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You're now reading The Brief by Introduction.com.

The private digest for entrepreneurs, operators, and investors shaping the future with technology.

In this industry, the ceiling isn't talent, it's access.

Success is defined by the hands you shake and the company you keep.

We exist to streamline that proximity, ensuring the "best of the best" are never more than one connection away.

Join a private network of leaders from a16z, Goldman, NBA, Coinbase, Stripe, and more.

A proud moment for the whole family.

Arcadia, our parent company, was just ranked by Inc. as the 93rd fastest-growing private company in America, and the 3rd fastest-growing in media, marketing and advertising.

Introduction.com and Arcadia are one team and one network. Arcadia was built four years ago on a simple belief: that trust, attention and influence were shifting away from traditional media toward creators, social platforms and internet-native communities. Introduction.com was built around the people shaping that future.

Today Arcadia is a team of 30 partnering with some of the world's most ambitious companies to shape how their products are understood and adopted at scale. Its campaigns have generated nearly $500 million in client revenue, and the media ecosystem it operates drives close to 300 billion impressions a year.

When they win, we win. And we are just getting started.

September 9. New York.

Introduction.com, XDC Network, & Plug and Play Ventures are opening one room, for one afternoon, on the two technologies about to collide: AI agents and blockchain.

Around the table:
→ Founders, operators, investors and allocators
→ Frontier AI, Fortune 500 technology, global finance and institutional capital

Chatham House Rule, as always.
→ Say what you actually think
→ It stays in the room

Attendance is limited.
→ Applications are reviewed one at a time
→ Acceptance is not guaranteed

Don't miss the room. Access is earned.

Meet Rufus Daniel 👋

Congrats on helping bring Monolith out of stealth, where he serves as Chief Growth Officer.

→ Chief Growth Officer at Monolith

→ Former Director of Ecosystem Strategy at the Hedera Foundation

→ Four years growing the Hedera ecosystem across EMEA

Rufus just helped unveil Monolith, the startup he recently joined as Chief Growth Officer.

Monolith wants to let oil and gas traders protect themselves against price swings at any hour, not just during market hours. It works through tokenization: a trader takes a real asset, like a shipment of oil, turns it into a digital token, and uses that token as backing to lock in a price on the spot, cutting days of paperwork down to hours.

As Chief Growth Officer, Rufus is the one bringing traders and big institutions on board. His timing is good: US regulators are now deciding whether to allow this kind of round-the-clock trading, and Monolith has already weighed in.

If it works, trillions of dollars sitting idle finally get put to use.

This is what our network is all about. Keep building.

We are proud to introduce the newest innovators and leaders joining our community; please take a moment to connect with them and welcome them to the inner circle 👇

Assets & Access Tampa @ The Copper Shaker
Thu Sep 3, 7:00 PM ET

Assets & Access NYC @ Pubkey
Tue Sep 8, 6:00 PM ET

Assets & Access Miami @ Better Days
Thu Sep 10, 6:00 PM ET

Assets & Access SF @ Rickhouse
Thu Sep 10, 5:30 PM PT

Assets & Access Tampa @ The Copper Shaker
Thu Oct 1, 7:00 PM ET

Félix

Félix raised $200M in a Series C co-led by a16z and General Catalyst, with QED, Castle Island Ventures and others joining. Félix runs an AI-powered remittance app that moves money from the US to Latin America over WhatsApp using stablecoins, and says it has processed more than $8B. The round, about $87M in equity plus $113M in debt, funds its expansion across 11 markets at a roughly $1.45B valuation.

Great look for Maggie Hsu from a16z too! Congrats!

Polymarket

Polymarket raised ~$300M from 1789 Capital, Donald Trump Jr.'s firm, as part of a roughly $1B round at a $21B valuation. Polymarket runs the largest crypto prediction market, where people trade on real-world outcomes. The new money roughly doubles its valuation from $15B and deepens 1789's existing stake.

Massive W for Elden Mirzoian and the Polymarket team!

RQD* Clearing

RQD* Clearing raised $74M in a strategic growth round led by Bain Capital, with ABN AMRO Clearing and Nyca Partners joining. RQD provides clearing and custody for broker-dealers, RIAs and financial firms, and is building the rails for tokenized markets. The round funds that build-out.

Mobula

Mobula was acquired by fomo for a reported $17M. Mobula provides on-chain market data and wallet APIs, and fomo folds its data infrastructure and team into its social trading platform.

