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Next Thursday, August 6, Introduction.com and Privy, a Stripe company, are bringing together a highly curated group of founders, executives, and investors in San Francisco.

Our private dinners have previously included leaders from J.P. Morgan, SpaceX, Anthropic, and some of the fastest-growing companies in frontier technology.

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Meet Thomas D’Eletto 👋

Huge congrats to Tom on his new role as Product Lead VP - Stablecoin Issuance at Anchorage Digital.

→ Product Lead VP - Stablecoin Issuance at Anchorage Digital
→ Former Head of Product at Arculus
→ Former Head of Product at trueDigital, now Tassat
→ Former Global Product Lead, Block Trading at Liquidnet

Tom came up on the infrastructure side of the market. He ran block-trading product at Liquidnet, where institutions move size quietly. He built digital-asset settlement at trueDigital, now Tassat. Then he led product at Arculus, putting hardware-grade security in people’s hands.

Now he’s building the stablecoin issuance layer at Anchorage Digital, whose bank subsidiary holds the first national trust charter the OCC ever granted a digital-asset firm. Issuance is moving inside the regulated perimeter, and Tom is building exactly where it lands.

Stablecoins. Custody. Settlement. Regulated rails.

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

Show Tom some love 👇

Same night out, different city, every month.

Assets & Access is our monthly series. Founders, investors, and operators, one room per city. Here’s August:

→ Thursday, August 6, Tampa at The Copper Shaker
→ Tuesday, August 11, New York at Pubkey
→ Wednesday, August 12, San Francisco at Rickhouse
→ Thursday, August 13, Miami at Better Days

Then we run it back in September and October. Both are already on the calendar. The series travels too: we’ve taken it to London with Flight3 and Hong Kong with Animoca Brands.

Past guests have included leaders from J.P. Morgan, SpaceX, Anthropic, Paramount Pictures, Grayscale Investments, and the National Basketball Association.

Membership has its privileges.

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 👇

Axis Robotics

Axis Robotics raised $12M in seed funding.

Hack VC led, with Nomad Capital, Pi Network Ventures, and 10K Ventures participating.

Proceeds will scale Axis’ training-data engine for physical AI, which pays contributors to generate robot-training data and sells the validated datasets to robotics foundation-model builders. More than 100,000 contributors are active.

Pi Network all the way! LFG!

Dow Protocol

Dow Protocol raised $9M in seed funding.

OKX Ventures, MH Ventures, and Animoca Brands led, with Arcane Group, Essentia Partners, and Quartet Group participating.

Proceeds will scale Dow’s onchain credit rails. The crypto arm of HSBC-backed cross-border lender Dowsure advances working capital to e-commerce merchants against real receivables, settling same-day in stablecoins with repayment routed back through the sales platform.

Great to see Diogo Duarte and the OKX team getting after it! Cheers!

World Foundation

World Foundation raised $52.5M in a strategic token sale.

Pantera Capital led, with Bain Capital Crypto, Selini Capital, Susquehanna Crypto, and Eightco Holdings participating. This is a first close, and the tokens carry a one-year lockup.

Proceeds will push World’s proof-of-human World ID into enterprise platforms and AI agents. 39 million people have joined, and more than 18 million have verified in person by Orb.

Huge win for Lauren Stephanian and the Pantera team!

Notabene

Notabene raised a strategic investment from Ripple.

The amount was not disclosed.

Proceeds will accelerate Notabene Flow, its pre-transaction authorization and Travel Rule network, and integrate Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin across more than 2,300 connected institutions handling $2 trillion in annualized volume.

Way to go Jack McDonald and the Ripple team!

NOBI

NOBI was acquired by Bybit in an undisclosed deal.

Bybit took a majority stake in NOBI’s operating entity, and the Indonesian exchange now trades as Bybit Indonesia under OJK supervision, launching with more than 500 trading pairs. NOBI’s senior leadership stays on to run it.

Glad Bybit is on our side!

Magic Labs

Payward agreed to acquire Magic Labs’ embedded-wallet business in an undisclosed deal.

Kraken’s parent is buying the wallet infrastructure only: 60 million wallets issued since 2018, 200,000-plus developers, and customers including Polymarket, Helium and Immutable. The deal is expected to close in the coming weeks.

The rest of the company becomes Newton Labs, built around Newton Protocol, a policy layer that checks identity, jurisdiction and sanctions before a transaction settles.

Kraken keeps on going! Way to go Jack Traube and the Kraken team!

Atoms

Atoms raised $1.7B in a funding round.

Andreessen Horowitz led, with Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and Uber participating.

Proceeds will fund hiring and expansion into mining and other heavy-industry automation at Travis Kalanick’s holding company. Ben Horowitz joins the board.

Etched

Etched raised $300M in Series C funding at a $10.3B valuation.

Sequoia led, with Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, and Jane Street participating.

Proceeds will fund Etched’s inference chips and cluster-scale memory interconnect. The company says it has booked $1B in orders and doubled its valuation since December.

Augustus

Augustus raised $180M in Series B funding at a $1B valuation.

Tiger Global led, with QED Investors, Hummingbird Ventures, and the founders of Ramp, Deel, Nubank and Circle participating.

Proceeds will extend Augustus’ clearing bank, which gives banks, fintechs and crypto firms programmable dollar accounts and 24/7 settlement across traditional rails and blockchains. It already clears billions of euros a year and holds conditional OCC approval for a US charter.

