November 10, 2025

Welcome to the Meridian Update. We hope none of your flights were impacted over the weekend. Unfortunately, the on-chain alternatives to air travel haven’t yet taken off. That is a bad joke. Let’s dive in.

Is the government shutdown over?

Back in early October, we made a joke about how the Meridian Update is dependable in comparison to the US federal government. The joke was that the Meridian Update was dependable because it was published even while the US federal government was shut down. Here we are in the middle of November, and it appears the US federal government may reopen after the Senate reached a deal. Keep in mind that we still don’t actually know what will happen in the House.

Anyway, we didn’t stop publishing throughout the whole shutdown, save one Friday we took off. During that time, we posted often about regulation and things that regulators were saying. For example, the chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) gave a speech at a financial technology event and said positive things about asset tokenization. A new nominee to be chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) tweeted about making the US the “crypto capital of the world.” An SEC Commissioner called asset tokenization a “key focus area.”

But nothing really happened on the regulatory front during the government shutdown. Why? Well, the SEC and the CFTC are, you know, part of the government. And they were shut down. One law firm partner described the SEC’s work on rulemaking and more as being brought to a “screeching halt.”

The government shutdown is not actually over. But it does look like it might be. And you know what that means? We may see some SEC and CFTC activity catch our attention and that of Crypto Twitter. Something to keep an eye on.

Folks at the Federal Reserve are talking about stablecoins

Increasing stablecoin adoption, increasing numbers of stablecoins, and stablecoin regulation have been major stories in the on-chain world in 2025. A landmark moment was the “Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act” (GENIUS Act) becoming US law over the summer. On Friday, a Federal Reserve Governor elegantly described that legislation’s regulatory impact in a talk titled “A Global Stablecoin Glut: Implications for Monetary Policy”:

“This regulatory apparatus for stablecoins establishes a level of legitimacy and accountability congruent with holding traditional dollar assets. For the purposes of monetary policy, the most important aspect of the GENIUS Act is that it requires U.S.-domiciled issuers to maintain reserves backed on at least a one-to-one basis in safe and liquid U.S. dollar–denominated assets.”

But it’s the rest of what this Federal Reserve Governor said that caught our attention, and that of Crypto Twitter. He said things like:

“If [Federal Reserve] forecasts prove accurate, the magnitude of additional demand from stablecoins will be too large to ignore.”

“These magnitudes [of stablecoin adoption] would matter for monetary policy.”

He added that these magnitudes might decrease steady-state interest rates, increase the amount of time interest rates are at their zero lower bound (ZLB, for discussion another day), and make the US Dollar stronger on average.

This is a lot to digest. We aren’t going to dig in today. We’ll just start by pointing this out. Many people don’t know what stablecoins are. Many years ago, many would’ve laughed at the idea that anything on-chain, let alone US Dollar equivalents on-chain, would matter.

It is 2025, and serious people like a Federal Reserve Governor discussing the importance of stablecoins and taking seriously the possibility that stablecoin adoption reaches a magnitude that matters for Federal Reserve policy. That is something.

What news from the DEX world?

We have talked about decentralized exchanges (DEXs) before. DEXs are the way assets actually actually trade on-chain in an on-chain way.

A centralized exchange is a singular place you can go to buy or sell ownership stakes in on-chain tokens. Of course you can’t really go there. But, you know, you can connect to its trading system and sell to someone who is buying, or vice versa, and the centralized exchange will track that the transaction occurred.

A decentralized exchange works differently. Namely, a decentralized exchange doesn’t track that the transaction occurred, as such. The decentralized exchange simply facilitates the transaction’s occurrence on the underlying tracking system…the blockchain network on which it operates! On a blockchain network like Solana, this tracking is definitionally decentralized, because it is distributed across a large number of operators on the network.

Somewhat complicated. We’ll keep coming back to this.

We aren’t diving into what a DEX is because we want to start the week giving ourselves, or you, a headache. We’re starting the week talking about DEXs because something interesting happened on Friday.

Jupiter has been the leading DEX aggregator on the Solana network for quite some time. A DEX aggregator is kind of like air traffic control (we could not be more sorry for this reference at this trying time for air traffic control). It finds good, open lanes where the transaction can be best facilitated, much like air traffic control finds open lanes where a plane can best take off. This isn’t our best analogy. But hopefully you get the concept. They track all the lanes, all the decentralized exchanges, and route transactions to them in an efficient way. DEX aggregators have become the dominant way for transactions like someone selling a token to someone else to find their way to a DEX.

Anyway:

“For the first time ever a competing @solana DEX aggregator has Dthroned Jupiter in active wallets over a 24hr period.”

That DEX aggregator? Dflow. Dflow is a newer entrant to the DEX aggregation world. And it appears to have made a splash. We’ll be keeping an eye on this.

That’s a wrap

The government shutdown mattered for crypto, a decentralized aggregator caught Crypto Twitter’s attention, and a Federal Reserve governor talked stablecoins. We’ll see you tomorrow morning.

Think we missed something today? Send us a note: email@meridianupdate.com.