TRON vs Polygon vs Stellar: Which Stablecoin Rail Wins? | Daily Crypto IQ

0:00So, Tron versus Polygon versus Stellar. Now, what does Tron, Polygon, and Stellar all have in common? Well, their stable coin rails is their main function, right? Tron's supposed to be a layer 1 blockchain, but all it really does is move USDT around. There's a lot of things that could be said there. I'm going to hold my tongue. So, which stable coin rails win here? This is the final exam. And don't be discouraged about a 100

0:26slides. We go through them so fast. So, this is the verdict. So, the token autopsy report, I'm not going to Everybody here is probably an OG, so I'm not going to explain what a token autopsy is, but here is our score. Every token autopsy gets a score. Tron actually won mostly because its utility is super high and it has a crazy amount of volume, but it's still very much stable coin and not much anything else. where Polygon and XLM have a little bit

0:53more to them, but still very much the same thing. Mostly stable coin rails, XLM actually only landed a 70. And I was kind of surprised cuz I learned along with you guys. You can't know everything in crypto all at once. Like you have to go through these type of processes to really raise your crypto IQ. One of the main goals of the channel. Hopefully you're finding that happening for you. But anyways, I was surprised XLM uh had so much

1:18disconnection from the token in the ecosystem. Let's move along. So, three definitions of success. Well, Tron just straight stable coin scale. Polygon's payment, production, and integration. That's what I was saying. It has a little bit more to it. A little more meat on the bone than simply just moving USDT around, right? Has a lot of integrations and things. And Stellar, of course, institutional asset infrastructure. it is built for that

1:42institutional money. All three are real accomplishments, but they do measure a very different job. So, which network has the strongest stable coin product today? These are the questions that we're asking, right? These higher crypto IQ questions, right? Which network appears best positioned for future payment growth? And which native token has the clearest connection that success or towards success? One network can win the product question and lose the token

2:12question. And if it wins the product question and you hold the token, well, doesn't really matter. That's that's just facts for you in your portfolio. If you got your pom poms out and you're a cheerleader for Tron or something, then great. You're you're going to have you're going to be real excited. The problem with a lot of this stuff is that, and this has really been a lot of fun to do this token autopsy series cuz

2:38I've really connected a lot of things. I wouldn't say a lot of them I never knew, but I was not as forward in my mind. And that's where I really think it helps us become better speculators in the market because stable coins are great for the companies that issue the stable coins, aka the issuers, right? They make fees and they have a they generate money, right? But the fees have to be super low in moving money around to be competitive. That means you don't really

3:05generate a lot of revenue or as much revenue as maybe another chain would. And because of that, there's not as much surplus funds to find its way into the token. So honestly, I I'm pretty negative on uh owning tokens in that are just basically stable coin rails. It makes a lot of sense. I've held Polygon. I originally bought I don't know 80 to 100 bucks of it, not this bare market, but the last bare market [music] and it never performed very well. It really

3:37never did much. I bought it around 30 cents and I didn't continue to DCA into it because I kind of blindly bought that. It was a long time ago when I had a much lower crypto IQ and [music] I didn't continue to buy once I kind of knew about it, but I figured I'd hold the little bit just in case. You know how it goes. You always there could be a chance. But anyways, I I don't think I'm going to really be adding or holding anything that's stable coin rails

4:01because of this whole fee generation, not much revenue to trickle into the coin type of dynamic. And I it's interesting because everybody's very bullish on XLM. It really doesn't generate a lot of fees for the token, but speculation alone and institutional interest could definitely take it some places. So out of the three, XLM is probably got a little bit more attention than of course Polygon and Tron does the token.

4:28Anyways, not to get off on a tangent, supply is not volume. So supply assets on the network versus volume, right? So if you take a $100, right? That's the supply and you move that $100 around 20 times, you will create a volume of $2,000. Now, for a lot of people, especially traders, I would feel like this is different. Like this is different, but it's also very much the same. You go into your perpetual trading platform, whatever one that is, and you

4:58throw on some leverage. Well, your supply is say a h 100red bucks, but you throw on 10x leverage, and that's a lot more money. That's a,000 bucks, right? So, this is the same idea. So then when you place that trade of $1,000, even though your supply is only a hundred bucks, the volume is going to look like $1,000 on the platform. So the whole point is there the same asset um same money or asset can move

5:28repeatedly. So cumulative volume needs contact. So, Polygon has reported more than three trillion in cumulative stable coin transfer volume since September 2020. And three trillion is a lot of money in volume, but you got to remember just people moving money around, right? This demonstrates meaningful usage. It does not represent current liquidity, protocol revenue, or poleholder earnings. And the biggest thing to take

