#468: Amazon Ads And Roku Forge A Landmark CTV Partnership, & More

Last week, Amazon Ads and Roku announced an exclusive integration¹ that will give advertisers access to the largest authenticated connected TV (CTV) audience—an estimated 80 million US households, representing more than 80% of all CTV homes globally—potentially transforming the US and, longer term, the global CTV advertising market. 

Early tests of the partnership delivered impressive results. Thanks to improved identity and cross-device targeting, brands achieved three times more value from their ad spend, increasing the number of unique viewers by 42%—without increasing their budgets—and reducing repeated, often annoying, ads by ~27%.²

The Amazon Ads and Roku collaboration should help solve a critical pain point in CTV—fragmentation—by allowing marketers to manage frequency, deduplicate reach, and measure outcomes more accurately than ever before. Although its reach has collapsed, linear TV sill accounts for ~$165 billion in global television advertising, ~$60 billion of which is in the US. The new solution should debut to all Amazon Delivery Service Partner (DSP) users in the US by the third quarter, marking a major leap forward in data-driven TV advertising.  

Last week, Eli Lilly acquired Verve Therapeutics for $1.3 billion, creating an inflection point in the evolution of gene therapy. For the first time, a major pharmaceutical company is making a substantial bet that in-vivo gene editing can address not only rare genetic disorders but also cardiovascular disease, the world’s leading cause of death.³

According to a number of genetic studies, individuals with mutations causing a loss of function in key genes, like ANGPTL3 and PCSK9 or expression-lowering variants in Lipoprotein(a) (LPA), have dramatically lower cardiovascular risk than those without the mutations.⁴ Both Verve and CRISPR Therapeutics are developing in-vivo gene-editing therapies targeting ANGPTL3 and LPA, while Verve has a third candidate, directed at PCSK9. By introducing loss-of-function mutations in these genes, the therapies aim to mimic the effects of naturally protective genotypes. 

In our view, the Verve acquisition signals important market validation of this science. Gene therapy platforms are maturing beyond boutique applications and could scale from tens of thousands of patients with rare diseases to millions with more common diseases. 

Despite help from chronic therapies—primarily statins—available today, more than 30 million people in the US and EU cannot control levels of LDL-C (“bad cholesterol”).⁵ Early clinical data highlight the potential for substantial benefit. Licensed from Beam Therapeutics, Verve’s single-dose base-editing approach targeting PCSK9 demonstrated up to 69% LDL-C reduction,⁶ while CRISPR Therapeutics’ in-vivo gene-editing therapy targeting ANGPTL3 has demonstrated reductions of up to 81%.⁷ A one-time infusion of each therapy is designed to deliver durable, curative efficacy. 

Gene editing could reduce the need for decades of drug adherence, costs, and cardiovascular risks into one treatment. Lilly’s acquisition signals growing conviction that gene therapies could scale to a market opportunity worth trillions of dollars. 

Last week, the U.S. Senate passed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins Act (GENIUS Act) with a vote of 68 to 30. Authored by Senator Bill Haggerty of Tennessee, the GENIUS Act is the first federal blueprint for dollar-pegged tokens.⁸ Its passage signals an important shift from courtroom trials to congressional rulemaking in the bipartisan conversation on stablecoins. With companion text in committee, the Act now goes to the U.S. House of Representatives for a final vote. 

The bill’s architecture rests on four pillars.⁹ First, issuers can choose a federal charter or a qualifying state charter. State charters, however, will limit tokens in circulation to $10 billion. Second, every coin must be backed 1-for-1 by high-quality liquid assets like bank deposits, or U.S. Treasuries maturing in 93 days or less, with monthly independent audit attestations. Third, payment stablecoins will be deemed neither securities nor commodities, granting bank regulators primary oversight. Fourth, Bank-Secrecy-Act rules will apply, giving freeze and burn¹⁰ rights to the U.S. Treasury. That said, the coins will not qualify for FDIC deposit insurance, and issuers will face marketing rules that ensure consumer protections against false or misleading claims about payment stablecoins—importantly, against implying that they are backed by FDIC insurance. 

The regulatory clarity in the GENIUS Act has fueled a revaluation of the market leader in the US. Shares of Circle (CRCL) have surged¹¹ 674% from their $31 IPO (initial public offering) price on June 4, and 248% from their first-trade price on June 5, to $240 on June 20.¹² Clearly, investors now expect that Circle’s stablecoin, USDC, will be the first GENIUS-compliant stablecoin. 

In our view, the GENIUS Act removes the most important regulatory overhang on crypto-based dollars. If the House passes GENIUS, then card networks, e-commerce platforms, and cross-border payroll providers will be able to pilot on-chain settlement, compressing interchange fees and accelerating financial inclusion. Among the variables we will be watching in the weeks and months ahead are on-chain stablecoin velocity, the share captured by US-regulated issuers, and moves in the three-month Treasury yields as reserves migrate onshore. Additionally, we will monitor developments like the new payment ecosystem partnership among Shopify, Coinbase, and Stripe, which enables merchant payments in USDC,¹³ and the launch of the Circle Payments Network (CPN) focused on wholesale, cross-border settlement between regulated financial institutions, which could challenge the Visa and Mastercard duopoly.¹⁴ Passage of the Act would mark a structural inflection for the digital-asset stack—and, in our view, a step toward shoring up the US dollar as one of the default settlement assets of the internet.