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Stablecoins splinter
The stablecoin market is fragmenting, and CoinDesk reports that onchain capital allocator Spark is betting it can capitalize on the split by acting as a layer to move money between networks.
“The stablecoin landscape "is about to fragment more and more," Sam MacPherson, CEO of Phoenix Labs”
Sam MacPherson, CEO of Phoenix Labs, told CoinDesk that the stablecoin landscape "is about to fragment more and more," as fintechs, exchanges, and banking groups launch their own dollar-linked tokens.
CoinDesk lists dollar-linked tokens including PayPal’s PYUSD, Circle’s USDC, and Tether’s USDT, while noting Robinhood has joined the Global Dollar (USDG) consortium and is building its own chain.
CoinDesk also says Spark is an affiliated lending and liquidity unit of Sky, the DeFi ecosystem formerly known as MakerDAO and the issuer of the USDS stablecoin, developed by Phoenix Labs and supported through Sky’s governance and capital.
Spark migrated about $150 million into Uniswap v4 pools pairing USDS against USDT and PYUSD, and CoinDesk reports the system accounted for about 30% of stablecoin-to-stablecoin swap volume on Uniswap and routed roughly $1.5 billion in its first 30 days.
Spark’s Uniswap hook
CoinDesk describes Spark’s stablecoin FX layer on Uniswap as concentrating liquidity in yield-bearing pools, using a Uniswap v4 hook called DualPool to keep liquidity-earning yield in Spark’s vaults while idle.
The mechanism, CoinDesk says, pulls yield into the pool only when a swap needs it, settling it within a single block.
CoinDesk reports Spark also struck infrastructure deals directly with issuers, including that PayPal teamed up with Spark last year to boost the liquidity of PYUSD as it competes with Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC.
MacPherson told CoinDesk that consumer apps are "extremely hard to compete in," and CoinDesk says Spark shelved a consumer-facing app indefinitely rather than compete for distribution.
CoinDesk adds that MacPherson described the pivot as "doubling down on this more B2B [business-to-business] or B2B2C [business-to-business-to-consumer] model," and points to Robinhood’s Earn as an example of the replacement model.
Crypto meets Big Tech
Beyond stablecoin fragmentation, Crypto Briefing ties crypto infrastructure to Big Tech’s AI-driven buildout, saying Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are collectively on track to spend $1.5 trillion on data center and chip infrastructure by end of 2027.
“Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are collectively on track to spend $1.5 trillion”
Crypto Briefing reports that the four largest cloud and AI companies spent $170 billion on data centers in a single quarter, up 72% from the same period last year, and it links that buildout to crypto mining hardware and blockchain infrastructure.
The piece says Bitcoin miners, particularly publicly traded ones like Marathon Digital and Riot Platforms, have been navigating a tighter hardware market, while Core Scientific and Hut 8 have struck deals to repurpose mining facilities for AI workloads.
Crypto Briefing also states that when Big Tech starts competing for power generation capacity, signing long-term energy contracts, and even building their own power plants, it reshapes the energy landscape for everyone.
CoinDesk, meanwhile, frames Spark’s strategy as a way to turn fragmentation into volume, with MacPherson projecting onchain payments could reach $3 trillion by 2030 and saying, "It's going to seem like nothing's happening," before "a lot is going to happen at once."