5:55away here is that when you see a title of a story [music] and it is volume centered, just know that they're most likely using a really big number to catch your eye cuz 3 trillion. Okay, volume since 2020. Been 6 years. Not completely crazy to think that that would happen in volume. But if you hold pull, that's not earnings. It's not liquidity of $3 trillion. The whole market right now is like $3 trillion, right? So you you put you piece that

6:26together best you can. Volume is very different. So the rail is not the cargo. So USDT users hold and transfer the asset. Tron the network settles the transfers and Tron the token resources and security. TRX holders do not receive Tether's reserve income. Again, the rails in which things move doesn't mean that whoever owns the train track owns the cargo that's being moved along with it. So, the low fee trade-off here. Low fees improve the payment product. And

6:58this is what I started talking about a minute ago. And again, I'm going to raise my crypto IQ no matter what. Late on a Saturday night, I'm holding myself accountable to be here and raise my crypto IQ. So, smash that like button, hit subscribe, especially if you're watching later, and uh grab one of those memberships as we did get rid of the pesky ads so you wouldn't be interrupted here. So, low fee improve the payment product, right? So, as a stable coin or

7:24stable coin rail, you definitely need cheap transaction fees. Low fees also create little native token consumption per transaction. Usage can grow much faster than the token's demand and cheap settlement is excellent marketing. Value capture may request another meeting, meaning it may be farther down the line. Abstraction changes the token story. Abstraction is hiding the complexity of anything in crypto but anywhere from the user and putting it in the background so

7:56they don't have to deal with it. A well-designed payment [music] product hides technical complexity and I think most of us like that. Users may never consciously acquire the native token. Merchants may receive stable coins or fiat rather than the network's native token. That's why you want it in the background to be converting everything over towards that native token. If it doesn't, well, then you have less value capture for the token. Better user

8:22experience can produce weaker visible token demand and certainly less branding. Institutional does not mean public. legal and compliance rules may require authorization freezing and clawbacks and that has a lot to do with the regulator, right? So, eligible investors to private onchain asset a private institution product does not prove broad retail adoption constraints, right? Risk and strength. So, 97.8% of Tron stable coin supply is

8:56USDT. There's not much other stable coin going on there. Very deep liquidity though and deeper issuance dependence, right? Capacity is not demand. Throughput measures what a network can process. Activity measures what it's actually processing and revenue measures what system [music] actually is earning. Token capture measure what reaches the native token. So if you're wondering why a lot of times your token's not moving,

9:25look at all the things that kind of have to happen. You have to have the activity. Then you have to have revenue built out of that activity. And then it has to have some kind of mechanism or way to make its way into the token that you're holding. Now, every project, company, startup, whatever you want to call it, is different. So that's why we study the economics in relation to the token. A wide highway is not automatically a thriving city. One

9:51person may control several addresses, right? Addresses are not people. So, when you say, "Oh, we have 1 million addresses and and we're brand new." Well, you can get bots together and you can run I don't know. I don't even know if there's a limit to how many wallets one bot could make, generate, and control. I don't know. One exchange address may represent thousands of customers. So, this is really interesting, too, because you have it on

10:17both sides. bots could take tons [music] and tons of addresses and make it look like there's a lot of address in activity. While on the flip side, one exchange address could have literally millions of users funds inside of it. It says thousands of customers, but it could really even be upwards of much more than that. Melissa, welcome in. Welcome in. Thank you for being here. We are wrapping up this week.

10:47So bots, routers, bridges, and contracts also create transaction. Address growth is evidence, not a popular consensus, right? It's good to see the address grow, but if you see it do crazy numbers really fast, have some have some speculation, right? Melissa says, "Just getting off work on the train." Well, I'm glad that you come to the show even before you reach your house. I really always appreciate your commitment to being here and learning,

11:17raising your crypto IQ, I dare say. So, signal versus noise, one of my favorite segments. It really has grown to be one of my favorite segments. Uh, Polygon, right? Polygon reported more than three trillion in cumulative stable coin transfers. Now, when we did the token autopsy and even right now, this is a little bit repetitive, right? But we really want to drive home because I think this is so important as a speculator in the market that you don't

11:42get wowed by big numbers, right? Three trillion since 2020 in volume, 6 years, not that crazy, but approximately 933 billion occurred in 2025 alone. 741 billion yeartoate 2026 so far. So out of that three trillion, most of it was in the last two years or this year and last year, right? So again, it's volume. It's not liquidity. It's not rewards. It's not anything that really matters more than to say, "Hey, this much money

12:20is moved around." Be kind of like if you counted how many freight trucks moved on, you know, train tracks last year. It wouldn't be that important, would it? Blues guy rolling in with a $5 super chat. I appreciate you doing that, man. I really, really do. Says, "Dedication and hard work goes a long way. Gratitude, Eugi. You are awesome, bro. I appreciate you and the comm community you are building. I greatly appreciate that. Today was a long day, a long day

