Circle buys USDC global payment network in major crypto expansion

Scott Melker discusses Circle’s acquisition of cross-border payment platform Tazapay, Iran easing currency controls to allow exporters to use crypto for foreign trade, Grayscale’s Zcash ETF reaching $500 million in assets and other big crypto news.

“The Daily Wolf with Scott Melker” airs every day at 12:00 p.m. Tune in for your daily dose of all things crypto.

Yesterday in our segment how not to invest, I talked about Hunter Biden’s laptop token that was launching today. Spoiler, it went up big and went down even bigger. We’re going to talk about that and everything happening in crypto markets today on the Daily Wolf. Let’s go.

What is up everybody? Welcome to the Daily Wolf on Yahoo Finance. I am your host Scott Melker, also known as the Wolf of All Streets. You can check me out on X @ Scottmelker, also Scottmelker on YouTube. I have to tell you that if you are not watching my YouTube show at 9:00 a.m. you are really missing out. We have the most exceptional lineup of guest interviews there on any channel regarding crypto. Today we had Matt Hogan, we’ve got Mark Moss coming this week. Tomorrow Matt Cole the CEO of Strive. We’ve got Caitlyn Long coming, Jordi Visser on Macro Monday. The lineup is absolutely insane and those interviews are not to be missed. But

now you’re watching this show and you probably want to hear what’s going on in the crypto news. And the first big story of the day is this one. Circle expands global payments infrastructure with agreement to acquire Singapore-based cross-border payments platform Tasa Pay. Yes, that is a massive mouthful, but this is a meaningful development for Circle in the race for stable coins supremacy. So they’ve agreed to purchase this company for about, what was the number? Valued at about $400 million dollars, although it has not been officially disclosed. So Tasa Pay processes more than $25 billion dollars in annualized payment volume, but most importantly, approximately 60% of that volume

already involves stable coins and they also bring more than 60 banking and Fintech partners plus local payment pay payout capabilities across more than 100 markets. They’re one of the biggest players in cross border payments. Now they’ve been working with Circle for quite a while. They’ve been a design partner for the Circle payments network since 2025. This transaction is expected to close in 2027. This is not happening yet and that of course is subject to uh regulatory approval from authorities including the monetary authority of Singapore. So we know that Circle like many other stable coins already issue digital dollars. But now they’re looking for ways to expand the network of actually using those digital dollars by buying the connections required to move those dollars into local bank accounts around the world. Now, Circle wants stable coins to power ordinary international commerce.

In Iran, crypto is serving a much more controversial purpose. That’s our second story today. Iran uses currency controls to let traders bring earnings home in crypto from the financial times. Exporters can use overseas earnings to fund import imports directly, bypassing the official foreign exchange system the FT reported. So they’re relaxing their currency controls to help exporters bring foreign earnings home, which is a

huge story when we know that one of the main uses of crypto, whether we like it or not, is to give people ways to move money outside of the normal financial system and to evade sanctions, right? I mean crypto is for everybody that can include your enemies like Iran and North Korea. But we’ve seen stories best at gloating on the news very regularly about how much crypto has been frozen, how they’ve sanctioned all the exchanges, how using Tether, they’ve been able to freeze massive accounts that are attached to the regime. Well, there are still plenty of ways that the Iranian government is using or allowing, I should say the use of crypto to circumvent those uh those those sanctions. So exporters here will be allowed to use open market mechanisms including cryptocurrency to finance certain in points imports primarily with Bitcoin and Tether because those can move value through trading corridors corridors where sanctions restrict access to correspondent banks and conventional payment systems. Now,

approximately 10 billion in cryptocurrency moved through Iran uh during 2025. I’ve told you stories in the past of how Iran has had a massive, massive plan to evade sanctions using crypto including their massive Bitcoin mining, which caused power outages in Tehran and of course using other crypto to make these cross-border payments. So, to be clear, in no way here is crypto replacing their broader financial system, but it can fill in specific gaps that are created here by sanctions. And this will largely develop this development will likely increase scrutiny of stable coin issuers and their ability to identify and freeze sanction funds. So we’re talking about, you know, a story like Circle buying Tazape to be able to do cross-border payments all over the world.

