Hey, it’s Marc & the 51 team.

I’ve watched banks lobby Washington for 100 years to keep their Fed access exclusive. This week, Deutsche Börse skipped the lobby and bought a seat.

Deutsche Börse paid $200M for a 1.5% stake in Kraken, hours before Kraken confirmed it filed for a US IPO. The real story wasn’t the valuation discount. It’s what Kraken’s Kansas City Fed account gives Deutsche Börse: a pipe into Fedwire that makes correspondent banks optional.

Meanwhile, Lummis says CLARITY dies if it doesn't pass now:

“This is our last chance to pass the Clarity Act until at least 2030. We can’t afford to surrender America’s financial future.”

— Senator Cynthia Lummis on X

Here’s what we’re covering:

* Deutsche Börse front-runs Kraken IPO with $200M stake

* Goldman Sachs files first-ever Bitcoin ETF

* Charles Schwab launches spot crypto trading for 39 million accounts

* UBS leads Swiss Banks into live CHF Stablecoin pilot

* Visa is building to replace Visa

* HSBC takes Stablecoin stack public on Canton blockchain

* Ripple lands Kyobo to tokenize Korean Sovereign Bond

* ECB undercuts US Stablecoin model with tokenization terms

And 15+ more signals. Let’s jump in 👇

Exclusive for 51 Readers:

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Top Boardroom Reads

* The Role of Digital Money in Capital Markets (GFMA)

* SoK: Blockchain Agent-to-Agent Payments (Research Paper)

* Detangling Tokenization of RWAs (Franklin Templeton)

* Stablecoin Issuance Market: Four Business Models Reshaping the Market (Tiger Research)

* Institutional Infrastructure for Global Settlement and Tokenized Assets (Allium)

* 2026 Insurance Value Creators Report (BCG)

* Tokenization of Financial Assets (IOSCO)

The Friday newsletter only scratches the surface. A lot more is going on that we’ll tell you in our PRO briefings.

Top Signals This Week

Deutsche Börse front-runs Kraken IPO with $200M stake

On April 14, 2026, Deutsche Börse announced it acquired a 1.5% fully diluted stake in Kraken (Payward Inc.), for $200M in a secondary share transaction. The deal implies a $13.3B valuation, down from the $20B Kraken printed in its November 2025 $800M raise. It closes before June. [RELEASE]

Hours later, Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi confirmed at Semafor’s World Economy Summit that Kraken has confidentially filed for a US IPO. [NEWS]

Why it matters: Through Kraken, Deutsche Börse bought a pipe directly into the U.S. central bank. Kraken’s “limited purpose” account can’t earn interest, can’t touch the discount window or FedNow, but it can settle on Fedwire. That’s the only access institutional wholesale fiat flows actually need. Correspondent banks exist solely to provide this. Kraken just made them optional, and banks are lobbying against it. The Bank Policy Institute called the Kansas City Fed’s decision a “front-run” of the Fed Board’s public comment process. Also, Deutsche Börse stepped in between Kraken’s November raise and IPO filing and captured a 1.5% secondary position.

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Goldman Sachs files first-ever Bitcoin ETF

On April 14, Goldman Sachs filed with the SEC for the Goldman Sachs Bitcoin Premium Income ETF, a covered-call strategy that buys shares of existing spot Bitcoin ETFs (BlackRock’s IBIT, Fidelity’s FBTC) and systematically sells call options against them to generate income. The earliest possible launch is late June, assuming no SEC objections. Management fee has not been disclosed. BlackRock’s competing product, the iShares Bitcoin Premium Income ETF (BITA), is further along and expected to launch within weeks. [NEWS]

Why it matters: Goldman filing its first Bitcoin ETF product is the signal, not the product itself. The covered-call wrapper turns Bitcoin volatility into yield, which makes BTC palatable to the exact investors who would never buy spot: retirees, endowments, conservative allocators, and the wealth management channels Goldman dominates. Fortune called it “boomer candy” and the label fits. The 40-100% overlay range gives Goldman unusual flexibility to toggle between aggressive and defensive positioning depending on vol regime. This is Wall Street domesticating Bitcoin into a familiar income product. The competitive race is now Goldman vs. BlackRock on who captures yield-hungry capital first.

Charles Schwab launches spot crypto trading for 39 million accounts

On April 16, Charles Schwab announced Schwab Crypto, a direct spot trading product for Bitcoin and Ethereum rolling out “in the coming weeks.” The product runs through Paxos, which handles both sub-custody and trade execution. Schwab is pricing trades at 75 basis points per transaction, undercutting Fidelity Crypto (100 bps) while sitting above Robinhood’s tightest spreads. [RELEASE]

Why it matters: Schwab manages $12 trillion in client assets across 39 million accounts. That makes it the largest traditional brokerage to offer direct spot crypto trading. When $12T in AUM gets a “buy Bitcoin” button in the same interface where clients hold their index funds, the distribution math changes. Schwab isn’t competing with Coinbase. It’s competing with the reason most traditional investors never bought crypto in the first place: friction.

UBS leads Swiss Banks into live CHF Stablecoin pilot

On April 8, UBS, PostFinance, Sygnum, Raiffeisen, Zürcher Kantonalbank, and BCV launched a joint CHF stablecoin sandbox. The CHF (Swiss Franc Stablecoin) sandbox is a controlled live environment. The six...