12:49of uh of work. So, I I feel you and uh I'm definitely glad to do it. Glad to be here no matter what as much as I can. It would have been very easy to be like, "Ah, let's not stream tonight. I'm exhausted." But I got my coffee, got my latte. What is this? And uh 190 milligrams of caffeine. Probably not what I need at 10:30 at night, but hey, that gets me here. Cumulative volume is not current liquidity. We're going to move on here. So, what is Polygon's open

13:20money stack? So, this is actually pretty interesting. Melissa says, "I try to do what I can." Let me let me start over. I try to do what I can do for you. Hey, I appreciate it. You do a lot. Even with some guy Oh, man. smoking smoking [music] the dopium a couple seats away from you on the train. You stay safe out there. I doesn't sound like a very nice train ride. If you want to know what I'm talking about, it's in the chat. All

13:47right. Customer is a wallet and an asset, right? Routing is verifying and moving a merchant is crypto or fiat payment. The merchant receives the selected outcome. So signal versus no stellar sweep. State street launched an actual tokenized private liquidity fund on XLM or stellar right on XLM ecosystem. I'm going to be a lot more careful about which words I use because I feel like we use a lot of things very interchangeably. Like somebody might

14:17make a post and be like, "Oh, XLM just got this thing." And it's like, "No, XLM didn't get that thing. Stellar, the company, the startup, the project, the blockchain got that thing. XLM is just a token, right? The token didn't get that thing." Unless it did, and you got to know the difference, right? Melissa throws a $1.99 in the hat and says, "Here is one from me to you, sir." Man, I really appreciate that. You guys are the best. Even though we have a

14:45small community, I really do feel like we attract some of the best quality people and I hope it stays that way. I'm not looking for quantity. I am looking for quality. So, this whole Stellar sweep thing is important because State Street Galaxy did launch the tokenized private liquidity fund on Stellar. But what is noise about it or far less important and not to be focused on is that a private institutional fund does not prove retail adoption or direct XLM

15:13[music] value capture. So for most people, if you're holding XLM, uh we still need to prove that retail wants to buy it and that institutions want to buy it, right? And that if that happens, it does anything for the coin that you hold. I know it's repetitive, but if this isn't clicking, then you're missing why all this information is so important, and I'd hate for that to happen to you. So, useful conclusion

15:38here is sweep strengthen Stellar's product thesis more than XLM [music] investment thesis. Sweep means street State Street. Say that a bunch of times. State Street Galaxy onchain liquidity sweep fund. It is a tokenized private liquidity fund for eligible investors. It supports onchain subscriptions and redemptions using certain stable coins subject to availability of course wherever you are in the world. The

16:07product is designed for institutional cash management. And just one more time, thank you everybody for the super chats. I really appreciate you guys. It really does lift the spirits and keep you going, especially when you have a small community to know people are getting something out of it. Otherwise, they wouldn't be dropping a super chat. So, if you're out there just hopping in, like, subscribe, link to our free Discord in the chat and uh subscription

16:29membership starts at $3 and you get custom emojis made by yours truly. So, the sweep operating structure, State Street, Galaxy. So, let's break it down. State Street is the issuer and the manager, probably the one that holds all the regulation. Galaxy is the tokenization and the distribution. Anchorage is the digital asset custody. Chainlink and NAV are data and transfer agencies. They provide the data in real time and State Street Bank underlying

16:59asset custody and probably also much better in with the regulators. That's why you see these people teaming up says I don't hold any unfortunately. Are you talking about XLM? You don't hold any XLM? I hold some but I didn't go too crazy with it. So the stellar contract supports authorization freezing and clawbacks. These controls help the issuer enforce eligibility and compliance. This is regulated onchain finance, not anonymous

17:29retail trading. Can you tell I'm tired? Got to finish the words when you're talking. Institutional blockchain adoption often keeps compliance department. And that's just that was all about sweet by the way if you didn't catch that. Signal versus noise on Tron. Well, Tron reports more than 30 trillion 30 trillion in cumulative transfer volume. That is a 10x from Polygon. It's also been around a long time. It currently

17:55holds approximately 94.8 billion in stable coins. Think about that. How many times do you have to move around a hundred billion to get 30 trillion? Is it the same money moved around? I'm not sure. So volume and stable coin balances are not Tron revenue or TRX holder income. This is kind of the problem with stable coin stuff. This is actually kind of why I've stayed away from Tron a lot because all it does is move around USDT for the most part. Of course, there's

