Coinbase Cases - Coinbase files lawsuits in 3 states over attempts to regulate prediction markets.

Chair Confirmed - Senate confirms CFTC Chair pick Michael Selig as agency takes larger role regulating crypto.

Stable Partnership - Intuit partners with Circle to integrate stablecoin infra, USDC across its platform.

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Messari’s Theses 2026 multi-chain roundtable takes a hard look at who’s actually winning the L1 and L2 wars—and what that means for the next cycle. The Enterprise team breaks down Ethereum’s recovery from 2025 lows, why Arbitrum and Base are separating from the L2 pack, how a potential Robinhood chain could reshape rollups, and what experiments like MegaETH’s native stablecoin signal for value capture. The conversation also introduces Messari’s new Disruption Factor framework, examines Solana’s push to become the “onchain NASDAQ,” and closes with forward-looking takes on Starknet, Monad, and native stablecoins heading into 2026.

Watch the full discussion on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

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Earlier this week, Circle announced it is acquiring the Interop Labs team and their proprietary intellectual property, with the deal expected to close in early 2026. The acquisition is designed to accelerate Circle’s interoperability roadmap for Arc and CCTP, strengthening its multichain developer tooling and native application stack. The Axelar Network, Foundation, and AXL token will remain independent under community governance, open-source components will stay public, and Common Prefix will assume Interop Labs’ prior network activities.

Strategically, the deal makes sense. Stablecoins are increasingly becoming global settlement rails, and settlement cannot be chain-specific. For Circle, owning in-house interoperability tooling reduces dependency risk and shortens product timelines. Buying a team that has already shipped cross-chain infrastructure is faster and more defensible than building internally, especially as stablecoins push deeper into payments and onchain finance. 

The backlash came from tokenholders. Many interpreted the headline as “Axelar got acquired” and expected value to accrue to AXL. Instead, the acquisition flowed to the developer company and its employees, not the token. That gap reignited a familiar crypto grievance where tokenholders help bootstrap ecosystems, but when teams exit via M&A, tokens often sit outside the transaction.

What made this deal so inflammatory is not that a team moved on, but that crypto still blurs the line between owning a network and owning the company building it. Tokens are sold as aligned exposure, while equity governs employment, IP, and exit outcomes. In practice, tokens sit at the bottom of the preference stack, with no contractual claim on acquisition proceeds. When a dev company is acquihired, there is often no obligation, and sometimes no value, to distribute to tokenholders.

The lesson for token investors is not that tokens are worthless, but that they are highly conditional assets. They perform well when projects grow, generate cash flows, and deliberately route value onchain. They perform poorly when companies struggle and there is no clear value capture mechanism. Tokens are upside instruments, not downside protection, and should be evaluated accordingly. 

This is not an Axelar-specific failure. It is a structural problem created by separating tokens from companies while implying shared ownership. Until tokenholders have clearer rights to cash flows, IP, or governance over core development, deals like this will keep happening, and each one will reopen the same debate about what token ownership actually means.