now if they’re doing that in Iran, they’re going to likely have to watch sanction wallets and continue to freeze transactions much like they have done alongside Tether. I mean the financial system spent years saying that crypto had no real world use case. Uh sanctions apparently forgot to read that memo because evading them, uh it’s a really good use case for for crypto right now. Now governments see permissionless uh payments and financial privacy as a potential threat, but investors increasingly see privacy as a product. and we’ve talked about the irony of this next story but we have this. Grayscale Zcash ETF tops 500 million.

with 100 million from an affiliate showing strong but partly internal growth. What a hedged and uh vague headline. It did really good but maybe it did kind of less, but some of it might be external but also partly internal. Right? But so first of all, talking about the irony, right? is the fact that the United States government actively is trying and governments all over the world trying to block private transactions on blockchains. Blockchains are very public, they’re very easy to actually figure out who’s doing what and where. Uh and Zcash is one of the favored privacy narrative coins that people use to avoid being uh having their transactions seen.

Right and privacy has become a huge narrative in crypto, it always was but as we see the adoption with institutions and governments, obviously privacy becomes a larger concern. So Zcash itself is used for private transactions and nothing says privacy like putting it in an ETF wrapper where everybody can see what you’re doing in your e-trade or Charles Schwab account. Right? But this has seen a massive uptake in interest here in its first two weeks. I mean it’s 500 million in assets accumulated only two weeks after listing on Arca. So first of all this had great timing because we’ve seen a massive market move in the last two weeks across crypto generally and Zcash made a new all-time high near 12 a new, you know, local high near $1,200 recently. So they really timed this particular particularly well. But the fund now holds more than 550,000 Zcash, which is approximately 3% of the circulating supply. This is meaningful and options are already trading on the ETF, which just began on Tuesday.

So obviously ZCSH, which is this product gives brokerage customers exposure to a privacy focus cryptocurrency without requiring them to buy or custody ZEC directly. So the caveat that’s in that uh headline that I showed you is that uh you know, 500 million in assets does not mean that investors deposited 500 million during the past two weeks. 100 million of that came from an affiliate of Grayscale’s parent company Digital Currency Group which contributed existing ZEC in exchange for ETF shares. So basically they took their actual ZEC and they did an in-kind transaction and converted it into shares in the ETF, obviously to help uh I would say with the popularity and to help push AUM. There’s probably some tax advantage to doing that as well. But

to me this shows that there is still a relatively major appetite in the market right now for single asset ETFs, which many believe stopped at hyper liquid. Right? We’ve seen very very successful launches of hyper liquid ETFs but there’s a point when you go down the risk curve where single asset ETFs may not make a lot of sense, but there are still assets like Zcash that have done so well

that this can be a successful product. I find it uh really, really interesting that this has done so well. So listen, the organic inflows are a little smaller than reported, but this still matters, right? And Zcash is bringing privacy into your brokerage account, sort of. The next ETF that we’re going to talk about here brings crypto native staking rewards with it and it’s another one being launched. Single asset ETF. Wall Street’s newest crypto fund comes with a staking feature to boost returns. There he is Justin Sun, Mr Banana suing World Liberty Financial himself. You remember the early days of the show and we had amazing memes and lots of people just to talk about. haven’t been that many memeable moments, but he is. This is Canary Capital launching a stake TRX ETF called TRXS. Staking means that they will stake the assets that are accumulated in the ETF and then more TRX will then be added. 80% of those rewards are passed on to staking related fees. So you actually get effectively a yield for holding this asset. Now TRX has actually been one of the few cryptocurrencies that’s performed well every year. I think it’s up

