Stable coins are eating the world. In today's news alone, we have Tether proposing a massive merger that would shake up the Bitcoin Treasury space. We also have Tether freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of assets for the United States Treasury of Iranian assets. And of course, Meta making a move into the stable coin space. That's not even all the stories we're discussing. Stick around now and I'll tell you about everything. Let's go.

What is up everybody? Welcome to the Daily Wolf. I am your host, Scott Melker, also known as The Wolf of All Streets, and we're going to spend the next 15 minutes together digging through all of the news to find the signal in the noise. Now, we have a lot of signal and as I said, a lot of it surrounding stable coins and stable coin companies. We can dig right into it because I think that this is absolutely a huge story, and there's potentially a lot of signal here. The story, as you can see it right here, Jack Mallers 21 Capital surges after majority holder Tether proposes three-way merger.

Who doesn't love a good proposition of a three-way merger? I remember when you didn't even propose those publicly.

But either way, we have Tether who is the majority holder in 21, which is a Bitcoin Treasury company proposing a merger that would bring together Treasury, mining, payments and lending. A merger between 21, Strike, the Bitcoin payments and financial services company and Electron, which is the Bitcoin miner that controls about 5% of the hash rate of the global Bitcoin Network.

So, 21 started as a Bitcoin Treasury company and we all know I've been extremely skeptical of those from the very beginning, was basically proven right. You can look at the chart of any Bitcoin company right up one side, right down the other. We call that the Burj Khalifa chart in the crypto world. So, most of them are trading 98, 99% off of their highs. It was absolutely a hype cycle and that bubble burst. What these companies largely did was they bought Bitcoin at the top and hoped for the best.

That to me is not a strategy and it's very hard to beat Bitcoin by financially engineering around Bitcoin. Well, 21 was one of the most notable because obviously Jack Mallers was the CEO of Strike. You had Tether participating. Tether holds 140,000 Bitcoin and 21 holds 43,514 Bitcoin. There's a lot of Bitcoin between all of them. And of course, SoftBank and Canter Fitzgerald also participated in that. So you had basically an all-star lineup of people for this Treasury company.

My criticism of Bitcoin Treasury companies was strong, but my point was always that you had to build a real business around them and that it made a lot of sense for a cash flowing business to have a Bitcoin treasury, not just to be a Bitcoin Treasury company. Just like I believe that you should probably have 5 to 10 if not more percent of your assets in Bitcoin, a company that has cash flow should take that money and put a percentage of it into Bitcoin to protect the value of their treasury because cash is trash.

We all know that. But that's not what these companies did. But in this case, we have a situation where as I said, they're going to basically create the full suite of financial services plus mining with a single Bitcoin company with the end in mind obviously to compete with Michael Sailor and strategy. So, I think the optimistic view, which is the one I generally take, is that they've realized that the Treasury model alone is broken. Tether has the controlling interest to vote on this and they figured if they can merge all these together, they can build a robust Bitcoin buying machine with actual cash flow from successful businesses and mining.

Of course, Bitcoin miners mine Bitcoin, they can put that right on the balance sheet instead of selling. The more cynical view is that in the in the Bitcoin space, in the Bitcoin Treasury space, specifically, we've already seen criticism of companies doing similar things. Now, I don't necessarily share in that criticism. This is just reporting on the facts. We had Nakamoto, which is David Bailey's Bitcoin Treasury company, effectively purchasing or merging with his other businesses, the Bitcoin conference and his hedge fund and consuming them. A lot of people thought that that was in self-interest.

We had Procap, which is Anthony Pompliano's Bitcoin Treasury company, effectively buying or merging with his AI company, CFO Sylvia. So a lot of people viewing those as self-interest. You can take once again an optimistic view and say that those companies maybe have cash flow and they add to the ability to add Bitcoin to the balance sheet. I don't really have a strong view on either of those. But I do know that right now, everybody's going to have to take notice of what Jack Mallers and and Tether are doing here because nobody's going to be able to exist as simply a Bitcoin Treasury company.

