#Gate广场四月发帖挑战 Web3 Today Must-Read | April 15

Today’s Quick Overview
• The Fed chairman nominee is heavily invested in crypto assets.
• Visa goes deeper into Stripe’s network as a validator.
• Goldman Sachs files for a Bitcoin options yield ETF.
• CoW Swap is forced to shut down urgently after a frontend hijacking.
• Russia plans to ban funds from being transferred into private wallets.
• Kra submits an IPO application in secret, with a valuation reaching tens of billions.
• Solana’s RWA lending scale surpasses Ethereum for the first time.
• Rakuten Japan opens XRP to 40 million users.
• Wall Street scraps day-trading thresholds, following suit from crypto circles.
• The Ethereum Foundation splashes out millions of dollars to fund audit re-evaluations.

Today’s Insights
We’re witnessing a power reshuffle of the “foundation” of global finance. The most chilling signal isn’t how much Bitcoin has risen again, but the disclosure of holdings by Kevin Warsh, the Fed chair nominee. This guy isn’t just holding Bitcoin—he also has Polymarket shares and positions in the Lightning Network. This means that in the future, the people steering global monetary policy could be “insiders” who deeply understand DeFi logic, even having personally participated in prediction-market battles. Previously, Wall Street viewed crypto as “the odd ones out”; now they want to move the Fed’s office onto the chain directly.
What’s behind this signal is that traditional finance (TradFi) is no longer satisfied with only doing small-time arbitrage by distributing ETFs. Look at Visa’s move: it no longer just wants to be a payment gateway—it has directly stepped in to serve as a validator for Stripe’s Tempo network. This was unthinkable in the past—it's like a printing press endorsing a settlement network used by the public. Add the derivatives-strategy ETF rolled out by Goldman Sachs, and at its core it “standardizes” the volatility of crypto assets into yield language that institutions can understand. Traditional giants are collectively completing the role shift from “skeptics” to “infrastructure builders.”
Interestingly, Wall Street has even started learning the rules of the crypto market in reverse. By abolishing that outdated $25,000 day-trading limit and switching to a real-time margin model, it’s clearly been “outcompeted” by the efficient 24/7 settlement of crypto markets. Before, the crypto world copied the stock market for compliance; now, the stock market is copying the crypto world to improve efficiency. The convergence of that underlying logic suggests that the so-called boundary between the “crypto market” and the “traditional market” is rapidly blurring.
In the future financial world, it may no longer matter whether things are on-chain or off-chain—only the difference between “real-time settlement” and “systems that expire.”

The real heavy hitter is the breakout of RWA (Real-World Assets). Solana’s RWA lending volume has surpassed Ethereum for the first time, and this is an extremely important watershed. It shows that institutional investors are very pragmatic: they don’t care about “orthodoxy”—they only care which path is wider, cheaper, and easier to run. While Ethereum is still busy patching frontend vulnerabilities like CoW Swap and issuing audit subsidies, Solana has already pulled institutional hard cash onto the chain thanks to its high throughput. This transition from “narrative-driven” to “business-driven” is the most hardcore support for this cycle. However, this “convergence” also brings the limits of regulatory pressure. The Russian central bank plans to strictly prohibit funds from being transferred into non-custodial wallets—this is intended to lock everyone’s private keys inside a cage called “compliance.” This reflects a brutal reality: when big institutions and governments move in fully, their first task is to eliminate that kind of “uncontrollable” freedom.
The next arena for the power struggle will no longer be whether cryptocurrencies are legal, but whether the private key string in your hands can still be controlled by you. This ultimate tug-of-war over financial sovereignty has only just begun.