18:27small exceptions to that, but that doesn't really do much for Tron holders. Therefore, I don't see any need to hold the token and I can't get any exposure really to USDT, right? like I can't buy into the company like a stock like you would on the stock market. At least that usually gives you [music] some allocation to the company and the revenue therefore generated. Not the same thing in crypto. That is why this token autopsy is so important. I'm going

18:50to continue to scream it kind of from the rooftop. Token autopsy, token value capture. The ecosystem of a project is not the same thing as the token. in you might think a project's going to do well and it might but that doesn't mean that the token will do well at all raising that crypto IQ one day at a time right so where stable coins are strongest stable coins are especially competitive in things like crossber settlements continuous 24 settlement programmable

19:20payments and markets where existing rails are slow and expensive it is a huge update right stable coin rails are great for crossber payment moving money around and just the whole global financial system becoming much much faster and up to-date but the fees are super low and they [clears throat] don't generate a ton of revenue for you as a token holder. So where you stable coin remains very weak right as users and intermediaries

19:49may carry more responsibility for error and fraud consumer protection systems remain completely inconsistent acceptance and offer off-ramp access is very fragmented. If you've been in crypto a while, you know, the whole off-ramp thing has been awful most of the time. And uh I blame I blame some of these for why I didn't buy Bitcoin at 50 cents. Now, I was very young and I was trying to buy it and to my best understanding, my bank kept blocking. I

20:19mean, I was 19 and now I'm 31, something like that. Age is just a number to me anyways, but you get my point. It was a very long time ago. And back then the relation between things like Kraken in a bank, they just block it. And so they kept blocking my card. I was young. I didn't really know what I had or what I was looking at. And I just didn't continue to try after a couple attempts. Just threw my hands up in the air and got distracted with life. And it

20:45cost me. So open loop retail payments require more than inexpensive block space. uh I would have been in a very different position today if the bank didn't decide that they know better than me on how to use my money. But at the same time, sometimes the bank stops somebody from using my, you know, credit card in California when I live in Florida. And I I like that. So you got to you got to be got to be transparent and honest about it, right? It's a good

21:12thing that they block it, but man, they cost me a lot of money. The six layer payment rail, stable coin issuers, wallet, on-ramp, blockchain settlement. Right? These are the six layers of a payment rail. Let me slow down. Take a deep breath. Stable coin issuers. Number one. First, the stable coins have to be issued. Then we have the wallet and on rail. Then you have blockchain settlement kind of as the main foundation there. This is where you kind

21:37of switch the first two and then three you switch into really being onchain in real blockchain technology and then you have liquidity off-ramp and payout and compliance resources. So layer one, the issuer. Well, the issuer creates and redeems the stable coin. By the end of this, you should definitely understand stable coin rails and how they operate because we're about to break it down. Blues Guy says, "Strugahart, great to

22:07see you. All-inclusive Melissa, I've got some crazy ready in Florida." Nice. Uh, UG is XLM good win. I sold all my XLM for Tron. Am I crazy? You cracking me up here. Okay, got to race home and then do it all over again tomorrow. Later, you guys. All right, I guess we won't see you again. Have a good night. So, the issuer creates and redeems stable coin. The issuer manages reserves and may earn reserve income. So this is all about the issuer and that

22:37income does not automatically belong to the blockchain. It belongs to the issuers and the issuers have to be in line with regulation or they have to deal with that. Right. Yes. Definitely be safe out there Melissa. So the stable coin and native token have different economics. Layer two access. Right. So past the issuer the stable coins have been issued. Users need an exchange. They need a wallet, a bank, a cash agent or a

23:04payment application in order to even interact with it. Convenient access can matter more than a theoretical chain performance. Right? Infrastructure without access remains impressive infrastructure that nobody uses. And that is not as important as convenience. Right? We have grocery stores that you can go to that are big and you got to walk around to find the chip aisle, right? And then you have convenience stores where you could walk in and get

23:31chips and be out of there in probably less than two minutes. There's a reason why you stop at the gas station or the convenience store versus going to your local grocery store every time you just want to pick up like a drink and a bag of chips. Anyways, layer three settlement. So the blockchain determines transaction cost and confirmation, right? Reliability and smart contract capability, validator structure and native token requirements.

23:57Now this is across any blockchain, right? This is where Tron, Polygon, and Stellar compete the most directly is on the settlement layer. So liquidity users may need to exchange fiat, stable coins, currency or blockchain versions of an asset. A fast payment is not useful if the recipient cannot convert the asset reasonably or quickly. Liquidity is part of the product. And when you get into like a new emerging ecosystem, layer 1 or layer two or whatever, you start to

24:28realize, especially if you're early to using it, how important liquidity is. So recipients may want this layer 5 payout. They might want a stable coin, a bank deposit, local currency, or another treasury asset. Polygon's merchant strategy is especially relevant because it attempts to deliver the merchant's selected outcome. Of course, number six, recurse. So, payments eventually create fraud, mistakes, sanctions, screening, refunds,

24:59and disputes. Code settlement or code settles transactions. It does not answer customer service calls. There's nobody you can call. A complete rail needs operational systems around that blockchain. So the metric here, stablecoin supply definition, the dollar value of a stable coin currently resides on the network. What it reveals is the size of the network's current stable coin monetary base. What it doesn't show you is how often an asset moves.

