---
title: 'Why Wall Street just embraced blockchain'
source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=LJ77CFHr9O0'
video_id: 'LJ77CFHr9O0'
date: 2026-08-01
duration_sec: 893
---

# Why Wall Street just embraced blockchain

> Source: [Why Wall Street just embraced blockchain](https://youtube.com/watch?v=LJ77CFHr9O0)

## Summary

In this episode of Daily Wolf, host Scott Melker breaks down the most impactful overnight stories in crypto: Wall Street's DTCC running its first real tokenization test, Tether freezing Iran Central Bank funds, Visa's report on AI agent payments, and the latest political maneuvering around the Clarity Act and Sam Bankman-Fried.

### Key Points

- **Bitcoin resilience and the real story beneath prices** [00:32] — Bitcoin is performing well and bad news no longer seems to impact price. Fear around strategy and treasury companies has faded. The real action is the plumbing being built below the surface for the next bull run.
- **DTCC tests tokenization with live transactions** [01:40] — DTCC, which clears $4.7 quadrillion in transactions annually, converted real securities at its depository into tokens and used them in live production transactions. Participants included JP Morgan, Citadel Securities, CME, Nasdaq, NYSE, Vanguard, Circle, State Street, and Microsoft. They tested repos, securities lending, collateral pledges, and equity trades.
- **Iran Central Bank stablecoin wallets frozen** [04:38] — The U.S. added four Iran Central Bank crypto wallets to sanctions. Tether froze $131 million in Tron-based USDT, adding to a previous $344 million freeze for a total of $475 million in USDT frozen. The central bank has been on the OFAC sanctions list since 2019.
- **Stablecoins are not decentralized money** [06:42] — Unlike Bitcoin, stablecoins can be frozen by governments and private companies like Tether. Transactions are fully visible, and issuers comply with Treasury calls. Escaping banks is not the same as escaping financial control.
- **Visa: AI agents will dominate micro-commerce** [07:49] — Visa predicts most sub-$1 transactions will be handled by AI agents on behalf of users. X402, a protocol originally created by Coinbase and now stewarded by the Linux Foundation, has already processed 109.6 million transactions with $15 million in volume in about a year.
- **Clarity Act meeting and SBF pardon opposition** [10:43] — Trump met with Senators Cynthia Lummis and Bernie Moreno to discuss an ethics compromise for crypto legislation. Separately, Hagerty and Lummis introduced a Senate resolution disapproving any Sam Bankman-Fried pardon, and SBF remains in jail.

### Conclusion

Wall Street's infrastructure is being rebuilt on blockchain rails and AI agents are already using stablecoins for machine payments. The big question for investors is whether the upside will happen on public blockchains they can own or inside walled gardens controlled by institutions.

