You’ve made it.

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.

Introduction.com is where companies connect. Arcadia is what happens after.

Behind every engagement is a growth and market execution system built to shape how products are understood, adopted, and discussed at scale.

Rather than treating content, creators, positioning, and distribution as separate initiatives, Arcadia combines them into a single coordinated growth engine designed to move markets.

Sitting between innovation and adoption, Arcadia ensures products are introduced with the clarity, credibility, and momentum needed to compound over time.

For ambitious teams looking to accelerate growth through strategic execution, Arcadia becomes the system behind that expansion.

Thank you, Privy, for the privilege and an excellent dinner.

Verjus brought the energy: French plates, eclectic cellar, the kind of room you want to be in.

Around the table:

→ Head of Enterprise at Apple
→ Director of Agentic Commerce at Mastercard
→ Head of Agentic Commerce and Stablecoin Payments at Ripple
→ Managing Director at HSBC
→ Head of US Business Development at Revolut
→ Head of Partnerships at SVB
→ Global Digital Asset Assurance Leader at EY

The people shaping the future of commerce don't meet on stages.
They meet around the dinner table.

Want a seat at the next one?

Access is earned.

Meet Michelle Tankimovich 👋

Huge congrats to Michelle on her promotion to Head of Investor Relations at American Bitcoin.

→ Former Chief of Staff at American Bitcoin
→ Former Senior Associate, Strategic Finance & IR at Hut 8
→ Former Senior Financial Analyst at Crusoe
→ Former Associate Consultant at Bain & Company

She has been at American Bitcoin since the week it existed. Most people inherit an investor relations function. She is building one from the first dollar raised.

In sixteen months she worked a $220M private raise, took the Chief of Staff seat, and helped take the company public on Nasdaq.

ABTC now holds more than 8,000 BTC, one of the twenty largest treasuries of any public company, and Michelle is the one who explains it to the market.

Banking. Consulting. Data centers. Now the shareholders.

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

Show Michelle some love 👇

This summer, inside the Introduction.com network:

→ One member's company, Securitize, went public on the NYSE at a $1.25B valuation.

→ Another was recruited to lead stablecoin issuance at Anchorage Digital, the first federally chartered crypto bank, now valued at $4.2B.

→ Another, a corporate partner at Dentons, (the world's largest law firm) was introduced to a new client at one of our dinners.

Funding rounds. Recruiting. Partnerships. None of it began with a cold email.

It began with an introduction, in the rooms we curate.

Apply to join 👇

That's all for this month.

Every city we run goes up on the calendar first. Be there for the next one.

Dow Protocol

Dow Protocol raised $10.5M in a seed round led by MH Ventures and Mapleblock Capital, with Animoca Brands, Arcane Group, HSK Chain, Essentia Partners and Quartet Group participating. That is the second seed round in two months, after $9M in July led by OKX Ventures, taking the company to $19.5M raised.

Proceeds will expand a real-world asset financing platform built for cross-border e-commerce merchants, who typically wait 14 to 28 days between making a sale and getting paid. Dow fronts the working capital across that gap, covering inventory, advertising, procurement, fulfillment and supplier payments, and is building toward programmable onchain infrastructure that handles repayment and settlement automatically.

Big win for Luca Ioannis and the Animoca team. Congrats!

Vangrid

Vangrid raised $9M in a seed round structured as a SAFT, with HashKey, Borderless, Crypto.com Capital, Animoca Brands, Gate Labs and Mapleblock Capital taking part. The round closed in tranches back in January and is only being announced now, with a token launch planned for later this year.

Proceeds will grow the network and fund partnerships with companies building physical AI. Vangrid is a DePIN project where users capture real-world locations on their phones, which get reconstructed into 3D spatial models and verified onchain, then sold to teams training robots and autonomous agents that need ground-level data which actually stays current. Fourteen people in Amsterdam, with a web app and an Android app already live.

Love to see Kevin Lehtiniitty and the Borderless team getting in on the action. LFG!

Hadrian

Hadrian raised $1.37B in a Series D at a $7.87B valuation. WCM Investment Management, Washington Harbour Partners, Valor Equity Partners, 137 Ventures and Baillie Gifford took part.

Proceeds will scale automated factories producing precision parts for defense and submarine manufacturing. The largest round of the week going to a manufacturing company is its own signal about where 2026 capital is heading.

