Robinhood did not ask customers to master a bewildering collection of wallets, blockchains and unfamiliar financial applications. Instead, it placed stablecoin lending and other blockchain-based services inside an app millions of people already know. Behind the scenes, established crypto protocols provide the technology. To the customer, it increasingly looks like another Robinhood product.

That may be how blockchain finally reaches the mainstream, not by persuading everyone to become a crypto expert, but by making the underlying technology almost invisible. Most people do not know which network processes a credit-card payment or which server delivers an email. They simply expect the service to work.

A similar transition is underway in artificial intelligence. Our Media of the Week shows AI agents rapidly becoming the largest users of AI infrastructure as they take on research, coding and multistep assignments with less human direction. In both finance and technology, increasingly powerful machines are moving behind increasingly simple interfaces.

News You Can Use

Did the SEC Just Open a $75 Million Door for Crypto

For years, American crypto entrepreneurs have faced an uncomfortable choice: launch overseas, exclude US investors or risk an SEC enforcement action. Chairman Paul Atkins wants to change that.

During a September 2 appearance on Fox Business’s Mornings with Maria, Atkins discussed “Regulation Crypto Assets,” a proposal that would create fundraising rules designed specifically for token projects.

Early stage developers could raise up to $5 million over four years through a one time startup exemption. Larger US companies could raise as much as $75 million within 12 months. Retail investors could participate, although limits would apply to nonaccredited investors in larger offerings.

Projects would still have to disclose important information, including development plans, token supply, insider allocations, governance, cybersecurity and investment risks. Larger issuers would also provide financial statements and continuing SEC reports.

The most consequential provision concerns what happens after development is finished. A token may initially be part of a securities transaction because buyers are relying on a team to build the network. Once that team completes or permanently abandons its promised work, the investment contract could be considered finished and the token could potentially trade without retaining the same securities designation.

The proposal does not exempt the entire crypto industry or resolve every question involving exchanges, brokers and stablecoins. It does, however, offer something the industry has wanted for years: a clearer path for launching tokens legally in the United States. The rules remain subject to public comment. SEC announcement

How Robinhood Built an $830 Million Blockchain in Two Months

The real growth engine is stablecoin lending, but the larger ambition looks like it is to rebuild the brokerage business on-chain.

At the beginning of July, Robinhood launched the public mainnet of Robinhood Chain, its new blockchain designed to connect traditional investments with decentralized finance. Approximately two months later, the network had already accumulated about $830 million in total value locked, or TVL.

That is remarkably fast growth for a new blockchain. Most networks spend years attempting to attract users, developers and liquidity. Robinhood appears to have assembled a substantial on-chain economy in a matter of weeks.

However, the $830 million figure requires some explanation. It does not mean investors have placed $830 million into Robinhood’s tokenized stocks. TVL measures the assets deposited into financial applications operating on the network. It is not Robinhood’s revenue, nor is it the market value of the blockchain itself.

Robinhood launched Robinhood Earn, which allows eligible customers to purchase USDG, a dollar backed stablecoin, and lend it through a self custody wallet directly from the familiar Robinhood application. The underlying lending infrastructure is provided by Morpho, one of the largest decentralized lending protocols. At launch, Robinhood advertised an estimated yield of approximately 7 percent, although the rate is variable.

This arrangement addresses one of decentralized finance’s longstanding problems. DeFi may offer attractive products, but using them has traditionally required customers to set up wallets, move assets between blockchains and select unfamiliar protocols. Robinhood packages the experience inside an application its customers already know.

The results have been immediate. In a recent snapshot, Morpho accounted for approximately $497 million, or about 60 percent, of Robinhood Chain’s TVL. Uniswap, the network’s principal public trading venue, held another $212 million. Stablecoins on the network totaled roughly $868 million, with USDG representing nearly two thirds of that amount. By comparison, DefiLlama classified approximately $207 million as active real world assets.

Robinhood also avoided the difficult and expensive task of building an entire financial ecosystem from scratch. Robinhood Chain uses Arbitrum’s blockchain technology, while established partners provide many of its essential functions. Morpho supplies lending, Uniswap provides liquidity and trading, and Chainlink delivers on-chain prices.

Robinhood’s true competitive advantage is distribution. It already has millions of customers, a recognized brand, established funding channels and a widely used financial application. Instead of asking consumers to find their way into DeFi, Robinhood can bring DeFi directly to them.

Trading and speculation have also accelerated the network’s growth. Robinhood Chain has recorded unusually high decentralized exchange and perpetual futures volumes, with activity extending well beyond tokenized stocks. Memecoins, launch platforms and speculative trading applications have attracted users and liquidity providers.

This raises an important question about the quality of the growth. Capital deposited to earn promotional yields may leave when those incentives decline. Speculative volume can also disappear quickly when investor attention shifts elsewhere. The durability of Robinhood Chain will depend on whether the network can convert this initial activity into long term demand for financial products.

Stock Tokens remain the strategically important part of the story, even if they are not yet the primary source of TVL. Robinhood’s tokens can be held in personal wallets, traded around the clock and incorporated into lending, collateral and other financial applications. Uniswap reported that ten tokenized stock pools paired with the S&P 500 generated $33 million in volume from more than 11,000 traders during their first 12 days, including substantial activity while conventional US markets were closed.

There is an important legal distinction. Robinhood Stock Tokens are tokenized debt securities that provide economic exposure to an underlying stock or exchange traded fund. Holders do not receive legal or beneficial ownership of the underlying shares. The tokens therefore reproduce much of the economic experience of owning a stock without necessarily delivering the same voting rights, direct ownership or relationship with the corporate issuer.

The broader implication is that Robinhood is becoming more than a broker. Traditionally, the company controlled the customer interface while depending on outside exchanges, market makers, custodians and clearing systems. Its own blockchain could allow Robinhood to control more of the financial stack, including the wallet, trading environment, asset issuance and settlement network.

Robinhood Chain’s rapid rise shows how quickly an established financial distributor can create an onchain market. Stablecoins supplied the capital, established DeFi protocols supplied the infrastructure and speculative trading accelerated the growth.

The $830 million does not yet prove that tokenized stocks have reached mass adoption. It may reveal how that adoption will eventually happen: stablecoins first, liquidity second and programmable securities once the market is ready.

In the paid Blockchain Income Report, we examine which protocols and tokens are capturing the economic value created by Robinhood Chain and which could benefit if its early growth proves sustainable.

Media of the Week

Rise of the Machines

This week’s chart from a16z captures how quickly AI is shifting from answering questions to performing tasks. On OpenRouter, AI agents now consume nearly five times as many tokens as human users, with agent activity increasing fourteenfold since February. The surge suggests that humans are becoming the minority users of AI infrastructure as autonomous systems increasingly conduct research, write code and complete multistep assignments on their behalf.

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Good Morning: Labor Day traditionally marks the point when the pace of business begins to accelerate again. In an election year, it is also when politics becomes more pronounced as voters start paying closer attention to the choices they will face in November.

This week’s BIR sits at the intersection of markets, regulation and politics. For the first time in the history of the Blockchain Income Report, we are endorsing a candidate for Congress. Brent Andersen, the Republican candidate in Florida’s 20th Congressional District, joins us as a guest contributor to explain why clear blockchain rules matter not only to financial institutions and technology companies, but also to everyday Americans and small businesses.

The regulatory landscape is already beginning to move. The SEC has proposed its first substantive overhaul of the transfer agent rules in decades, explicitly recognizing blockchain based recordkeeping. Although the proposal is not yet final, its importance should not be understated. The debate is shifting away from whether blockchain can be part of the official financial system and toward how it should operate within that system.

Markets were relatively quiet this week. The S&P 500 finished essentially unchanged, while the Nasdaq posted a modest gain. European and Asian equities moved lower, Treasury yields rose and Brent crude climbed nearly 9 percent. In digital assets, Bitcoin fell 3.1 percent to approximately $77,800, while Ethereum declined 4.1 percent to about $2,407.

Despite that pullback, the longer term adoption story continues to develop. This week’s Media of the Week highlights the rapid growth in tokenized equity ownership, with holder addresses rising from roughly 367,000 in July to 1.9 million in September.

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The SEC Just Named Blockchain in the Rulebook

On Tuesday the SEC proposed the first substantive rewrite of its transfer agent rules since the late 1970s and early 1980s, naming blockchain explicitly rather than leaving the market to infer where distributed ledgers fit. Transfer agents are the roughly 273 registered firms that maintain the official record of who owns a company’s securities, process transfers and handle dividends, which is about as unglamorous as financial infrastructure gets. To put the timing in perspective, Commissioners Aguilar and Gallagher publicly called these rules anachronistic and overdue for reform in 2015, so this has taken eleven years from the point where two sitting commissioners said out loud that the framework no longer matched the industry.

Most of the proposal is housekeeping. Registration would become effective in 45 days rather than 30, retention requirements get consolidated, processing standards get aligned with the current settlement cycle, and the threshold that triggers limits on a transfer agent expanding its business rises from 75% to 95%. The load-bearing part is the terminology, updated throughout to recognize electronic and blockchain-based recordkeeping, because that changes what an agent may treat as the official record. Proposed Rule 17ad-31 on restrictive legends matters for the same reason, since in a tokenized context the restriction could be enforced by a smart contract rather than by a person checking a document. Safeguards come attached, with stronger requirements on cybersecurity, data integrity, operational risk, compliance and business continuity.

This is now the third time this year a regulator has extended existing obligations to the new technology rather than writing a separate rulebook for it, after the Fed confirmed capital treatment for tokenized securities in March and the ECB accepted them as Eurosystem collateral at the end of the same month. That is the outcome the industry should want, even though it is more work than a bespoke regime.

The qualification is that this is a proposal, not a rule. The comment period runs 60 days from Federal Register publication, after which the Commission reviews comments and votes on a final version, and proposals change materially between those points. The SEC is also asking for input on questions it has not answered, including how digital wallets should be treated, how onchain fraud risk should be handled and how ownership records ought to interact with distributed ledgers. Anyone reading this as a finished framework is reading it wrong.

Still, the argument has moved. Two years ago the question was whether a blockchain could serve as an official ownership record at all, and the answer arrived through enforcement actions rather than rulemaking. The question now is how it should be done and what controls come with it. The separate roundtable the SEC has scheduled for September 17 on round-the-clock trading, with NYSE, Nasdaq, DTCC, State Street, Citadel Securities, Cboe and Robinhood attending, means the ownership record and the trading day are being examined in the same season by the same regulator. For anyone building in tokenized stocks, funds or depositary receipts, the record layer is no longer the unresolved question it was in January. The unresolved questions have moved downstream, which is where the comment file is pointed.

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Clear Rules of the Road: Why Blockchain Clarity Matters for Everyday Americans and Small Businesses

By Brent Andersen

Guest Contributor

Good morning.

U.S. markets continue to digest a mix of labor data, energy prices, and geopolitical signals, while crypto has shown relative resilience. Bitcoin have held steady amid broader equity fluctuations, and institutional interest keeps expanding. Stablecoin volumes remain robust, tokenization pilots are moving from experiment to production, and traditional finance continues its quiet migration onto blockchain rails.

The real story is not price action. It is the growing recognition that digital assets are becoming infrastructure. Banks are exploring 24-hour settlement. Corporations are testing tokenized treasuries and equity. Everyday investors and small businesses are looking for ways to earn yield, cut costs, and reduce friction without taking unnecessary risk. The missing piece remains the same: clear, durable rules written by elected representatives rather than left to shifting regulatory enforcement.

That is why market structure legislation and stablecoin frameworks matter so much right now, and why the leadership of Senators Rick Scott and Ashley Moody, along with Speaker Mike Johnson, has been so important in advancing practical solutions.

The Cost of Uncertainty

In business, uncertainty is expensive. When regulators apply securities rules by enforcement rather than by statute, capital sits on the sidelines or moves offshore. Innovators spend more time managing legal risk than building product. Ordinary people and small business owners who want exposure to blockchain technology face confusing disclosures and uneven protections.

I have spent my career in commercial insurance and risk management. I have seen how clear rules lower costs, expand opportunity, and protect the people who follow them. The same principle applies here. Digital assets can make payments faster, settlement cheaper, and capital markets more efficient. They can also create new ways for Americans to earn income through liquidity provision, tokenized assets, and well-structured yield products. None of that scales without predictable guardrails.

Senator Rick Scott has put it plainly: government should not create uncertainty that prevents businesses from innovating. When the rules are clear, competition flourishes and technology comes back to the United States. Under Republican majorities and with strong support from the current administration, Congress has already delivered important progress through the GENIUS Act on stablecoins. The next step is finishing the job on broader market structure so that the United States remains the place where this innovation is built and scaled. I share that view completely.

Stablecoins, Small Businesses, and Real-World Results

Payment stablecoins and on-chain payments are among the clearest near-term opportunities for everyday Americans and the businesses that serve them. They function as digital dollars for transfers, settlement, and commerce. The GENIUS Act was an important first step, establishing reserve requirements, licensing paths, and transparency expectations. Federal agencies are now writing the implementing rules. Florida has moved in parallel with its own state-level stablecoin legislation, positioning the state as a practical place to build.

The benefits are not theoretical. Steak ‘n Shake began accepting crypto payments via the Lightning Network across its U.S. locations in May 2025. Same-store sales rose 10.7% in the second quarter and 15% in the third, gains the company says outpaced every major fast-food competitor, while payment processing costs fell by nearly 50 percent compared with traditional credit cards. Those savings, paired with new customer traffic, allowed the company to launch a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, now worth roughly $15 million, that helps fund operations and improvements without raising menu prices. That is a real-world example of a mid-sized American business using blockchain technology to lower costs, attract customers, and strengthen its balance sheet.

Small businesses across Florida and the country face the same pressure from high card processing fees and slow settlement. Clear rules for private stablecoins and digital asset payments give them practical tools to compete. Issuers should maintain high-quality, liquid reserves. Audits should be regular and public. Consumers and merchants should know exactly what stands behind the tokens they hold and accept. When those conditions exist, stablecoins and on-chain payments stop being a speculative sideshow and become useful tools for businesses and families.

I do not support a government-issued central bank digital currency. A CBDC would give the federal government a direct window into private transactions and a new lever of control that Americans should never accept. Private, competitive payment systems achieve the same efficiency gains without that surveillance risk. Senators Scott and Moody and Speaker Johnson have been clear and consistent on this point, and I stand with them.

Market Structure and Tokenization

Beyond stablecoins, the larger opportunity is market structure. Legislation in the spirit of the CLARITY Act would define which digital assets are securities and which are commodities, clarify custody standards, and create workable pathways for trading and fundraising. That clarity would allow banks to offer digital custody with confidence, enable portfolio margining across traditional and digital assets, and accelerate the tokenization of real-world assets.

Tokenization is not abstract. It can reduce settlement times from days to minutes, lower intermediary costs, and improve transparency. Public equities, Treasuries, and other instruments issued or recorded on-chain can make markets more accessible and less expensive to operate. Florida’s financial services sector, its ports, its real estate markets, and its growing technology base all stand to benefit when these tools become mainstream.

The goal is to let efficient technology compete on a level playing field while protecting investors and national security interests. Anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance remain essential, and clear rules make those protections more effective, not less. After years of regulation by enforcement that drove innovation and capital overseas, practical leadership in Congress is bringing the industry back under workable American rules.

Opportunity for Everyday Investors and Local Businesses

Most people reading this are not running crypto funds. They are looking for practical ways to participate in a technology that is reshaping finance, or they own small businesses trying to keep more of every dollar they earn. Clear regulation helps them. It reduces the risk of opaque products, improves disclosure, and encourages responsible platforms to compete for their business, and it supports the kind of fee savings and sales growth Steak ‘n Shake has demonstrated in the real world.

America should be the place where this innovation happens. Capital, talent, and technology will go where the rules are workable. If we leave the field unclear, other jurisdictions will write the standards and capture the jobs and the tax base. That is not an abstract concern. It is a competitive reality that will shape the next decade of American economic leadership.

Looking Ahead

The direction of travel is clear. Corporate adoption is accelerating. Stablecoin transparency is improving, and federal agencies are now writing the rules to implement the GENIUS Act. Market-structure legislation in the spirit of the CLARITY Act has not yet reached a final Senate vote, with a September window now in view. Voters should pay close attention to where candidates stand on these issues in the midterms. The remaining task is to finish the job of providing durable clarity that protects consumers, preserves innovation, and keeps the United States at the center of the next financial infrastructure.

I approach these issues the same way I approach insurance and risk: with a preference for clear rules, practical outcomes, and solutions that work for ordinary people and small businesses rather than for the bureaucracy. Blockchain technology offers real tools for lower costs, faster settlement, and new income opportunities. Those tools will reach their potential only when the rules of the road are written in statute rather than left to enforcement actions and shifting guidance.

I support legislation that delivers this clarity: building on the GENIUS Act, advancing market structure bills in the spirit of the CLARITY Act, protecting Americans from a surveillance-oriented CBDC, and ensuring that small businesses and everyday investors can participate in this technology with confidence. Clear rules. Private-sector innovation. Strong protections against both fraud and government overreach. And a determination to keep the future of this technology built in America.

Through my work in commercial insurance, including Directors & Officers coverage for companies operating in the digital asset space, I see firsthand both the opportunities and the risks that come with this technology. Clear, workable rules benefit the innovators, the investors, and the small businesses that want to participate responsibly.

Brent Andersen is a commercial insurance broker and the Republican candidate for the United States House of Representatives in Florida’s 20th Congressional District.

Thank you to Tom and the team at The Blockchain Income Report for the invitation to share these thoughts.

Media of the Week

This week’s media of the week is a tweet from the Cointelegraph showing the growth in tokenized equity holders. On-chain tokenized equities appear to be reaching an important distribution inflection point. The number of holder addresses climbed from approximately 367,000 in July to 810,000 in August and 1.9 million in September, representing a thirteenfold increase over the past year. This suggests that platforms such as Robinhood, Ondo and xStocks are successfully introducing tokenized shares to a much broader audience and moving the market beyond its experimental phase.

Lynyrd Skynyrd’s final concert on October 19, 1977, at the Greenville Memorial Auditorium in Greenville, South Carolina.