25:31Transfer volume is gross volume transferred during a period of time. What it actually tells you is how much value moved during that time period. It doesn't tell you how much new money entered or how many unique users participated in that time period. Transaction count, the number of recorded transactions. That one's pretty simple. A dollar $1 payment and a million dollar transfer each count as one transaction. So, it doesn't tell you

25:58volume. The number requires value and user context. There it goes. My neck finally cracked. Throughput. The definition of throughput the number of transactions or operations the system can theoretically emphasis on theoretically process. It measures capacity. It does not prove demand, adoption or revenue. And of course, stablecoin dominance, right? So the percentage of stable coin supply represented by the largest asset.

26:30High dominance can improve liquidity and familiarity. It also increases dependency on one issuer. Utility versus value capture. This is where we start to get into some of the sauce when it comes to what a token is capable of doing and then it actually capturing monetary value. So a token utility asks what must a token do or what can it do? Token value capture asks does growing network use create durable token demand relative to supply. A token can be useful without

27:03capturing much of the economic value. So if I have a token built in my ecosystem in this metaphor that I'm coming up with and every transaction cost 0.00001 in US dollar, it's nothing. Fractions of fractions of fractions of a penny. Can you understand why it would take a lot a lot of transactions to even make $1,000? $10,000 would be a lot of transactions. So, you get the point. And the problem

27:38with holding tokens that are really just stable coin rails, not a lot of value to go to the token. Now, the issuers, that's a different story. 9.94.8 8 billion call it 95 billion stable coins uh value resident on Tron and 97.8 eight USDT is the share, right? So that's saying about 98% of it is USDT. Nearly all of the track balance depends on USDT. And so I would dare say that all of the money on Tron is basically USDT. Polygon snapshot here, 2.9

28:17billion. You see how far you've dropped, right, from 94 billion to a little less than three billion. That's how much stable coin is on Polygon. And only 55% of it is USDC. So that other 45% or whatever if you really want to get math [music] mathem. And then 57% of that is USDY which is a stable coin on XLM. So the product strengths behind Tron. Remember this wrap-up is about everything we went over this week. We took some time to explain

29:01some definitions what stable coin rails really mean and of course we're breaking down Tron, Polygon, and XLM. So Tron itself, its product strength is existing global USDT liquidity and a lot of it. It's deep broad wallet and exchange support, lowcost transfers, strong reoccur reoccurring settlement behavior, and Tron stable coin use is already operating at scale. So, it's a very proven product. But TRX, the token mechanic here is TRX can be staked for

29:32bandwidth and energy. I found this very interesting because I don't feel like a lot of blockchains operate like this, but Tron is old, right? probably even though there's updates, probably very old architecture really at the core of it. Users consume resources when processing transactions and contracts. Now, it works well for what it does, so they don't fix what isn't broken. Users without sufficient resources can pay

29:58through TRX consumption. So, although you can use TRX, you can also just stake it for bandwidth and energy and use things without actually handing it over. This creates a visible link between network usage and TRX demand. And again, this USDT Tron thing I feel like is just very much outside of the US global economy. You know, the rest of the world besides like America. I'm sure some of it is used in America, but it really seems to me like,

30:27you know, this is used in a lot of other countries besides America. So, value capture limits for TRX. It doesn't receive Tether reserve income. The ecosystem is highly dependent on USDT. I mean, think of what would happen if tomorrow some giant regulator, maybe even globally, came out and said USDT is fraudulent. It's illegal to use it or heavily frowned upon. And if you're an institution or a bank, which are

30:57institutions, uh, and you use USDT, we're not gonna we're not going to do business with you. Because that's how you enforce something in a world globally where laws don't necessarily carry, it's relationships and penalties through relationships that you use to control. And my point here is if Tron is like 98% USDT, and I'm not saying anything's going to happen to USDT. I think USDT is fine. As much FUD as they've tried to crush it, it's still

31:23here. But if anything did they are highly highly dependent on that USDT. Anyways, governance and validator concentration remain concern and the network defect is real but not guaranteed to remain permanent as there is a ton of competition around stable coin rails. The final card for Tron is current scale winner, right? Lowcost USDT reach wins that category and token alignment winner. But even though it

31:56gets a 76 in the best out of our stable coin rails series here, it still falls short of an 80 or higher to get that passing verdict. And now on to Polygon. So what is Polygon strength then? [music] Broadstable coin and application ecosystem. One thing that Tron doesn't have as much of is the actual application ecosystem. Merchant checkout and payout infrastructure. Tron doesn't have a ton of that that I know of. Uh cross-chain routing and wallet

32:26integration, multiple enterprises and fintech relationships. And Polygon is building a payment stack rather than only selling blockace. Token mechanics. On the other hand, pull the token is native gas and staking token for polygon poss. So it supports transaction fees, validator staking and network security. Planned annual emissions are approximately 2% dividend between validator reward and treasury support.

