The original text is " Stablecoin Treasury Company ", translated by Odaily Planet Daily jk.

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering finance, consistently ranking as the most read columnist on Bloomberg Finance. He was formerly the editor of Dealbreakers and has worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, as an M&A lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, and as an associate judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

Stablecoin asset allocation strategy?

Here is a trading method:

You start a company and issue 100 shares at $1 per share, raising $100 in total. Use this $100 to buy ______.

The company now has $100 worth of ______ on its books and nothing else, for a net asset value of $100. The market is very optimistic about ______, and the stock price rises to $2 per share (a 100% premium to net asset value), giving it a market capitalization of $200.

You issue another 50 shares at $2 per share, raising another $100. You use this $100 to buy more ______. You now have $200 worth of ______, with a net asset value of $200.

There are 150 shares outstanding, with a net asset value of $1.33 per share. The stock price continues to rise to $2.66 per share (still a 100% premium to net asset value), with a market capitalization of $400.

You issue another 50 shares at $2.66 per share, raising $133 , and continue to buy ______.

Shareholders were delighted : "This company is continually increasing its holdings by ______ per share, using clever capital management strategies to compound shareholder value. Therefore, it deserves to trade at a premium to its net asset value. If you buy ______ directly, you only get a fixed amount, but buying the company's stock gives you a growing share of ______."

Is there a flaw in this logic? Let's discuss it. If you fill in "Bitcoin" in the ______, that's MicroStrategy's approach . This strategy has indeed worked for a long time with large capital flows, although the premium has narrowed recently. MicroStrategy's success has attracted a lot of followers, some of whom are also hoarding Bitcoin, Ethereum, Trumpcoin, Dogecoin, gold, or GameStop stock.

Ideally, ______ should contain something interesting and dynamic; I've mentioned before that it should be "crypto-related." But the point I want to emphasize is that what's in ______ isn't really important. The core of this entire transaction is capital management: as long as you can issue shares at a premium to acquire assets, you can increase net asset value per share, which in turn justifies the premium. An increase in the value of the acquired assets is certainly a tailwind, but it's not a requirement. This strategy works for anything of value.

For example, money itself has value. So, what about "I issue shares at a premium and deposit the money in the bank. Because the premium allows me to continuously increase my cash per share, I can continue to issue shares at a premium"? Let's discuss! Isn't this too opportunistic? What about stablecoins? Stablecoins are definitely crypto-related, right? How about "I issue shares at a premium to invest in crypto assets, and the crypto tokens I put into my asset vault are USD stablecoins"?

I hope someone does this, because it's both the best and dumbest trade I've ever written about in this column. I should quit my job and start a USDT asset management company. As far as I know, no one's done that yet. I actually received a press release today from StableX Technologies Inc., which changed its name from AYRO Inc. two weeks ago "to better reflect its strategic transformation and new focus on investing in foundational tokens for the stablecoin industry." I was expecting it! But no, this is what happened:

StableX Technologies, Inc., formerly AYRO, Inc. (NASDAQ: SBLX) ("StableX" or the "Company"), today announced the commencement of purchases of FLUID tokens, marking the Company's first transaction since announcing its focus on investing in foundational tokens for the stablecoin industry.

"This inaugural purchase of FLUID tokens marks the beginning of a significant new chapter for StableX," said James Altucher, Manager of Digital Asset Management at StableX. "In less than a year, FLUID has grown from zero to a market leader in stablecoin trading, generating millions of dollars in monthly fees and experiencing phenomenal community growth. Due to this surge in fee volume, FLUID has announced a token buyback program using all proceeds starting October 1, 2025, which we believe will be a significant catalyst for FLUID's price appreciation. While the purchase of FLUID is StableX's first investment in its stablecoin industry token portfolio, we look forward to updating stakeholders as we execute on our planned portfolio expansion through the acquisition of additional high-value assets within the stablecoin industry. The launch of our previously announced strategy, with FLUID as our first purchase, demonstrates the value of acquiring foundational tokens within the stablecoin industry. As the industry continues to accelerate, we believe this token purchase strategy will be a primary beneficiary, creating value for all stakeholders."