This week’s BIR takes a lighter turn as summer winds down. We also share some personal reflections on the music we heard this season, including a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert that left me thinking about why certain songs, ideas and institutions endure long after their original creators have left the stage.

Markets did not all play the same tune this week. The S&P 500 declined 0.42 percent and the Nasdaq fell 0.76 percent, while European equities recorded a modest gain. The much louder performances came from gold and crypto. Gold rose 3.54 percent, Bitcoin gained 13.34 percent and Ethereum advanced 9.81 percent.

Bitcoin briefly moved above $80,000 before ending the period at $78,509. Concerns about dollar debasement, renewed institutional inflows and optimism surrounding US crypto legislation helped shift sentiment from caution to enthusiasm in a matter of days.

If the market were a concert, equities provided a subdued rhythm section while gold delivered a strong supporting performance. Bitcoin returned to the spotlight as the headliner, Ethereum shared the main stage and Stacks emerged as the week’s breakout act with a gain of more than 112 percent.

The rally still needs to be viewed in context. Bitcoin remains down 11.52 percent for the year and Ethereum is down 17.60 percent, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq are both up more than 12 percent. This was a powerful rebound, but it has not yet erased crypto’s earlier losses.

Whether this is the opening song of a sustained recovery or simply a late summer encore remains to be seen. What is clear is that investors are listening again.

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News You Can Use: When Blockchain Couldn’t Find an Audience

Nina Protocol began in 2021 with an appealing idea. The Solana based music marketplace would allow independent musicians to sell releases directly to listeners, retain ownership of their work and keep the proceeds from their sales.

It was intended to be an alternative to the large streaming platforms, where musicians frequently complain about low payments, algorithmic discovery and the difficulty of forming direct relationships with listeners. Nina also developed a respected editorial operation that covered experimental musicians, emerging genres and music scenes that received little attention elsewhere.

The cultural idea worked. The economics did not.

An analysis of Nina’s activity estimated that only about $50,000 was spent across the platform during its entire lifetime. Approximately 77 percent of its nearly 37,000 listings were never purchased. An artist whose release attracted only five purchases was already in the top 3 percent of the platform. Nina once suggested that reaching 10 percent of Bandcamp’s daily sales volume would make the business profitable. According to the same analysis, it never reached even 0.01 percent.

Nina also struggled to reconcile its audience with its technology. Independent music listeners may care deeply about supporting musicians, but that does not mean they want to learn about wallets, tokens and blockchain infrastructure before buying an album. A service intended to reduce the distance between artists and their fans still placed an unfamiliar technical environment between them.

For more than four years, Nina collected no platform revenue. It did not introduce its $1 community revenue fee until October 2025, only months before announcing that it would close. Its venture financing gave the company time to build an admired community, but ultimately the business needed to reach a scale that its deliberately specialized audience could not provide.

Nina shut down in July. SoundCloud subsequently acquired its editorial archive and genre map and offered Nina’s artists the opportunity to move their catalogs into SoundCloud’s creator platform. The transaction preserved some of Nina’s most valuable work, but not its blockchain marketplace.

Nina’s failure does not prove that blockchain has no place in music. It demonstrates something more useful. Good technology cannot compensate for limited demand, an inconvenient user experience or the absence of a sustainable business model. Before blockchain can improve a product, there must first be an audience that wants the product.

The Songs Outlived the Band

Photo from the concert last weekend in Massachusetts

Growing up in Alabama during the 1970s, I was conscious that the state was still living under the long shadow of segregation, George Wallace and the battles of the civil rights era. Two areas seemed to receive a great deal of attention and made many Southerners feel good about themselves: college football and music.

Neil Young released “Southern Man” in 1970 and “Alabama” in 1972. Both songs offered harsh criticism of racism in the South. Ronnie Van Zant believed Young was condemning an entire region for the actions and beliefs of some of its people. Lynyrd Skynyrd responded with “Sweet Home Alabama,” released in 1974.

The members of Lynyrd Skynyrd were not from Alabama. The band was formed in Jacksonville, Florida. It did, however, have an important musical connection to the state. Lynyrd Skynyrd recorded formative early sessions at Muscle Shoals, and “Sweet Home Alabama” celebrated the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, better known as the Swampers. Those early Alabama sessions helped establish the guitar driven sound that would later define the band.

For those of us who grew up in Alabama, the details mattered less than the song. “Sweet Home Alabama” became an unofficial state anthem. It was played at football games, dances, concerts and almost any gathering where the organizers wanted everyone to sing together. Even people who knew little about Lynyrd Skynyrd knew the opening guitar notes.

More than 50 years after the song was released, I finally saw Lynyrd Skynyrd perform last weekend in Massachusetts.

There were no founding members on the stage and no one from the band’s celebrated recording lineup of the 1970s. Gary Rossington, the final surviving founder, died in 2023. Johnny Van Zant, Ronnie’s younger brother, has been the lead singer since the surviving musicians reunited for a tribute tour in 1987. Ronnie spent approximately 13 years leading the band before his death in 1977. Johnny has now been singing these songs for 39 years.

Lynyrd Skynyrd is frequently remembered through its image. The band helped define Southern rock, used the Confederate battle flag at its concerts for many years and developed a reputation for representing a particularly rough form of Southern rebellion.

When I listened to their songs in concert, I heard a different message. In a world of AI driven lyrics, there was something unusually original about their songs. Ronnie Van Zant was not simply writing Southern anthems. He was telling stories about people, mistakes and lessons drawn from his own experiences.

“The Ballad of Curtis Loew” tells the story of an overlooked blues musician who plays outside a country store where Ronnie would frequent. He never became famous, but to the boy listening to him, Curtis was “the finest picker to ever play the blues.” The song is ultimately about Ronnie recognizing talent and dignity in his own small town.

The song “Simple Man” is about advice Ronnie received from his mother. The song was said to have been inspired by the death of Ronnie’s grandmother. It is about being honest and authentic, being guided by love rather than ego and being at peace with yourself. These are ideas I had never previously associated with a band like Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Seeing all the songs I knew performed by the next generation of musicians made for a fun evening, but it also made me question what a band really is. The legal answer may be a name. My conclusion after the concert was that the band lives in the stories told through its songs, just as Ronnie would have liked. They reflected his ideas, his messages and his success.

The people on the stage had changed. The audience had changed. The world around the music had changed. The band’s Confederate battle flag had been replaced by the Alabama state flag. Yet thousands of people still knew the words and understood the characters Ronnie Van Zant created.

I suspect Ronnie Van Zant would have appreciated that.

The memorial to the band in Magnolia, Mississippi, just near the crash site from October 20, 1977

Media of the Week: Well Farewell Dolly

Following the death of Dolly Parton this week, tributes appeared around the world. One of the most touching came from an unexpected location.

During the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, the Band of the Coldstream Guards performed “9 to 5.” The cheerful working day anthem sounded surprisingly at home within one of Britain’s most formal ceremonies.

It was an appropriate farewell to a songwriter whose music traveled far beyond Tennessee and reached people who may have shared little except their affection for her songs. It also reinforced the theme running through this week’s BIR: performers eventually leave the stage, but great songs continue to find new audiences.

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Crypto was the clear standout. Bitcoin rose 13.3% to $78,509 and Ethereum gained 9.8% to $2,472. The rebound extended well beyond the largest assets. Stacks jumped 112.5%, this past week making it the strongest performer among CoinMarketCap’s top 100, while the week’s weakest name, MemeCore, declined 8.3%.

Today we examine why the debasement narrative is supporting both gold and Bitcoin, and why tokenized equities may be one of blockchain’s largest mainstream opportunities - provided investors can clearly understand what each token actually represents. We end with a meme that captures crypto’s remarkable ability to move from despair to euphoria in a matter of hours.

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Crypto News You Can’t Miss

The Debasement Trade Returns

Wall Street is once again talking about the “debasement trade,” the idea that rising government debt, persistent budget deficits and government intervention in bond markets will gradually weaken the value of the dollar. The discussion has intensified as US federal debt has surpassed $40 trillion and the Treasury has expanded its bond buyback program in an effort to stabilize the market.

Investors appear to be responding by moving toward assets viewed as scarce and resistant to currency depreciation. Gold has climbed for five consecutive weeks, while Bitcoin recently recorded its strongest three-day rally since 2023. At the same time, the dollar has weakened against other major currencies.

Our view at the BIR is that the market is increasingly treating gold and Bitcoin as part of the same broader investment thesis. Gold remains the traditional protection against fiscal and monetary uncertainty, while Bitcoin is gaining recognition as a digital alternative with a fixed supply. If concerns about US debt and the dollar continue, the debasement trade could provide lasting support for both assets.

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Tokenized Equities Will Take Off, but Investors Need to Know What They Own

Tokenized equities are often presented as a solution in search of a problem. Most investors can already buy stocks cheaply through an online brokerage account, so why move them onto a blockchain?

The answer is that tokenization can make equities more useful, not simply easier to trade. A tokenized share can potentially move around the clock, settle almost immediately and interact with other digital assets through programmable financial systems. It can also be divided into much smaller units, making expensive shares more accessible to smaller investors. For investors outside the United States, tokenization could provide a simpler route to global markets that are currently difficult or costly to reach.

These advantages are substantial enough that tokenized equities are likely to take off. The question is not whether shares will move onto blockchain infrastructure. The question is what investors will actually own when they buy them.

Today, products described as tokenized stocks can represent very different legal arrangements. One token might be the official digital form of a share issued by the company itself. Another might represent an interest in a special purpose vehicle that owns the shares. A third might be a depositary instrument backed by securities held elsewhere. A fourth may simply be a derivative designed to follow the share price without giving its holder any ownership in the underlying company.

To an investor looking at a trading screen, these products can appear nearly identical. All may carry the same company name and display a price that closely tracks the traditional share. But the rights behind them can be radically different.

A genuine shareholder may be entitled to dividends, voting rights and the proceeds of a takeover. The holder of a synthetic token may receive only a payment based on changes in the share price. An investor in a special purpose vehicle may own an interest in the vehicle rather than the company itself. If the platform fails, enters bankruptcy or loses access to its custodian, the token holder may discover that the asset was never legally separated from the platform’s own property.

This ambiguity will become especially important during corporate actions. Stock splits, tender offers, mergers, rights issues and special dividends are routine in traditional markets, but each requires someone to determine what the token holder receives. If the token does not carry formal shareholder rights, the platform may have considerable discretion over how these events are handled.

The solution is not to slow tokenization. It is to establish a clear disclosure standard that allows an ordinary investor to understand the product before buying it. Every tokenized equity should answer a few basic questions in plain language. Does the token represent direct ownership of a share? Who holds the underlying security? Are the assets independently verified and protected if the platform fails? Does the investor receive dividends and voting rights? Can the token be redeemed for the underlying share? Which regulator and legal jurisdiction govern the arrangement?

We think the answers should appear next to the price, not buried in a lengthy legal agreement. Independent verification will also be essential. Investors should be able to confirm how many tokens are outstanding and whether an equivalent number of shares is held by a regulated custodian. If a platform can create new tokens without first acquiring the corresponding securities, tokenization becomes little more than an unsecured promise wrapped in blockchain technology.

None of this diminishes the opportunity. In fact, greater clarity could accelerate adoption. Brokers, asset managers and banks are more likely to support tokenized equities if the legal rights are standardized and the underlying assets can be audited. Regulators will be more comfortable when marketing accurately reflects ownership. Investors will be more willing to commit capital when they know exactly what happens if the platform encounters trouble.

The first generation of tokenized equities has focused heavily on access and trading. The next generation must focus on ownership. The winners will not necessarily be the platforms offering the largest number of tokens or the fastest trading. They will be the ones that can make a simple promise and prove it: this token represents a clearly defined asset, held in a clearly identified place, with rights that remain enforceable when something goes wrong.

Tokenized equities can become one of blockchain’s largest mainstream applications. But before investors embrace the technology, the industry must make certain that buying a token means more than buying exposure to a name and a price. Investors need to know what they own.

Media of the Week

Crypto Is So Back - Until It Isn’t

One meme captured the mood better than any chart. After weeks of panic, a modest green screen is often enough to turn crypto social media from capitulation to euphoria. Also a useful reminder that sentiment usually moves much faster than fundamentals. Enjoy the rally…for now!

Source: @chriscyss on X, August 19, 2026.

Investors also responded positively to the latest inflation data. July’s Producer Price Index was unchanged, below economists’ expectation of a 0.2% increase, while core PPI rose 0.2%, slightly below expectations. This followed Wednesday’s consumer price report, which showed that July CPI increased 0.1%, in line with forecasts. The relatively mild inflation readings led traders to reduce expectations for a September rate hike. Over the past 24 hours, crypto has been relatively quiet, with Bitcoin and Ethereum trading sideways, while Tether’s first clean full financial audit and growing institutional interest in Ethereum were the biggest developments.

Today we look at how Tether’s first clean audit and the potential passage of the CLARITY Act could push crypto closer to mainstream finance, with banks, brokers, stablecoins, and tokenized assets becoming faster, more regulated, and more integrated into everyday financial markets. And don’t forget the BIR portfolio!

Crypto News of the Week: USDT Gets Audited?

Tether, the company behind the USDT stablecoin, has completed its first full independent financial statement audit, with KPMG U.S. issuing an unqualified, or “clean,” opinion on Tether International’s 2025 financial statements. The audit examined the company’s complete financial position, including its assets, liabilities, transactions, ownership records, valuations, income, equity, and cash flows. KPMG also physically inspected and verified every gold bar held by Tether. According to Tether, its reserves exceeded its liabilities by $6.8 billion at the end of 2025.

The audit is significant because Tether had promised a full financial audit as far back as 2017 but had never completed one. The company has faced past scrutiny over whether USDT was properly backed, including settlements with the New York Attorney General and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 2021. Tether has since published regular reserve reports, but those were not full financial audits. The completion of the KPMG audit represents a major step toward greater transparency for the world’s largest stablecoin issuer, although Tether described it as the beginning of its next phase rather than the end of its efforts.

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Five Ways the CLARITY Act Will Change American Finance

The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act is often in the news and lays out new rules and regulations for both crypto and banking. It is currently stuck in the Senate, but we felt it might be worth writing about what the bill will or will not do, assuming it eventually passes and becomes law. One thing we do not know is how the bill will change before it gets passed, but we thought we should share some ideas of what it does and the implications of it passing in its current form.

In its current form, the CLARITY Act would establish the legal foundations for banks, brokers, exchanges and asset managers to use blockchain infrastructure within the regulated American financial system. The House passed an earlier version in July 2025, the Senate Banking Committee advanced its version by a bipartisan 15 to 9 vote in May 2026, and Senators released a substantially expanded substitute text on July 22. That version remains subject to amendment and is not yet law, but it provides the clearest indication of what the final legislation may contain.

The most important change is a clearer division of responsibility between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Today, a digital asset can be treated as a security, a commodity or something outside either category depending on how it was issued, sold and used. The resulting uncertainty has encouraged regulation through enforcement actions and litigation rather than clear rules everyone can follow.

CLARITY creates a category called an ancillary asset, or generally a network token whose value still depends on the managerial efforts of its originator. The investment contract through which such a token is initially sold can remain subject to securities law, while the token itself would generally be treated as a commodity. Issuers would provide initial and semiannual disclosures while the project remains dependent on their efforts. A new exemption called Regulation Crypto would allow qualifying projects to raise up to 50 million dollars annually for four years or 10 percent of the value of their outstanding tokens, subject to a 200 million dollar aggregate ceiling and disclosure and insider sale restrictions. This gives developers a defined fundraising route without requiring them to comply with every rule applicable to a public company.

The CFTC would receive exclusive jurisdiction over spot digital commodity trading conducted through registered exchanges, brokers and dealers. These firms would face requirements covering customer asset segregation, capital, trade surveillance, conflicts, disclosures and cybersecurity. The SEC would retain jurisdiction over securities and anti-fraud authority, while tokenized stocks, bonds and funds would explicitly remain securities. Putting a Treasury bond on a blockchain does not turn it into an unregulated commodity, which is a crucial distinction that removes a lot of current confusion.

The bill’s most consequential provision for banking may be one of its simplest. It clarifies that national banks, state banks, financial holding companies and certain credit unions may use digital assets and blockchain technology to perform activities they are already permitted to conduct, including payments, lending, trading and custody. This should reduce the risk that a legally permissible activity is discouraged through supervisory uncertainty. Banks would still be subject to capital, liquidity, compliance and safety and soundness requirements, but they would have a statutory basis for providing blockchain services.

CLARITY also directs the SEC and CFTC to enable portfolio margining across securities, futures, swaps and digital commodities. A customer holding offsetting positions would no longer necessarily need to fund each account independently. Recognizing the portfolio’s net risk could reduce collateral requirements, financing costs and trapped liquidity. The bill similarly directs banking regulators to recognize appropriately structured cross product netting agreements. For large banks, broker dealers and market makers, more efficient netting can release substantial balance sheet capacity without reducing the protection against actual economic risk.

The legislation does not itself make blockchain transactions inexpensive. It creates the legal conditions under which regulated institutions can replace fragmented infrastructure. A shared ledger can reduce the need for separate records maintained by banks, custodians, brokers, transfer agents and clearing organizations. Smart contracts can automate interest payments, collateral calls, compliance checks and asset servicing. Near real time settlement can shorten counterparty exposure and reduce the capital held against unsettled transactions. Banks could offer 24 hour dollar settlement using regulated stablecoins or tokenized deposits, reducing dependence on correspondent banks, cutoff times and multiday cross border processes. Tokenized collateral could be transferred immediately rather than confirmed through emails, spreadsheets and multiple reconciliations.

CLARITY expressly requires a study of automated regulatory compliance and directs the SEC to modernize recordkeeping rules so distributed ledger records can be used. These provisions could make compliance continuous and machine readable instead of a retrospective exercise involving duplicated reports. There will also be new costs. Registration, custody controls, transaction monitoring, cybersecurity and disclosures will be expensive. Smaller crypto firms may struggle, accelerating consolidation around well capitalized exchanges, banks and infrastructure providers.

If CLARITY passes substantially in its current form, we expect five important developments.