32:57Burn and dilution we got going for polygon here. So Polygon did complete 100 million token burn from previous collected base fees. The burn reduced existing supply, but the supply is in the billion. So 100 million is a little bit of a drop in the bucket. Annual emissions continue to introduce new supply, not deflationary. And one large burn does not establish permanent deflation. Value capture limits here. Very low

33:27fees, right? Limit demand per transaction for the Polygon token. Payment routing can conceal native token interactions and merchants may receive fiat or stable coin rather than pole token. Product adoption may grow faster than pole demand. So it wins in merchant payment stack diversification and future optionality, but it still gets a 74. And if you watch if you want to know more about the actual token autopsy, go watch the token autopsy video. Right. So

33:59stellar product strength. Now we're on to Stellar, right? So purpose-built asset issuance and settlement, low and predictable transaction costs, issuer level control, strong institutional and crossber positioning. Stellar is specialized for financial infrastructure. XLM the token token mechanic pays stellar transaction fees utility. XLM supports account reserve requirements and base fees and reserves are

34:26deliberately small to be highly competitive. sponsored reserves can allow another party to cover that requirement of the XLM token. So the XLM so the fees can be sponsored, right? Which I say if the customer pays XLM and fees or a sponsor pays XLM to cover fees, I don't really care. Doesn't really matter to me. It's the same amount of fee to my understanding. Anyways, value capture limits. The fee pool is not directly XLM holder revenue.

35:01Institutional clients may never consciously hold XLM and sponsored reserves improve onboarding but reduce direct user demand. The network [music] can succeed without creating equally dramatic XLM demand. So it wins for institutional issuance, regulated design, and capture capture gap. Right. And I will say these this winner, all right, it's still on a watch list. It's a 70 out of 100. It needs 80 or higher to get a passing vote. So, we're saying

35:30what it does well. I don't want anybody confused by the [music] word winner being there. It's uh just that's what it does well. So, category winners here in market in the market, Tron for current stable coin scale, lowest USDT reach, Tron. Stable coin diversification, Polygon, and existing network effect, Tron. Merchant payment infrastructure, Polygon. Product [music] breath, Polygon. Institutional asset issuant, Stellar. And institutional architecture,

36:00Stellar. Native token necessity, TRX. Native token capture, value capture, TRX. Lowest [music] single issuer concentration, Polygon. Strongest future optionality, Polygon. So the clear framework here is cost, legality, experience, architecture, and reach. A payment rail is more than its blockchain fee. Clear cost, right? All three networks can settle value inexpensively. So that's not really the competition. The larger cost may appear

36:33at the on ramp currency conversion or off-ramp, right? No decisive winner really when you break it down. The cheapest blockchain does not guarantee the cheapest complete payment once you on and off ramp and that has a lot to do with where you live and who you're allowed to use. Legal treatment depends on the issuer asset jurisdiction and intermediaries. Stellar makes institutional compliance controls especially visible and that is a very

37:00strong case for institutions to want to use XLM uh stellar as the ecosystem, right? This does not make every stellar issued asset legally safe though. Experience Tron is familiar to existing USDT users pretty much globally. Polygon emphasizes wallet routing and merchant abstraction and Stellar becomes powerful when embedded inside institutional or anchor application. The edge here polygon

37:31out of architecture well resources or resourcebased USDT settlement at scale. Polygon flexible application and merchant infrastructure for building with merchants and applications. Stellar controlled issuance and financial settlement and architecture. The edge here is Stellar for issuance, polygon for application and flexibility. So they all have their thing that they do well and none of them seem to do all the same things well. When it comes to reach,

37:59Tron is the winner. So, Tron has the largest current stable coin balance and strongest existing USDT network effect and it's about a 10x from where Polygon's at. So, reach measurement current access and behavior, not permanent dominance. So, the counterargument for Tron is that most Trron success belongs to USDT rather than the TRX token. that activity could migrate if issuers, exchanges, and users prefer another network and that

38:29can happen almost overnight. Sometimes the response here is that existing liquidity and integration can create meaningful switching costs. Just give them incentive and they will go somewhere else. Polygon can produce excellent products without strong pole token value capture. Pole retains gas as a utility staking security roles, but low fees, abstraction, and emission weakens that connection. The product opportunity remains stronger than the

