October 22, 2025
Gold had a really bad day, which is a perfect (?) time to talk about asset tokenization. Also, Coinbase bought another thing.
Welcome to the Meridian Update, your daily on-chain report. Was the Coinbase NFT purchase a publicity stunt? Let’s dive in.
Gold had a really bad day
Esteemed readers of the Meridian Update have maybe not heard of this “gold” stuff before. This is a daily on-chain report, and gold is not on-chain. To get you up-to-speed: you might think of gold as the Bitcoin of the off-chain world. You’ve probably heard people talk about Bitcoin as a store of value. This is how people talk about gold. But what is gold? Gold is a metal…OK, we’ll stop the bit.
“JUST IN: Gold falls 6.3%, largest single-day drop since April 2013.”
But why are we writing about the price of gold? To ask a question. When can we buy tokenized gold? (Can we already?)
We have mentioned asset tokenization many times on the Meridian Update. We have also enjoyed a clip of the founder and CEO of the world’s largest asset management firm talking about everything getting tokenized. But we have never fulfilled our promise to explain what, exactly, a tokenized stock, or a tokenized asset more broadly, is.
Let’s start with something we have written about. We recently explained wrapped assets as follows:
"SOL is the native token of the Solana network. ETH is the native token of the Ethereum network. You can’t get SOL on Ethereum, and you can’t get ETH on Solana. Except you can. If you go on the Solana network right now, you can find an ETH token. It is ETH wrapped onto Solana. Not all wrapped assets are created equally. But a way this can happen is that someone buys the ETH on Ethereum, promises to hold it, and then turns the promise to hold it into a token you can buy on Solana. This is backing the asset one-to-one."
Tokenized off-chain assets are a similar concept. TSLA is the NASDAQ stock ticker for Tesla. You can’t get TSLA on Solana. Except you can. If you go on the Solana network right now, you can find the TSLAX token. It is TSLA tokenized onto Solana. Not all tokenized assets are definitionally created equal. But a way this can happen is that someone buys TSLA on NASDAQ, promises to hold it, and then turns the promise to hold it into a token you can buy on Solana. This is backing the asset one-to-one. And people are doing it. And some important people at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are talking about how tokenization is a priority for them.
So again, are they tokenizing gold yet? All press is asset tokenization press, as the saying goes (it doesn’t).
Once upon(ly) a time (part 2)
We talked yesterday about a former podcast that might be coming back. The summary is that Coinbase paid $25M for a non-fungible token (NFT). Don’t worry, this does not mean the Meridian Update will turn into an NFT report. That will never happen. Ever. Unless the CEO of Coinbase calls and offers us $25M to do it for 8 months. Then maybe.
Bringing back Up Only was just the warm up.
We’ve acquired @echodotxyz, the leading onchain capital raising platform.
→ Joining builders with community capital
→ Giving investors access to new opportunities
→ Growing economic freedom worldwide
Why does this matter? Maybe it doesn’t. But it is funny. Why is it funny? Because the host of UpOnly is also the founder of Echo. So maybe, just maybe, though we will never know for sure, the UpOnly NFT purchase was a publicity stunt leading up to this second, more serious (?) announcement.
Congrats to the host of UpOnly/founder of Echo. It seems it’s been a great week for him.
What is Echo? According to Coinbase’s tweet, it is the “leading onchain capital raising platform.” We wrote about MetaDAO a while back. Echo seems to be a lot like MetaDAO but different.
The Meridian Update covers on-chain markets, or ways people are putting off-chain markets on-chain, often. It is a theme of the on-chain world in 2025. One off-chain market is the startup private equity market. They call it venture capital. Crypto Twitter talks often of ways to disrupt this market. Something to keep an eye on.
That’s a wrap
Gold had a really bad day, which is a perfect (?) time to talk about asset tokenization. Also, Coinbase bought another thing.
Think we missed something today? Email email@meridianupdate.com.