First, major banks will introduce institutional digital asset custody, tokenized deposit networks and blockchain based collateral services within 12 to 24 months of final rulemaking. Think of this as a bank offering something similar to what you see in stock brokerage accounts today, but for digital assets. Just as Fidelity or Vanguard can hold your stocks and bonds safely, major banks will now be able to safely hold and manage digital assets for large institutions and wealthy clients. They will operate 24 hour settlement systems using regulated digital versions of the dollar instead of relying on traditional banking hours. A pension fund could move money and securities at midnight on a Sunday just as easily as on a Tuesday afternoon, eliminating delays and the need for multiple intermediaries to coordinate across time zones.

Second, securities brokers and crypto platforms will converge. Leading firms will seek both SEC and CFTC permissions so customers can hold tokenized securities, digital commodities and derivatives in integrated accounts. Imagine opening a single brokerage account where you can buy traditional stocks, Treasury bonds, crypto tokens and commodity futures without moving your money between different platforms or firms. Today, if you want to invest in both tokenized stocks and Bitcoin, you likely need accounts at completely different companies. After CLARITY, a major broker like Fidelity could offer everything in one place, just as they do today with stocks, bonds and mutual funds.

Third, tokenized Treasury securities, money market funds, private credit and corporate bonds will grow faster than speculative token issuance. These products offer measurable savings in settlement, collateral mobility and administration. Right now, if you own Treasury bonds, the Federal Reserve maintains the records and it takes two business days to settle a sale. With tokenization, an institution could transfer Treasury securities in real time, which means institutions could use those securities for multiple purposes in a single day instead of having them locked up waiting for settlement. A company with bonds could pledge them as collateral immediately rather than going through a lengthy confirmation process with multiple banks. The efficiency gains mean lower costs that could eventually reach individual investors through lower fees.

Fourth, portfolio margining will produce a new generation of digital prime brokerage businesses and competition for institutional order flow should lower spreads, financing charges and collateral requirements. Consider a hedge fund managing a complex portfolio of stocks, bonds, derivatives and digital assets. Today the fund has to maintain separate margin accounts at different banks and broker dealers because no one system can see across all the different asset types. The fund needs to keep more cash on hand than it economically needs to because that money is segregated across multiple accounts. With portfolio margining, the fund’s total risk can be calculated once and collateral can be held centrally. The result is the fund uses less capital, borrows at lower rates and pays lower fees because the prime brokers compete on efficiency rather than on custody silos.

Finally, payment stablecoins will become transactional instruments rather than deposit substitutes. The bill prohibits paying passive interest merely for holding a payment stablecoin, while allowing transaction, liquidity and staking related rewards. Banks will therefore compete through regulated stablecoins, tokenized deposits and interest bearing tokenized securities. Instead of a stablecoin being used like a bank account where you park money to earn interest, it becomes purely a payment tool. Banks then compete by offering tokenized deposits that function like interest bearing savings accounts and are protected like traditional bank deposits. A company making cross border payments no longer waits three days for an international wire transfer and pays excessive fees. Instead they use a regulated stablecoin for instant settlement. A consumer sending money to family in another country gets a guaranteed exchange rate and the funds arrive in minutes instead of days, paying a fraction of what a traditional wire transfer costs.

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July’s inflation report showed consumer prices rising 0.1% for the month, with annual headline inflation at 3.4% and core inflation at 2.5%. Both annual measures were slightly lower than in June, helping ease concerns that the Federal Reserve might need to raise interest rates. The inflation data increased expectations that the Fed could leave interest rates unchanged at its September meeting. Markets are now pricing in about a 60% chance of rates staying in the current 3.50% to 3.75% range, up from roughly 45% a week earlier.

Crypto markets were relatively subdued this week, with Bitcoin hovering around $64,000, while investors focused on U.S. inflation, potential Fed rate cuts, and growing momentum around crypto regulation and institutional adoption.

This week, we explore how blockchain is moving beyond crypto into the real economy, from tokenized shipping finance and digital cargo documents to Zama’s push for mainstream onchain privacy and Robinhood’s rapidly growing blockchain ecosystem.

From Coffee House to Blockchain: Is Shipping Finance Next?

When most people think about ships and cargo, blockchains do not come to mind. But that may be changing. This week’s announcement that Shipfinex, a Dubai-based maritime tokenization platform, is partnering with Abu Dhabi’s ADI Chain to place vessel-linked financial interests on-chain is bringing new attention to a market whose financing structures remain highly relationship-driven. We think this matters because shipping finance illustrates how blockchain might solve practical problems in the real economy.

Modern shipping finance is thought to have evolved from the British Baltic Exchange which opened in 1744 as the Virginia and Maryland Coffee House on Threadneedle Street in London. The original idea was simple: bring together people who owned ships, merchants who had cargo and brokers who could connect them. Business was intensely personal. A merchant with grain, timber or other goods requiring transportation would meet brokers and shipowners, exchange information about ports and prices, and negotiate the cost of hiring a vessel. Deals depended on reputation, relationships and verbal commitments. That culture survives in the Baltic Exchange’s motto: “Our Word Our Bond.” Contracts agreed orally would subsequently be confirmed in writing. Its centerpiece was a trading hall of more than 2,000 square feet, later described as cathedral-like.

Maritime finance still retains some of that relationship-driven character. A commercial vessel can cost tens of millions of dollars, yet financing remains concentrated among specialist banks, shipping companies, leasing firms, export-credit providers and private investors. Transactions require dedicated legal entities, technical inspections, insurance, extensive documentation and considerable industry expertise. Cargo finance similarly depends on bills of lading, warehouse receipts, bank guarantees and other documents passing among exporters, carriers, banks and importers.

Tokenization does not remove those requirements. A poorly maintained ship does not become a good investment simply because a token is attached to it. Tokenization can, however, change how an investment is divided, distributed, transferred and settled.

A vessel can be placed in a special-purpose vehicle, which can then issue digital tokens representing a loan, a claim on charter income or another economic interest connected to the ship. Subject to securities laws and investor-eligibility rules, this could allow a broader group of investors to participate in financings that might otherwise require a bank or small lending syndicate. Cash distributions could be automated, stablecoins could accelerate cross-border settlement, and records of token holdings and transfers could be updated in near real time. The tokens would not necessarily replace the vessel’s legally registered ownership.

Cargo may present an even larger opportunity. Where recognized under the applicable legal framework, an electronic bill of lading functions as a digital document of title, establishing who has the right to claim goods in transit. If that title can be securely transferred or pledged, cargo can become verifiable collateral while still at sea. Lenders gain better visibility, exporters may receive financing sooner, and the risk of the same cargo being fraudulently financed more than once may be reduced.

Developments since the beginning of 2026 range from completed transactions to early-stage proposals. In January, Galactica completed Pegasus 1 through Singapore’s regulated InvestaX platform. The transaction provided $25 million of bridge financing for a 145,000-cubic-meter liquefied natural gas carrier, with tokens minted on the Kaia blockchain.

Galactica launched Pegasus 2 in March and completed the $1.5 million raise on April 16. The 120-day bridge-financing transaction was linked to the expansion of an established Indonesian shipping business and offered accredited investors a target return of 10 percent per year. Galactica therefore completed two tokenized maritime financings during the first four months of 2026.

Cargo finance advanced in May, when Capital4Trade and Tech Cargo completed a transaction supporting frozen food shipped from Valencia to Miami. The structure combined a WaveBL electronic bill of lading, cargo monitoring and decentralized-finance-linked liquidity, giving the financier greater digital oversight of the goods supporting the loan.

In June, five electronic-bill-of-lading providers—CargoX, edoxOnline, TradeGo, WaveBL and eTEU—adopted a common legal and technical framework allowing documents to move across their platforms. This addresses a major barrier to adoption: the previous need for every participant in a shipment to use the same closed system.

That month, Ethra Ship also launched a protocol intended to connect investors with financing opportunities backed by operating dry-bulk vessels. Its first proposed vessel-backed credit offering, however, remains subject to final documentation and regulatory approval.

Most recently, ADI Chain and Shipfinex announced plans involving approximately 35 vessels worth $500 million. Each eligible vessel would sit in a separate special-purpose vehicle, with tokens potentially representing vessel-backed credit, charter-linked income or another economic interest. It is an ambitious pipeline, although no Maritime Asset Tokens have yet been issued publicly.

Shipping has always depended on matching assets, cargo, capital and trusted information. In 1744, that happened over coffee on Threadneedle Street. Tokenization could place some of those same relationships on faster and more accessible financial rails while preserving the legal structures, underwriting standards and commercial discipline on which the market still depends.

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Crypto News You Can’t Miss: Token Listings Go Live on Revolute

Zama has listed its native ZAMA token on Revolut across the European Economic Area, giving it access to Revolut’s more than 70 million customers, including over 15 million who already trade crypto on the platform. Users can buy and hold ZAMA without opening a new account or completing additional identity checks, and they can also withdraw the token to a self-custody wallet. The listing is a major step toward making Zama’s blockchain privacy technology more accessible to everyday users.

Zama uses fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE, to keep balances and transactions encrypted while still allowing them to operate on public blockchains such as Ethereum. The company believes this could make privacy a standard feature of blockchain technology rather than something users need to access through separate privacy-focused networks. The Revolut listing follows several major developments for Zama, including a confidential DeFi yield vault with Morpho and Steakhouse Financial, its acquisition of TokenOps, and the February launch of the ZAMA token after an auction that shielded more than $121 million on Ethereum. As of August 11, ZAMA was trading at around $0.04.

Revolut is essentially one of Europe’s largest digital banking and financial apps, and it is somewhat comparable to a combination of Robinhood and a digital bank in the U.S. It offers everyday banking, payments, currency exchange, crypto, and investing through a single app. Revolut now has more than 75 million customers globally, with more than 25 million in Western Europe alone, making its reach significant for a crypto project like Zama.

That makes the ZAMA listing more meaningful because it puts the token in front of a huge existing European financial user base, rather than just listing it on a crypto-native exchange.

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Media of the Week: Robinhood Still Making Waves on Crypto Twitter

Castle Labs says the chain generated $14.4 billion in DEX volume and $3.6 million in revenue over the past 30 days, putting it among the largest chains by activity.

And then to top it off, they dropped this teaser tweet yesterday. This could be exciting because Lighter gives Robinhood Chain a serious derivatives product rather than just another place to swap tokens. Lighter is a decentralized perpetual futures exchange, and Robinhood has already integrated Lighter perps into Robinhood Wallet for eligible users.

The bigger opportunity is the combination of Robinhood’s huge retail distribution + Lighter’s onchain derivatives infrastructure. If Robinhood pushes more users toward onchain trading, Lighter could become a major source of volume and fees for the ecosystem. There is also a direct token angle: Robinhood committed $11 million worth of LIT to its community, with trading points converting into LIT, which gives Lighter exposure to Robinhood’s user base.

Gold was the week’s standout major asset, climbing 6.12 percent to $4,373. Crypto also participated in the rally. Bitcoin gained 3.25 percent to $64,813, while Ethereum rose 3.80 percent to $1,913. Fluid was our top performing token, advancing 16.75 percent to $0.0460.

The combination of rising stocks, stronger crypto and surging gold suggests investors are looking for growth while continuing to hedge against economic and monetary uncertainty. For paid BIR subscribers, Fluid’s performance also illustrates why we focus on identifying promising tokens before they attract wider market attention.

The most valuable use of blockchain may also be one of the least exciting. Tokenized collateral will not generate the headlines of Bitcoin or tokenized stocks, but it could help banks move assets faster, reduce funding costs and release enormous amounts of trapped capital. This week, we examine why the real opportunity is not the value of the assets being tokenized today, but the second-order effects if the technology begins working across the financial system.

Dinari has made more than 700 tokenized American stocks available to eligible US investors, including every company in the S&P 500. But with traditional brokers already offering inexpensive and reliable stock trading, who actually needs them? We look beyond the promise of round the clock access to explore the investors Dinari is really targeting and why the growing pool of dollars already living on-chain could eventually reshape the market for equities.

Crypto News You Can’t Miss: Crypto Clarity Will Have to Wait

The Senate has postponed consideration of the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act until at least September. The legislation is intended to establish clearer rules for digital asset markets, including the respective responsibilities of the SEC and CFTC.

The delay reflects unresolved disagreements over the bill’s substance, an ethics provision addressing President Trump’s crypto interests and the political risks of a vote before the midterm elections. The legislation needs 60 votes to pass and may currently lack even a simple majority.

For the crypto industry, this means another month of regulatory uncertainty. The larger question is whether lawmakers can reach a compromise in September or whether meaningful market structure legislation will be pushed beyond the election.

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Tokenized Collateral and the Second-Order Problem

Tokenization itself is not new and has been running in production at individual banks for several years, but this summer it reached the center of the American settlement system with very little fanfare. On July 15, DTCC converted assets held in its own depository into tokens and used them in live trades, covering equities, ETFs and Treasuries across collateral, repo and outright transactions, with more than twenty-five firms taking part and JPMorgan opening the session by tokenizing shares of the Invesco QQQ. The full tokenization service is scheduled to launch in October and the Collateral AppChain, which is the piece that actually matters, is due in Q4 with Chainlink providing pricing, valuation and margining data so it can run outside market hours. To give DTCC credit, they have taken the less glamorous route here, tokenizing assets that already sit in regulated custody rather than building a parallel network and asking the market to migrate to it, which is where most of the last five years of blockchain effort went to die.

Looking at the size of what is currently on-chain, it remains very small compared to the overall market. Total tokenized real-world assets excluding stablecoins are running around $25 to $31 billion depending on whose inclusion rules you use, with tokenized US Treasuries the largest single category at roughly $14 billion, up from about $8.9 billion at the start of the year. Set that against the $114 trillion of securities DTCC’s depository subsidiary custodies, and the entire tokenized asset universe is around 0.02% of the assets held at DTCC. JPMorgan’s Kinexys, which is considered the most advanced bank platform in this space, has processed over $3 trillion cumulatively since 2020 and averages about $5 billion a day, which is real money but a rounding error against daily flows in the repo and securities financing markets it is trying to serve. So the direct effect of tokenized collateral in 2026 is close to zero.

But the interesting question is not the current volume, it is what changes if the mechanism works, and here the second-order arithmetic is much larger than the first-order arithmetic. The demonstration case is still the October 2023 transaction on what is now Kinexys, where BlackRock tokenized money market fund shares and pledged them to Barclays as collateral against an OTC derivative. The shares were never redeemed. BlackRock kept earning the yield, Barclays held enforceable collateral, and the underlying asset never moved through the custody chain. That is the whole proposition compressed into one trade: not a new asset, but an existing asset made usable in two places at once without paying the operational tax of relocating it. DTCC’s research with Finadium, which is a vendor document and should be read as one, projects that intraday repo settled on a digital ledger rather than overnight could cut intraday funding costs roughly in half and free meaningful capital at the large dealer banks, alongside lower liquidity coverage ratio requirements from moving exposures off the books before end of day. A bank does not need any view on crypto to want that. It needs a view on its own return on equity.

What changed this year, and the reason I am writing about this now rather than in 2024, is that the legal question got settled in the two jurisdictions that matter. In March the Federal Reserve confirmed that tokenized securities carry the same capital treatment as their conventional equivalents, that the ledger does not alter the risk weight, and that eligible tokens can qualify as financial collateral. Two weeks later the ECB began accepting tokenized securities as eligible collateral for Eurosystem credit operations from March 30, keeping existing haircuts and eligibility rules unchanged. Those two decisions did more for this category than every consortium pilot of the preceding five years, because the blocker was never engineering. It was whether a receiver holding a token against a defaulted counterparty owns the Treasury or owns a lawsuit, and regulators have now answered that.

Three things still argue against the thesis. The first is fragmentation, which is the most obvious and the least discussed. Kinexys is one chain, Canton is another, DTCC’s AppChain is Besu-based with Stellar named as its first public chain, and collateral that moves freely inside five walled gardens is not mobile collateral, it is the existing problem with better branding. The second is that the legal clarity is American and European, not global.

The IMF’s April note makes the point directly, that collateral moving at machine speed across borders has no geographic anchor while every resolution regime in existence assumes assets sit somewhere specific and a court somewhere specific can reach them, and that mismatch does not get resolved by anyone shipping code. The third is speed itself, which is unambiguously good in calm markets and considerably less so otherwise. The UK pension crisis in September 2022 is the reference case, where LDI funds facing gilt margin calls they were solvent enough to meet but not fast enough to meet sold gilts, pushed yields higher, triggered more margin calls, and required the Bank of England to intervene.

Part of what made intervention possible was that the spiral took days. Automated margin calls running against programmatic liquidation logic on a 24/7 ledger do not offer that window, and the industry has not priced it.

None of that changes the direction, only the timetable and how ugly the first stress event looks. DTCC’s service launches in October, the Collateral AppChain follows in Q4, and by the middle of next year there will be enough throughput to tell whether the capital efficiency claims survive contact with real balance sheets. If they do, the argument for blockchain in institutional finance stops depending on anyone believing anything about crypto, and turns the focus to capital efficiency.

Media of the Week

Crypto advocates reportedly contacted U.S. lawmakers one million times in support of the CLARITY Act. Presumably, Congress understood the industry’s position after the first 750,000 calls; the remaining 250,000 were simply to eliminate any lingering ambiguity.

Behind the impressive—or mildly alarming—number is a serious point: crypto has developed into a large, organized political constituency capable of mobilizing at scale. Washington may still be debating how to regulate digital assets, but lawmakers can no longer pretend that the industry—or its voters—is easy to ignore.

Whether this represents grassroots democracy or the legislative equivalent of repeatedly pressing the elevator button is open to interpretation. Either way, the message appears to have been delivered.

Tokenized Stocks – Who Buys Them?

