Menu #2 - The Web3 Dinner Club

Stablecoins
Obvious Adams
Web3 Dinner Club: April (LDN)
RWA Tokenisation
Novel Labs
Brand spice
Chefs Note

Welcome to The Menu, the weekly newsletter for the Web3 Dinner Club.

The weekly dispatch on Web3 in the UK, what founders, investors, and builders are talking about around the table.

First: stablecoins are moving from theory to infrastructure.
With the FCA launching sandbox testing, the UK is beginning to treat stablecoins less like a crypto experiment and more like financial plumbing.

Second: AI is dominating the London tech conversation.
From new labs to new capital, there’s a growing sense that London is becoming an AI hub what some are jokingly calling “Londonmaxxing.”

The question for Web3 is simple:

Does the AI boom spill into blockchain investment, or do the ecosystems evolve separately?

In this issue:

• The UK’s stablecoin sandbox
• Founder lessons from Obvious Adams
• A contrarian take on RWA and the next dinner invite

Signal, served weekly.

This month’s dinner is proudly sponsored by Novel Labs.

A multi-award-winning London storytelling studio building the brands of the future in AI, blockchain, and emerging technologies.

Best known for the $100m expansion to the Bored Ape Yacht Club, The Mutant Cartel World.

If you’re a startup or scale-up building a brand and looking for real go-to-market impact from those who have repeatedly built unicorns and category kings as VCs and founders... ask for an intro at the table.

Last week we talked about the UK making crypto boring by pulling it into the existing financial system. This week is what that looks like in practice: the FCA has picked four firms to test stablecoin models inside its regulatory sandbox.

This is the UK’s integration strategy in action: instead of debating stablecoins in theory, the regulator is validating what actually works under supervision before the wider regime goes live.

Stablecoins don’t win because they’re cool. They win when regulators can trust the plumbing: reserves, redemption, and operational resilience.

This isn’t “crypto adoption"; it’s stress-testing the pipes before opening the tap.

The FCA also reiterated the bigger timeline: the UK’s broader crypto regime is expected to go live in October 2027, with an authorisation gateway opening in September 2026, meaning serious firms should already be preparing.

If stablecoin rules harden in 2026, does the next wave come from the following:

Every founder is searching for the nonobvious insight: the hidden opportunity no one else has spotted.

Obvious Adams makes the opposite argument.

The biggest opportunities in business are often completely obvious; they’re just ignored.

First published in 1916, the book follows Adams, an ordinary clerk who becomes highly successful not through brilliance or innovation, but by consistently noticing simple problems and fixing them.

In one story, he’s sent to investigate declining sales of a product. Instead of complex analysis, he visits shops and asks customers why they aren’t buying it.

The answer is simple: people don’t understand what the product does.

Adams changes the messaging and packaging to make the benefit clear.

Sales increase.

The lesson for founders is powerful: many startups fail because they chase complexity instead of clarity. The best companies often succeed by solving an obvious problem in a better way

Uber made taxis easier.
Airbnb made spare rooms rentable.
Stripe made payments simple for developers.

None of these ideas were invisible; the need already existed.

The real advantage wasn’t discovering the problem.

It was actually doing something about it.

In a world obsessed with disruption and cleverness, Obvious Adams is a reminder that great businesses are often built on clear thinking, common sense, and execution.

The Web3 Dinner Club is a curated, seated dinner that brings together founders, investors, builders, and operators across crypto, blockchain, AI, and adjacent tech. Not for pitches or panels, but for real conversation at one long table.

It’s for people who value signal over noise and want high-quality relationships in the UK scene. Attend if you want thoughtful intros, sharper context on what’s happening locally, and a night that actually turns into follow-ups.

The next dinner is coming up on Thursday, 23rd April.
Schedule: 6:00 pm early meet-up → 7:30 pm seated dinner.
Ticket: £125 (includes three-course dinner + drinks).
Venue: In Mayfair/Soho, announced to ticket holders.

Proudly Sponsored by Novel Labs.

Real-World Assets (RWAs) are traditional assets (Treasuries, funds, credit, commodities, and property) represented as tokens on a blockchain. The pitch is better rails: faster settlement, easier movement, and more automation.

Most “RWA growth” is happening in the boring corner first, especially tokenised and treasuries/money-market-style products.

They’re standardised, liquid, and easier to wrap in regulated structures. The more ambitious stuff (like tokenised real estate at scale) is still early.

A lot of RWA talk is just finance doing what it always does, building new wrappers and distribution channels and calling it a revolution.

For the average person, tokenisation doesn’t automatically mean better access, lower fees, or better outcomes. In many cases it can simply add complexity: new platforms, new risks, and unclear protections if the wrapper is weak.

What it means for normal people (so far): you probably won’t “buy RWAs” directly; you’ll use products built on tokenised rails inside apps and brokers if they’re offered in a regulated way.

The real questions remain:
Who holds custody?
What legal rights do you have?
How does redemption work?
What happens in a failure scenario?

If RWAs win, it may feel less like “the future arriving” and more like infrastructure quietly upgrading behind the scenes.

Alongside stablecoins and regulation, another theme keeps surfacing in conversations across the UK tech scene: AI companies moving into London at speed.

New labs, research hubs, and startups are clustering around the city — from frontier model developers to applied AI companies building tools for finance, law, and enterprise. Capital is following quickly, with investors increasingly treating London as Europe’s most important AI hub.

Some people online have jokingly started calling this "Londonmaxxing," the idea that the city is entering another tech cycle, driven by AI talent, capital, and global attention.

What’s interesting for Web3 is the potential second-order effect.

Major technology waves tend to pull adjacent ecosystems with them. As AI founders, engineers, and investors concentrate in one place, it often creates spillover into other frontier technologies: infrastructure, cryptography, decentralised systems, and new financial rails.

We’ve seen this pattern before in London during previous tech cycles.

The question now is whether AI’s momentum brings renewed energy and capital into blockchain, or whether Web3 continues to develop as its own parallel ecosystem.

If London becomes Europe’s AI capital, does that ultimately strengthen the UK’s position in Web3, or does AI absorb most of the attention and capital?

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Until next time