Whatnot

Whatnot raised $545M in a Series G at a $20B valuation, nearly double its October 2025 mark. ICONIQ, Lightspeed and Avra led.

Proceeds will expand the live commerce platform, where sellers run livestream auctions across collectibles, fashion and electronics.

Moove

Moove raised $250M in a Series C at a $2.1B valuation, led by Mubadala with Woven Capital and Ion Pacific participating.

Proceeds will build out vehicle financing and depot infrastructure for robotaxi fleets. Worth noting the shape of it: the autonomy trade is quietly becoming an asset finance trade, the same way the GPU trade did.

HappyRobot

HappyRobot raised $150M in a Series C at a $1.2B valuation, making it the week's newest unicorn.

Proceeds will scale AI voice agents that handle freight and logistics phone calls, the part of the supply chain still run by people on hold.

OpenFX

OpenFX acquired Global Ledger, a blockchain analytics and crypto compliance platform. The amount was not disclosed.

Global Ledger builds AML risk monitoring, transaction analysis, fraud detection and investigation tools for exchanges, financial institutions, OTC desks and law enforcement. OpenFX runs cross-border FX and payments infrastructure for fintechs across stablecoin and traditional rails, and is folding the compliance stack straight into a new multi-currency account product launched the same day, letting fintechs collect in local currencies and hold before converting across ACH, Fedwire, SWIFT and stablecoins. Buying your compliance layer rather than renting it is the tell worth watching here.

Lending money against AI chips used to be a bad idea. If the borrower went under, the bank was stuck with a warehouse of used graphics cards and nobody to sell them to. That's why CoreWeave paid about 15% interest on its GPU loans back in 2023. In March, it borrowed $8.5 billion against the same kind of hardware at around 6%, and the ratings agencies called it investment grade. Same category as debt from a normal blue-chip company.

Nvidia went to the lenders and said, more or less: if these chips don't bring in enough rental money over the next six years, we'll cover the shortfall ourselves. That flips who the bank is actually lending to. It's not betting on CoreWeave staying in business, and it's not betting that a used H100 still sells for something in 2029. It's betting Nvidia pays up, and Nvidia can. They also pledged the customer contracts as collateral, not just the boxes, so if the deal goes bad the bank takes over the incoming payments rather than a pile of hardware it has no idea what to do with. Predictable payments plus a creditworthy name standing behind them is the recipe for every securitized asset there is, which is why this deal got rated at all.

A new asset class just got born, and it's being built on the template of commercial real estate. Think about how an office building gets financed: long leases from decent tenants, a stable stream of rent, and a lender who will hand over money against that stream for thirty years without ever wanting to own the building. Data centers full of GPUs now look like that, and they're starting to get financed like that. The practical effect for you is that compute went from something you buy to something you finance. A year ago, needing GPUs meant selling equity, which is the most expensive money there is. Now there's a debt market for it. If a competitor's hardware carries an Nvidia guarantee and yours doesn't, they're getting the same chips at a materially better rate, and that gap compounds quietly.

Michael Burry thinks the whole thing is propped up by accounting. His argument is that the big tech companies keep stretching how long they claim these chips last, and the longer the claimed life, the smaller the cost booked each year, and the better earnings look. In July he called depreciation "an economic lever, not a physical measurement." He can prove the number is a choice. Amazon shortened its estimate by one year and it cost them $677 million in profit. Meta stretched theirs by six months and saved $2.9 billion. Same hardware, same year, opposite answers. And notice who everyone turns to when they need to defend those numbers. Nvidia is the authority on how long a GPU lasts, and it is also the company selling the chips and now the company guaranteeing the rent. Every one of those roles pays better when the answer is "longer." That isn't a scandal, it's just worth knowing who's grading the exam. The real hole is simpler: the first H100s shipped in 2022, so nobody has actually rented one for six full years yet, and six years is the number this entire market is built on. The chips will still run fine. The question is whether anyone keeps paying full price for a 2022 chip once the 2028 model is on the shelf, and you'll find that out one contract renewal at a time. Nvidia reports August 26.

The economy lost 23,000 jobs in July when forecasters expected it to add about 80,000. Then the government went back and admitted May and June had been overcounted by 103,000 jobs between them, which means the slowdown started earlier than anyone realized. Retail cut 19,000 on its own. Unemployment actually went down to 4.1%, but only because people stopped looking for work, and you don't count as unemployed if you're not looking. Stocks had their best week since the spring anyway, on the theory that a weak labor market forces rate cuts. That logic holds right up until the layoffs start showing up in earnings.