Dinari, a company founded by Stripe and Apple alumni, announced on August 4 that eligible American investors can now buy 724 tokenized US stocks, covering the entire S&P 500, directly from self-custody wallets funded with Circle’s USDC. Each token, called a dShare, is backed one-for-one by a real share held with a regulated custodian, dividends are paid in USDC, and holders keep voting rights and corporate actions. The tokens run on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base and Avalanche, with Solana and Sei coming, and the whole thing operates through Dinari’s own registered broker-dealer and transfer agent rather than through the offshore structures that Robinhood and Kraken’s parent, Payward, have used to offer similar products outside the United States. That last point deserves credit and is the part most of the coverage skipped. Building this inside the American regulatory perimeter is slower, more expensive and far less fun than incorporating somewhere accommodating, and it is the only version of this that has a chance of mattering.

The immediate question is why any American would want this. Buying Apple through Fidelity, Schwab or Robinhood costs nothing, settles reliably, and comes with SIPC coverage and a phone number to call when something goes wrong. Dinari’s own risk disclosure concedes that markets for tokenized securities may be limited and that holders could find them harder to sell at a desired time or price, which is a real warning and not boilerplate. So the honest answer is that for the investor who buys index funds inside a 401(k) and looks at the balance twice a year, this product solves nothing.

The sizing supports that. Total tokenized stocks were worth roughly $1.7 billion at the end of June according to a16z, having grown about 600% over the preceding year, which sounds impressive until you set it against the $67.2 trillion market capitalization of the S&P 500 at the end of the second quarter. The entire tokenized equity market is about one four-hundredth of one percent of the index Dinari has just finished tokenizing. Against USDC’s own market capitalization of roughly $72 billion, tokenized equities are still only about two percent. So the overall impact is negligible but this will likely change over time.

But the relevant denominator is not the equity market, it is the stablecoin float, and that changes the arithmetic considerably. The people this product is built for are not deciding between Dinari and Schwab. They are people whose dollars already sit on-chain, in USDC or something like it, who currently have to move money out to a bank, wait for it to clear into a brokerage, buy the stock, and then reverse the whole sequence to get back to where they started. That is not a large population today, but $72 billion of USDC is a meaningful pool of capital that is structurally excluded from equities without an off-ramp, and every dollar of stablecoin growth expands the addressable market for something like this by definition. The bet is not that Americans abandon their brokers. It is that the pool of dollars living permanently on-chain keeps growing and eventually wants equity exposure without leaving.

The more interesting case, and the one that connects this to what DTCC is doing on the institutional side, is what happens once the share is programmable. A tokenized Microsoft position can be pledged as collateral against a loan without being sold, lent out, or wired into an automated strategy that rebalances without anyone filing a transfer form. The same logic driving banks toward tokenized collateral applies in miniature to a retail portfolio, which is that an asset which can be used in two places at once is worth more than one that cannot. Whether the infrastructure and the regulation arrive to support any of that is genuinely uncertain, and most of it does not exist yet.

Several things cut the other way. Liquidity is the obvious one, because 724 tickers is a lot of tickers to make markets in and thin books outside exchange hours produce exactly the pricing that gives skeptics their material. Self-custody moves risk rather than removing it, and losing a wallet or signing a malicious approval is considerably more permanent than forgetting a Schwab password. The underlying share still sits with a custodian, so tokenization has not removed the intermediary, it has changed which intermediary and what happens if that one fails. And the competitive picture is unsettled, with Robinhood and Payward running offshore versions, Ondo having announced an SEC-compliant structure tied to the iShares S&P 500 ETF that is not yet available domestically, and both JPMorgan and Goldman circling the same territory from the institutional end. Being first through the US regulatory door is an advantage but not a moat.

Dinari already distributes dShares through fintechs and exchanges across more than 85 jurisdictions, and the American launch is the harder half of the problem, not the whole of it. What is worth watching over the next two quarters is not the token count but whether spreads outside market hours stay tolerable, whether any meaningful volume shows up, and whether a broker-dealer or bank licenses the API and puts tokenized equities in front of an ordinary customer base. If that happens, the argument stops being about crypto users and starts being about distribution.

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Good Morning & Happy Friday! U.S. stocks rebounded sharply on Thursday, recovering from the previous day’s Federal Reserve driven sell-off as investors focused on strong technology earnings despite concerns about rising bond yields, geopolitical tensions, and artificial intelligence spending. Microsoft was the standout performer, with its stock surging more than 15% after reporting strong earnings and announcing that its Azure cloud business had surpassed $100 billion in annual revenue.

Markets also reacted to broader economic developments. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates unchanged, while long term Treasury yields remained elevated. Although U.S. strikes on Iranian targets raised geopolitical concerns, slowing inflation and weaker than expected second quarter economic growth suggested that price pressures may be easing, providing some reassurance for investors.

Over the last 24 hours, the cryptocurrency market was relatively stable, with Bitcoin holding near $64k after the Federal Reserve kept interest rates unchanged, while investor attention shifted to weak Coinbase earnings and continued optimism around AI driven technology stocks.

A pair of major developments suggest blockchain is becoming a core part of traditional finance, as Citadel backs Crypto.com with a $400 million investment and BNY expands blockchain technology into one of Wall Street's oldest and largest banking businesses. And don’t forget to check on the BIR portfolio!

Crypto News You Can’t Miss: Crypto.com Worth Billions

Crypto.com was recently valued at $20 billion after receiving a $400 million investment from Citadel Securities, marking the company’s first institutional investment since it was founded ten years ago. The investment is notable because it comes during a period of uncertainty in the cryptocurrency market, when higher interest rate concerns have reduced investor enthusiasm and hurt the performance of crypto-related companies such as Coinbase.

Unlike Coinbase, which primarily serves the U.S. market, Crypto.com has a global presence with more than 150 million users and offers a wide range of financial services beyond cryptocurrency trading. These include stock and ETF trading, a crypto-linked Visa card, decentralized finance tools, and its native token, Cronos, which provides users with rewards and lower trading fees. The company has also focused on expanding its brand through partnerships and sponsorships.

According to some sources, Citadel’s investment reflects confidence in Crypto.com’s long-term infrastructure rather than its current financial performance. Citadel plans to use the platform to support the growth of futures and options trading while also advancing the tokenization of traditional financial assets such as stocks and bonds. This strategy allegedly aligns with Citadel’s broader efforts to expand its presence in both institutional and retail financial markets.

Overall, Citadel’s investment signals confidence in the future integration of blockchain technology with traditional financial markets.

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A 242 Year Old Bank Is Betting on Blockchain

For years, blockchain was promoted as the technology that would replace the banks. Now, one of the oldest banks in the world is adopting it. We think this is a significant moment worth paying attention to.

BNY was founded in 1784 by Alexander Hamilton and is launching a digital version of its transfer agency business. This isn’t some small innovation lab or a demonstration project with limited real world impact. Transfer agents do one of the financial system’s central jobs. They process fund transactions and maintain the official records showing who owns what.

BNY is also not your typical bank. It safeguards and administers more than 59 trillion dollars in assets. Its transfer agency business services approximately 8.6 trillion dollars across 7.6 million investor accounts. When an institution of this size begins moving ownership records onto blockchain, it deserves real attention.

The reason is less glamorous than much of the crypto market, but potentially far more important. A typical fund transaction involves several organizations that maintain separate databases. The asset manager has its records, the custodian has another set, and transfer agents, brokers and other service providers may have their own versions. These parties constantly compare their records to make sure that the numbers match.

This process is called reconciliation, and it consumes enormous amounts of time and money. It also reflects an era when financial institutions could not safely share a common database. Blockchain offers a different model. Instead of each organization maintaining its own version of a transaction, authorized participants can use a shared record that gets updated when the transaction occurs. Everyone sees the same ownership history, subject to the permissions and privacy controls built into the system.

This doesn’t mean BNY is putting trillions of dollars onto Bitcoin or handing control of its records to anonymous internet users. Its digital transfer agency capabilities are designed for regulated funds, institutional clients and multiple blockchain environments. The objective is to combine the efficiency of blockchain with the legal protections and controls of conventional finance.

So why is BNY doing this now? Cost is one reason. Reducing reconciliation and eliminating unnecessary duplication could make fund administration considerably more efficient. Speed is another factor. Tokenized assets can potentially settle much faster than conventional transactions, freeing capital that would otherwise remain tied up while a trade is completed.

There is also the possibility of continuous markets. Traditional financial infrastructure still observes business hours, weekends and banking holidays. Blockchain networks do not. If both the asset and the money used to purchase it exist on compatible digital systems, transactions could eventually happen at any time.

But BNY is also acting defensively. If more funds, bonds and other assets become tokenized, someone will need to maintain the records, safeguard the assets and connect the new markets with the banking system. BNY has performed those functions for generations. It would rather build the new infrastructure than allow a technology company or crypto platform to take its place.

Other banks are reaching a similar conclusion. JPMorgan’s Kinexys platform supports programmable payments, tokenization and near real time settlement. Citi Token Services allows institutional clients to move tokenized bank deposits around the clock. HSBC has expanded its Tokenized Deposit Service across several major financial centers, including the United States. These institutions are pursuing different models, but they are all addressing the same strategic question: if financial assets and money move onto blockchain, what role will our bank play?

That question is now appearing in boardrooms across the industry. Banks must decide which blockchains to support, whether to build private networks or connect with public ones, how to protect client information and how tokenized deposits will compete or coexist with stablecoins. They must also determine where they can cooperate on common infrastructure and where blockchain creates a competitive advantage.

At the BIR, our view is that this marks an important change. Blockchain has not yet replaced the traditional financial system, and BNY will continue operating its conventional transfer agency alongside the digital version. Cybersecurity, regulation and compatibility between networks remain significant obstacles that need to be solved.

Nevertheless, the conversation has moved on. Banks are no longer asking whether blockchain has a place in finance. They are deciding how much of their business should run on it. Blockchain may reach the mainstream without most people noticing. Investors may never open a crypto wallet or purchase Bitcoin, but their mutual funds, money market funds and bonds could eventually be recorded and transferred using blockchain infrastructure.

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Good Morning! US stocks fell sharply on Wednesday as investors reacted to the Federal Reserve’s decision to leave interest rates unchanged, with bond markets signalling concerns that the Fed may be falling behind in its fight against inflation. The Dow dropped 2.2%, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq also posted significant losses, as Treasury yields climbed to multi-year highs despite the Fed’s hawkish rhetoric.

Markets were also pressured by rising inflation expectations after oil prices surged more than 6% following President Trump’s comments about a stronger US response to Iran. Meanwhile, semiconductor stocks extended their recent sell-off amid concerns over AI spending returns and increasing competition from China, further weighing on the broader market.

Crypto markets were broadly weaker over the past week as macroeconomic concerns overshadowed the sector, with the Fed’s rate decision and rising bond yields pressuring risk assets, while optimism around US crypto regulation faded as the CLARITY Act faced growing delays in the Senate.

This week, we unpack why the CLARITY Act is losing momentum, how crypto trading is evolving beyond traditional exchanges, and what the biggest crypto VCs are betting on next. Read on!

Crypto News You Can’t Miss: CLARITY Act Gets Farther Away

The CLARITY Act’s chances of becoming law in 2026 have dropped significantly, with prediction markets now pricing the odds at 27% and analysts estimating around 30%. (while Polymarket measures it at 28% as of last night). The decline reflects growing concerns that the Senate is running out of time, as lawmakers have prioritised Russia sanctions and other legislative business ahead of the August recess. Ongoing negotiations over ethics provisions and stablecoin regulation have also slowed progress, making passage before the break increasingly unlikely.

The bill would establish a clearer regulatory framework by dividing oversight of digital assets between the SEC and CFTC, and it has broad backing from both the crypto industry and major financial institutions. However, it still faces several procedural hurdles, including Senate approval and reconciliation with the House version. If Congress fails to pass the legislation, SEC Chair Paul Atkins has said the agency is prepared to clarify parts of the crypto market through its existing rulemaking authority, although legislation would provide a more durable and comprehensive framework.

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The Exchange Is Dead. Long Live the Exchange

This week, the crypto exchange BitMEX announced that it will close on September 23. It was striking news. BitMEX was once one of the best known names in crypto and helped turn perpetual swaps into one of the industry’s most popular trading products. Its closure inevitably raises a question: are we watching the slow decline of crypto trading?

Look elsewhere and the answer appears to be no. Robinhood launched the public mainnet of Robinhood Chain on July 1 and quickly attracted considerable trading activity and capital. Hyperliquid, a blockchain network and a decentralized trading platform, founded in 2022 is now processing billions of dollars in weekly volume across cryptocurrencies and perpetual contracts linked to stocks, commodities and other traditional markets.

The better explanation is that crypto trading is moving, not disappearing. BitMEX offered no specific reason for closing beyond a strategic review of the business and the wider industry. The numbers, however, tell much of the story. By the time the closure was announced, BitMEX was processing only about $400,000 in daily volume and held less than 0.01 percent of the exchange market. Its departure will have little practical effect on the derivatives market.

BitMEX helped refine and popularize the crypto perpetual swap, but it could not hold on to the liquidity that made the product successful. That liquidity has not simply abandoned centralized exchanges. Most perpetual trading still takes place on large centralized platforms such as Binance and OKX. What has changed is that activity has concentrated around fewer dominant exchanges, while a growing portion has migrated to onchain platforms such as Hyperliquid.

This is where the distinction between CeFi, DeFi and traditional finance matters. CeFi includes centralized crypto exchanges that operate the trading platform and generally hold customer assets. DeFi uses blockchains and smart contracts to let users trade, borrow and lend through their own wallets. Traditional finance includes banks, brokerages and regulated exchanges. Until recently, these were relatively separate markets. They are now beginning to overlap.

Hyperliquid may be the clearest example. It has built an onchain perpetual futures exchange with the speed and order book normally associated with a centralized platform. More importantly, it has accumulated something every exchange wants, deep liquidity which has brought more institutional players.

MetaMask, Phantom and the South African exchange, VALR can route customer trades into Hyperliquid instead of trying to create their own order books. Hyperliquid handles matching, margin, pricing and liquidations. The outside application keeps the customer relationship and earns a fee through Hyperliquid’s builder code system. Hundreds of developers are now using this model, and builders have reportedly earned over $90 million.

That is a powerful business model. More applications bring more traders. More traders attract more market makers. Better liquidity improves execution and makes the platform still more useful. Hyperliquid is becoming less like a single exchange and more like a shared trading engine for onchain finance.

It is also expanding beyond crypto. During the week of July 13 through July 19, contracts linked to real world assets generated $25.1 billion of Hyperliquid’s $48.2 billion in volume. The RWA label can be misleading. These contracts generally provide price exposure to stocks, commodities and indices. They do not give traders ownership of the underlying assets. Even so, they demonstrate that an onchain exchange can compete for activity far beyond Bitcoin and Ether.

Robinhood is approaching the opportunity from the other direction. Hyperliquid began with onchain liquidity and is searching for broader distribution. Robinhood already has nearly 28 million customers and is moving more of the infrastructure beneath them onchain.

Robinhood Chain is a Layer 2 network built using Arbitrum technology. Artemis estimated that it reached approximately $589 million in total value locked within three weeks, although DefiLlama’s narrower methodology placed the figure closer to $308 million. Much of its early trading came from memecoins, but the wider strategy is more ambitious.

Robinhood’s Stock Tokens allow eligible users outside the United States to gain economic exposure to underlying shares. They are tokenized debt securities, not actual ownership interests in the companies. Robinhood also offers onchain USDG lending through Morpho and access to perpetual futures through the decentralized exchange Lighter. The technical details are largely hidden from the customer, which may be precisely the point.

Our view at the BIR is that the old exchange market is contracting, but the market for trading is becoming larger. CeFi is consolidating. DeFi is developing credible liquidity and execution. Traditional financial companies are adopting blockchain infrastructure to create products that trade continuously and reach customers across borders.

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Media of the Week: Who’s Who in VC

Coinbase Ventures, Animoca, a16z, and Tether are the most active crypto investors in 2026, but each has a distinct strategy. Animoca is pivoting from NFTs and gaming to AI and stablecoins, Coinbase invests early to strengthen its ecosystem, a16z is making fewer but much larger infrastructure bets, and Tether invests to expand USDT adoption. Despite their activity, their portfolios barely overlap. Check it out below!

Cryptocurrencies traded lower over the past 24 hours as broader risk off sentiment tied to AI spending concerns and Middle East tensions weighed on digital assets, with Bitcoin slipping below $66,000 while the overall crypto market remained relatively stable.

Today, we cover Wall Street’s AI spending concerns, a major shift in crypto regulation, and why blockchain could become the financial backbone of the AI economy. An don’t forget to check on the BIR portfolio!

Crypto News You Can’t Miss: Goldman Speaks Up

Goldman Sachs Chairman and CEO David Solomon has voiced strong support for the proposed Clarity Act, a bill that would establish a new regulatory framework for digital asset markets. Although he acknowledged that the legislation is not perfect, Solomon said it would create a more level playing field, improve market stability, and provide the regulatory clarity needed for the crypto industry to continue developing. He argued that passing the bill would give regulated financial institutions greater confidence to participate in digital asset markets and help move innovation forward.

Solomon’s endorsement stands in contrast to the views of several major banking leaders, including JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who have criticized parts of the bill. Banking groups argue that provisions allowing crypto companies to offer yield on dollar-backed stablecoins could put traditional banks at a disadvantage by encouraging customers to move deposits away from the banking system. Solomon declined to comment directly on those concerns, saying Goldman Sachs supports a financial system where all participants can compete under a clear set of rules. He added that while additional regulatory work will likely be needed in the future, the Clarity Act represents an important first step.

The legislation has been the focus of lengthy bipartisan negotiations, but its path through Congress remains uncertain. Lawmakers continue to debate issues surrounding stablecoins, consumer protections, and ethics rules, including proposals that would prevent federal officials from launching their own digital tokens. Democrats have also raised concerns about President Donald Trump’s family’s crypto ventures and argue that the latest version of the bill does not go far enough in addressing potential conflicts of interest, setting the stage for further debate before any final vote.

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AI’s Next Growth Engine May Run on Blockchain

For the past several years, the AI investment story has largely been an infrastructure story. Nvidia supplies the chips. Cloud providers supply the computing power. Data centers supply the electricity and physical capacity. The companies building the largest models sit at the top of this increasingly expensive technological stack.

At the BIR, we think the next phase of AI growth may require another kind of infrastructure, one that has received much less attention. AI does not just need intelligence and computing power. As AI systems become capable of taking action, they will also need identity, money and a reliable way to transact. That is where blockchain could become essential.

