BNY as custodians in proposed bitcoin ETF filing: The Wall Street giant updated its S-1 filing for a proposed bitcoin spot ETF, naming BNY as a cash manager and custodian and Coinbase Custody as a cryptocurrency custodian.
- Kraken becomes the first cryptocurrency company to secure access to the Federal Reserve’s master account: The approval allows Kraken to accelerate deposits and withdrawals for large traders and institutional clients, but is limited, as Kraken does not earn interest on reserves or access emergency loans from the Federal Reserve.
- Kazakhstan’s central bank will invest $350 million in gold and currency reserves in digital assets: the strategy will focus on shares of high-tech infrastructure companies and cryptocurrencies, as well as crypto-linked index funds.
- Billions in cryptocurrencies are moving in Iran. Analysts can’t agree whether this is wartime panic or business as usual: When airstrikes hit Iran on February 28, Nobitex cryptocurrency outflows surged 873%, suggesting a “digital bank run” was underway. The reality may be more complex.
Chart of the week
Kamino Reaches $90M In OnRe Liquidity While $KMNO Falls 16%
Kamino’s OnRe marketplace has surged 80% to nearly $90 million in 30 days, cementing its position as the primary liquidity layer for OnRe’s on-chain reinsurance protocol. This growth allows users to stake a real-world vertical of over $480 billion using $ONyc, a tokenized insurance asset, as collateral.
However, this fundamental scale of the RWA differs markedly from the native $KMNO token; The KMNO/SOL pair has fallen 16% in six months, pressured by a broader market slowdown and the unlocking of 13 million monthly tokens (0.13% of total supply).
Hear. Read. Look. Engage.
Looking for more? Get the latest cryptocurrency news from PakGazette.com and explore our robust data and index offerings by visiting PakGazette.com/institutions.
Note: The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CoinDesk, Inc., CoinDesk Indices or their owners and affiliates.
