Four Pillars Research

: : [Institution/Comment] Blockchains Can No Longer Be Just Tech Providers
Written by Eren

Since its 2021 launch, Injective has positioned itself as a blockchain built for finance. Fast chain performance alone, however, no longer meets what institutional finance requires. So what does Injective's registration as an SEC transfer agent actually mean?

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: : [Crypto/Article] Umia: A New Way to Build Crypto Projects
Written by Steve

- If crypto’s bottleneck lies not in technology but in capital formation, Umia is a project that aims to redesign the entire process onchain, from company formation and token issuance to treasury management.

- What is particularly interesting is its attempt to use decision markets to put major corporate decisions in the hands of the market, while giving those decisions real-world legal enforceability through a Cayman corporate structure.

- $UMIA is also designed to align the growth of the ecosystem with the value of the token. In that sense, its first auction at the end of August will be the first real test of whether Umia can prove its own capital formation model.

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: : [Data/Comment] Koreans Buy the Alt Top, Not the Bitcoin Top
Written by Ponyo

Korean retail has historically entered mid-cycle as alts started outperforming, with kimchi-premium blowoffs marking altcoin tops more reliably than Bitcoin tops.

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: : [Newletter] Crypto Rebounds: Is Spring Finally Here? (Week 35, 2026)

🗞 Major News
- [Institution] SEC Proposes First Crypto-Specific Offering Rule, "Regulation Crypto Assets"
- [Crypto] Crypto Market Posts Largest Gain in Two Months on Treasury Buybacks and Regulatory Tailwinds

📊 Data Spotlight
- Will Institutional Capital Reach the Rest of Crypto?
- Upbit in 2026: New Listings Propping Up the Volume

✍️ Four Pillars Weekly
- Optimum: Rethinking the Blockchain Network Layer
- Tempo: Where Specialized Blockchains Are Headed

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: : [Asia/Issue] Hong Kong Puts Stablecoins Into Real Use as Japan Tests Onchain Settlement (ASA News #28)
Written by ASA, Heechang

[News #1] Hong Kong Puts HKDAP to Work in Insurance Premiums and Trade Finance Settlement
✍️ From Issuance Announcements to Validating Fund Flows

[News #2] Japan Brings Government Bond Repos Onchain and Tests Interbank Settlement
✍️ Japan’s Integrated Ledger Starts With Government Bonds

[News #3] Korea Expands Overseas Distribution Channels Through Its Offshore Tokenized Securities Interpretation
✍️ The Triangle of Domestic Assets, Overseas Issuance, and Institutional Investors
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[ASA News] is a weekly newsletter where we share the most important stablecoin-related news across Asia, along with commentary from industry insiders. (Subscribe to the Newsletter)

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: : [Data/Comment] Upbit in 2026: New Listings Propping Up the Volume
Written by Rejamong

Upbit's KRW markets added 61 coins this year, and they now drive a quarter of the volume. The listing premium is being spent on defending volume in a down market.

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: : [Data/Comment] Will Institutional Capital Reach the Rest of Crypto?
Written by Jay

As capital in the crypto investment market increasingly shifts toward strategic investment from TradFi and corporates, the benefits are likely to become more selective, concentrating on infrastructure that institutions actually need rather than spreading across the broader crypto ecosystem.

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: : [Asia/Comment] ADGM Emerges as a Tokenized Stock Hub (feat. Coinbase & Binance)
Written by 100y

ADGM has recently emerged as a tokenized equities hub for both Coinbase and Binance. So, what makes ADGM so attractive to these global crypto players?

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: : [Tech/Article] Tempo: Where Specialized Blockchains Are Headed
Written by Rejamong

- Institutional blockchain adoption is starting with payments. For these institutions, a blockchain is not simply a network to deploy products on. It is treated as part of the product itself.

- Instead of building on a finished framework, Tempo picks consensus, data dissemination, and cryptography as individual parts from a parts box called Commonware. The result is a payments-focused L1 that assembles an EVM execution layer and a Threshold Simplex consensus layer into a single binary.

- Tempo builds the requirements of payments into the protocol itself rather than the application layer. Deterministic half-second settlement with no reorgs, blockspace and fees that stay guaranteed regardless of congestion, and issuer policy enforcement and privacy all live inside the consensus rules and the token standard.