Most people currently interact with AI by asking it to produce something. We ask ChatGPT to summarize a document, Claude to analyze a contract or an image model to create a graphic. The AI responds, but the user remains responsible for taking the next step.

Agentic AI changes that relationship. Instead of simply answering a question, an AI agent can be given an objective and authorized to complete it. Ask an agent to organize a trip, for example, and it could compare flights, evaluate hotels, purchase insurance and make reservations. A corporate agent might acquire data, rent computing capacity, hire another specialized agent or purchase software services without waiting for a person to approve every action.

This creates a problem that is easy to overlook. How does the agent pay?

Traditional payment systems were built for people and companies, not software programs conducting millions of transactions among themselves. Credit cards work well when a person buys a $500 airline ticket. They work less well when an AI agent wants to pay one tenth of a cent for a piece of data or two cents for a software query. Fees, settlement delays and account requirements can make these transactions uneconomical.

Blockchain offers a different model. An AI agent can control a digital wallet, receive funds and make payments according to rules embedded in software. It could use stablecoins to pay for goods and services, while the blockchain provides a permanent record of what was purchased, when it happened and which digital identity authorized it.

Consider an AI research agent preparing an investment report. It might pay a market data provider for a single price feed, purchase access to a specialist database, rent extra computing power for an analysis and then pay a separate AI agent to check its conclusions. Instead of maintaining four subscriptions or asking a human to enter four credit cards, the agent could pay for each service as it uses it.

This could transform software pricing. The subscription model assumes that people purchase access in advance, often paying for far more than they use. An economy populated by AI agents may prefer to pay per task, per query or per second of computing time. Blockchain based micropayments could make that model practical.

Payments are only part of the opportunity. AI agents will also need verifiable identities. A company must know whether it is interacting with an authorized purchasing agent, an unknown program or a malicious impersonator. Blockchain based credentials could allow an agent to prove that it represents a particular business, has permission to spend up to a certain amount and is approved to purchase specific services without revealing unnecessary confidential information.

Smart contracts could then enforce the rules. A company might give an agent a weekly budget of $5,000, prohibit it from transacting with unapproved vendors and require additional authorization for purchases above $1,000. Blockchain would not make the agent infallible, but it could create clearer controls and a more transparent audit trail.

The broader implication is that AI and blockchain may be more complementary than the market currently assumes. AI can reduce the cost of producing knowledge and completing digital work. Blockchain can reduce the cost of moving value and coordinating activity between parties that may not know or trust one another. Put the two together, and the result could be a new machine economy in which agents purchase services, sell their capabilities and hire other agents.

None of this is guaranteed. Banks, card networks and technology companies will develop competing solutions. Regulation, cybersecurity and liability will also matter enormously. If an autonomous agent mistakenly transfers $100,000, businesses will care much more about recovering the money than celebrating instant settlement.

Our view, however, is that blockchain has a credible opportunity to become the financial layer beneath agentic AI. Users may never see wallets, tokens or smart contracts. They may simply ask an AI agent to complete a task and receive the finished result.

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Traders are now pricing in a roughly 34% chance of a rate hike this month, up from just 10% a week ago, with expectations for a September hike also increasing. Higher energy prices could keep inflation elevated, reinforcing the view that interest rates may stay higher for longer.

Crypto markets traded mostly sideways over the past week as investors balanced strong institutional adoption and continued product launches against rising geopolitical tensions and renewed concerns that higher oil prices could keep interest rates elevated for longer.

This week's BIR explores Coinbase's vision of becoming an "Everything Exchange," examines why crypto's biggest adoption challenge may be its persistent gender gap, and unpacks what the SEC's evolving stance on DeFi vaults could mean for the future of on-chain investing. Enjoy.

Crypto News You Can’t Miss: Canada, Get Ready

Coinbase is expanding its vision in Canada beyond crypto, positioning itself as an “Everything Exchange” that would allow users to trade crypto, stocks, ETFs, and prediction markets from a single platform. Coinbase Canada CEO Eric Richmond said the company is working with Canadian regulators to bring the offering to market, building on its status as the first international crypto exchange registered in Canada. While no launch date has been announced, the initiative reflects Coinbase’s broader strategy of creating a seamless, 24/7 financial platform powered by blockchain technology.

The model is already taking shape in the U.S., where Coinbase has introduced stock and ETF trading, prediction markets, and plans to offer tokenized stocks to international users. Richmond argued that blockchain-based markets can improve access by enabling instant settlement and around-the-clock trading, addressing limitations of traditional financial infrastructure. A full Canadian rollout, including a Canadian dollar stablecoin, is expected to depend on the country’s forthcoming stablecoin regulations, which are anticipated in 2027.

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The Hidden Math Behind Crypto’s Gender Gap

At the BIR, we write about the trends we believe will shape the future of crypto and blockchain, while also examining what the industry may be overlooking. This week, we turn to one of its most consequential blind spots: the persistent gender divide. Roughly 30 percent of American adults own some form of crypto, but men outnumber women by approximately two to one. Women are also half as likely as men to plan a purchase during the next year, while 19 percent say they see no benefit in cryptocurrency, compared with just 10 percent of men. Existing investors may remain enthusiastic, but crypto will struggle to achieve broader adoption unless it can convince far more women that digital assets are useful, secure and worth the risk.

The crypto industry usually attributes disappointing adoption to regulation, technical complexity or unfavorable market cycles. Each matters, but the industry’s inability to appeal to women may be just as important. No financial technology can credibly claim to be mainstream when it struggles to attract half the population.

The gap extends beyond ownership. Female crypto owners tend to be older, with the largest concentration between the ages of 45 and 59. Male ownership is more heavily concentrated among those aged 30 to 44. This suggests that men and women may be entering the market through different channels and for different reasons. It may also indicate that younger women, who should represent an important source of future growth, are not finding a compelling reason to participate.

Some of the explanation may be psychological, although it is important to avoid simplistic conclusions about gender and risk. Research frequently finds differences in average financial risk tolerance between men and women, but those differences are influenced by income, wealth, confidence, social experience and perceptions of control. They do not mean that women are categorically unwilling to take risks.

A more useful distinction concerns whether the expected benefit appears sufficient to justify the perceived danger. Crypto continues to be presented primarily as a speculative investment. According to the survey, 38 percent of adults identify potential price appreciation as cryptocurrency’s greatest benefit. Among current owners, that number rises to 51 percent. Only 10 percent point to lower banking or transaction fees.

This framing naturally appeals to people attracted by competition, novelty and the possibility of unusually large returns. Crypto culture has frequently reinforced those instincts through trading leaderboards, online bravado and stories of sudden wealth. Such an environment can also produce overconfidence, particularly when participation becomes associated with technological sophistication or being early to an important trend.

For a more cautious consumer, however, the calculation looks very different. The potential reward is uncertain, the volatility is obvious and the practical benefit may be difficult to identify. Declining to participate can therefore be a rational judgment rather than evidence of inadequate financial education.

Trust compounds the problem. Fifty nine percent of Americans lack confidence in crypto security. Consumers worry about cyberattacks, exchange failures, scams, lost passwords and the absence of bank or government protection. Those concerns are not merely hypothetical. Sixteen percent of crypto owners report having experienced problems accessing their holdings.

Traditional finance is often criticized for placing too much power in institutions. Crypto responds by transferring responsibility to the individual. Experienced users may regard self custody as empowering, but many consumers see it as an additional burden. A system in which one mistake can lead to an irreversible loss will inevitably discourage people who place a high value on security, recovery and institutional accountability.

This is why the gender gap should be understood as a product design problem rather than simply an education or marketing problem. The industry often assumes that skeptical consumers need to learn more about crypto. In reality, greater knowledge of volatility, scams and operational risk may make some consumers less willing to participate.

Embedded wallets could begin to change that equation. Telegram’s effort to provide its billion plus users with access to a native noncustodial wallet offers an important test. Integrating digital assets into a familiar communications platform could eliminate several points of friction. Users would not need to seek out an exchange, download a specialized wallet or master an unfamiliar interface. Sending crypto could begin to resemble sending a message.

More importantly, embedded wallets could shift crypto’s value proposition from speculation toward payments. Consumers who would never purchase a token as an investment might still use digital dollars to send money internationally, pay a merchant or receive funds more quickly.

Yet convenience alone will not resolve the trust problem. If embedded wallets still require users to manage private keys without reliable recovery, fraud protection or meaningful recourse, a simpler interface may merely conceal the same underlying risks.

A genuinely inclusive crypto product would combine easy onboarding with dependable account recovery, transparent fees, understandable risk disclosures and practical household or commercial uses. It would resemble a familiar financial service while preserving the advantages of digital assets. Above all, it would offer something more persuasive than the possibility that a token’s price might rise.

Crypto does not need to teach women to accept more risk. It needs to give them, and everyone else, a better reason to take it.

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Media of the Week: Crypto Mom Gets Real

Crypto “Mom”, SEC Commissioner Hester Pierce, had some opinions on vaults and lending in the Defi space that has been making the rounds in crypto this last week and came to a conclusion that many have been touting for a while: vaults are not a single, uniform product. Some operate entirely through immutable smart contracts with predefined allocation rules, while others rely on human curators who actively determine strategies and manage risk. That distinction is important because it shifts the regulatory conversation away from whether all vaults should be treated alike and toward how much human discretion is actually involved.

At the heart of the debate is accountability. Traditional investment funds require managers to register because investors rely on their judgment to allocate capital. DeFi vaults, however, blur that line when capital allocation is governed by transparent, programmatic rules rather than ongoing human decision-making. Where curators retain the ability to adjust strategies or assess risk, they may begin to resemble traditional fund managers from a regulatory perspective. The SEC’s recognition of this spectrum—and its openness to engaging with builders on how existing securities laws apply—marks a constructive step toward a more nuanced regulatory framework for on-chain investment products.

Despite the weakness in technology, earnings season has remained strong, with more than 87% of S&P 500 companies reporting results so far beating analyst expectations. Economic data also pointed to continued resilience in the U.S. economy, as jobless claims came in below forecasts and retail sales met expectations, suggesting consumer spending remains steady despite ongoing inflationary pressures.

Over the last 24 hours, the crypto market was relatively steady, with Bitcoin holding around $64,600, Ethereum outperforming with modest gains, and institutional adoption remaining the dominant theme (as well as for today’s newsletter!).

From Stripe's reported bid for PayPal to Visa's stablecoin platform and Crypto.com's $400 million raise, this week's biggest stories highlight the growing convergence of crypto and traditional finance. And don’t forget to check out the BIR portfolio update.

M&A’s Spotlight: Stripe & Advent Eyeing PayPal\

Stripe and Advent International have reportedly made a $53 billion offer to acquire PayPal, proposing $60.50 per share, a premium of about 28% over PayPal’s share price before news of the bid emerged. While PayPal’s board is reviewing the proposal, reports indicate it believes the current valuation is too low, suggesting negotiations could continue. Beyond the size of the deal, the acquisition could have major implications for the cryptocurrency industry.

Stripe has spent years building stablecoin infrastructure through USDC, crypto payment tools, and its acquisition of Bridge, while PayPal already offers digital asset trading and operates its own stablecoin, PYUSD, across Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon. Combining Stripe’s blockchain infrastructure with PayPal’s network of more than 400 million active users could significantly expand the adoption of stablecoin-powered payments and digital financial services.

The merger, however, would also face regulatory scrutiny and technical integration challenges, particularly around compliance systems and consumer payment networks. Investors have reacted positively to the news, with PayPal shares rising as expectations grow that the buyers may ultimately increase their offer.

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Visa Announces Partnership with New Stablecoin

Visa has announced the Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP), a new enterprise solution designed to help banks, fintechs, payment providers, and crypto companies integrate stablecoins into their operations through a single Visa-managed platform.

Initially supporting Open USD (OUSD), the platform enables institutions to mint, store, transfer, and redeem stablecoins while providing onchain wallet infrastructure through a new Wallet-as-a-Service offering. Visa says the platform combines stablecoin functionality with its existing payment network, fraud prevention, and security tools, making it easier for institutions to incorporate digital assets into treasury management, settlements, and payment workflows.

VSP also includes enterprise-grade features such as approval controls, audit logging, secure wallet management, and interoperability with Visa’s existing stablecoin services, including stablecoin-linked cards and settlement solutions. The platform is currently available in beta for select clients, with Visa planning to expand availability as institutions test and develop real-world use cases for stablecoin payments.

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Fundraising Spotlight: Crypto.com Raises $400M

Crypto.com has raised $400 million from Citadel Securities in its first-ever institutional fundraising round, giving the cryptocurrency exchange a valuation of $20 billion. The investment underscores the growing convergence between traditional finance and the digital asset industry, as major banks, exchanges, and investment firms continue expanding into crypto infrastructure.

Crypto.com said it will use the new capital to accelerate growth in areas such as tokenized securities, derivatives, and other blockchain-based financial products. Citadel Securities described the partnership as part of a broader shift toward integrating digital assets into mainstream financial markets, while Crypto.com CEO Kris Marszalek emphasized the long-term potential of crypto as the foundation for future financial systems.

The announcement also reflects the crypto sector’s continued recovery following previous market disruptions, even as price volatility remains a challenge. Although Bitcoin has declined significantly this year amid economic uncertainty and geopolitical tensions, industry leaders argue that institutional adoption and infrastructure development continue to strengthen the sector’s long-term outlook.

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Meanwhile, a lower-than-expected wholesale inflation report reinforced expectations that price pressures are easing, offsetting some concerns about rising oil prices following President Trump’s comments about intensifying attacks on Iran.

Over the past week, crypto markets were driven by strong institutional momentum, with Bitcoin climbing to new record highs, Ethereum outperforming on expectations of growing stablecoin and tokenization activity, and renewed optimism fueled by progress on U.S. crypto regulation and continued corporate adoption.

From high-stakes crypto regulation in Washington to the rise of AI-powered commerce and Base's strategic reset, here's what mattered this week in all things blockchain and crypto. Enjoy!

Crypto News of the Week: Clarity Act Continues Progress

Several Republican senators are meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House on Thursday to discuss the progress of the Clarity Act, a major cryptocurrency regulation bill. Sen. Bernie Moreno said the meeting will focus on the bill’s status and strategy for getting it passed, noting that Trump has been closely involved.

The biggest sticking point in negotiations is an ethics provision addressing Trump’s financial ties to the cryptocurrency industry. Senate Democrats have made this provision a key condition for their support, which is needed to pass the bill.

Lawmakers are aiming to pass the legislation before Congress begins its August recess, after which midterm election politics are expected to make major legislation more difficult. Senate Majority Leader John Thune hopes to bring the bill to a vote before Aug. 7, even if negotiations with Democrats are not fully resolved.

A revised draft of the bill has not yet been released. Sen. Cynthia Lummis said senators are still deciding whether to include the ethics language now or leave it as a placeholder while negotiations continue.

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AI Agents Are Coming for the Company, Not Just the Job

Most discussions about artificial intelligence still focus on productivity. AI can write an email faster, summarize a report, analyze a spreadsheet or produce a first draft of software code. These are useful capabilities, but they may represent only the earliest stage of a much larger transformation. The more consequential development is the emergence of AI agents that can act rather than merely respond.

An AI agent can be given an objective, divide that objective into smaller tasks, select the tools required, coordinate with other agents and complete a sequence of actions with limited human supervision. Over time, these systems may become capable of purchasing services, managing budgets, negotiating terms and making payments. That would change not only how we work, but how companies and markets operate.

Consider a small business launching a new product. Today, the founder might need a marketing agency, a web designer, a research consultant, an accountant and a customer support team. In an agentic model, one coordinating AI system could break the project into separate assignments. A research agent could analyze competitors. A design agent could produce the website. A marketing agent could create and test advertising campaigns. A finance agent could monitor spending and revenue. The founder would still set the objective and approve important decisions, but much of the execution could be performed by specialized software.

This creates the possibility of much smaller organizations producing work that previously required large teams. The company of the future may not be defined primarily by the number of people it employs. It may be defined by how effectively a small group of people can coordinate a much larger network of digital capabilities. The impact will extend far beyond technology companies.

A lawyer could use agents to review documents, research precedents and monitor regulatory changes. A doctor could use them to organize patient histories, compare treatment options and manage administrative work. A construction company could deploy agents to order materials, compare supplier prices and update project schedules. A family could use a personal agent to manage bills, insurance renewals, travel reservations and household purchases. The workplace itself may become less focused on completing individual tasks and more focused on setting goals, reviewing results and exercising judgment.

That does not mean expertise disappears. In many cases, expertise becomes more important because someone must determine whether an agent’s work is accurate, appropriate and safe. The valuable employee may be the person who understands the broader objective, knows what questions to ask and can recognize when the automated answer is wrong.

AI therefore changes the nature of leverage. In the industrial economy, leverage came from machines, factories and capital. In the agentic economy, leverage may come from the ability of one person to direct hundreds of specialized systems simultaneously. This is where blockchain may become important.

AI agents can already produce information and execute digital tasks, but they remain limited when they need to participate directly in economic activity. An agent may need to purchase data, rent computing capacity, pay another agent for a service or receive compensation for work it has completed.

Traditional payment systems were designed for people and companies. They rely on bank accounts, cards, manual approvals and payment networks that may be expensive or slow for very small transactions. Agents will need money that can be moved automatically, globally and continuously.

Blockchain based payment systems can allow software to hold funds in a wallet, make payments through programmable instructions and produce a verifiable record of each transaction. A smart contract could release payment when a service is completed, return funds when agreed conditions are not met or enforce a spending limit established by the owner of the agent.

Imagine an AI travel agent instructed to plan a family holiday within a fixed budget. It could compare flights, reserve accommodation, purchase insurance and pay local service providers. Its wallet could be limited to approved categories and a maximum dollar amount. Every payment would be recorded and reviewable.

A corporate procurement agent could operate similarly. It might automatically purchase raw materials when inventory falls below a specified level, compare prices across suppliers and settle invoices immediately after delivery is confirmed. Blockchain could also support identity and reputation. An agent might carry digital credentials showing which individual or company authorized it and what actions it is permitted to perform. Its history of completed work and successful payments could help other participants decide whether to trust it.