YZi Labs, the roughly $10B fund CZ spun out of Binance Labs, backed ten different startups in August alone, spanning DeFi, stablecoins, AI and real-world assets:

→ Nara — stablecoin yield
→ Alloco — tokenized asset management
→ FinTax — crypto tax and accounting
→ De1 — AI-driven DeFi
→ TermMax — on-chain lending
→ Kravata — stablecoin payments
→ SmartX — prediction markets
→ Primus Labs — zero-knowledge infrastructure
→ Facto — DeFi payments
→ Liquorice — lending and liquidity

Nvidia posted the biggest quarter in corporate history: $96.2B in revenue, up 106%, and guided next quarter to $108B. The tell is that the guide assumes zero sales into China, where export rules froze its business. Even writing China off, Nvidia expects a record.

The number holds only if the AI buildout keeps getting funded, and two tests are live now. Anthropic filed to go public, the first read on whether public markets will fund an AI lab at scale. Salesforce and CrowdStrike beat earnings on AI, the first sign real demand is paying for it. If both hold, $108B is easy. If either breaks, Nvidia is left with a number it cannot hit.

This week, 21 of the world's biggest banks, including Bank of America, Citi, Goldman and Deutsche Bank, announced a joint company to issue one shared dollar stablecoin, launching in early 2027 with a euro version to follow.

The motive is defensive. When a customer buys Tether or Circle, that dollar leaves the bank and the issuer keeps the yield on it. The banks want those deposits back, and to prove their own rails can move money as fast as a blockchain.

But a bank stablecoin is still bank money: KYC-gated and freezable. It settles in seconds, but it can be shut off. The banks just validated the technology and made the decentralized version more valuable, not less. The hedge still matters.

The market is now betting the Fed's next move is a hike, not a cut, with September odds above 60% after new chair Kevin Warsh flagged more inflation work to do. Good economic data now reads as a reason to sell.

A federal appeals court ruled states can regulate prediction markets as gambling, cracking the federal shield behind Kalshi's roughly $40B valuation. It lands the same week Polymarket (above) raised at $21B.

The FTC and 22 states sued Amazon, claiming it quietly overcharged advertisers by around $20B. The case goes after its ad auctions, the highest-margin part of the business.

Nvidia agreed to buy the open-model hub Hugging Face for $12.9B, its biggest deal ever. It moves the chipmaker from selling silicon to owning where models live, in the same week it guided to a record (above).

Washington took a 35% stake in a Venezuelan oil venture through its new Office of Strategic Capital, with rights to route a fifth of the output to the national reserve. This is the government taking direct equity in a foreign resource, not just easing sanctions.

Public companies kept buying into the dip: Strive added 1,800 Bitcoin to become the fifth-largest corporate holder, and BitMine made its 65th straight weekly Ether buy, pushing its stake toward 5% of all ETH.

China has yet to approve a single purchase of Nvidia's H200, leaving up to $30B in sales frozen. It is the same China business Nvidia already wrote off in its guidance (above).

Revolut launched its own euro stablecoin on Ethereum, built on Stripe's Bridge. While the big banks plan their shared dollar coin (above), a neobank already shipped one.

Gold posted its best month of the year in August, climbing toward $4,500 an ounce even as the Fed turned hawkish. Safe-haven and central-bank buying is overpowering the usual higher-rates headwind.

Entry-level hiring is collapsing as employers swap junior roles for AI. Stanford found that by June, employment for 22-to-25-year-olds in the most AI-exposed jobs had fallen 19% behind their less-exposed peers. The bottom rung of the career ladder is thinning fastest.

Thirty-nine US state banking associations launched their own blockchain network, BankChain, for tokenized deposits and payments. It is one more group racing to put bank money on-chain (above).

At this week's SCO summit, US tariffs helped push India closer to China and Russia, with Modi, Xi and Putin sharing the stage. The cost of maximum tariff pressure is a warmer Delhi-Beijing relationship.

The CLARITY Act, which would move most tokens from the SEC to the CFTC, faces a Senate floor vote around September 15. Passage is hanging by a thread as Democrats stall over Trump's family crypto ties.

A federal judge ruled the Pentagon's "supply-chain risk" label on Anthropic was illegal retaliation for the company criticizing its AI plans. The first court check on Washington punishing AI vendors it dislikes.

Canada is hitting about $20B of US goods with retaliatory tariffs starting September 8, after Washington's first-ever Section 338 tariffs on Canadian dairy, alcohol and vehicles. Carney says the two are economically "at war."

Singapore's central bank proposed forcing stablecoin issuers to hold 100% reserves and pay zero yield, matching the US and EU. Another major hub shutting the door on yield-bearing coins.

China's pause on its toughest rare-earth export licenses expires in November, when Beijing decides whether to reinstate the curbs. It processes nearly all the metals inside chips and datacenters.