📅 August 27, 2025 📖 Read time: ± 12 minutes
Welcome to the WC, where you’re trapped in my mind for eight to twelve minutes weekly.
We have a crypto-heavy issue this week, as Wyoming and Ethereum are both making big moves. And then, for something completely different, let’s take a look at farmland, which is setting new highs.
Let’s get to it.
Wyoming made stablecoins boring
And boring is beautiful.
You know cryptocurrency has gone mainstream when Wyoming launches its own digital dollar.
Last week, the Cowboy State dropped the Frontier Stable Token (FRNT). It’s the first government-issued stablecoin in America, backed entirely by U.S. Treasuries and cash.
No blackbox algorithms. No “trust us, bro” mechanics; just boring, beautiful, fully-reserved digital dollars.
The grown-ups have entered the chat
While everyone was losing their minds over tokenized Treasuries hitting $7.4 billion, something bigger was happening. Companies started using these things for actual work.
Franklin Templeton has one. BlackRock has one (BUIDL). Ondo Finance built a whole business around them. Even Centrifuge crossed $1 billion managing real-world asset tokens.
But these aren’t investments. They’re infrastructure.
What Wyoming figured out
Think about it. You’re a state government. You need to manage money: payments, benefits, and procurement. You can either:
A) Pay banks and credit card companies usurious fees
B) Issue your own programmable dollars that work 24/7
Wyoming picked option B.
What’s more, when Wyoming releases a yield-bearing stable token, the government pockets the yield spread and uses it to fund the state’s education system.
FRNT, Wyoming’s token, isn’t trying to moon. It’s trying to replace the payment rails that have been extracting rents from everyone for decades. And it’s backed by the same Treasuries your money market fund owns.
The real revolution
This isn’t about getting rich quick. It’s about getting paid on time.
Want to settle a trade after hours? Done. Need to post collateral instantly? Done. Want to move treasury operations outside of banking hours? Also done.
The use cases sound boring because they are boring.
- Fintechs parking float.
- Fund companies settling subscriptions faster.
- Stablecoin issuers not waiting for wire transfers.
But boring infrastructure that works beats exciting infrastructure that doesn’t.
What happens next
Altea is partnering with Hashfire to develop two funds that utilize blockchain technology. While onboarding and adoption are real frictions for many, it’s simply a superior solution.
Meanwhile, other states are watching. So are cities, universities, and anyone else tired of paying interchange fees on digital transactions.
The fees will come down—they have to. When you’re charging 20-40 basis points on what’s essentially a Treasury wrapper, competition will fix that real quick.
And the interoperability will get better. More exchanges will accept these as collateral. Same-day mint and redemption will become standard. Cross-chain transfers will actually work.
The bottom line
Wyoming just proved something important: the most revolutionary technology often looks the most boring.
FRNT isn’t trying to disrupt anything. It’s just better plumbing. And sometimes, better plumbing changes everything.
Is Ethereum still relevant?
Ask any cryptonerd, and they’ll tell you Ethereum is a technically inferior coin to most other level ones.
Slower than Solana, Avalanche, and Cardano. Fewer GitHub commits. More expensive and complex to use.
Nonetheless.
Ethereum ETFs just had their best month ever, with $5.4 billion flooding in during July. August topped that with a single day of over $1 billion.
Why are institutional allocators betting on a clear technical loser?
- Liquidity: ETH’s TVL is $95 billion, nearly ten times that of its competitors.
- Developer ecosystem: despite Cardano’s GitHub commits, Ethereum’s ecosystem is vastly larger.
- Institutional CYA: BlackRock’s BUIDL fund is based on Ethereum, and ETFs are available for ETH.
- Credibility: Ethereum has been battle-tested through multiple cycles. It has survived the DAO hack, multiple network upgrades, and the DeFi summer.
While ETH is a less desirable product than other L1 coins, the currency is beating them.
It’s a story we’ve heard before.