38:57actual proven token value capture and stellar institutional announcements have not created equivalent XLM demand. Sweep is functional product rather than a vague partnership. Reoccurring usage must still be visible for XLM to deserve a higher score. Final findings, they all do different jobs, right? Tron wins existing USDT settlement. Polygon wins merchant abstraction and product breath. Stellar wins controlled institutional issuance

39:27and there is no universal payment rail because payments describe several different jobs. Blues guy says TRX is my second biggest bag. Is it really? Is that is that facts? So low fees improve competitiveness. They're not great for generating revenue. I'm just getting through this a little quickly. Value is dividend or divided sorry value is divided. Stablecoin activity can benefit the issuers's wallet exchange and

39:56liquidity provider the merchant processor and offramp and the blockchain invalidator. The native token does not inherent the entire economy. So is the network being used? Again, here's our ranking. TRX technically wins here, right? Largest current stable coin rail. Why TRX doesn't pass though? Extreme USDT concentration, governance concentration, no claim on Tether reserve economics, and dependence on continued routing

40:30behavior. Pole gets second. XLM comes in third. I don't want to get too repetitive. The only thing that's passed our token autopsy so far is a which is good because if all if half of the things we did pass, well, that would make the pass verdict far less valuable. Hype TRX for second and third. We actually have a tie for third between TRX and Arrow. So, there's that. Then, of course, keep

40:56moving down the line. This is all still watch verdict. And then you get watch the conditional pass. I don't know why it puts conditional pass. I'll have to fix that. But it should be a watch verdict for a render and ENA gets you to speculative right onto an H bar. We have done about 17 token autopsies so far. We're halfway almost. I don't know why I said we're halfway. We're almost halfway to 50. Right. Current scale

41:27future options and institutional design. closing principle principle is the best payment rail may become invisible. Sorry guys, I am absolutely exhausted. [music] But that was a lot of fun and I still retained it and I still followed and that's all that really matters for me to raise my crypto IQ here and stay consistent and hold myself uh kind of accountable and to the fire no matter what's going on in life. So

41:58that's always a lot of fun. So, where's my news? Anything exciting? News has got to be around here somewhere. All right, cool. So, BitGat 387 million hack is now being attributed to North Korea. Shocker. That's not surprising. [music] Arbitum temporarily shut off new stylus activations over AI assisted attack risks. So, this is probably my favorite protocol engineering story today. Arbitum Security Council temporarily

42:32blocked the new stylus contract activation on Arbitums 1 and Nova after researchers identified increasingly sophisticated attacks. Blast is shutting down. And this is a huge layer 2 reality check. Ethereum layer 2 blast is winding down. Too many layer twos. Uh hey, did you ever use blast? I never used blast. So, it makes me think it just really wasn't that attractive. Maybe they didn't do a good job with

43:01marketing. I don't know. I know Bass. Bass has been around a lot less time, but I know Bass. Ethereum launched a privacy system for paying AI models. So, Open an Animinity Project launched ZK API, zero knowledge APIs, a system that allows users to pay AI models and other metered APIs without revealing the identity behind the payment. and it's already live on Ethereum mainet. Works in plain English like this. You deposit ETH or USDC into an Ethereum vault. You

43:33your device creates a zero knowledge proof showing you have money to pay. That API service can verify payment authorization without learning which deposit or Ethereum identity funded the request. Then you receive temporary API key with a spending limit. That means API AI sorry not API but that means AI company doesn't automatically build one giant identity trail connecting your wallet payment information and years of prompts. This is something that a lot of

44:01your I guess scared AI scared people would would actually like to use if they wanted to use AI. Anyways, you put that together. This grew out of work previously proposed by Vitalic and Ethereum Foundation DAI lead David Crappies crepus I don't know doesn't matter honestly Ethereum pulled the conversational validator reward burn proposal from Hegota remember the proposal we discussed that

44:35would have burned an increased portion of validator rewards as more Ethereum became game staked. Well, it's been withdrawn from Ethereum's Hegota upgrade. EPI, which is a proposal 836 8363 was designed to change Ethereum issuance economics by reducing validator rewards as staking participation increased. But critics receive concerns around things like solo staking economics, validator concentration, liquid staking, network security, and

45:08whether a hard fork upgrade process is even the appropriate plan to decide monetary policy. The SEC proposed new crypto custody framework. I feel like we've been over that one a lot of times. Let's not do that one. Near Intent got every dollar of its 3.8 8 million exploit back. So Near Intent was exploited for 3.8 million after a bug involving its omni deposit withdrawal infrastructure and the intent smart contract