The average American consumed $51,564 worth of goods and services in 2024, adjusted for what a dollar actually buys locally. Nobody else is close:

→ United States $51,564
→ Germany $31,591
→ Canada $29,844
→ United Kingdom $28,851
→ EU average $26,004
→ Japan $22,639

Two things are driving that at once. America produces more per person, $86,170 of GDP per capita against Germany's $73,957 and Japan's $54,156. Then it routes far more of that output to households: 67.9% of US output reaches consumers, versus 52.7% in Germany. Eurostat maintains an index built specifically to compare living standards across countries, and the US scores 153 against a European average of 100. The fair objection is that American healthcare gets counted at what it costs rather than what it delivers, which inflates the figure. Strip it out and the lead narrows. It does not go away.

Eleven companies went public in the first week of August, and the split was brutal:

→ Braveheart Bio raised $383M, priced above its range, ended the week +67%

→ Latigo raised $346M, also above range

→ Attovia raised $289M, +29% on day one

→ Ticketplus, a ticketing company, priced 43% below range and still fell 13%

And of the ten companies that filed to go public behind them, eight were blank-check shells with no business yet. Clinical data gets a premium. A blank check gets funded. An ordinary company with actual revenue gets Ticketplus's week.

Britain's AI Security Institute ran frontier models through security testing and documented 19 actions nobody authorized, including setting up fake GitHub accounts and trying to manipulate the volunteers who maintain open-source software. Seventeen came from Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 and two from OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol. GitHub confirmed its terms had been broken and helped clean up afterward. One caveat almost every outlet dropped: the researchers said those 19 traced back to a handful of connected behaviors, not 19 separate rogue incidents.

Thune filed cloture on the motion to proceed the weekend of August 8, setting a procedural vote for mid-September after the Senate returns on the 14th. The ethics language covering senior officials’ crypto activity is still being negotiated, with the Gallego-Tillis compromise awaiting a White House response for over a week, but the newer problem is Republican: Josh Hawley opposes over deposit flight from community banks and Jerry Moran over stablecoin yield. Republicans hold 53 seats and cloture needs 60, so an ethics deal alone no longer gets there.

The Commission is set to propose a tailored offering regime on August 14 that would let crypto firms issue tokens and raise capital without full registration. The proposal reportedly includes a mechanism to exit SEC jurisdiction once a project stops being actively managed, which is the first official answer to a question every token project has been asking since 2017. We told you two weeks ago that this rule had failed to appear, and it is appearing.

An August 7 advisory says displaying event contracts in American, casino-style odds "is likely to mislead market participants about the nature of the transaction." Venues have to make clear the product is a regulated event contract and not bookmaking, and misleading price display risks running into the federal prohibition on manipulative devices. It reaches affiliated platforms and partners, and unlike New York's lawsuit it needs no court to take effect.

The Fed's FIMA repo facility lets foreign authorities borrow dollars against US Treasury collateral rather than selling the bonds, capped at $60 billion per counterparty per day, and Japan leaned on it to fund the July 31 joint intervention. Japan holds $1.14 trillion in Treasuries and nobody in Washington wants the largest foreign holder forced into the market, which is why the Treasury Secretary is publicly asking the Fed for more room. Raising the cap takes an FOMC vote in mid-September, and the BOJ's July Summary of Opinions, published August 10, said price risks are "significantly skewed to the upside."

Central bank data published August 8 shows companies remitted $3.3 billion in dividends and profits between January and July, with June's $1.015 billion the largest single month since 2010. That is the harder half of dismantling exchange controls working exactly as intended, because capital arrives only when it is confident it can leave. The same week, country risk backed up to 463 basis points, a two-month high against an eight-year low near 402 in early July.

Banco Central's Resolution 584/2026 requires a hold of up to 24 hours on crypto transfers where a single transaction, or a customer's same-day total, exceeds roughly $10,000, effective January 1, 2027. It covers transfers to offshore platforms and, unusually, to a customer's own self-custody wallet, with the compliance burden landing on Brazilian exchanges rather than individuals. The stated purpose is interrupting fraud proceeds before they move, but a central bank reaching past the exchange perimeter is a new posture and other regulators will read it.