four years in a row and still doing well and largely that’s because half of Tether’s uh AUM is actually being used on Tron. Around the world, even though people don’t realize it, most people are using Tron wallets to send small amounts of stable coins because it’s cheap and it’s fast and they don’t really care what network that it’s happening on. So once again, we have a single asset ETF that could be successful. We don’t know if it’s actually going to be successful as of yet, but is being launched here. So somebody believes that there’s still an appetite for this, those people are obviously Canary Capital. uh and it’s not a surprise that Wall Street finally embraced staking here because they discovered that they can charge basically two separate fees to do it. So ETFs are making crypto native products look like uh conventional

investments here and Robin Hood is now doing the same thing with future events in prediction markets. Of course, this is the next big story. Not a crypto story per se, but we like to talk about the AI here. We’ll, you know, just like to dabble in the AIs. By the way, if you missed the other stories on AI today, it’s going to kill us all and it’s over.

In case you didn’t see that. We have guys leaving Anthropic and Deepseek and Open AI because they said that AGI is here and that there’s a 10% chance that uh the world is going to end in the next two weeks because of AI. So just wanted you to put that on your radar uh in case you want to think about things more important than prediction markets, like uh getting your affairs in order and saying goodbye to your loved ones. Robin Hood strikes deal with crypto Robin Hood strikes deal

with crypto.com in latest prediction markets push. So we had talked about that they were potentially doing this. Clearly prediction markets are commoditized here and for a platform like Robin Hood, it makes a hell of a lot of sense for them to work with multiple potential partners to provide different kinds of uh prediction markets. So they signed a multi-year deal here with crypto.com and its prediction market exchange and clearing house OG.com. So interestingly crypto.com had recently gotten a massive uh investment from Citadel. So I don’t remember the evaluation, 20, 30 billion, something like that. I think it was around 20 billion. Uh and Robin Hood as a part of this is actually getting a stake here in both crypto.com and OG, which are minority stakes of course. So Robin Hood will be routing some event contracts through OG while continuing to use Kalshi and all of their other providers. They are very very promiscuous when it comes to who they’ll do prediction markets with.

Robin Hood’s doing prediction markets with people all over the place. They don’t even care. No, no standards. Uh so this additional expansion includes football contracts with election focused product hub plant. This is mostly football. Now if you look back, right, customers traded 13.6 billion event contracts during the second quarter including approximately 5 billion connected to the World Cup. So obviously the World Cup was a huge catalyst. Now we have the NFL football season starting tonight.

Crazy because it’s a Wednesday and now we do football on Wednesdays, right? Uh so it’s starting tonight. So obviously looking to capitalize on actual football that the Americans play with the oblong ball that doesn’t use your feet. So uh yeah, this is a massive move once again by Robin Hood into the prediction markets uh world, becoming the everything app for everything and everywhere and everyone.

And now I don’t even have a image to show you or anything, but we’re going to do a update on yesterday’s how not to invest. Hit the music.

How not to invest. How not to invest.

So I’m not even going to take a look at the chart right now because I looked 90 minutes ago and I spontaneously vomited on the desk and I decided that I didn’t want to spontaneo spontaneously vomit once again live. So I told you yesterday that laptop from Hunter Biden was launching. We have yet another political grift in the memecoin space promising amazing utility if you buy their token because it will support the Democratic party and the Bidens and Bitcoin price going up.

Who knows. Okay, So what I saw from the chart at 8:00 a.m. this morning was that I took a look and it went from zero to a 110 billion dollars in about five minutes, $110 billion. Trump Token made it to about 75 billion for reference. But it went straight up

and then had slowly just continued all the way down to last time I checked, it was about 400 million dollars. So, uh to put it the round there, round numbers, you know, if the token was up at let’s call it what, $400 near the top, you know, now trading under a buck. I don’t know what it is now because I’m not going to look and it doesn’t matter because this is entirely avoidable. This is entirely criminal. This is entirely stupid. And if you’re still participating in these, you probably unfortunately deserve exactly what you’re getting. But here’s a hint. Don’t buy the next stupid political memecoin from some idiot on the internet. That’s all I got for you tomorrow. Uh today. I’ll see you tomorrow. Peace.

Source: finance.yahoo.com