Now you have to wonder also what happens to the Bitcoin Treasury space? Like I said, these companies are down 80, 90, 99% from their all-time highs. But interestingly, most of them are trading at a massive discount to the net asset value of the Bitcoin on their balance sheet. You'd have to imagine that for a strategy or a 21 or even someone who just comes in and raises capital, that's a huge opportunity to buy Bitcoin at a massive discount. So, maybe at some point we will see that kind of activity in the market. For now, it makes me scratch my head that we haven't. Maybe it's coming.

But for sure, right now, 21 and Tether becoming a major player once again in the Bitcoin Treasury market. Now, the next story we have is also about Tether, but in a very different light. Here it is right here. We have the Freezer-in-chief, Scott Bessent says US seized nearly 500 million in Iranian crypto as Operation Economic Fury sends regime into crisis. I thought Operation Economic Fury was just when I get my credit card bill.

But either way, this is a very interesting story because many people view crypto assets as decentralized and that they should not be frozen, there should be no outside tampering. That is not the case for stable coins at all. Tether, USDC Circle, they have long said that they will participate with law enforcement and will respond to requests to freeze assets and that's exactly what's happening here. And this is a very big number. Now, of course, Operation Economic Fury is not just about crypto or stable coins.

This is about freezing bank accounts, uh freezing all kinds of sanctioned assets all around the world, but this is a huge chunk. Now, we saw last week it's about 350 million in Tether was frozen. But last night on Kudlow, Bessent said it was 500 million in Iranian crypto. I can't say that that's all stable coins because they were non-specific. But very clear that for criminals, using a transparent public ledger to evade sanctions and steal things is a really bad idea.

This once again dispels the narrative that crypto is just for criminals because it's actually really easy to freeze these assets if they're fast enough. And that's exactly what Tether did here. Basically the enforcement arm of financial weaponry for the United States government. I've long talked about how stable coins are basically a tool for hyper dollarization. You send stable coins all around the world. Every time a stable coin is issued, a United States Treasury is bought and nobody else is really interested in buying United States Treasuries.

I think Tether themselves are about the 11th largest holder of United States Treasuries in the entire world. An absolutely astounding number. But if you want people all over the world to use the dollar instead of their local currency, the stable coin is the way that they do it. Someone in Venezuela with a hyper inflating currency can send his friend 10 bucks in USDT, they don't suffer from inflation, they hold their value in dollars. I wish they would do it in Bitcoin, but they're holding it in dollars, which makes sense.

And that's the way that stable coins are taking over the world. And by proxy, the United States dollar is taking over the world. Now, here's an astounding stat I can show you about stable coins and this is just to the end of 2025. Volume, stable coin transactions versus visa payments. That green bar is stable coins, that black bar is visa. Visa is growing, but stable coins are going absolutely parabolic here. And when you add 2026, that chart is almost comical. We've had almost as many stable coin transactions already in 2026 as we did in 2025.

And when you add in AI agents transacting with stable coins back and forth, the numbers are even more astounding. I believe we saw that over 50%, some reports saying as high as 70% now of stable coin transactions already via agents. Now I don't judge what any agent's doing with his money if he's at the club making it rain, but stable coins are the currency of agentic trading and there will be trillions of dollars transacted by AI agents in the future.

So what we have here is not only stable coins being a financial weapon that can be frozen to basically punish a government and uh you know, beat them into submission. I mean think of this like medieval times. You could either attack the castle and risk your men or you can just surround the castle and wait for them to starve. That's what the United States is doing to Iran right now with these economic sanctions. Crypto playing a huge part of that. That's not even the only stable coin stories of the day. We have a huge one right here.

Meta platforms pays some creators in stable coins. Now, I'm going to tell you what this really is. It's a big headline and it will be meaningful because it will continue. But right now, this is creator payments launched only in Colombia and the Philippines. So this is a very small pilot. Interestingly, they chose to do this on Polygon and once again Solana. I told you the story about Western Union, the Pony Express guys trying to adapt adopt stable coins to not lose their entire business.