- Betamax was technically superior to VHS
- Google+ had better features than Facebook
- The Dvorak keyboard is 70% faster than QWERTY
However, ETH has network effects, a robust distribution, and a locked-in ecosystem.
It’s here to stay.
And so allocators are no longer forced to pick sides between Bitcoin and Ethereum. They’re building positions in both.
Does this make sense?
Bitcoin is digital gold. Store of value. Finite supply. Hedge against monetary debasement. All the greatest hits.
Ethereum is different. It’s digital infrastructure that actually does stuff. And gets paid for it.
- Bitcoin is like owning gold bars.
- Ethereum is like owning shares in the company that processes all the digital transactions.
Most institutional players want the next moonshot. They want two different types of crypto exposure that work together.
Bitcoin gives you pure monetary premium play. Ethereum provides exposure to the economic activity of an entire ecosystem, along with potential yield from staking.
Most model portfolios are settling on something like 60% Bitcoin, 40% Ethereum. Or flip it around. The exact split matters less than having both.
Spot ETFs solved the custody nightmare. No more worrying about private keys or validator operations or any of that nonsense.
The Bitcoin ETF proved institutions could hold crypto without the sky falling. The Ethereum ETF gives them a second, complementary exposure.
If ETFs eventually allow staking, Ethereum becomes the “dividend-paying crypto.”
That’s a very different animal from pure speculation.
Is farmland still a buy?
American farmland is now worth an average of $4,350 per acre. Cropland is pushing $5,830 per acre.
Those are all-time highs. And if you think that sounds expensive, you’re right.
And valuations will continue to diverge from economic reality.
The next decade of farmland investing won’t be about crop prices. It’ll be about water, weather, and Washington.
What’s actually driving prices
Farmers aren’t broke. That’s the main thing. Leverage levels are manageable, and land is still the best collateral in rural America.
Plus, land does more than grow corn now. Wind leases, solar installations, carbon credits (maybe), and hunting rights all add revenue streams.
But the big gains from 2020-2023 are probably over. Cash rents haven’t kept up with land prices, so investor yield is getting thinner.
At these prices, speculators investors are not buying farmland for the farming. They’re buying it for everything else.
Water rights in California are worth more than the dirt. Wind leases in Kansas can pay better than wheat. Solar installations in Texas generate more cash flow than cattle.
That’s not necessarily bad. It’s just different.
What the next 10 years look like
Climate change isn’t coming. It’s here. And it’s going to reshape what land is valuable.
The corn belt is creeping north. Heat stress is pushing optimal growing zones toward Canada. Water scarcity is making irrigation rights more valuable than the land itself.
Meanwhile, politicians are becoming increasingly concerned about foreign ownership. More states are passing restrictions. More paperwork. More friction for international buyers.
The smart money is focusing on three things:
- Water security. If you don’t have reliable water, nothing else matters.
- Climate adaptability. Well-drained soil that can handle weather extremes.
- Infrastructure access. Proximity to processing, storage, and transportation.
At record prices, you need operational alpha. Buying land and hoping it goes up isn’t a strategy anymore.
You need better drainage. Smarter crop rotations. Precision agriculture. Maybe specialty crops that command premium pricing.
Or you need land that works for multiple uses. Farming plus energy generation. Agriculture plus carbon sequestration. Crops plus hunting leases.
Despite the high prices, farmland still offers something most assets don’t: real diversification.
It’s not correlated to stocks. It’s not correlated to bonds. It’s barely correlated to anything except weather and government policy.
And people will always need food.
Farmland at record highs isn’t a buy signal. But it’s not a sell signal either.
It’s a “get smarter about what you’re buying” signal.
The days of buying any decent farmland and watching it appreciate are over. Now you need to understand water rights, climate projections, and energy infrastructure.
But for investors who do the work? There’s still money in the dirt. It’s just harder to find.
That’s all for this week; I hope you enjoyed it.
Cheers, Wyatt
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