This does not mean that every AI interaction must happen on a public blockchain. Banks, payment companies and technology platforms will develop their own systems. In many cases, traditional infrastructure may remain more practical. But as agents begin transacting across companies, platforms and national borders, open and programmable networks become more attractive. Software needs common standards in much the same way that the internet required shared protocols for information.

There are also significant risks. An agent with access to money can make expensive mistakes. It can be manipulated, hacked or given ambiguous instructions. A payment may be technically valid but commercially inappropriate. Regulators and courts will still need to determine who is responsible when autonomous software causes financial harm. For this reason, the first agentic economy will probably not be fully autonomous. It will consist of agents operating within tightly defined permissions, spending limits and approval processes.

The larger shift, however, is already beginning. AI is moving from generating answers to performing work. The next stage is allowing it to coordinate resources and participate directly in commerce. When that happens, blockchain may provide part of the financial infrastructure that allows machines to pay, contract and cooperate with one another.

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Media of the Week: Changes at Base’s Blockchain

Jesse Pollak, the creator of Base, reflected on what he described as a difficult first half of 2026, admitting that he misjudged the role social applications and creator-focused crypto products would play in driving adoption. While he said Base’s bet on supporting developers paid off, he acknowledged that investments in onchain social platforms and creator coins largely failed, causing the network to fall behind in key areas like trading, payments, and tokenization.

Looking ahead, Pollak said Base is shifting its strategy to focus on becoming the blockchain for global finance, prioritizing trading, stablecoin payments, and AI-powered agents over social experiences. He also announced that development of the Base app will return to Coinbase under Cobie, while Base itself will continue emphasizing infrastructure and supporting builders as it competes with companies like Robinhood and Stripe. Read his entire post below.

Although the U.S. launched another round of strikes on Iran following attacks on commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, oil prices declined after President Donald Trump said Iran had reached out to negotiate. Despite the market’s resilience, analysts cautioned that geopolitical uncertainty and persistent inflation risks could keep markets volatile.

Over the past 24 hours, crypto markets traded cautiously as geopolitical tensions in the Middle East kept Bitcoin and Ethereum largely rangebound, while Arbitrum (ARB) outperformed on strong adoption of Robinhood’s new Layer-2 blockchain, helping lift the broader crypto market modestly.

From Arbitrum's Robinhood-powered breakout to the emerging battle over open stablecoin infrastructure, we examine two stories that could reshape crypto's next phase. And don’t forget to check out the BIR portfolio!

Crypto News You Can’t Miss: Robinhood Launches New Chain

Arbitrum’s ARB token surged 19% after strong early activity on Robinhood’s new blockchain, Robinhood Chain, which is built using Arbitrum’s technology. The network generated more than $568 million in trading volume on Wednesday and another $350 million on Thursday, driven largely by memecoin trading, while stablecoin deposits exceeded $260 million in its first week. Under Arbitrum’s Expansion Program, 10% of the net revenue from chains built on its technology flows back to the Arbitrum ecosystem, giving it a direct financial benefit from Robinhood Chain’s growth. The Arbitrum Foundation estimates the chain is already on pace to generate more than $12.5 million in annualized revenue, with additional upside expected as tokenized real-world assets gain traction.

Robinhood launched the blockchain alongside broader crypto initiatives, including tokenized U.S. stocks, DeFi-powered savings, and AI-driven trading tools. While the initial surge in trading activity may moderate, ARB’s price rally suggests investors view Robinhood Chain as a meaningful long-term revenue driver for the Arbitrum ecosystem rather than simply another distribution partnership.

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The Stablecoin War Will Not Be Won by a Stablecoin Company

The stablecoin race is usually described as a battle between issuers. Tether versus Circle. USDT versus USDC. Offshore dominance versus regulated legitimacy. The story is familiar, simple and very possibly wrong.

Our view at the BIR is that the stablecoin war may not be won by a stablecoin issuer at all. It may be won by the companies that decide stablecoins are too important to be controlled by any one company.

This week we are looking at a new startup called the Open Standard. Open Standard, the independent company announced on June 30, 2026, is launching Open USD, or OUSD. It is being led by Zach Abrams, the co-founder of Bridge, the stablecoin infrastructure company acquired by Stripe. The company is not positioning OUSD as simply another dollar stablecoin trying to compete for market share. It is positioning it as neutral infrastructure for payments, trading, treasury and internet commerce. That may sound like a subtle distinction, but we think it is the whole point.

Stablecoins have spent years being treated as products. USDT is a product. USDC is a product. PYUSD is a product. Each has a brand, an issuer, a balance sheet, a regulatory profile and a business model. Open Standard is trying to make a different argument. It is saying that the market does not need another proprietary dollar token. It needs a common standard that many companies can use, distribute and build around.

The reported backer list makes this more than a crypto story. Open Standard has brought together more than 140 companies, including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Stripe, BlackRock, Coinbase, Google, BNY, Standard Chartered, Ripple and Shopify. These companies are not natural allies. Visa and Mastercard compete every day. Stripe competes with payment processors, banks and fintech platforms. Coinbase and Ripple have very different visions for crypto infrastructure. BlackRock and BNY sit deep inside the traditional financial system.

So when companies like this gather around the same stablecoin project, it is worth paying attention. They are not doing it because they suddenly agree on everything. They are doing it because a shared stablecoin standard may be more useful than a world where every major platform issues its own dollar token.

The economics are especially important. OUSD is expected to allow businesses to mint and redeem without fees and without volume limits. Instead of allowing one issuer to capture most of the reserve income, Open Standard plans to share much of that income with the partners that distribute and integrate the stablecoin, after operational costs. Governance is also meant to be collective, with Open Standard operating as an independent entity rather than as a token controlled by one exchange, bank, payment network or technology company. That structure goes directly at the heart of the stablecoin business model.

For years, the assumption has been that issuance is the prize. If you issue the stablecoin, you capture the reserve income. If you capture the reserve income, you build a powerful financial business. If your token becomes widely used, you become part of the payment infrastructure.

But we think that framing misses something important. Stablecoins are only valuable because other people use them. The value comes from distribution, liquidity, payment volume, merchant acceptance, wallet integration, exchange activity and trust. In other words, the value is often created by the platforms, fintechs, exchanges, wallets, banks and merchants that bring the users. From that perspective, the issuer should not be the king. The issuer should be the plumbing.

This is where Circle’s position becomes more complicated. USDC is the leading regulated dollar stablecoin, and Circle deserves enormous credit for building it. But success creates its own tension. As Circle expands into payment networks, dedicated blockchain infrastructure and broader financial services, some partners may start to ask a reasonable question: is Circle enabling us, or is Circle gradually becoming a competitor?

That is what makes Open Standard potentially provocative. It offers a different bargain. Instead of one issuer controlling the token, the rails and the economics, it proposes a shared model where the companies that drive adoption also participate in the upside.

We do not think this guarantees success. Announcing a consortium is the easy part. Making it work is much harder. The history of payments is full of alliances that looked impressive on paper and then became trapped in governance, incentives and politics. Getting banks, payment networks, fintechs, crypto firms and technology companies to agree on rules will not be simple. They will need to agree on reserve management, redemption rights, compliance standards, chain support, revenue sharing and control. That is a serious challenge. But it is also the challenge that matters.

The better historical analogy here is not Bitcoin. It is Visa. Visa became powerful because banks needed a shared acceptance network. They could cooperate on the standard while still competing for customers. That structure was messy, but it worked. Dee Hock described Visa as a “chaordic” organization, part chaos and part order. Stablecoins may need something similar: enough coordination to create trust, but enough openness to prevent any one company from capturing the entire system.

Libra tried to move in this direction before. It failed because the political environment was hostile and because Facebook was the wrong sponsor for a global money project. But the underlying idea was not foolish. A global digital money standard becomes more powerful when wallets, merchants, exchanges and platforms can build on top of it.

The difference now is that the world has changed. Stablecoins are no longer theoretical. Banks are experimenting with tokenized deposits. Payment companies are building blockchain settlement tools. Asset managers are moving funds onchain. Regulators are not simply asking whether stablecoins should exist. They are asking how stablecoins should be regulated.

Our view is that the stablecoin market does not need hundreds of isolated dollar tokens. It does not need every bank, fintech, exchange and payment company launching its own version of digital cash. That path leads to fragmentation, liquidity silos and unnecessary complexity. It also makes the user experience worse, because money becomes less useful when it has to be constantly converted, bridged or redeemed.

The more interesting future is one where companies compete above the stablecoin layer, not for ownership of the stablecoin layer itself. Exchanges can compete on trading. Wallets can compete on user experience. Payment companies can compete on merchant acceptance. Banks can compete on custody, compliance and treasury services. But the base unit of digital dollars could become more standardized.

If Open Standard succeeds, it will not just challenge Tether or Circle. It will challenge the idea that the most important stablecoin business is issuing the stablecoin.

That is the provocative point. The winning stablecoin may not be the one with the loudest brand, the biggest issuer or the strongest first-mover advantage. It may be the one that becomes boring enough, neutral enough and useful enough that everyone can build on it.

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The S&P 500 slipped while the Nasdaq Composite edged higher as semiconductor stocks rebounded. Investors also digested minutes from the Federal Reserve’s June meeting, which showed policymakers remained divided over the outlook for interest rates as they await further evidence on inflation.

This week in crypto, institutional adoption took center stage as banks expanded blockchain payment networks, regulators focused on interoperability and market structure, and geopolitical tensions added volatility to digital asset markets.

Today’s newsletter examines how blockchain is reshaping global payments through tokenized deposits and programmable settlement, and why common standards will be essential to safely connect an increasingly fragmented blockchain ecosystem. Enjoy!

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How Blockchain Is Rewiring Global Payments

Global payments are changing because the world they serve has already changed. Corporations operate across time zones, digital platforms settle activity around the clock, capital markets increasingly trade outside traditional windows, and multinational treasurers are expected to manage liquidity in real time. Yet much of the banking infrastructure underneath global payments still reflects an older model: batch processing, market cut-off times, correspondent banking chains and settlement delays that can leave money trapped in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That is why J.P. Morgan’s expansion of Kinexys matters. The bank’s blockchain business has added Australian dollar, Hong Kong dollar, Japanese yen, Chinese renminbi and Singapore dollar Blockchain Deposit Accounts to a network that already supported U.S. dollars, euros and pounds. The result is an eight-currency blockchain-based settlement network designed for institutional clients, with support for 24/7 settlement, onchain foreign exchange and programmable payments. J.P. Morgan says Kinexys has now processed more than $4 trillion in cumulative transaction volume, with average daily transactions above $7 billion.

This is not crypto in the speculative sense. It is not a bank offering retail customers another way to trade volatile tokens. It is the use of blockchain as payment infrastructure, with tokenized bank deposits moving across a controlled network. The distinction is important. A tokenized deposit is still a claim on a regulated bank deposit. The blockchain component changes how that claim can be represented, transferred, programmed and settled. It does not necessarily change the fundamental banking relationship.

The most immediate impact is on treasury management. Large companies often hold cash across multiple banks, entities, subsidiaries and jurisdictions. Moving money between them can involve delays, cut-off times and operational friction. For a company that needs to fund an Asian subsidiary after U.S. business hours, settle a margin call overnight, or move liquidity between trading entities in different currencies, traditional payment rails can be too slow. Blockchain-based deposit accounts allow that movement to become more continuous.

The client examples in J.P. Morgan’s announcement show where this is going. Payoneer is using the Australian dollar version for 24/7 cross-border settlement, while JERA Global Markets is using the Japanese yen account to manage intragroup treasury flows and optimize liquidity. These are practical, unglamorous use cases. That is precisely why they are important. The first major institutional blockchain payment applications are not about replacing money. They are about making existing money move faster and with more control.

Programmability is the second major shift. In traditional payments, instructions are often separated from business logic. A payment may need to be triggered manually, reconciled later, or matched against another system. With programmable payments, a company can connect money movement more directly to operational events. Funds can move when collateral thresholds are reached, when an invoice condition is met, or when liquidity needs to be rebalanced between accounts. This turns payments from a back-office process into a more automated layer of enterprise infrastructure.

The competitive landscape is also changing. J.P. Morgan is not alone. Reuters reported that BMO plans to launch tokenized cash capabilities with CME Group and Google Cloud, aimed at helping institutional clients move funds continuously for trading, margin and settlement needs. The same report described tokenized deposits as a way for clients to use bank-held funds in digital form for payments, treasury movements and programmable cash applications.

At the same time, major U.S. banks have been exploring broader tokenized deposit networks. The Wall Street Journal reported that banks including J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo have been planning a nationwide tokenized deposit system that could launch in the first half of 2027. The strategic logic is clear: if stablecoins have shown that money can move around the clock on blockchain rails, banks need a regulated deposit-based answer.

This creates an important distinction between three competing models. Stablecoins are usually issued by non-bank or special-purpose issuers and backed by reserves. Central bank digital currencies would be direct or indirect public-sector digital money. Tokenized deposits, by contrast, keep commercial banks at the center of money creation and payments. For large institutions, that may be the most natural bridge between the old system and the new one.

Regulators are also beginning to treat tokenization less as an experiment and more as an infrastructure question. In March 2026, U.S. banking regulators clarified that banks would not face extra capital charges simply because securities are tokenized, reflecting a technology-neutral approach to capital treatment. Meanwhile, Bank of Japan Deputy Governor Ryozo Himino has called for a broader approach to the future monetary system that considers tokenized bank deposits, stablecoins, CBDCs and blockchain-based central bank reserves together rather than in isolation.

The broader trend is that blockchain is moving from the edge of finance toward the plumbing of finance. Payments, deposits, FX, collateral, treasury and settlement are all being re-examined through the same lens: can value move continuously, securely and with programmable logic attached?

There are still limits. Networks remain fragmented. Legal treatment differs by jurisdiction. Interoperability between bank-led chains, public blockchains, stablecoin systems and traditional rails is still developing. There is also a governance question: blockchain may reduce some operational risks, but it does not eliminate credit risk, compliance obligations or the need to know who is moving money and why.

Even so, the direction of travel is becoming clearer. Global payments are shifting from messages about money to programmable movement of money. For banks, this is defensive and offensive. It protects their role against stablecoin and fintech competition, while creating new high-value services for corporate clients. For companies, it offers a future where liquidity can be managed with far greater precision.

For readers following the digital asset market, the lesson is straightforward: the most important blockchain adoption may not come first from consumers buying crypto. It may come from treasurers, banks and market infrastructure providers quietly rebuilding how money moves.

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Too Many Chains, Too Many Risks: The Case for Blockchain Standards

The Bank for International Settlements’ recent Bulletin, “Blockchain consensus mechanisms and fragmentation,” offers an important framework for understanding one of the central challenges facing public blockchain markets. The paper argues that permissionless blockchains have not converged around a single scalable infrastructure. Instead, activity has spread across many layer 1 networks, layer 2 systems and specialized execution environments. This has fragmented infrastructure, liquidity and assets across the broader digital asset ecosystem. The BIS attributes much of this fragmentation to the basic tradeoffs embedded in blockchain consensus mechanisms, particularly the tension between decentralization, security and scalability.

This fragmentation is not accidental. It reflects the fact that different protocols optimize for different priorities. Some networks emphasize decentralization and security, even if that means higher costs and lower throughput. Others prioritize speed, scalability and low fees, often by relying on smaller validator sets, higher hardware requirements or more centralized governance structures. Layer 2 systems add further complexity by separating execution from settlement and by introducing additional layers for sequencing, data availability and fraud or validity proofs. The result is an ecosystem composed not of one unified blockchain market, but of many partially connected markets with distinct technical, economic and governance assumptions.

There are clear advantages to this diversity. Multiple protocols allow experimentation. Developers can choose infrastructure suited to specific use cases. Payments, decentralized finance, gaming, tokenized real world assets and institutional settlement may each require different design choices. In this sense, fragmentation can support innovation by allowing different architectures to compete.

However, fragmentation also creates significant costs. Liquidity becomes dispersed across chains and applications. Users must manage multiple wallets, networks, bridges and fee tokens. Developers face the burden of building across ecosystems that do not always communicate cleanly with one another. Institutions face even greater complexity. For banks, asset managers and payment companies, each protocol introduces a separate set of questions around custody, settlement finality, operational resilience, governance, compliance and legal enforceability. In traditional finance, fragmentation is managed through standards, regulated intermediaries and well understood market infrastructure. In blockchain markets, those mechanisms remain underdeveloped.

The most visible attempt to solve this problem has been bridging. Bridges allow assets or messages to move between blockchains, thereby making fragmented networks more usable. In a typical bridge design, an asset is locked on one chain and a corresponding representation is issued on another. This allows users to access liquidity or applications outside the asset’s native network. Yet the same mechanism that makes bridges useful also makes them dangerous.

A bridged asset is not simply the original asset in a new location. It is a representation whose value depends on the continued functioning of the bridge. A user may believe they hold ETH, BTC, USDC or a tokenized security, but in practice they may hold a wrapped or synthetic version that depends on smart contracts, validator sets, relayers, oracles, key management systems and governance processes. If any of these components fail, the asset may lose convertibility or value even if the underlying blockchain remains secure.

The BIS highlights this problem directly. It notes that bridges can reduce friction but also concentrate risk, including the risk of compromised keys, falsified messages and smart contract bugs. The paper cites the Ronin Network hack, in which approximately $625 million was stolen, as an example of the scale of losses that can arise from bridge vulnerabilities.

This is not merely a technical concern. It is a market structure concern. Bridges create dependencies between networks that were originally designed to operate independently. A failure in one bridge can affect liquidity, collateral values and user confidence across multiple chains. In decentralized finance, a bridged asset may be used as collateral in a lending protocol, paired in a liquidity pool or referenced by an oracle. If the bridge fails, the consequences can spread beyond the bridge itself. This gives bridging risk a systemic character, especially as tokenized assets become more widely used.

