Welcome to our institutional newsletter, Crypto Long & Short. This week:
- Sylvia To about AI agents choosing denationalized money
- Top headlines institutions should be aware of by Francisco Rodrigues
- Kamino Hits $90M in OnRe Liquidity, While $KMNO Falls 16% in Chart of the Week
Thanks for joining us!
-Alexandra Levis
Expert insight
Hayek predicted it, Satoshi built it, agents will use it: stealth denationalization of money
– Off Sylvia Twovice president, Bullish Capital Management
While FA Hayek, Satoshi and AI may seem like three unrelated topics, the next few minutes will reveal exactly how critical this triad is to our financial sovereignty, and it will fundamentally change your view of money as we know it.
Crypto’s cypherpunk ethos
Amid flashy distractions of memecoins, speculation and NFTs, Satoshi would like us to remember the true ethos of crypto, which is: privacy, decentralization and censorship resistance. These ideologies did not come from central banks or policy makers. They came from cypherpunk’s definition that freedom is best defended not by persuasion, but by architecture.
As Vitalik Buterin recently articulated in his March 2026 thread on X, this means building “sanctuary technologies” that create “shared digital space without an owner,” enabling “interdependence that cannot be weaponized” and promoting “de-totalization” to prevent total control by any power.
Money should be a product, not a decree
In 1976, Hayek argued that money should not be “legal tender” forced upon people by the state. It should be discovered, adopted and discarded through market choice like any other product. His book Denationalization of money outlined these characteristics of “good money”:
• Non-government issue: not decreed, not reconciled, not salvageable.
• Rule-based monetary policy: predictable supply plan, not discretionary.
• Global Choice: Adoption is voluntary; everyone can opt in or out.
• Resistance to capture: no central issuer to pressure, no board to replace.
• Settlement without permission: value transfer does not require institutional approval.
Does that sound familiar? Yes, Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is in a special category in that experiment. Not because it is perfect today, but because it is probably the first monetary network to meet Hayek’s central requirements. It is money that is brought in by a road that cannot be easily stopped. As Bitcoin undergoes price discovery, its volatility is the cost of birth and the market determines what an uncontrolled, fiduciary scarce asset is worth in a world trained for fiat. But even in the turbulent phase, Bitcoin checks a surprising number of Hayek’s boxes.
The Trojan Horse: Stable Coins and the Trap Inside It
To be honest, stablecoins are currently one of crypto’s most successful use cases. They are fast, programmable and easy to price. They move across borders with far less friction than bank wires.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: stablecoins don’t denationalize money. They digitize the existing national money and expand its reach. Most stablecoins do not compete with the dollar. They import the dollar.
The dollar is a tool in state politics. Affiliation with it binds you to its inflation, its surveillance, its sanctions regime, its banking freeze and its regulatory priorities. Stablecoins may feel like freedom because they move on open networks, but their reference asset is still the same old sovereign instrument.
So while stablecoins can be useful, they also run the risk of becoming the perfect bridge to tighter control. In that sense, stablecoins are not neutral. They are a competitor to decentralized currencies. If bitcoin is denationalization, stablecoins are nationalization with better user interface.
The right end user
This is where the story gets more interesting and more Hayekian.
Humans are emotional, irrational, politically driven and short-sighted. Our monetary systems reflect that. We routinely trade long-term stability for short-term relief, then act surprised when crises worsen.
But what happens when most of the participants in the economy are not human?
With the rapid rise of agent software and apps increasingly designed for agents using frameworks like the Model Context Protocol (MCP), there is a credible near-term future where autonomous agents purchase services, data, computing, API calls, storage, inference, and specialized tools through continuous micropayments.
Agents will care less about branding and narratives and more about properties such as:
• machine-readable transaction metadata
• instant, programmable finality
• compatibility with other systems
• low transaction costs
• censorship resistance (because uptime is a feature)
• predictable monetary rules (because models optimize against them)
In other words: agents will gravitate towards money that behaves like good infrastructure. A stablecoin is stable because an issuer maintains a peg. An agent might ask: What is the error condition for the issuer? What is the political risk? What is the censorship risk? What is the settlement risk under stress? Bitcoin’s value may fluctuate, but its ruleset is unusually legible. Its issuance is not negotiated. Its core features do not depend on a board decision, a regulator’s discretion or a nation’s solvency.
Perhaps humans will not choose the best money because we are too entangled in politics, habits and fears.
Perhaps Hayek’s “new money” was never intended for humans—at least not at first.
Perhaps the path that governments “cannot stop” is not a mass political movement.
Perhaps AI agents operating at machine speed, unconcerned with national identity, and optimizing for reliability, can rule over the new monetary rails.
When that tipping point comes, the denationalization of money will not feel like a philosophical triumph. It will be an inevitable engineering result, driven not by ideology but by raw mechanical necessity.
When that tipping point comes, the denationalization of money will not feel like a philosophical triumph. It will be an inevitable engineering result, driven not by ideology but by raw mechanical necessity.
This week’s headlines
– Off Francisco Rodrigues
Traditional financial giants, including the owner of the NYSE, ICE and Morgan Stanley, have continued to make strategic moves in the crypto space, while regulatory milestones like Kraken securing Fed access signal the industry’s path towards mainstream integration.
- NYSE owner invests in crypto exchange OKX worth $25 billion: Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, acquired a minority stake in crypto exchange OKX, valuing the company at $25 billion. ICE will license OKX’s spot crypto prices to launch crypto futures, while OKX will offer ICE futures and tokenized shares to its clients.
- Morgan Stanley names Coinbase and BNY as custodians in proposed bitcoin ETF filing: The Wall Street giant updated its S-1 filing for a proposed spot bitcoin ETF, naming BNY as administrator and cash custodian and Coinbase Custody as crypto custodian.
- Kraken becomes the first crypto firm to secure Fed master account access: The approval lets Kraken speed up deposits and withdrawals for large merchant and institutional clients, but is limited in that Kraken does not earn interest on reserves or access the Fed’s emergency lending.
- Kazakhstan’s central bank will invest $350 million gold, foreign exchange reserves in digital assets: The strategy will focus on shares of high-tech and cryptocurrency infrastructure companies, as well as crypto-linked index funds.
- Billions in crypto move in Iran. Analysts can’t agree on whether it’s wartime panic or business as usual: When airstrikes hit Iran on February 28, crypto outflows from Nobitex surged 873%, suggesting a “digital bank run” was underway. The reality may be more complex.
Chart of the week
Kamino Hits $90M In OnRe Liquidity While $KMNO Falls 16%
Kamino’s OnRe market has increased by 80% to almost DKK 90 million. USD in 30 days, cementing its position as the primary liquidity layer for OnRes on-chain reinsurance protocol. This growth allows users to bet on a $480B+ vertical using $ONyc – a tokenized insurance asset – as collateral.
However, this basic RWA scaling differs sharply from the original $KMNO token; The KMNO/SOL pair is down 16% over six months, pressured by a broader market decline and 13M monthly token unlocks (0.13% of total supply).
Listen. Read. Clock. Engage.
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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.
