The Last Look…

Talk data to me*

Quite unexpectedly, Uncle Sam is now onchain. That’s a swift pivot for a country that just 12 months ago was busy prosecuting and collecting billions of dollars in penalties from the digital asset sector.

In December 2024, the CFTC boasted that it’s an agency that has “cemented its reputation as a premier enforcement agency in the digital asset space.” Today, it seemingly struggles to appoint a chair and its staff of commissioners has dwindled to one, in a dramatic fall from grace (talk about moving the goalposts!).

For those that missed it, US economic data will now be published on the Pyth network, live on the blockchain – so what does that mean for the long run? At first glance it doesn’t mean much, it’s entirely possible to access US GDP figures online or via API connections if one is feeling fancy, but looking deeper, this move does signal a significant shift – if nothing else in terms of the level of commitment the US government is signalling towards digital assets.

Beyond that, this could be the first step towards a complete change in market structure and one that goes beyond FX markets. Financial data is a multi-billion dollar business and one of the key reasons for its size is the difficulty in getting access to information. This is true in FX, where the lack of central price, or tape, is a key feature of the market. Once information is publicly available, the prices will collapse as the difficulty around access is resolved.

This raises the point about how much transparency markets need around data, as well as the fundamental question of data ownership. That can be tricky to address due to the various cans of worms that are opened in the process. Still, the FOMO is strong: European officials recently allowed it to be known that they are considering speeding up efforts to create a digital euro as they worry about getting left behind by the US where stablecoins are very much de jour.

EU officials even said they’d consider public blockchains for these endeavours, in a sharp departure from typically European concerns about data privacy and a strong preference for private systems. So, does this mean that we are heading to a world where data is public, everything is on a public blockchain and the access to information problem is forever resolved? Unlikely.

It’s obviously not feasible for banks and central banks to put everything onto publicly available venues, a limitation that’s already spurring the development of initiatives “data dark pools” such as the Canton Network and others where privacy on public blockchains becomes possible by shielding some of the sensitive and crucial information even though it’s on a publicly-available system.

The interesting question is how these developments will change the value of data and what this means for the $42 billion a year business that is financial market data. (As a quick theoretical exercise, how would FX markets change if all data was publicly available?)

FX is a relatively small part of the revenues that exchanges, the main owners of trading platforms, bring in, especially when compared with their data businesses.

LSEG, the owner of FX Matching and FXall, brought in around $188 million from FX platforms in the first six months of 2025, as volatility jumped and transaction fees climbed as a result. In the same period, LSEG made north of $1.2 billion from its data and feeds business, a 6.6% increase fuelled by “strong demand for historical market data.” Similarly, the CME made roughly $178 million from FX transactions, both spot and listed, and just shy of $400 million from its data and information segment.

Putting GDP figures on the blockchain might seem like it’s a small and irrelevant step, a whimsy of President Trump and his crypto buddies. But ignoring the implications could turn out to be a multi-billion dollar blindspot. And really, just imagine what transparent data and clear ownership of it would do to FX.

Frankly, that’s off the chain.** 

*Thanks to Kaiko for coming up with the phrase.

**I make it my personal mission to keep Colin updated with the ways of the youth. You’re welcome.