The problem becomes even more acute as blockchain markets move beyond speculative crypto trading and into institutional finance. Stablecoins, tokenized deposits, tokenized money market funds and tokenized securities all depend on reliable settlement and clear ownership structures. If these assets are issued or represented across multiple chains, the infrastructure connecting those chains becomes part of the asset’s risk profile. Investors are no longer exposed only to the issuer or the underlying asset. They are also exposed to the interoperability layer.

This is why agreed standards are essential. The solution is not to eliminate protocol diversity. A single global blockchain is neither realistic nor desirable. Different use cases require different architectures. The more practical goal is to create standards that allow diverse networks to interact safely and predictably.

Common standards could address several weaknesses in the current ecosystem. Standards for cross chain messaging would make it clearer how instructions are verified and transmitted between networks. Standards for asset representation would help users and institutions distinguish between native assets, wrapped assets, bridged assets and synthetic claims. Standards for finality would clarify when a transaction can be considered settled across chains. Standards for disclosure would require protocols and issuers to explain which dependencies support an asset or application. Standards for governance and operational resilience would make it easier to evaluate whether critical infrastructure is sufficiently robust.

Such standards would support growth by reducing uncertainty. Developers would be able to build cross chain applications with more confidence. Institutions would be better able to assess risk. Users would have clearer information about what they own and what infrastructure they rely on. Liquidity could move more efficiently because market participants would have greater trust in the connective layer. In this respect, standards are not opposed to innovation. They are a precondition for broader adoption.

The BIS also discusses other mechanisms designed to reduce fragmentation, including native multi chain issuance, shared layers for security, shared data availability, shared sequencing and interoperability protocols based on verified messaging. These mechanisms may reduce some frictions, but they also introduce new dependencies. Native multi chain issuance can still leave liquidity siloed across networks. Shared sequencers and data availability layers can improve efficiency, but they may concentrate operational risk in a small number of providers. Interoperability protocols can reduce the need to move assets directly, but they still require assumptions about verification, governance and message transmission.

This is where regulators are likely to become more vocal. As cross chain infrastructure grows in importance, it begins to resemble financial market infrastructure. Shared sequencers determine transaction ordering. Data availability layers support verification. Messaging protocols transmit instructions across networks. Bridges and interoperability systems help move value or coordinate settlement between chains. These are not peripheral services if they support large volumes of financial activity. They are part of the market’s core plumbing.

Regulators are likely to focus less on whether this infrastructure is called decentralized and more on what function it performs. If a protocol performs a function similar to clearing, settlement, messaging or transaction ordering, supervisors may ask whether it should meet standards similar to those applied to traditional financial market infrastructure. The BIS makes this point explicitly, arguing that shared sequencers, data availability layers and cross chain messaging services may warrant governance arrangements, resilience standards and supervisory attention comparable to those applied to FMIs as they grow in scale.

The regulatory concern will be systemic risk. If many applications, assets and institutions depend on the same bridge, sequencer or messaging protocol, then the failure of that component could transmit stress across the wider ecosystem. This is analogous to concerns in traditional finance around clearinghouses, payment networks, custodians and major technology providers. Concentration can create efficiency, but it can also create single points of failure.

The next phase of blockchain development will therefore require a more mature approach to interoperability. Fragmentation may remain a permanent feature of the ecosystem, because different protocols will continue to serve different purposes. But unmanaged fragmentation is inefficient and potentially dangerous. Bridging has shown both the necessity and the risk of connecting chains without sufficient standards. The broader challenge is to move from ad hoc interoperability toward a more standardized, transparent and resilient market structure.

For the blockchain ecosystem to grow, it must become easier to understand what risks are being taken, where dependencies exist and who is accountable when critical infrastructure fails. Agreed standards would not remove all risk, but they would make the system more legible, more resilient and more suitable for institutional adoption. As digital assets move closer to mainstream financial markets, regulators will almost certainly increase their scrutiny of the middleware that connects chains. The question is not whether blockchain will remain fragmented. The question is whether that fragmentation can be governed well enough to support a larger and more credible financial ecosystem.

For investors, this shift is important. The most visible competition may appear to be between individual blockchains or tokenized assets. But the more consequential competition may occur in the infrastructure layer that connects these markets.

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Analysts said the shift reflects investors taking profits in technology and moving money into more stable blue-chip stocks, a sign of a broadening bull market.

Crypto markets traded mostly sideways over the past week as investors digested a wave of industry announcements, including Robinhood's major push into decentralized finance and the launch of the new Open USD (OUSD) stablecoin, while bitcoin remained near record highs — both of which you can read about below.

Crypto News You Can’t Miss: Robinhood Unveils A Whole New Portfolio of Products

Robinhood announced its biggest international expansion and product update yet at its London event, Robinhood Presents: The World is Flat. The company is doubling down on decentralized finance (DeFi) by launching the public mainnet for Robinhood Chain, its new Layer 2 blockchain built on Arbitrum, alongside stock tokens that allow eligible users in more than 120 countries to trade tokenized stocks around the clock and use them in DeFi applications like lending and trading.

Robinhood is also introducing Robinhood Earn, a decentralized lending product that lets eligible US customers earn an estimated 7% APY by lending USDG, while expanding perpetual futures trading beyond crypto to commodities, ETFs, and foreign exchange for European users. On the global front, the company plans to launch crypto trading in the UK, has officially entered Canada following its acquisition of WonderFi, and received regulatory approval to move toward brokerage services in Singapore. Robinhood also highlighted its growing use of artificial intelligence by announcing upcoming AI-powered crypto trading agents for US users that can monitor markets and execute strategies within user-defined limits. Overall, the announcements reflect Robinhood’s strategy to combine traditional investing with blockchain technology, expand internationally, and make advanced trading tools more accessible to retail investors.

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Dead Drops on Chain: Why Companies Must Prepare for Blockchain Enabled Malware

Blockchains are most often discussed in the context of financial innovation, tokenization, digital identity, and decentralized applications. Yet the same characteristics that make blockchain networks attractive for legitimate use cases can also make them useful to cybercriminals. Public availability, censorship resistance, persistence, and programmability are not inherently good or bad. They are technical properties. When placed in the hands of attackers, those properties can become part of a more resilient malware architecture.

The concept is relatively straightforward. Malware needs a way to communicate with its operator. In conventional attacks, that communication often depends on a command and control server, commonly called C2. If defenders identify and block the server, seize the domain, or disrupt the hosting provider, the malware can lose contact with the attacker. Blockchain technology changes that model. Instead of hardcoding a server address directly into the malware, attackers can place instructions, server locations, payload references, or configuration data on a public blockchain. The malware then queries the chain to learn where to connect next.

In cybersecurity, this is often understood as a form of “dead drop resolver.” MITRE ATT&CK describes dead drop resolvers as a technique where adversaries use public web services to host or provide information that helps malware locate command infrastructure. Blockchains fit naturally into this pattern because they are public, globally reachable, and difficult to remove once data has been written.

One of the best known early examples was Glupteba, a malware botnet that used the Bitcoin blockchain to improve the resilience of its command infrastructure. Google took legal and technical action against Glupteba in 2021, alleging that the botnet had infected more than one million Windows devices. Security researchers later showed that Glupteba used Bitcoin transactions to store command and control domains. In earlier versions, the malware could decrypt information embedded in Bitcoin transaction data and use it to recover updated server locations. The important lesson from Glupteba was not that Bitcoin itself was malicious. Rather, it showed that a public blockchain could be used as a resilient coordination layer. Bitcoin’s durability and openness, normally seen as strengths, allowed attackers to distribute infrastructure information in a way that was harder to erase than a traditional domain record.

A more recent and technically sophisticated pattern is known as EtherHiding. In this model, attackers store malicious code or configuration data inside smart contracts. Google’s Threat Intelligence Group reported in 2025 that North Korean threat actors had adopted EtherHiding to deliver malware and facilitate cryptocurrency theft, marking the first time Google had observed a nation state actor using the technique. The campaigns involved public blockchains such as Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain, with attackers using smart contract based storage to make malicious JavaScript loaders harder to remove.
EtherHiding demonstrates why smart contract platforms create a different threat surface than Bitcoin. Bitcoin can be used to store small pieces of data in transactions, but Ethereum, BNB Chain, and similar networks are programmable environments. Smart contracts can store data, expose callable functions, and respond to queries from malware. That means the blockchain can become more than a passive ledger. It can become a distributed, queryable component of the malware’s operating environment.

Another example is EtherRAT, a malware campaign that used Ethereum smart contracts to hide or retrieve command and control infrastructure. Reporting on EtherRAT described malware that queried Ethereum based infrastructure to obtain live C2 information, while eSentire observed a Node.js based backdoor during a 2026 incident response investigation in the retail sector.
The newest case study is TONResolver. To understand why this attracted attention, it is useful to start with Telegram and The Open Network, known as TON. Telegram is one of the world’s most widely used messaging platforms and has long been central to crypto culture, where token communities, trading groups, and developers use it as a coordination layer. TON began as the Telegram Open Network, a blockchain project originally associated with Telegram’s effort to build payments, tokens, and decentralized applications for a large user base. Telegram later stepped back from direct control, and the network continued through the broader TON community and TON Foundation. Today, TON operates as a public blockchain with smart contract capabilities.

TONResolver did not use TON to steal cryptocurrency directly. Instead, it abused TON as malware infrastructure. In the observed campaign, attackers targeted employees of Booking.com partner companies in Japan using phishing emails framed as guest complaints, review requests, and evidence downloads. When hotel staff opened a malicious file disguised as a photo, the malware infection began. The malware then used Node.js and queried a TON smart contract through TonAPI to retrieve the current command and control domain.

This was a classic blockchain enabled dead drop resolver. The attacker could change the C2 domain by updating the TON smart contract. Infected machines would then ask the contract for the current destination and reconnect to the attacker’s new infrastructure. The employee information was not placed on chain. The blockchain’s role was narrower but still powerful: it helped the malware locate its command server and maintain persistence despite takedown efforts.

For companies, the defensive implications are practical. Organizations should determine whether ordinary employee devices need access to blockchain gateways, JSON RPC services, smart contract APIs, or services such as TonAPI. If there is no business need, those connections can be restricted at the proxy, firewall, or endpoint level. Security teams should also monitor unusual use of PowerShell, Node.js, autorun entries, and outbound connections to blockchain infrastructure from nontechnical workstations.

The broader conclusion is that blockchain based malware is not a theoretical problem. Bitcoin has been used to distribute C2 domains. Ethereum and BNB Chain have been used to hide malicious code and configuration data. TON has now been used to resolve malware command infrastructure in a targeted phishing campaign. The same properties that make blockchains resilient for finance can make them resilient for adversaries. Companies that treat blockchain only as an investment or payments issue may miss its emerging role in cybersecurity.

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Media of the Week: And Another New Stablecoin….

Robinhood wasn’t the only company making crypto news this week. A new consortium-backed stablecoin called Open USD (OUSD) was announced, joining an already crowded market that includes USDT, USDC, PYUSD, RLUSD, and dozens of other dollar-pegged tokens. OUSD aims to stand out by sharing reserve revenue with participating businesses rather than concentrating it with a single issuer.

That’s what makes the below tweet so funny. It jokes that instead of asking whether you’d like to pay with cash or a credit card, cashiers will soon have to ask which of the seemingly endless list of stablecoins you’d like to use. The humor comes from the fact that the crypto industry keeps launching new versions of what is, to most users, essentially the same product: a digital dollar.

Crypto markets were little changed over the past 24 hours, with bitcoin and ether trading in a narrow range as investors awaited fresh macroeconomic data and broader market direction.

The next wave of tokenization is here, but buying a tokenized ETF doesn’t always mean owning the underlying asset. Read on to learn why the legal structure matters. And don’t forget to check in on the BIR!

Crypto News You Can’t Miss: Blockchain Infra and the AI Intersection

Cambrian, a startup focused on blockchain data infrastructure for institutions and AI agents, has raised $6 million in a seed funding round led by Franklin Templeton and Polychain Capital. The new investment brings the company’s total funding to $11.9 million.

Founded in 2024, Cambrian provides an API that delivers real time and historical blockchain data, including lending rates, liquidity, trading activity, risk metrics, and market sentiment. The company aims to expand this into a verifiable oracle network that gives institutions and AI agents reliable data for making on chain financial decisions.

Unlike traditional crypto oracles that mainly provide price feeds, Cambrian combines a broader range of on chain and off chain financial data into a single platform. The company is currently in private beta, supports Base and Solana, and plans to add Ethereum and additional blockchains in the near future.

Cambrian will use the new funding to expand its blockchain coverage, accelerate development of its oracle network, and grow its team. It plans to generate revenue through SaaS subscriptions, enterprise contracts, and agent based payment systems.

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Tokenized ETFs Are Expanding, But Investors Need to Ask What They Actually Own

The next stage of tokenization is moving beyond stablecoins and Treasury bills into a more complicated category: U.S. dollar denominated funds, ETFs and stock market exposure offered in tokenized form. On the surface, the appeal is obvious. A tokenized ETF or fund can potentially trade outside normal market hours, move across blockchain wallets, settle faster than traditional securities and reach investors who may not have easy access to U.S. brokerage infrastructure. For global investors, this is particularly powerful. A blockchain token can look like a simple way to obtain exposure to U.S. markets without opening a conventional U.S. securities account.

But the apparent simplicity is deceptive. The central question is not whether the token tracks a U.S. asset. The central question is what the buyer legally owns. Recent products show that “tokenized ETF” can mean several very different things. In one model, the token may represent a share or unit of a regulated fund whose ownership records are maintained on blockchain based infrastructure. Franklin Templeton’s BENJI token is one of the clearest examples. One share of the Franklin OnChain U.S. Government Money Fund is represented by one BENJI token, and the fund’s official transfer agent records share ownership through blockchain integrated recordkeeping. In this model, the token is not merely a price tracker. It is part of the fund ownership and recordkeeping system itself.

BlackRock’s BUIDL fund is another important reference point, though it is not an ETF. It is a tokenized institutional liquidity fund available through Securitize, aimed at qualified purchasers. The fund invests in cash, U.S. Treasury bills and repurchase agreements, and investors receive tokens representing their interest in the fund. This is tokenization as a fund administration and settlement technology, not a retail wrapper around a public stock market product.

The more complex structures arise when tokenization is used to give investors exposure to publicly traded U.S. stocks or ETFs. Kraken’s xStocks, issued by Backed, are described as tokenized representations of real world stocks and ETFs. The product is marketed to non U.S. retail clients in select jurisdictions and is backed one to one by the underlying equity. Yet Kraken also makes clear that xStocks do not confer shareholder rights such as voting. The investor receives price exposure and portability, but not the full legal bundle that would come with holding the actual ETF share in a brokerage account.

Ondo Global Markets is pushing a similar idea at larger scale, offering tokenized stocks and ETFs across public blockchains. Ondo says each token is fully backed by the corresponding stock or ETF, together with cash in transit. However, Ondo also states that the tokens are distinct from the underlying shares and do not themselves confer shareholder rights. Its partnership with Broadridge to enable token holders to express voting preferences is therefore important, but it also highlights the structural gap. The token holder does not simply become the shareholder of record. The holder has an onchain instrument backed by assets held through an issuer structure, with governance rights mediated through that structure.

Robinhood’s European stock tokens make the distinction even sharper. Robinhood states that its stock tokens are derivative contracts between the customer and Robinhood. They reflect the price of underlying stocks and ETPs, but do not grant rights to those securities. That is a very different product from a tokenized fund share. It is an exposure contract, and the investor is taking both market risk and platform counterparty risk.

This week we had the announcement that Nouriel Roubini’s USAFi product will be issuing a tokenized security backed by the Atlas America Fund, a Nasdaq listed, SEC registered ETF. Atlas presents the product as a “Technodollar,” but in practical terms it appears less like a dollar substitute and more like a tokenized access product for eligible global investors. The buyer would not appear to be holding ordinary USAF ETF shares in a brokerage account. Instead, the buyer would hold a digital security backed by or collateralized by the ETF and its real world assets, with the precise rights depending on the final offering documents, issuer structure, custody arrangements and redemption mechanics.

Foreign regulators are already focused on this problem. The European Securities and Markets Authority has warned that tokenized stocks may create investor misunderstanding because they often provide exposure to listed shares without making the buyer an actual shareholder. The Bank of Lithuania has also reportedly sought clarification on Robinhood’s EU stock token structure. These concerns are not anti innovation. They reflect a basic investor protection issue. A token that references Apple, the S&P 500 or a Nasdaq ETF may feel familiar, but the legal claim can be unfamiliar and materially different.

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Concerns over stretched valuations, heavy AI-related spending, and the potential for higher interest rates weighed on the sector, while the more industrial-focused Dow Jones Industrial Average managed a modest gain. At the same time, oil prices fell sharply to their lowest levels since the start of the U.S.-Iran conflict as tanker traffic resumed through the Strait of Hormuz, easing some concerns about supply disruptions.

Crypto markets were volatile over the past week, with both Bitcoin and Ethereum finishing lower as risk appetite weakened and traders reacted to broader macro uncertainty and choppy trading conditions.

This week we discuss how tokenization is evolving from a crypto-native concept into a core priority for major financial institutions building the next generation of market infrastructure.

Tokenization Is Becoming an Exchange Issue

For much of the last decade, tokenization was treated as a crypto story. It was discussed in the language of decentralized finance, stablecoins, real world assets and experiments at the edge of the financial system. The basic idea was simple enough: take an asset that exists in the traditional world and represent it digitally on a blockchain. That asset could be a Treasury bill, a share of stock, a private fund interest, a deposit, a commodity claim or even a piece of real estate.

What is changing now is not only the technology, but the identity of the institutions paying attention. Tokenization is no longer just a project for crypto startups. It is increasingly becoming a strategic concern for the world’s major exchanges, clearing houses and market infrastructure providers.

The recent joint venture between OKX and Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, is an important example of this shift. The venture is expected to operate as a regulated U.S. broker dealer and futures commission merchant, allowing OKX customers to access ICE futures and potentially NYSE tokenized equities markets. Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is serving as co chair, underscoring the political and regulatory dimension of the project.

The symbolism matters. ICE is not a speculative crypto firm looking for attention. It owns some of the most important financial infrastructure in the world, including the NYSE. Its involvement suggests that tokenization is being taken seriously not as a replacement for regulated markets, but as a possible upgrade to them.

