05-25-2026 
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The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of CoinGeek.
Blockchain token volume has been “dead” for about eighteen months. The non-fungible token (NFT) boom collapsed into a punchline in Miami, where Bored Apes have become very bored indeed. Fan tokens, memecoins, celebrity coins, all of it became evidence that the whole experiment was nonsense.
- Stripe’s bold blockchain vision
- Tokenization in asset management
- Reevaluating the utility of NFTs
- The advantages of the BSV blockchain
- Changing the token/blockchain narrative
Buy a JPEG of a monkey, lose everything, never speak of it again.
So it is interesting to watch, in May of 2026, the suits start saying things that sound suspiciously familiar, but in a totally different context.
Patrick and John Collison of Stripe published their 2025 Annual Letter directly to X, and dropped a sentence that should have shaken the room: “agents will most likely soon be responsible for most internet transactions, and we will likely need blockchains that support more than one million — or even one billion — transactions per second.”
“A billion.” Per second. Said by the people who run the payment rails for most of the internet, not by a Twitter crank with a BSV avatar.
The Collisons backed up the claim with a story. They acquired the stablecoin company Bridge for $1.1 billion in early 2025. Then this happened, in their own words: “Last year, a memecoin trading frenzy on one of the major blockchains delayed payouts for one Bridge user by over 12 hours and spiked per-transaction prices 35x.” So Stripe did what every company seems to do when its blockchain clogs up. They built their own chain.
Tempo, the Stripe blockchain targeting 100,000-plus TPS with sub-second finality, because the existing ones could not do the job. Patrick Collison has also written publicly that stablecoins are “room-temperature superconductors for financial services.” That is the CEO of Stripe saying the quiet part out loud.
Larry Fink at BlackRock (NASDAQ: BLK) has been louder. From his 2025 Chairman’s Letter, amplified on X by Ondo Finance: “Every stock, every bond, every fund—every asset—can be tokenized. And if they are, it will revolutionize investing.” Fink’s BlackRock now runs BUIDL, a tokenized Treasuries fund that crossed $2.5 billion in assets and was accepted as collateral on Binance.
The biggest asset manager in the world is custodying tokens on a public blockchain, so this has become more than a hobby line item.
Robinhood (NASDAQ: HOOD) launched 200-plus tokenized U.S. stocks for 400 million Europeans on June 30, 2025. CEO Vlad Tenev said, “Our latest offerings lay the groundwork for crypto to become the backbone of the global financial system.” Galaxy Digital (NASDAQ: GLXY) tokenized its own SEC-registered shares on Solana in September 2025 and held the first on-chain shareholder vote of a U.S. public company in April 2026. Mike Novogratz said it plainly: “We’re taking part in building a model that can scale, not just for Galaxy, but for the market more broadly.” JPMorgan’s (NASDAQ: JPM) Kinexys platform has processed more than $1.5 trillion since 2020 and now does over $2 billion a day. Circle (NASDAQ: CRCL) is building Arc with Visa (NASDAQ: V), BlackRock, and HSBC (NASDAQ: HSBC) because USDC at a trillion-dollar monthly volume cannot live on a chain that randomly chokes.
PayPal’s (NASDAQ: PYPL) PYUSD has wandered from Ethereum to Solana to Arbitrum to Stellar to Stable Mainnet, looking for throughput that holds up.
This pretext of quotes and examples forces an honest look at the wasted season. Bored Ape Yacht Club was a beautiful idea executed by clowns. Strip away the JPEGs, and what you have is a membership token. A country club without the country club. A verifiable, transferable, programmable claim to access. That is genuinely useful. Then it became pumper economics, paper millionaires posting Lamborghinis, and the underlying concept got buried under the wreckage of what was actually a pretty cool idea.
Then there’s Tether: almost certainly corrupt, so the audits never quite arrive. The reserves are an open question that gets answered with attestations and excuses. And yet the business model is one of the most powerful uses of this technology that exists. A dollar-backed digital bearer instrument used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide for cross-border value transfer. The model is brilliant. The execution is shady. The lesson is not “stablecoins are bad.” The lesson is “Tether got lucky to be first.”
Creator tokens, fan tokens, celebrity coins, all the rest: every one of them was sold as a get-rich-quick play and built on a chain where gas fees ate the value, throughput collapsed under demand, and finality was a coin flip. The casino swallowed the use case.
Now imagine if the same ideas were executed competently. Imagine McDonald’s launches “ArchBucks.”
You earn them on every purchase, you can buy them outright, and you get a 5% discount when you pay with them. Now McDonald’s has a loyalty currency, a treasury asset, and a customer engagement loop that runs on rails they actually trust. Imagine Trump-branded tokens grant access to exclusive dinners or town halls, traded openly like a fan club membership with a real market value. Imagine sports teams issuing fan tokens with actual voting rights on jersey designs, music selections, and ticket allocations. Yacht clubs, dinner clubs, golf courses, and alumni associations all use tokens for verifiable transferable access. Creators issuing tokens that let true superfans own a sliver of upside or unlock private content.
None of this is exotic. It is what tokens were always supposed to do. They were just done by goofballs and put on chains that could not do them well; decisions based on liquidity rather than throughput.
That is the part the BSV community has been quiet about for years, while the world laughed. A blockchain that handles billions of transactions per day at fractions of a penny is not a science project. It is the missing ingredient for what the big boys know is coming. Teranode, the next-generation BSV node, was architected from day one for unbounded scale on the original Bitcoin protocol that Satoshi designed. While other chains were selling marketing decks around 65,000 TPS that turned out to be closer to 292 TPS in the real world, BSV was quietly proving out the math.
Now Stripe is asking for a billion. The SEC is opening the door to exemptive relief for blockchain-based stock trading, and BlackRock is treating tokens as instruments rather than toys. The whole conversation has moved from “is this real” to “which chain can handle it.”
We are going to look back at the JPEG monkey era the way we look at GeoCities. Goofy fonts, blinking text, animated GIFs of dancing babies. A first attempt that needed a real internet underneath it before anyone could build anything serious. The sleeping giant was the use case all along. The chains were not ready. Now the chains are getting ready, and BSV was already there, saying, “Hey guys, you need to scale for these ideas to work!”
The pumpers are not the story. The merchants, the brands, the issuers, the clubs, the funds, the banks, and yes, Stripe, are the story. They are building what the JPEGs only gestured toward. And when they need a chain that can carry that load without breaking, there is exactly one designed from the start for the job.
The giant is waking up.
This opinion piece is published to encourage discussion. The author’s views are their own and do not constitute legal, procurement, or policy advice, nor do they represent the positions of CoinGeek or its partners.
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