Tokenizing stocks, bonds and cash onto digital rails will not fix monetary inflation, Michael Tanguma, CEO of Onramp, told his co-hosts on Onramp's weekly Final Settlement roundtable. It will make money move faster.
Most of the case for tokenization is about speed and lower costs. Michael's argument is that a faster, more inflationary system needs a fixed-supply bearer asset sitting beside it, and that asset is Bitcoin.
"Meaning that's like Bitcoin, that digital bearer asset. So all these assets will go up in nominal value and inflation will run through it. But as people start to hold Bitcoin, it will sit there as that kind of like effective tether to let everything else run around it." — Michael Tanguma
Michael runs a Bitcoin financial-services firm built on custody shared among several institutions. He worked through the week's news after a two-week break with Brian Cubellis, Onramp's Chief Strategy Officer, and Liam Nelson of the Bitcoin venture firm Early Riders.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 1 hour 6 minutes of audio, 9 minutes of reading.
Here are the 7 takeaways that matter.
Final Settlement (Onramp Bitcoin Media) · Oct 13, 2026 · 1h 6m · 57m saved
Key Takeaways
Tokenizing stocks, bonds and cash speeds money up without curing inflation, and Michael says that leaves room for Bitcoin as the fixed-supply asset beside it
A tampered batch from an authorized Ledger reseller in Southeast Asia drained buyers' wallets
Ledger told recent buyers from that reseller not to set the device up
Proof of reserves is "a pretty, pretty, pretty low bar," Michael says, because exchanges that published it still lost funds
Breaking Bitcoin's signature scheme could not be cashed in quietly, Liam argues, against an Ethereum researcher's call for a "bunker mode"
AI is wearing down the advantages software companies rely on, with a funded AI model copied in open source within days
AI lowers the cost of starting a business, and Bitcoin raises the bar for one that lasts
1. Ledger's Reseller Hack
The week's biggest story was a supply-chain attack on Ledger hardware wallets. Buyers in Southeast Asia bought devices through CryptoBilis, an authorized Ledger reseller in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, which had tampered with the units before sale. On-chain estimates of the losses ran from roughly $72 million to $90 million, mostly in Bitcoin with some Ethereum and Tron.
Ledger paused the reseller and told anyone who had bought through it in the prior 90 days not to set up the device or move funds to a new one. Ledger did not tamper with the hardware; the reseller did. Michael, Liam and Brian compared the attack in scale to the earlier entropy bug at Coldcard, another hardware-wallet maker, while treating it as a different kind of failure.
Brian Cubellis points to the standard advice on resellers
"Best practice recommendation forever has been like don't buy from a reseller." — Brian Cubellis
Liam's view is that most retail buyers have no idea that rule exists. Repeating it as received wisdom, in his view, is no substitute for telling people what self-custody actually involves.
Liam Nelson wants the industry to be candid about what self-custody costs
"It's really time that the industry as a whole is honest about the trade-offs of self-custody... it's a shame to see these types of things happening literally every single week at this point." — Liam Nelson