## Transcript

dollars in transactions a year tested tokenization and blockchain rails yesterday. We've been talking about the future of all finance being on blockchains. It is happening right now in real time. We're going to talk about
that and more right now on the Daily Wolf. Let's go.
Daily Wolf on Yahoo Finance. I'm your host Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of All Streets and we've got 15 minutes to talk about everything that is are mornings when I wake up and I run through the news and I think nothing
really happened. And then I dig in a bit deeper and realize that even though there are only a few stories, they're massively impactful and deeply worth digging into because sometimes things change overnight and we entirely miss it
because we're staring at price or concerned about the bear market that seemingly never ends. Well, first of all, to to that end, Bitcoin has been performing relatively well. It feels like bad news doesn't impact it anymore
and a lot of the fear and uncertainty and doubt in the market specifically surrounding strategy and treasury companies have ceased to be the narratives here for a few weeks. So, I view that as a general positive. Now,
outside of the prices of the assets that we're holding, the plumbing right now, as I continue to tell you, is being laid below the surface so that next time there is a massive run to the upside, the pipes are there to support it and
nothing nothing nothing is bigger than this. DTCC, Wall Street's post-trade powerhouse, test tokenized markets with industry heavy hitters. So, tell you what the DTCC is. It is the
single transaction that you do. As I mentioned in the intro, 4.7 quadrillion dollars in volume every single year. When we talk about T+2 settlement or T+1 settlement, it's the DTCC that is clearing all of those and it has
historically been the reason that it's a relatively slow process. That is not the case anymore. Tokenization stopped being a crypto conference promise yesterday. The institution that actually clears Wall Street used it in real
transactions. So, we'll tell you exactly what happened here. So, they converted securities held at their depository into tokens and use them in live production transactions. This was their first test that they promised they would be doing
in late 2025. They actually said that by the end of 2026, the entire process DTCC would be tokenized. By the way, in case you missed that at the end of last year, saying they could do it. The next day, announced that they would be doing it
others and that this was the future. So, this is the first major test. These were not synthetic tokens. They were merely tracking the price of stocks. These are actual digital representations of these securities that are held at the DC, so
rights uh and ownership rights and entitlements and investor protections as a normal stock. So, as a part of this, JP Morgan tokenized some of their QQQ ETF holdings. We had
Citadel Securities, CME, Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange, Vanguard, Circle, State Street, Microsoft, and more all participating in this. They didn't just do tokenized stock transactions.
repos, securities lending, collateral pledges, and equity purchases and sales. So, this wasn't just a little test. They effectively tested in a micro micro version all of the different kind of
transactions that could benefit here from tokenization. So, once again, this was not just the wrapper. These are the real assets. They are tokenized and they sit at the DCCC. So, this is the official ownership and settlement layer.
This is not just a random digital representation. So, they used their own ledger here, Hyperledger Besu network, and the public Canton network. So, they did a lot here for a daily test and
say that this will be ready for mainstream adoption likely October 2026. mainstream adoption likely October 2026. That's only a few months away. So, once
traditional assets move onto blockchains, the question really becomes who controls what happens after they get there. And the Iran Central Bank just there. And the Iran Central Bank just after round and found out exactly uh who
tokenized. And we're talking about stablecoins. US adds four Iran Central Bank crypto wallets to sanctions. Tether freezes 131 million of contents. The freeze targets Tron-based addresses that held over 165
million dollars, preventing those specific funds from being transferred or redeemed. So, to be clear, these funds are frozen. They're still So, the Iranian Central Bankers can look at them
and say that's all theirs. It's a balance, but they cannot do a single thing with them at all. So, telling you about for a long time. We've had a very smiley and happy Besu telling
they've frozen of the Iranian Central Bank since the war started. A huge chunk of that was in crypto. So, before it was I think reported as roughly a half a
billion dollars in assets had already been frozen. In this case, it's 131 million in wallets that had received 165 million. This adds to the previous 344 million in USDT that was frozen. So, that gives us
USDT that was frozen. So, that gives us 475 million just in USDT that has been frozen. So, to be clear, the Central Bank has been on the OFAC sanctions list, I believe, since 2019. There's nothing new here except that
they're identifying new wallets on new chains, and now are actively freezing them since the war started. Now, being sanctioned does not mean being frozen. importantly, the United States did not take these assets like we do from
criminals and pig butchering scandals and such. We're just freezing them so that they can stare at them longingly, as I mentioned to you before. But, this really does provide us the opportunity to talk about
the massive differentiation between a stablecoin and a decentralized protocol or an asset that can't be tampered with or frozen like Bitcoin. It is ironic that the killer use case
for blockchain technology outside of Bitcoin, which is fully decentralized Bitcoin, which is fully decentralized hard money, is a faster, cheaper way of using the very thing that Bitcoin was created as a hedge against, which is
fiat currency. Right? So, this is a representation of a digital dollar that cannot only be frozen by your government, can be frozen by a private company like Tether when they get a call from that government. And every time the
Treasury calls, I can promise you, Tether and Circle, they answer, and they Tether and Circle, they answer, and they do exactly what they are told. So, it's a really important distinction, I think, for people. When you are using