45:42intents smart contract. So protocol paused service identity and suspected exploder and essentially gave them 48 hours to return the money under responsible disclosure. The story is expected is especially interesting because near intents had just helped recent had just helped reject more than 50 million in swaps associated with the bit hacker. So [music] that's actually really interesting and near's intent itself got exploited days later but hey

46:14for like 4 million not 50 million. It also highlights the growing importance of intentbased crosschain infrastructure. Anoma anoma. The systems are convenient because users can say essentially turn asset A into chain X into asset B on chain Y. It's basically chat GBT for the DeFi web. You give it an intent intention what you want it to do and it figures out how to do the complicated part. It ab it abstracts to use words that I'm always trying to get

46:45people to understand. It abstracts the complicated process of doing this right here, asset A on chain X and asset B on chain Y, uh, without having to figure out how to do that. Just like you tell Chat GBT, make me a grocery list for, I don't know, whatever diet, insert diet that you want, and it'll do that. So, web 3 gaming, DJ games are beginning to migrate towards the Robin Hood chain. Shout out Kindra. And that's pretty much where we're going

47:18to wrap that up. You know what it is. Follow me over here at Underground Crypto. And um if you hate my AI content, please do me a favor and and make sure you comment that on on [music] the post when you see them. Uh because it really helps with engagement. And I've been posting tons of news and things on here in the Discord under the DeFi tab. I don't see a lot of interaction with it. Man, there's been some really interesting stories that

47:46I've been posting over there. Would highly, highly encourage you to go look at that. Robin Hood chains first play to earn game just opened a flooded mine. Hello Fall went live around October, too. So, there's all kinds of DeFi stuff. There's the Arbitum story about stylus and that was posted yesterday. So, we're on it when it comes to the news. That is the Defi Hangout. That's where I'm posting all that news as of right now. And I

48:17post what show and all that stuff. Free link to the Discord in the chat. And that's about all I got for you guys tonight. I can't believe that was only an hour. How was that only an hour? I feel like I've been on here for like three hours. Let's check out some other things real quick. Actually, while I got your attention, let's go to trending cryptos. They keep changing this. Or am I clicking a different thing? Recently

48:47listed. That's what I like to look at. So, top 20 search coins. Concrete. We looked at concrete a couple of times. It is up 112%. We caught a lot of these things right as they came out. I mean, lighter, we we were looking at lighter for like two months before the token ever issued, right? Same thing with Zama. We looked at that thing for like a month and a half, two months before it ever issued a token. So, uh, we've been putting it on

49:14your radar for a long time and we're probably the most slept on crypto community and probably one of the newest, right, out there. But a lot of people just want to click on a, hey, y'all do what you want to do. A lot of you guys want to just click on a video that says uh, 10x tokens, 100x tokens, [music] and you don't want to understand anything. And hey, you don't want to raise your crypto IQ, that's on you. So, Blues Guy says, "Yes, sir. I own about

49:43five of [music] them." Let's go. Off to the races with five TRX. Struggle heart says, "Thanks again. I've been listening." I love that. Struggart, you've been consistent. And you I am how much strugg I I think there's no way you haven't raised your crypto IQ a lot, especially if you've been listening. And I can tell you're listening by what you comment. Anyways, yeah, I I could find other things to click on. I could play games

50:34and stuff like that, but like I said, guys, I am absolutely exhausted. So, I appreciate you being here. Stay underground, stay crypto. Catch you in the next one. No stream tomorrow because it's Sunday. Got a lot to do on the resale business. Did a lot of sourcing today. Okay, I was at was at the place I source at for like 7 hours, which is not normal. I'm not normally there. It was just that good. And uh that means I have a ton of work to do tomorrow. Shipping,

51:00all of that stuff. If you don't know what I'm talking about, well, you haven't been here very long. Smash that like button and I'll see you on Monday, 8:30 p.m. New York time with a fresh series. This week, we wrapped up stable coin rails. It's important that you understand them. There's a reason why all of the regulation has been directed towards stable coins and issuers of stable coins and that's where they started. That's what they were most

51:22concerned about especially here in America um that I'm talking about. You might live somewhere else. So, uh it is highly important to understand the dynamics. Now, there's not a lot of room for us to actually capitalize off of something like USDT, but that is what it is. Reliable Jay giving giving the thumbs up. Appreciate using those custom emojis, man. Appreciate you being here as always. I appreciate all my undergrounders, all the support, and the

51:48fact that you guys care about crypto. You guys were mostly here when nobody else cared in the bare market. Y'all are going to be the OGs and hopefully the ones who bought something during those lows and going to receive that, you know, economical financial reward. uh what two two and a half years top of the market type stuff will be up way more than they are now. That's my opinion, never financial advice.

52:16Love y'all. See y'all on Monday, 8:30 p.m.