Ikenomic Insights

  This  Forbes  piece   published last month offered explanations for why and how cryptocurrencies and asset tokenization have gone mainstream. Well, brace yourselves because that “mainstreaming” is only accelerating. The transition from a hostile to supportive regulatory environment in 2025 has encouraged widespread institutional adoption and a broadening role for digital assets in global finance. Indeed, mentions of stablecoins in SEC filings surged by more than 60 percent in the months following enactment of the GENIUS Act ( as industry analysts note ), and major financial institutions began rolling out new product offerings built on blockchain technology. Major financial institutions , including Citigroup, Fidelity Investments, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Mastercard, and Visa are either offering or developing crypto-enabled products for everyday consumers. These allow customers to buy, sell, and hold digital assets alongside traditional instruments like equi...

(Originally published at Forbes .) The supply of beef in the U.S. market is at a seven-decade low, consumer prices for beef are at near-record highs, and Americans are foregoing their beloved burgers and steaks for cheaper sources of protein. To remedy the shortage, President Trump is opening the door for Argentina to ship more beef to the U.S. Such a measure would augment supply and help restrain prices, while reinforcing U.S. relations with a regional ally being aggressively courted by Beijing. Although U.S.  cattlemen are profiting handsomely and would prefer to quell discussion of the issue altogether, Americans are facing a serious beef shortage. According to the  Department of Agriculture , the inventory of all U.S. beef cattle in 2025 was 27.9 million heads, down 1% from 2024, which was down 2% from 2023, which was 4% below 2022 levels. Today’s beef herd is the smallest since 1951. Bureau of Labor Statistics data show the connection between waning supply and skyrocket...

(Originally published at Forbes .) When businesses operate in transparent, predictable environments and have new markets to tap or efficiencies to extract, investment and game-changing innovations are sure to follow. That, in a nutshell, explains why we have witnessed a broad, mainstream embrace of cryptocurrencies and other blockchain technologies in 2025.  Innovation is essential to economic growth; investment is the lifeblood of innovation; and policy clarity is crucial to identifying and estimating the value of the risks and rewards of investment. For years, legal uncertainty presented a very high barrier to institutional use of cryptocurrencies for financial transaction settlement. Firms could not reliably determine whether a token was a security, a commodity, or something else. Nor could they be sure which agency would enforce the rules. That ambiguity deterred “on-chain” innovation.  But recent legislation signed into law and an energized Securities and Exchange Commi...

  Financial innovation is well underway. So is the race among countries to attract the entrepreneurs and investment that will yield practical, timesaving, commercial applications of a diversity of blockchain technologies. Thanks to legislation signed into law a few months ago and a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) refreshingly committed to clarifying and optimizing the U.S. regulatory landscape, much of that innovation will take place in the United States. Last month, the SEC introduced “ Project Crypto ,” an initiative aimed at modernizing securities rules to better accommodate on-chain markets and tokenized securities. Its goals include clarifying how securities laws apply to cryptocurrencies, creating space for trading tokenized securities, facilitating the development of custody and intermediation models for trading tokenized assets, and ensuring investor protections. Right on cue , Ripple Labs (a blockchain platform with a digital currency called XRP), DBS (a digit...

(Originally published at Forbes ) Who will be fired when President Trump learns his own administration is subverting his promise to achieve U.S global  energy dominance ? On January 20, Trump lifted the Biden administration’s liquified natural gas (LNG)   export licensing ban as a crucial first step toward “ Unleashing American Energy .” Yet, the current Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), running with a Biden administration initiative undertaken to please organized labor , has determined that the best policy response to China’s state-support for its shipbuilding and maritime industries includes imposing hefty port fees on Chinese vessels that call on U.S. ports. It won’t be long before a White House advisor informs the president that there is no discernible difference between those fees and Biden’s LNG export licensing ban in terms of the adverse impact on America’s energy sector. Beginning next month, the new port usage fees will be imposed on Chinese container...

  Despite Yogi Berra’s sage observation that it is difficult to make predictions, “ especially about the future ,” I’m quite comfortable predicting that 2025 will be regarded as a consequential inflection point in the maturation and mainstreaming of the cryptocurrency industry. Not only did the GENIUS Act become law earlier this year, providing a crucial and long-awaited regulatory framework for payment stablecoins, but the Securities and Exchange Commission shifted its posture toward industry participants from adversarial and prosecutorial to collaborative and constructive. This month, the SEC granted a waiver to Ripple Labs, citing good cause to  lift its injunction for past securities violations , which restricted the company from raising private capital from investors without complete SEC registration. The SEC also withdrew its appeal (lodged during the Biden administration) against a 2023 ruling by Judge Analisa Torres , who determined that sales of XRP on public...

  On Wednesday, the Working Group on Digital Asset Markets released its highly-anticipated  report , establishing a historic blueprint to facilitate blockchain and crypto innovation. The  160-page report stems from President Trump's January 23, 2025  Executive Order 14178 , Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology,  and the Working Group consists of a broad swath of federal government officials—from the Treasury Secretary and the Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman to the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Secretary of Homeland Security. Policymakers must create an environment that ensures U.S. leadership in the global blockchain revolution, and the legislative and regulatory recommendations in the report would do just that.    As I wrote in Forbes back in April, “[T]he perseverance of determined entrepreneurs, changes in U.S. political leadership, and a growing appreciation for the economic i...

  (Originally published at Forbes .) In May 2024 , prospects for the United States becoming a global innovation center for digital assets and other promising blockchain technologies were gloomy. Regulatory uncertainty and general hostility from Washington presented high hurdles to industry growth. But the perseverance of determined entrepreneurs, changes in U.S. political leadership, and a growing appreciation for the economic importance and broader application of these cost-saving technologies have changed perceptions and raised expectations that the United States will become “ the crypto capital of the world .” The ball is now in Congress’ court. Throughout the previous four years, firms and investors seeking to develop markets for cryptocurrency in the United States were stymied by an antagonistic Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, who regarded the industry as “ rife with hucksters, fraudsters, scam artists .” Rather than offer a clear regulatory framework within which...

  (Originally published at Forbes .) Whether the goal is to get Germany to fund its NATO obligations, convince Mexico to crack down on drug traffickers, tout the benefits of U.S. statehood to Canada, or compel Colombia to receive U.S. deportees, President Trump’s international overtures are often infused with tariff threats. Trump’s first term record makes those threats credible, despite the collateral damage his tariffs inflicted upon U.S. manufacturers and farmers. But the administration must not allow tactical use of tariffs to subvert its long-term U.S. economic security objectives, including the imperative of building out and ramping up U.S. electrification infrastructure to meet the demands of our emerging, power-intensive, 21 st century industries. The outcomes President Trump seeks by threatening tariffs differ by country, but common to most cases is his desire for foreign investment in the U.S. economy. In a remote speech broadcast to the World Economic Forum in Switzerl...

  (Originally published at Forbes .) On the third day of his first term in office, President Trump committed a monumental foreign policy error that undermines U.S. economic security to this day. By withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation agreement to strengthen trade and investment ties with countries around China’s periphery, Trump extinguished with the stroke of a pen important leverage that could have deterred Beijing’s coercive and subversive behavior of the past decade. In the waning days of his tenure, President Biden can mitigate the consequences of Trump’s geopolitical blunder and reinforce his own administration’s “latticework” of initiatives to strengthen alliances in the Indo-Pacific by simply not blocking Nippon Steel’s acquisition of the United States Steel Corporation. But recent leaks suggesting that Biden intends to block the deal call into question the sincerity of his administration’s commitments to U.S. allies and improvin...