stablecoins, you are not transacting privately. It is not exactly even the same as digital cash. There's full visibility into your transactions, and the government and those private companies, they can freeze them. Now,
Iran was using stablecoins to escape the traditional banking system, but they discovered that escaping banks is not the same as escaping financial that allowed Tether to freeze Iran's money may make stablecoins useful for an
entirely different customer. And that customer is not humans. It is artificial intelligence. You guys know that thing AI that everybody's been doing the AIs. That's what I've heard. Uh behind the
gym at school, kids are doing AIs. Here's the story. Visa A gentle caveat from the ground up. What the on-chain data tells us. So, uh to be clear, this is coming from Visa, which is the entity most likely to be directly
disrupted by blockchain technology. And what they're saying here is that humans may still need a credit card to buy lunch and do big transactions, but payments for you before you even finish the sandwich.
Right? They're saying that there's going to be basically two buckets of commerce in the future. Macro commerce, uh also known as people using credit cards and buying things, and micro commerce, which they think is more likely to be highly
disrupted by AI agents. So, when we talk about the cross-section between crypto and AI, this is the conversation that you should absolutely be paying attention to. And Visa is saying all of the quiet parts out loud.
They're saying that most of your small transactions, let's call it sub $1, are going to be handled by an agent on your behalf. You won't know what they're doing, they'll just be out there doing it. Now, I'm going to be honest, I think
transactions, too. And I think that Visa is just coping here when they say that all of us are going to need to transact still peer-to-peer using credit cards. we've already actually seen some evidence of this. So, the Visa reports
evidence of this. So, the Visa reports that X402, which was originally created by Coinbase, but now has been is stewarded by the Linux Foundation, they've already done 109.6 million transactions from AI agents with
$15 million in volume in roughly a year since they launched at the beginning of the summer of 2025. So, this is already happening in test, and it's already done 109.6 million transactions. This is going to be
transactions. This is going to be trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars in transactions. It's going to happen very soon. Now, think about it. AI can't transact in cash. AI is not going to pay credit card fees
or wire fees to transact using the legacy system. What they can do is use effectively free stablecoin transactions on blockchain rails to do all of their bidding. That is what is coming. So, the
future of crypto is machines making invisible payments to you. Uh and while debating whether the humans writing crypto rules should be allowed to profit from the industry. This is arguably the biggest story of the day. We have an
update for the Clarity Act. We haven't done that before. Here's a positive meeting on Thursday with Trump to discuss ethics. Raises hopes for passage of sweeping crypto legislation. So,
I've been saying the entire time that all stories about the Clarity Act and things are misdirection because the only debate that truly matters right now is
signaled, to be fair, that it would be willing to sign some sort of ethics clause that was not directly targeted at Trump and his family, but broadly included everybody and a certain kind of transaction or
investment. So, we also know that Trump has no problem just doing stuff regardless of what the law likely says. So, I don't think he's going to feel blocked by it anyways. So, maybe there is a glimmer of hope that in
recess, they have 20 days to get this done, then ethics clause could be passed. But in this case, he is meeting with senators to discuss what the path to getting this done, whether that path is unlikely, is and how he can help to
senators like Cynthia Lummis and Bernie Moreno and is reportedly happening at Moreno and is reportedly happening at 2:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time today. So, listen, we've had a lot of Democrat pushback on this bill. I think they're
going to get to continue pushing back. I have extreme doubts that anything that comes out of this meeting is going to go far enough to get a bunch of Democrats go across the aisle and vote for this when it's becoming politically
unpalatable with their own party, unfortunately, because we were in an unfortunately, because we were in an environment where we were not such a partisan issue anymore. But of course, Trump's involvement is the issue in the
industry has ended that. Uh but we're going to see what happens in this meeting. And listen, maybe the odds will move in our favor that this could get done. But while lawmakers are negotiating
who should be allowed to profit from crypto, they've already found one single person in crypto who will not uh receive any of their sympathy. And that of course is one SBF. Sam Bankman-Fried. Remember
The hair and the bean bags and the Adderall. Hagerty and Lummis introduced resolution disapproving of any Sam Bankman-Fried pardon. Dare I say Sam Bateman will not be freed.
On the spot. No writers, guys. We're just We're just freestyling here. Yes, they brought this to the Senate floor because he's been trying to get clemency. Can you imagine that the Senate with our taxpayer
dollars had to sit down and actually discuss whether Sam Bateman freed who's going already in jail for 25 years uh should be freed. By the way, even the fact that they did this unanimously unanimously actually doesn't prevent the
there's one thing that we can get unanimous consent on in government is that this guy is going to stay in jail and uh baby oil parties. They were in the same prison.
Did make that up. I I did not make that up. That's true. So, listen. Uh we could talk about as I said price endlessly. We could talk about all of the news that might impact it, but the reality is that the
infrastructure for everything is being built on blockchain rails when it comes to the financial system. Now, the question will remain how can we as investors profit from that or will it all happen behind the walls of a walled
garden here where the institutions capture all of the upside? I think blockchains that you and I can invest in and I'm excited to see it happen. That's special Daily Wolf coming for you tomorrow. Peace.