Why Morgan Stanley, Walmart, Rumble & Silicon Valley Are Betting BIG on Bitcoin
Timestamps:
00:30 - Morgan Stanley's Bitcoin ETF Filing
12:30 - Rumble and Tether's Crypto Wallet Launch
18:07 - Walmart's One Pay Bitcoin Integration
29:49 - Early Riders Team Updates
31:58 - The White Paper: A Manifesto For All Future Capital Allocation
34:26 - Building Bridges: Traditional Finance Meets Bitcoin
36:47 - The Bitcoin Standard: A New Era of Capital Formation
38:46 - Debasement and the Search for Sound Money
43:30 - The Future of Venture Capital: Aligning Incentives
47:03 - AI and the New Age of Entrepreneurship
55:24 - Onramp for Everyone: Expanding Access to Bitcoin
Wall Street’s digital asset pivot is moving from allowing access to owning the economics. The issuer race is now in full swing after Morgan Stanley filed for a branded spot Bitcoin ETF, while existing wallet and tokenization plans show the game is changing in real time. At the same time, Tether and Rumble are fighting for users while Walmart’s OnePay continues its explosive growth as it reaches a nearly $4B valuation. Additionally, the Early Riders team announced their New Early Riders’ Whitepaper and also welcomed Nick to the team, who previously worked at Citi in investment banking.
Morgan Stanley Turns Issuer
Morgan Stanley’s Bitcoin ETF filing is expected to bring clients from IBIT to their own product stack, allowing Morgan Stanley to fight for additional fees and help them create a moat to prevent clients from leaving their existing product suite.
Morgan Stanley’s spot BTC ETF would become only the third ETF ever to carry the Morgan Stanley brand name.
The filing represents a direct response to the success BlackRock has had with IBIT to-date as it remains BlackRock’s most profitable product.
Morgan Stanley are looking to pair ETF issuance with a broader digital-asset roadmap across E-Trade, wallets, and tokenization.
New Wallets Fight For Users
Rumble and Tether’s new wallets show the distribution land-grab, but it’s still unclear whether these new consumer wallets will last beyond niche use cases.
Tether continues to focus on their barbell strategy of dominating emerging-market dollarization while also experimenting with consumer distribution.
Rumble integrates stablecoins and Bitcoin, while Tether’s tokenized gold pushes beyond payments and into a lightweight savings and treasury experience within a media app.
A key use case for Rumble is the opportunity for creator monetization through donations, tips, and payouts, where stablecoins can remove bank friction and provide global access without the need for traditional rails.
Walmart’s OnePay is Scaling Rails
OnePay’s growth and valuation furthers the acquisition thesis that the largest institutions are acquiring and partnering with the entrepreneurs and businesses bridging the gap between digital assets and traditional finance.
OnePay’s rapid rise to #14 in Finance on the “App Store” emphasizes how quickly a new product backed by a large institution with a network like Walmart, can rival legacy institutions such as Stripe and PayPal.
OnePay’s digital-asset rails lower the cost to offer banking-like services to underserved cohorts.
Legacy payment firms that rely on slow settlement and embedded fees, will have to adapt or lose to businesses like OnePay who can settle stablecoin transfers in minutes and for pennies on the dollar.
New Market Expansion Requires Patient Experience
The Goldman Sachs and Apple Card partnership became a template for what could go wrong in digital asset lending if existing incumbents move too quickly and without the appropriate expertise.
Goldman Sachs’ partnership with Apple highlighted how distribution can be expensive and losses can compound if the “growth at all costs” framework is front and center.
Bitcoin-backed lending will fail instantly if lenders can’t manage 24/7 volatility, weekend liquidity events, and a no-bailout reality.
Legacy institutions like Goldman Sachs often can’t attract the top talent and personnel in the digital asset space, which is why partnerships and acquisitions are becoming the path of least resistance.
The New Early Riders’ Whitepaper
Capital allocation has been distorted for decades by cheap money, negative real yields, and an unreliable unit of account. When capital steadily loses purchasing power, investors and operators are pushed toward poor capital allocation, leverage over durability, and financial engineering over real value creation.
Quote of the Week
“There's a race inside Wall Street to develop best in class solutions across the digital spectrum, not just for other institutional investors.” — Michael Tanguma
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