Disappointingly, FLUID isn't a stablecoin, but rather an equity/governance token for a decentralized crypto lending and trading protocol. StableX isn't exactly a stablecoin asset management company either; it doesn't issue shares to buy stablecoins, but rather to buy "tokens that will drive the rapid development of the stablecoin industry." Still, it's pretty close.

In addition, of course:

Traders are frantically buying into a corrugated packaging company that's acquiring tokens tied to OpenAI boss Sam Altman's iris-scanning crypto project, sending its stock price soaring 3,000% in a day.

Eightco Holdings, which makes custom packaging products and also has an e-commerce inventory management division, announced on Monday that it would implement a "first-of-its-kind" strategy by acquiring Worldcoin tokens, a core component of the Ultraman World digital identity project.

It will change its stock symbol to ORBS (Odaily Note: Worldcoin's spherical hardware for collecting iris data).

Blockchain mergers and acquisitions!

We recently discussed the topic of "AI M&A integration." M&A integration involves a buyer acquiring a group of smaller companies in the same industry. The theoretical basis for this is (1) economies of scale and (2) the buyer possesses certain general skills or technologies that can be applied to each company, making them all more efficient. Traditionally, M&A integration has been handled by private equity firms, and the theory behind this approach—financial leverage, cost control, incentive adjustments, and having Harvard MBAs run plumbing operations—is widely applicable and can improve many businesses.

But AI mergers and acquisitions have become popular lately, often driven by venture capital, where instead of throwing Harvard MBAs at a bunch of small companies, they're throwing generative AI models at them. More abstractly, the point is that if you have a powerful general-purpose business technology that requires scale and sophistication to implement—like AI or leveraged finance—then you can create value by applying that technology to scale and sophistication, acquiring companies that can't.

Another topic we used to discuss frequently, but haven't discussed in years, is "blockchain, blockchain, blockchain." As I vaguely recall, the idea back then was that "blockchain"—the distributed ledger technology popularized by Bitcoin—would revolutionize business and technology. With blockchain technology, banks could... transfer money... and stock exchanges could... trade stocks... I don't know. Everyone was definitely excited at the time, but I can't quite recall why. The consensus now is that blockchain was forgotten once ChatGPT came out. While blockchain's theoretical revolutionary potential was always in the near future, generative AI, which provides a chat window where you can ask questions and get answers, is more tangible. That's why crypto venture capital has shifted to AI venture capital.

But if you're serious about blockchain, there's a way to combine these two themes. And that's blockchain M&A. You set up a private equity fund, raise capital, and then acquire small accounting, pest control, plumbing, or other businesses. Then, you use your powerful and sophisticated general-purpose technology—in this case, blockchain—to make these businesses more efficient. Because blockchain is so powerful and so difficult for plumbers or accountants to deploy, you can create significant value this way.

This specific idea has never crossed my mind, for a reason, but here’s a Wall Street Journal report about someone doing blockchain M&A:

New York-based Inversion Labs plans to acquire low-profit companies, equip them with blockchain to improve efficiency, and then reap the profits that follow.

"The technology is powerful, but the reality is that there aren't that many active cryptocurrency users," said Santiago Roel Santos, co-founder and CEO of Inversion. "Our North Star is to make cryptocurrency invisible to users. They can't see how the technology works, but they can feel the impact. It's going to be faster, better, and cheaper."

Inversion will target private and public companies with large user bases and internal infrastructure they believe are suitable for blockchain transformation, Dannheim said.

“You can acquire and embed it into a product that drives revenue, or you can rip out a bad operating system and replace it with a better one based on blockchain,” Dannheim said.

Inversion is initially targeting South American telecom companies and has submitted several acquisition targets. Denheim said blockchain could enable these companies to reduce data procurement costs, among other improvements.

Why not? Back in the heyday of blockchain (2017), I received several press releases about Dentacoin (a dentist blockchain) every week. Perhaps there are opportunities for M&A there as well.