Weekly Journal: Football Club Treasury Reinvented: Paris Saint-Germain Holds Bitcoin, Incubates Startups
[6 min read] Your weekend guide to getting ahead on the digital frontier. PSG will back Bitcoin startups through investment, go-to-market support, and global distribution
Happy long weekend to all Kiwis! Welcome to this week’s Weekly Journal 📔, your guide to the latest news & innovation in emerging technology, digital assets, and our exciting path to the Metaverse. This is week 130 of the 520 weeks of newsletters I have committed to, a decade of documenting our physical and digital lives converge. New subscribers are encouraged to check out the history & purpose of this newsletter as well as the archive.
- Ryan
🌐 Digital Assets Market Update
To me, the Metaverse is the convergence of physical & virtual lives. As we work, play and socialise in virtual worlds, we need virtual currencies & assets. These have now reached mainstream finance as a defined asset class:
🔥🗺️Heat map shows the 7 day change in price (red down, green up) and block size is market cap. A pullback this week.
🎭 Crypto Fear and Greed Index is an insight into the underlying psychological forces that drives the market’s volatility. Sentiment reveals itself across various channels—from social media activity to Google search trends—and when analysed alongside market data, these signals provide meaningful insight into the prevailing investment climate. The Fear & Greed Index aggregates these inputs, assigning weighted value to each, and distils them into a single, unified score.
🗞️ Metaverse news from this week:
Paris Saint-Germain Becomes First Major Sports Club to Hold Bitcoin as Treasury Asset
In a historic move blending elite football with digital finance, Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) has confirmed it holds Bitcoin on its balance sheet - making it the first major sports club globally to treat BTC as a long-term treasury asset. The announcement came from Pär Helgosson, head of PSG Labs, during the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas, ahead of PSG’s Champions League final clash with Inter Milan this Saturday.
“We took our fiat reserves and we actually allocated Bitcoin. We still have it in our books,” said Helgosson. “We’re the largest player in the sports ecosystem to do that.”
🧠 Strategic Shift: From Fan Tokens to Financial Infrastructure: While most clubs have dabbled in crypto through short-term promotions—such as NFTs or Socios fan tokens—PSG is taking a bold step into institutional-grade digital asset strategy. The move marks a clear departure from speculative hype to structural commitment in Web3 and Bitcoin. PSG sees this as part of aligning with its youth-driven global fanbase, of which over 80% are under 34. According to Helgosson, Bitcoin resonates with this demographic’s values of autonomy, digital fluency, and what’s next.
🚀 PSG Labs: The Club as Crypto Builder: Beyond holding Bitcoin, PSG is going a step further through PSG Labs, its venture and incubation arm. It aims to:
Back Bitcoin startups through investment, go-to-market support, and global distribution
Position PSG as a builder, not just a brand in the crypto ecosystem
This strategy positions PSG as more than a football club—it’s becoming a cultural and financial platform for a decentralised future.
⚽️ Global Impact: With 550 million fans worldwide, PSG’s move could shift how clubs view digital assets—not just as sponsorship revenue, but as core components of treasury and innovation strategy. Their announcement arrives in parallel with Pakistan’s plans to establish a national Bitcoin reserve, showing rising institutional momentum around BTC.
Yuga Labs Sells CryptoPunks IP to Non-Profit NODE for $20M
In a major development for digital art and NFT culture, Yuga Labs has sold the intellectual property (IP) rights to CryptoPunks—one of the earliest and most iconic NFT collections—to the Infinite Node Foundation (NODE), a non-profit entity. The deal includes five specific Punk JPEGs and is reportedly worth $20 million, though terms remain undisclosed.
Yuga, which bought the full IP from Larva Labs in 2022, still retains 414 Punks valued at over $50 million at current floor prices. The sale has sparked both enthusiasm and critique within the Web3 community. Some collectors and artists see this as a noble shift toward cultural preservation over commercialisation.
NODE intends to:
Create a permanent CryptoPunks exhibition in Palo Alto
Protect the legacy of CryptoPunks as the defining art of the early Web3 era
Position the collection as public digital heritage, not a commercial asset
Punk prices surged 10% on the announcement. However, controversy emerged as Pudgy Penguins CEO Luca Netz claimed he would have paid $75 million for the rights, raising concerns about transparency and community involvement in the decision-making process.
The move reflects a growing tension in the metaverse and digital art ecosystems—between profit-driven platforms and preservationist ideals aiming to enshrine blockchain-native creativity for posterity.
👓 Read of the Week:
I found this read really interesting, anything that moves the technology towards mainstream adoption is great in my opinion:
🎥 Watch of the week:
I enjoyed this showcase of an immersive movie watching experience, I can’t wait to see this make education more engaging across the board.
AI Showcase🎨🤖🎵✍🏼: 10 Survival Strategies
In the Metaverse, AI will be critical for creating intelligent virtual environments and avatars that can understand and respond to users with human-like cognition and natural interactions.
This week, we’re spotlighting a powerful and timely guide for navigating the age of artificial intelligence—not with fear, but with clarity, creativity, and courage. Misha da Vinci’s 10 AI Survival Secrets offers a mindset shift that’s especially relevant for those feeling overwhelmed, uncertain, or passive in the face of rapid technological change. Here they are in full:
1. Put a limit on reading, watching, or listening to the news. Mainstream media thrives on clickbait, fear, and outrage. The more time you spend in these loops, the less time you have to think clearly or originally. Reclaim your mental space.
2. Spend more time reading, being in nature, or tuning into your inner genius. True clarity and creativity come from stillness, not noise. When you slow down enough to hear your own thoughts, you realise how much of your thinking was never yours to begin with.
3. Stop debating politics or current affairs. These conversations rarely illuminate. They drain your energy and attention, keeping you stuck in problems instead of contributing to solutions.
4. Talk to people who are building. Engage with founders, designers, engineers, and creators—those bringing new ideas into the world. Their momentum is infectious and expands your capacity to act.
5. Stop complaining that AI is taking your job or ruining the world. Complaints are passive. If you’re only reacting to the future, you’re forfeiting your role in shaping it.
6. Learn how AI works—and how to use it. Understand the technology. The winners of this era will be those who learn to partner with machines, not fear them.
7. Stop catastrophising the collapse of the old world. Yes, many systems are breaking. But this isn’t the beginning of collapse—it’s the aftermath. The real task now is to participate in what comes next.
8. Learn the new tools, and help design what replaces the broken systems. From decentralised networks to open-source platforms, powerful technologies are emerging daily. If you’re paying attention, you can help shape the blueprint for tomorrow.
9. Stop blaming public figures. Blame is easy. Creation is hard. The future will not be built by critics—it will be built by those doing the work.
10. Get in the arena. Do something valuable. Don’t wait for permission or rescue. The people who shape the future will be the ones bold enough to build it themselves.
This isn’t just advice—it’s a call to action. In an AI-driven world, survival doesn’t mean hiding from the future. It means stepping up to shape it.
That’s all for this week! If you have any organisations in mind that could benefit from keynotes about emerging technology, be sure to reach out. Public speaking is one of many services I offer.