Welcome to our institutional newsletter, Crypto Long Short. This week:
- Sylvia To talks about artificial intelligence agents choosing non-nationalized currencies
- Headlines Institutions Should Watch By Francisco Rodrigues
- Kamino’s OnRe Liquidity Hits $90M While $KMNO Drops 16% on This Week’s Charts
Thank you for joining us!
-Alexandra Levis
Expert Insights
Hayek predicted it, Satoshi built it, and agents will use it: the stealth denationalization of money
– go through Du AijiaVice President of Niuli Capital Management Company
While Hayek, Satoshi Nakamoto, and artificial intelligence may seem like three unrelated topics, the next few minutes will reveal just how important this triad is to our financial sovereignty, and it will fundamentally change the way you think about money.
Crypto’s cypherpunk spirit
Amid the glitz of memecoins, speculation, and NFTs, Satoshi Nakamoto wants us to remember the true spirit of cryptocurrency, which is: Privacy, decentralization and censorship resistance. These ideologies do not come from central banks or policymakers. They come from the cypherpunk definition that the best way to defend freedom is not persuasion but architecture.
As Vitalik Buterin recently laid out in a March 2026
Money should be a product, not a fiat
In 1976, Hayek believed that currency should not become “legal tender” imposed on people by the state. It should be discovered, adopted and discarded through market selection like any other product. his book denationalization of currency These characteristics of “good money” are outlined:
• Non-state issue: Not enacted, not voted on, not bailable.
• Rules-based monetary policy: predictable supply planning rather than arbitrary decisions.
• Global choice: Adoption is voluntary; anyone can opt in or out.
• Resistance to takeovers: There is no central issuer under pressure and no board of directors to replace.
• Unauthorized Settlement: Transfer of value does not require agency approval.
Sound familiar? Yes, Bitcoin.
Bitcoin falls into a special category within this experiment. Not because it is perfect today, but because it appears to be the first monetary network that meets Hayek’s core requirements. This is money being brought in through some means that cannot be easily stopped. When Bitcoin undergoes price discovery, its volatility is the cost of its creation, and the market determines the value of an unregulated, trusted, scarce asset in a fiat-trained world. But even at that turbulent stage, Bitcoin conformed to Hayek in a surprising amount.
Trojan Horse: Stablecoins and their inner traps
To be honest, stablecoins are currently one of the most successful use cases for cryptocurrencies. They are fast, programmable and easy to price. The resistance to their cross-border movement is far less than that of bank wire transfers.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Stablecoins will not denationalize currencies. They digitize existing national currencies and expand their scope. Most stablecoins do not compete with the U.S. dollar. They import dollars.
The dollar is a tool of national policy. Pegging it ties you to its inflation, its surveillance, its sanctions regime, its banking bottlenecks and its regulatory priorities. Stablecoins may feel like freedom because they move on open networks, but their reference assets are still the same old sovereign instruments.
So while stablecoins are useful, they also have the potential to be the perfect bridge for greater control. In this sense, stablecoins are not neutral. They are competitors to decentralized currencies. If Bitcoin is denationalization, then stablecoins are nationalization with a better user interface.
real end user
This is where the story gets more interesting and more Hayekian.
Humans are emotional, irrational, politically driven, and short-term oriented. Our monetary system reflects this. We often trade long-term stability for short-term relief, then act surprised when crises intensify.
But what happens when most of the participants in the economy are not human?
With the rapid rise of agent software, and more and more applications designed for agents using frameworks such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP), in the near future autonomous agents will purchase services, data, computation, API calls, storage, inference, and specialized tools through ongoing micropayments.
Agents will care less about brand and narrative and more about properties that:
• Machine-readable transaction metadata
• Instant, programmable finality
• Composability with other systems
• Low transaction overhead
• Censorship resistance (since uptime is a feature)
• Predictable currency rules (because the model is optimized for these rules)
In other words: Agents will gravitate toward funding like good infrastructure. Stablecoins are stable because the issuer maintains the peg. Agents might ask: What are the issuer’s failure modes? What are the policy risks? What are the censorship risks? What are the settlement risks under stress? Bitcoin’s value may fluctuate, but its rules are incredibly clear. It is issued without consultation. Its core properties do not depend on board decisions, regulator discretion or the solvency of the state.
Maybe humans don’t choose the best currency because we’re too wrapped up in politics, habits, and fears.
Perhaps Hayek’s “new money” was never meant to serve humanity—at least not in the first place.
Maybe the government’s “unstoppable” path isn’t a mass political movement.
Perhaps AI agents running at machine speed, indifferent to national identities, and optimized for reliability, could become the decision makers of new monetary trajectories.
When that tipping point comes, currency denationalization won’t feel like a philosophical victory. It would be an inevitable engineering achievement, driven not by ideology but by the necessity of primitive machinery.
When that tipping point comes, currency denationalization won’t feel like a philosophical victory. It would be an inevitable engineering achievement, driven not by ideology but by the necessity of primitive machinery.
This week’s top stories
– go through Francisco Rodriguez
Traditional financial giants including the New York Stock Exchange, Intercontinental Exchange and Morgan Stanley have been making strategic moves in the cryptocurrency space, while regulatory milestones such as Kraken gaining access to the Federal Reserve mark the industry’s path toward mainstream integration.
- NYSE owner invests in cryptocurrency exchange OKX at $25 billion valuation: New York Stock Exchange parent company Intercontinental Exchange has acquired a minority stake in cryptocurrency exchange OKX, valuing the company at $25 billion. ICE will license OKX’s spot cryptocurrency prices to launch cryptocurrency futures, and OKX will offer ICE futures and tokenized shares to its customers.
- Morgan Stanley names Coinbase and BNY as custodians in proposed Bitcoin ETF filing: The Wall Street giant updated the S-1 filing for its proposed spot Bitcoin ETF, naming BNY as the administrator and cash custodian and Coinbase Custody as the cryptocurrency custodian.
- Kraken Becomes First Cryptocurrency Company to Gain Access to Fed Master Account: This approval allows Kraken to speed up deposits and withdrawals for large traders and institutional clients, but the effect is limited because Kraken cannot earn interest on reserves or obtain emergency loans from the Federal Reserve.
- Kazakhstan’s central bank invests $350 million worth of gold and foreign exchange reserves in digital assets: The strategy will focus on stocks of high-tech and cryptocurrency infrastructure companies, as well as index funds linked to cryptocurrencies.
- Billions of cryptocurrencies are flowing in Iran. Analysts can’t agree whether this was a wartime panic or business as usual: When Iran was hit by air strikes on February 28, Nobitex’s cryptocurrency outflows surged 873%, indicating that a “digital bank run” was underway. The reality may be more complex.
Chart of the week
Kamino’s OnRe Liquidity Hits $90M While $KMNO Falls 16%
Kamino’s OnRe market grew by 80% in 30 days to nearly $90 million, solidifying its position as the primary liquidity layer for the OnRe on-chain reinsurance protocol. This growth allows users to stake $480B+ in real-world verticals using $ONyc, a tokenized insurance asset, as collateral.
However, this basic RWA extension is very different from the native $KMNO token; the KMNO/SOL pair is down 16% in six months, pressured by the broader market downturn and the monthly unlocking of 13 million tokens (0.13% of total supply).
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Note: The views expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of CoinDesk, Inc., CoinDesk Indices, or its owners and affiliates.