- A blockchain reassembled for a specialized purpose gains performance and control optimized for that purpose, but it trades away many of the values of a traditional blockchain. Decentralized networks and specialized networks are complements rather than substitutes, and Tempo is a concrete example of the technical direction specialized chains are taking.

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: : [Newletter] Bitcoin Stalls, Tether Evolves (Week 34, 2026)

🗞 Major News
- [Crypto] BIP-110 Forks From Bitcoin, but Fails to Gain Adoption
- [Institution] Tether Completes Its First Full Financial Audit With KPMG

📊 Data Spotlight
- PUMP Insiders Kept 92% of the July Unlock
- The Dying Upbit Listing Pump
- Is Money That Keeps Changing Its Roadmap Still Money?
- Stablecoin Payment is Actually Not Moving Cross Border
- Do Prediction Markets Work as Hedges?

✍️ Four Pillars Weekly
- Tokenized Stocks: The Next Battleground
- Tokenized Money for Banks
- Korea Needs Tokenized Deposit, and Strategies Beyond
- Monad: The Last General-Purpose L1

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: : [Crypto/Issue] Optimum: Rethinking the Blockchain Network Layer
Written by c4lvin

- Discussions around Ethereum's scalability have largely centered on two domains: the execution layer and the consensus layer. The networking layer, or the gossip protocol that determines how data propagates between validators, has received relatively little attention, and Optimum is a project that targets exactly this area.

- Optimum's flagship product, mump2p, is a data propagation protocol built on RLNC (Random Linear Network Coding), a protocol co-invented by Optimum's CEO and MIT professor Muriel Médard. It is designed to replace GossipSub, Ethereum's existing gossip protocol. Early test results shows that Optimum records an average block propagation speed 2.42x faster than the GossipSub baseline (2.50x faster on a median basis). while propagation variance ran approximately 7.88x lower than libp2p (2.81x lower on a std-dev basis), meaning both faster and far more consistent delivery.

- From a validator's perspective, an additional 50 to 150ms of slot time raises the average MEV bid value by 13 to 16 percent and can lift the network-wide head vote accuracy from 98.6 percent to between 98.8 and 99.1 percent. According to Optimum's analysis, major validator operators accounting for 36 percent of Ethereum's total stake could see their staking rewards rise by roughly 0.66 to 1.97 percent, about 6 to 19 extra ETH per year on a 32,000 ETH stake.

- Optimum runs in parallel with existing consensus clients as a sidecar without requiring any consensus changes, which keeps adoption friction low. The more fundamental implication, however, lies in what this means for Ethereum's future roadmap. Scaling scenarios such as shorter slot times, larger blobs, and accommodating a greater number of validators all presuppose the throughput limits of the networking layer.

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: : [Asia/Issue] Hong Kong Launches HKDAP and Japan Brings JGB Repo Onchain (ASA News #27)
Written by ASA, Heechang

[News #1] Hong Kong Moves Licensed Stablecoins Into Real Distribution With the HKDAP Phase 1 Launch
✍️ Hong Kong's First Test From Issuance to Real Use

[News #2] Korea Tightens Both Operator Screening and Transfer Management Under the Specific Financial Information Act
✍️ Korea's Regulatory Focus Gatekeeping

[News #3] Japan Moves Into a Core Institutional Finance Market as MUFG Brings JGB Repo Onchain
✍️ Tokenization's Center of Gravity Moves Toward the Repo Market
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[ASA News] is a weekly newsletter where we share the most important stablecoin-related news across Asia, along with commentary from industry insiders. (Subscribe to the Newsletter)

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: : [Crypto/Comment] Why Headless Merchant Endpoint Matters
Written by Jun

Agentic commerce is most likely to gain adoption where the benefits of automation exceed the trust cost of delegating payment authority to AI.

Headless merchant endpoints are well suited to low-value, high-frequency transactions and could support the early T3 market while helping develop payment infrastructure and trust technology.

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: : [Data/Comment] Stablecoin Payment is Actually Not Moving Cross Border
Written by Heechang

For institutions evaluating stablecoin payment demand, domestic settlement services and regional Asia Pacific corridors therefore offer the largest immediate opportunities.

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: : [Data/Comment] Do Prediction Markets Work as Hedges?
Written by Eren

Can prediction markets work as hedging instruments? Data from Kalshi weather, Kalshi sports, and CME grain futures offers an answer.