Well, they did that on Solana as well and we're really seeing a battle between chains for where stable coin adoption will happen. But it's a bigger story here with meta. First of all, YouTube did this with the Ethereum-based PayPal stable coin, PYUSD in December. Now, I will never understand how you call something PYUSD. If it was my show in the morning, I would spell it out and say it for you, but I encourage you to do that at home and wonder what it sounds like. That's what PayPal decided to name their token, PYUSD.

Well, now meta being forced to do the same. On YouTube, if you are a creator, you can get paid in almost real time in stable coins, in dollars instead of your local currency. It's so much easier than having to give them your banking information and for them to wire you money. It's it's just clunky. That's an antiquated system that nobody should be using. Meta's getting on board here. This will extend beyond the Philippines and Colombia inevitably and you may remember that there's a long storied history of Meta with stable coins.

They four years ago, I believe, tried to launch Libra, which was basically a private stable coin owned by meta. It was rebranded to DM. They had everyone on board but Congress and the government said, absolutely not, we're not allowing meta to print money. So, with the recent Genius Act, and this is credit to Austin Campbell on my show this morning, they basically said just like JP Morgan can't be a social media company, a social media company can't pretend to be JP Morgan. So in this case, companies like Google and Meta are not allowed to mint their own coins.

But what they can do in this case is use USDC, adopt other stable coins and use them for payments. That's what's happening here. This really wraps the bow on a very long arduous history of meta with stable coins and once once again, I think that this will grow massively. You've seen the adoption of stable coin, I've shown you the charts. That's what's coming. Now, we're going to pivot off of stable coins here for one more story. This is a fun one because uh it's an update to what we've been talking about with the Trump family, World Liberty Financial.

Here's the headline. Trump-backed World Liberty Financial races toward 62 billion token unlock with near unanimous vote. What a headline. Everybody's in agreement. Incredible. Proposal introduces vesting for 40.7 billion insider tokens after two-year cliff, even as voting power remains concentrated among a handful of large holders. Now, let's put some numbers on that just so we understand. So the top wallet of World Liberty Financial controls 13% of the voting power. The top four wallets combined uh control 40%.

Now, I actually went ahead and got a uh image of the four top wallet holders. You know those guys? The Trumps, right? No, it's not. Yeah. You get the idea. If you put together the top 10 or 20 wallets, who basically have all of it. So when you look at this number, what did they say, 99.9% or something absurd. 99.95. Sorry, I exaggerated to the downside. 99.95% of voters have voted in favor.

Now, let's talk about the background to this story because you may remember one Justin Sun is suing World Liberty Financial because they froze all of his tokens. He had a $75 million investment, they froze his tokens. So not only is he not getting his tokens, but he also doesn't get to vote on this proposal which he said is the most absurd that he's ever seen. So now if you actually dig into the proposal and why you'll understand my uh my reference to those four guys I showed before,

You vote yes and you get your tokens two-year cliff, so you wait two years for them to start vesting then over a two or three year period after that. So after four or five years depending on what kind of holder you are. If you vote no, your tokens remain locked forever and you get no tokens. I'm not making that up. That's what you're voting on here. So if you're wondering why I would bring up the good fellas and talk about mafia tactics from, I can't say from the Trumps themselves, but from their endorsed project, World Liberty Financial.

That's what's happening and that's what's under the hood here. That is not a vote. That is forced consent. That is coercion. That is Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes. That's what we're talking about here. But the Trumps are still headlining every single crypto conference just in case you want to go hear their thoughts. That's coming soon. So listen, we have a story here of crypto taking over the world and the leader being stable coins.

Now, yes, there's some irony to the fact that Bitcoin was created as a hedge against fiat and printing money and dollars and the killer use case of the technology has been digital dollars that make that process easier and faster. But regardless of your feelings on that, stable coins are a better, cheaper, faster way to transact and they spread dollar dominance all over the world. Scott Bessent knows that. He's using stable coins as a weapon against Iran.

And on the other side, every major platform is getting in line and adopting stable coin technology because it's a better way to do payments. Man, the Trumps, I don't even know what to say. But that is all we got for you today on this daily Wolf. I will see you tomorrow. Peace.