The attraction is easy to understand. Traditional securities markets still operate within a structure built around business hours, delayed settlement, fragmented custody and multiple layers of intermediaries. That system is highly reliable, but it is also expensive and slow. Tokenization offers the possibility of markets that trade continuously, settle faster, support fractional ownership and allow collateral or cash to move more efficiently across platforms.

This is particularly important for global investors. U.S. equities are among the most widely demanded assets in the world, but access remains uneven. Investors outside the United States often face frictions related to brokerage access, local custody, market hours and settlement. A properly regulated tokenized equity market could allow investors to gain exposure to the same underlying economic assets in a more flexible digital format. That does not mean investor protections disappear. In fact, the most important tokenization projects are moving in the opposite direction: they are trying to combine blockchain efficiency with existing legal and regulatory safeguards.

This is why exchanges are paying attention. Exchanges are not simply venues where buyers and sellers meet. They are trust engines. They provide rules, listings, surveillance, clearing relationships, data, liquidity and credibility. If tokenized assets become a major financial product, the institutions that already control trusted market infrastructure will not want to watch from the sidelines.

The same logic applies beyond equities. CME Group has been working on tokenized cash and settlement tools that could allow institutional clients to move value continuously for margin, collateral and settlement workflows. This points to one of the most practical uses of blockchain technology: not replacing markets, but reducing friction inside them. In derivatives markets, where collateral must be posted, moved and optimized constantly, faster settlement and more mobile collateral could have real economic value.

DTCC is also moving in this direction through its tokenization initiatives. This is significant because DTCC sits at the heart of U.S. post trade infrastructure. If the exchange represents the front end of the market, DTCC represents much of the back end. Tokenization only becomes truly powerful when both sides evolve: the trading venue and the settlement infrastructure.

The important point is that tokenization is no longer a single product category. It is becoming a design principle for financial markets. Tokenized equities address access and trading hours. Tokenized deposits address payments and treasury management. Tokenized Treasuries address collateral and yield. Tokenized fund interests address private market access. Each use case is different, but the common theme is the same: financial assets are being rebuilt so they can move more like software.

There are still substantial challenges. Regulators must decide how tokenized claims map to traditional legal ownership. Exchanges must ensure that tokenized markets do not fragment liquidity or create weaker investor protections. Issuers must prove that token holders have enforceable rights. Custodians must show that assets are properly backed. And investors must understand the difference between owning a token that references an asset and owning the asset itself.

These issues are not minor. In fact, they explain why the involvement of major exchanges matters so much. Crypto native firms brought the innovation. Traditional market operators bring the legal structure, institutional relationships and operational discipline needed for mass adoption.

The next phase of tokenization will probably not look like the early crypto boom. It will be more regulated, more institutional and less ideological. It may also be far more consequential. If exchanges, banks, clearing houses and asset managers begin using blockchain rails for securities, deposits and collateral, tokenization will move from a niche investment theme to a core part of global financial infrastructure.

For investors, this creates an important opportunity and a warning. The opportunity is that tokenization could reshape how assets are issued, traded and settled. The warning is that not every tokenization project will benefit equally. The winners are likely to be the platforms that combine regulatory credibility, deep liquidity, technical execution and real market demand.

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Crypto News You Can’t Miss: Brazil Brings DeFi Into the Tax Net

Brazil has introduced stricter crypto reporting requirements through Normative Instruction No. 2,291/2025, significantly expanding tax transparency and oversight of digital asset transactions. Under the new rules, individuals and businesses must report crypto activity conducted through foreign exchanges, decentralized finance (DeFi) platforms, or direct peer-to-peer transactions when monthly transaction volumes exceed BRL 35,000. The framework broadens the range of reportable activities to include purchases, sales, staking, airdrops, and crypto-to-crypto trades, with filings submitted electronically through Brazil’s tax portal. Failure to comply can result in monthly fines, making accurate record-keeping and reporting increasingly important for crypto users and businesses operating in the country.

For crypto users in Brazil, the changes mean greater accountability and a reduced ability to operate outside the view of tax authorities, particularly when using foreign platforms or DeFi protocols. While the new requirements create additional compliance obligations, they also provide clearer regulatory guidance and reduce uncertainty around how crypto activities should be treated for tax purposes.

More broadly, the regulation reflects a global shift toward integrating crypto into existing financial and tax systems rather than treating it as a separate or lightly regulated market. By aligning with international standards such as the Crypto-Asset Reporting Framework (CARF), Brazil is increasing transparency, improving regulators’ visibility into cross-border crypto activity, and strengthening efforts to combat money laundering and illicit finance. Although this may reduce some of the anonymity historically associated with crypto, it also represents another step toward mainstream adoption, helping legitimize the industry and creating a clearer regulatory environment that could encourage greater institutional participation and long-term growth of the digital asset economy.

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Media of the Week: Aave’s Revenue Generation

Aave is a decentralized lending marketplace where users supply capital, borrowers take loans, and the protocol earns fees for facilitating those transactions. Revenue has reached record highs and is continuing to grow in 2026, even before several anticipated product upgrades are released, leading many investors to expect further growth ahead.

What's especially notable is that Aave generates this revenue with:

• no physical branches,

• no loan officers,

• no large sales force,

• and a relatively small team.

Its all about efficiency,

Crypto markets weakened over the past 24 hours as a hawkish Federal Reserve outlook prompted risk-off sentiment, pushing Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most major altcoins lower despite continued strength in stablecoin adoption.

From World Cup tickets to stablecoin infrastructure, this week’s newsletter explores how blockchain is quietly moving from crypto speculation into real-world systems that manage access, ownership, and money. And don’t forget to check on the BIR portfolio!

The World Cup Ticket Problem Meets Blockchain

Few sporting events create demand like the FIFA World Cup. Every four years, millions of fans compete not only to watch the games, but to gain access to the stadiums where national identity, global attention and commercial value converge. The 2026 World Cup, spread across North America, has made that challenge even more visible. With matches taking place in the United States, Canada and Mexico, demand is global, venues are dispersed and ticketing has become one of the most important operational issues facing the tournament.

The problem is not simply that there are too few seats for too many fans. That has always been true of major sporting events. The more serious issue is that high-demand ticket markets attract fraud, bots, scalpers and counterfeit sellers. In the traditional ticketing model, fans often enter digital queues or lotteries with little certainty. Bots can flood systems the moment tickets are released. Secondary markets then emerge where tickets are resold at enormous markups, sometimes with limited transparency about whether the seller actually controls a valid ticket. For fans travelling across countries or continents, the risk is especially painful. A counterfeit ticket is not merely a financial loss. It can ruin an entire trip.

This is the background against which FIFA’s blockchain experiment should be understood. The organization is not merely dabbling in digital collectibles or trying to add a crypto layer to the World Cup for promotional reasons. It is testing whether blockchain infrastructure can solve a real commercial problem in one of the largest consumer markets in the world: event ticketing.

FIFA Collect, the federation’s digital collectibles and fan platform, is using Avalanche blockchain infrastructure and Modex to support a new ticketing model. The system is built around two concepts: the Right-to-Buy, or RTB, and the Right-to-Ticket, or RTT. These are not the tickets themselves. Instead, they are digital entitlements that sit in front of the official ticketing process.

An RTB gives a fan priority access to purchase a specific ticket before it becomes available more broadly. That RTB can be acquired through FIFA Collect and traded on a secondary market. Once redeemed, the RTB converts into an RTT, which can then be used to purchase the official match ticket through FIFA’s existing ticketing infrastructure. In other words, blockchain is being used to manage rights, ownership and transferability before the final ticket is issued through traditional channels.

This distinction matters. Many early blockchain ticketing proposals imagined that the ticket itself would live fully onchain. FIFA’s approach is more practical. It allows the organization to keep its core ticketing infrastructure intact while using blockchain to create a verifiable, transferable layer around access rights. For a tournament of World Cup scale, that hybrid model may be more realistic than replacing the entire ticketing stack at once.

The key benefit is verification. A blockchain-based entitlement can be tracked as it changes hands, reducing the risk that multiple buyers are sold the same access right or that a seller is offering something they do not actually control. In a market where counterfeit listings and fake resale offers are persistent problems, verifiable ownership has obvious value.

A second benefit is control over the secondary market. In the traditional model, much of the resale activity moves to third-party platforms. These platforms capture the customer relationship, the transaction data and often a large share of the economics. FIFA’s model attempts to move at least part of that activity back into its own ecosystem. That does not eliminate resale, but it changes where resale occurs and who can observe it.

A third benefit is better data. For FIFA and other sports organizations, knowing who ultimately attends an event is increasingly important. Ticketing is no longer only about filling seats. It is about understanding fans, managing security, developing commercial relationships and building long-term digital engagement. If ticket rights are transferred within a controlled blockchain-enabled environment, FIFA can gain better visibility into the life cycle of those rights while still keeping personal information offchain.

A fourth benefit is user experience, assuming the technology is implemented well. Ava Labs has described the goal as delivering a Web2 experience with blockchain underneath. That is the correct framing. Most football fans do not want to think about wallets, chains or tokens. They want to know that the ticket access they bought is real, transferable and redeemable. If blockchain is doing its job, the consumer may barely notice it.

The experiment is still early, and there are fair criticisms. A tradable right to buy a ticket could become another speculative layer between fans and access. Instead of eliminating scalping, it could formalize a new version of it. The success of the model will depend on pricing rules, transfer restrictions, user protections and whether ordinary fans feel that the system increases fairness rather than complexity.

Even with those caveats, FIFA’s use of Avalanche is important because it points to where blockchain adoption may be heading. The next phase may not be defined by asking consumers to buy crypto assets directly. It may be defined by using blockchain invisibly inside large existing markets where verification, ownership and transferability are valuable.

For the blockchain industry, the World Cup offers a useful test case. This is not a theoretical DeFi product or a speculative token launch. It is a real-world problem with millions of potential users and substantial economic stakes. If blockchain can help reduce ticket fraud, improve transparency and give event organizers better control over secondary markets, then it becomes infrastructure rather than ideology.

That is the broader lesson. Blockchain’s most important consumer applications may not look like crypto at all. They may look like a fan arriving at a stadium, scanning a valid ticket and never knowing that a blockchain helped make the experience safer.

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Crypto News You Can’t Miss: Fundraise Alert

Range, a Zug-based stablecoin infrastructure startup, has raised $8.3 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round, bringing its total funding to $11 million. The round attracted both traditional fintech investors, including TX Ventures and SixThirty, and crypto-focused firms such as Maven 11 Capital and Onigiri Capital. Range provides a platform that helps companies manage both stablecoin and traditional fiat operations, serving clients such as Circle, the Solana Foundation, Stellar, Squads, and Jupiter.

The company’s platform consists of two main products: Unify, which consolidates data from bank accounts, custodians, wallets, and exchanges into a single real-time ledger, and Protect, which screens blockchain transactions for compliance risks, fraud, sanctions violations, and policy breaches before execution. According to Range, it tracks 99.41% of all stablecoin payments, safeguards more than $30 billion in customer assets through its Unify system, and connects with over 10,000 financial institutions, custodians, and wallets.

CEO Andres Monteoliva said the convergence of stablecoins and traditional finance is creating demand for tools that provide real-time visibility, compliance controls, and audit readiness across both systems. The new funding will be used to expand the company’s products, grow its engineering and commercial teams, and increase the number of supported integrations and networks beyond the more than 200 it currently supports.

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BIR Portfolio

The Blockchain Income Report portfolio had a strong week, rising 6.9% compared with a 1.1% gain for the blended Bitcoin and Ethereum benchmark. The result was especially notable because it was not driven by a broad market surge. Bitcoin was essentially flat, down 0.5% on the week, while Ethereum gained a modest 2.8%. In other words, this week’s performance came from token selection rather than simple market exposure.

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Meanwhile, SpaceX shares fell more than 3%, putting the company on track to end its strong post-IPO rally after rapidly surpassing Amazon in market value within days of going public.

Over the past week, cryptocurrency markets were mixed as investors weighed rising expectations for higher U.S. interest rates, ongoing geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, and growing interest in crypto-linked financial products, with major tokens fluctuating while blockchain-based trading platforms continued to gain attention following the success of SpaceX-related perpetual futures markets (more on that below).

Today, we talk about how prediction markets, crypto-native exchanges, and new financial infrastructure are reshaping the way information is priced, traded, and used to forecast real-world events in real time. Enjoy!

Crypto News You Can’t Miss: SpaceX IPO From the On Chain Lens

SpaceX’s historic $2 trillion IPO highlighted the growing influence of blockchain-based trading platforms alongside traditional financial markets. Ahead of the company’s public debut, exchanges such as Hyperliquid and Binance offered perpetual futures contracts tied to SpaceX, allowing traders to speculate on the company’s value before shares began trading. The prices of these contracts closely tracked the stock’s eventual market performance, demonstrating the potential of decentralized markets to provide early price discovery.

On its first trading day, SpaceX opened at $150 per share and closed at $160.95, giving the company a market capitalization of more than $2.1 trillion. Hyperliquid alone saw more than $1.2 billion in SpaceX futures trading volume, underscoring growing investor interest in perpetual futures. The success of these markets has increased pressure on traditional exchanges to adapt as new trading products gain regulatory acceptance and popularity.

While analysts praised investment banks for successfully pricing the IPO, cryptocurrency advocates viewed the event as a win for blockchain technology. They argue that platforms like Hyperliquid demonstrate how decentralized financial infrastructure can complement traditional markets by expanding access, liquidity, and price discovery for major financial assets.

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When Fable Finds the Flaw: AI and the New Crypto Security Crisis

For much of crypto’s history, the industry has understood hacking as a contest between human engineers. Protocols were written by developers, audited by specialist security firms, tested through bug bounties, and eventually attacked by highly skilled adversaries. The process was imperfect, but it was at least familiar. A vulnerability might sit unnoticed for months or years because discovering it required patience, domain expertise, and a great deal of manual work. That assumption is now under pressure.

A recent Zcash incident offers one of the clearest examples yet of how artificial intelligence may change the economics of cyber risk in digital assets. According to public reports, a security researcher working with Zcash used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 to uncover a critical vulnerability that had gone undetected for more than four years. The flaw reportedly could have allowed an attacker to create an unlimited supply of Zcash tokens. Although the issue appears to have been found by a white hat researcher and patched before public disclosure, the market reaction was severe. Zcash fell sharply as investors reassessed the security assumptions behind one of crypto’s best known privacy networks.

The important point is not simply that one token sold off. The deeper lesson is that AI is beginning to compress the time required to discover, understand, and potentially exploit complex software vulnerabilities. Work that once required months of expert review may increasingly be performed in days, hours, or even minutes by a capable model guided by a knowledgeable operator. That changes the threat model for every open source protocol, and crypto is almost entirely an open source industry.

The timing is especially notable because of the controversy surrounding Anthropic’s newest models, including Fable. The U.S. government has reportedly moved to block foreign access to Anthropic’s most advanced models, including Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security concerns. Anthropic responded by disabling access more broadly while it worked through compliance issues. Whatever one thinks of the policy, the episode reveals something important: governments now see frontier AI models not merely as productivity tools, but as strategic technologies with potential offensive cyber capabilities.

In the early years of crypto, the main security concern was whether a human hacker could find a bug in a smart contract or exploit weak operational controls at an exchange. Today, the question is whether an AI-assisted adversary can systematically scan thousands of codebases, identify subtle errors, simulate attack paths, and produce working exploit strategies faster than defenders can respond. The same models that help researchers audit code can also help attackers prioritize targets.

This creates a paradox for crypto. Blockchain networks rely on transparency. Open source code is meant to increase trust because anyone can inspect it. But AI changes the meaning of “anyone.” It no longer means only expert developers, academic cryptographers, or well-funded audit teams. It may also mean state-sponsored hacking groups, criminal organizations, or lightly skilled attackers using models that can reason through unfamiliar code. In a world where software can be read at machine speed, openness remains valuable, but it is no longer sufficient protection.

Decentralized finance is particularly exposed. DeFi protocols often hold large pools of immediately transferable assets. Unlike traditional finance, there is usually no central intermediary that can reverse a transaction, freeze a wire, or call a regulator before funds leave the system. Once an exploit is executed, the money can move through bridges, mixers, decentralized exchanges, and privacy tools. This is why North Korean hacking groups and other sophisticated actors have focused so heavily on crypto. AI does not create that incentive, but it may lower the cost of acting on it.

The Zcash case also highlights a second-order problem: even responsible disclosure can damage confidence. If a white hat researcher finds a catastrophic bug, patches it, and tells the world, investors may still ask the obvious question: what else is hidden in the code? For privacy networks, the question becomes even harder because the design that protects user confidentiality can also complicate retrospective analysis. If a flaw might have allowed hidden inflation, proving that it was never exploited may be extremely difficult.

For the industry, the response cannot simply be to fear AI. Crypto teams will need to use the same tools defensively. AI-assisted audits, continuous code scanning, formal verification, adversarial simulation, and automated monitoring are likely to become standard. The bar for “reasonable security practice” is rising. A protocol that relies on one annual audit and a modest bug bounty may no longer meet the market’s expectations.

This may also strengthen the case for more mature infrastructure. Investors will increasingly distinguish between projects that treat security as marketing and those that treat it as an ongoing institutional discipline. The winners in the next phase of crypto may not be the loudest communities or the most imaginative token designers, but the networks that can prove they have rigorous defenses against both human and machine adversaries.

AI has not made crypto uniquely vulnerable. It has made visible a broader reality: software systems are only as secure as the assumptions used to protect them. In crypto, those assumptions are being rewritten quickly. The same technology that can help find the next bug before it is exploited can also help an attacker find it first. Over time, we expect that AI will make systems more secure but as AI systems release new versions with more power, this could be a long road.

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Crypto Media of the Week: 6 Years of Polymarket

Over the past six years since its launch, Polymarket has grown from a small crypto experiment into a major prediction market platform handling billions in trading volume, while raising large institutional funding rounds and reaching multi-billion-dollar private valuations as it helped bring “information markets” into the mainstream.

Happy Anniversary to Polymarket.