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: : [Data/Comment] Is Money That Keeps Changing Its Roadmap Still Money?
Written by Rejamong

Ethereum has been overhauling its roadmap for ten years now. Positioning ETH as money in the traditional sense helps neither the network's evolution nor ETH's valuation.

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: : [Crypto/Report] Monad: The Last General-Purpose L1
Written by c4lvin

- Monad is the last case in which record levels of capital and time were bet on the thesis of a "high-performance general-purpose chain that can hold everything." It is also the final large-scale experiment testing whether integrated production can beat specialization in an era when chains are dividing into purpose-built roles. Its conditions for success come down to three things: 1) proving the composability premium that only integration can create, 2) keeping successful apps from leaving, and 3) monetizing demand that works without incentives.

- Monad's ecosystem is the product of a four-stage funnel: community building designed as a status economy without a token, a founder pipeline represented by Monad Madness, testnet validation backed by 2.6 billion cumulative transactions and the full open-sourcing of its clients, and staged support after mainnet. That process, however, only cleared doubts about the technology. Whether the traffic represents real demand that will remain once costs apply is something only post-mainnet metrics can prove.

- Results in the trading sector split sharply. Kuru overtook Uniswap in volume with a 36.4% share even as chain-wide volume shrank, but its fees remain effectively zero. Perpl is small in scale but has been charging fees and growing from the start. LeverUp records the largest volume and fees with its house model, though its thin user base concentrated in a few wallets remains a caveat. The landscape shifted in July, however. The perps segment led a rebound in chain-wide trading volume, with 30-day perpetual futures volume ($1.6 billion, based on the Foundation's figures) overtaking spot volume ($1.3 billion) for the first time. Perpl recorded $1 billion in cumulative volume and more than $800 million for the month, rising to the top of the ecosystem by weekly trading volume.

- Lending currently contributes the most to Monad's TVL, but much of that capital is mercenary money that follows incentives. Liquid staking shows the widest gap between expectations and results: combined TVL sits at roughly $12 million against more than $46 million raised. Structural factors, namely native staking built into consensus and the absence of slashing, limit the added value liquid staking protocols can offer.

- Stablecoin supply passed an all-time high of $517 million, but the increase was driven by a single asset, AUSD, in tandem with Pendle incentives. Outcomes pointing toward payments, RWA, and institutions, such as MetaMask's Money Account choosing Monad as its sole settlement chain, Aave's official deployment, and joining the x402 Foundation, are only beginning to show up in the data. This trend gained full momentum in July. Aave's total deposits crossed $500 million within a month of deployment, lifting Monad's DeFi TVL to $770 million and placing it in the top 10 across all chains. Stablecoin supply expanded beyond $550 million, and the onboarding of new dollar assets such as Ethena, Maple, and Saturn Credit diversified the sources of inflows. The active market cap of RWAs surpassed $430 million, making Monad the third-largest RWA chain after Ethereum and Solana.

- The nearest variable over the next six months is the TGEs of ecosystem projects. Beyond valuation events for individual projects, the TGE cycle will be the first sector-by-sector measurement of how much demand stays on Monad without incentives.

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: : [Data/Comment] PUMP Insiders Kept 92% of the July Unlock
Written by Ponyo

Despite an $80 million team and early-investor unlock, only 7.6% of the July PUMP allocation was sold.

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: : [Asia/Report] Korea Needs Tokenized Deposit, and Strategies Beyond
Written by Heechang

- Tokenized cash is already settling wholesale markets around the clock, while stablecoin migration could erode the deposit base, so banks must offer money that works on onchain rails.

- Tokenized deposits answer both pressures. The client gains onchain settlement while the claim stays a deposit, preserving insurance, interest, and the lending relationship.

- Korean banks can build this today through Project Hangang, and the JPMD precedent shows deposit tokens can reach public blockchains under whitelisted access ahead of the stablecoin law.

- The law sets the sequence. Build deposit token rails now, prepare won stablecoin issuance for when the Digital Asset Basic Act passes, and move before others capture the flow.

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: : [Data/Comment] The Dying Upbit Listing Pump
Written by Ponyo

The 14 fresh Upbit listings since June 15 carry a median first-day gain of 10% on median turnover of ₩54 billion. The best of them, HOME, managed 90%, and 8 of the 14 closed their first day below the open.

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