Glow

Glow raised $180M in Series A funding at a $1.2B valuation.

Sequoia Capital, Cyberstarts, Greenoaks, and Redpoint Ventures co-led, with Index Ventures, Lux Capital, and others participating.

Proceeds will build out Glow’s endpoint security platform, which uses AI agents to map enterprise environments in real time and enforce policy on employee devices.

Humanoid

Humanoid raised $152M in Series A funding at a $1.35B post-money valuation.

Prime Movers Lab led, with Schaeffler, Bosch, and Fubon Financial participating.

Proceeds will start mass manufacturing of the UK company’s wheel-based humanoids for logistics, manufacturing, and retail. Humanoid has raised $270M to date.

Alpaca

Alpaca raised $135M in equity funding, part of $435M in total financing including debt.

Peak XV led, with Elefund, BNP Paribas’ Opera Tech Ventures, and Unbound participating. The debt came primarily from Payward, Kraken’s parent, and BMO.

Proceeds will scale Alpaca’s agent-first brokerage infrastructure, which lets fintechs, banks and broker-dealers embed stock, options, crypto and tokenized-equity trading. Revenue has doubled year over year three years running.

Candid Health

Candid Health raised $120M in Series D funding.

Sixth Street Growth led, with Oak HC/FT, 8VC, and Y Combinator participating.

Proceeds will expand Candid Health’s autonomous billing software for healthcare providers. The round triples the company’s valuation from early 2025.

Paper

Paper raised $34M in Series A funding.

Accel and ICONIQ co-led, with Designer Fund and angels from WorkOS, Lovable, Anthropic, and OpenAI participating.

Proceeds will expand Paper’s design tool, which renders in HTML and CSS so mockups carry straight into agentic engineering workflows. ARR has grown 25x since Paper Desktop launched in early 2026.

SkyPilot

SkyPilot raised $20M in seed funding.

Lux Capital led, with Amplify Partners, Coatue, Foundation Capital, and operators from Databricks, Google, and Hugging Face participating.

Proceeds will build SkyPilot’s control plane for running AI training, inference, and serving across clouds, Kubernetes clusters, and accelerator types.

Digital Asset

Digital Asset raised an additional $10M, expanding its round to $365M at a flat $2B valuation.

Shinhan Financial Group and SC Ventures, Standard Chartered’s venture arm, joined this tranche. The original round was led by a16z crypto.

Proceeds will support Canton Network, Digital Asset’s Layer 1 for regulated institutions moving assets and financial workflows onchain.

Poke

Poke was acquired by Cognition in an undisclosed deal. Poke is a personal AI agent that lives in text messages, with more than 100 million messages exchanged in three months by Cognition’s count. The founding team joins Cognition and the product keeps running.

Hailo

Hailo signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Microchip Technology in an undisclosed deal, expected to close by the end of September pending approvals. Hailo builds edge AI processors for drones, robots and industrial automation, bringing more than 100 customers into Microchip’s embedded portfolio.

Korbit

Korbit was acquired by Mirae Asset Consulting, now its largest shareholder at 92.06% and headed to 97.15%, in a deal reported at roughly $102 million. South Korea’s fourth-largest crypto exchange is retiring the brand and relaunching as Digital X.

Banco Porto Real de Investimentos

Banco Porto Real de Investimentos agreed to be acquired by Nubank in an undisclosed deal, pending Brazilian regulatory approval. Nubank is buying 100% of the institution for its structured investment and credit operations and a fuller banking authorization.

Vision Aerial

Vision Aerial signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Mobix Labs for approximately $15 million in cash and stock, expected to close this quarter. The Montana company builds US-made drone systems with imaging, thermal and LiDAR payloads for customers including the US Air Force and Navy.

Raven

Raven was acquired by Premia in an all-cash deal of undisclosed size. Premia, the institutional digital-asset manager (a separate firm from the DeFi options protocol of the same name), takes Raven’s Canton Network options infrastructure into its platform. The standalone product is retired.

Nikkei went through the filings and found $1.65 trillion of “hidden debts” across five US tech giants: AI capacity financed through special-purpose vehicles, leases, and guarantees that never hit the balance sheet the way the announcement hits the front page.

Nvidia is reportedly in talks to guarantee more than $250 billion of financing so OpenAI can lease SoftBank’s 10-gigawatt Ohio mega-campus, a project whose total cost exceeds $500 billion with compute included.

Read that again: the chip vendor is underwriting its biggest customer’s rent. Nothing is signed, and both companies declined to comment.

One deal is signed. Nvidia announced a long-term strategic partnership with Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence, which Bloomberg reports includes a $5 billion investment into a $32 billion lab with no product and no revenue. The deal secures SSI large allocations of Nvidia’s next-generation GPUs. The money leaves Nvidia and comes back as orders.

The pattern repeats up and down the stack. AMD paired its 2-gigawatt Anthropic deployment with a commitment to invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic. Alphabet’s record quarter leaned on $99 billion of unrealized gains on its SpaceX and Anthropic stakes, paper marks on companies it also sells to and buys from.

Markets are starting to price the difference. Tuesday’s tech selloff was attributed by name to “AI circular financing” fears, and Korea’s leveraged unwind, one section down, shows what happens when borrowed conviction meets a falling tape.

Vendor financing built the railroads. It also built the telecom bubble. The question for anyone allocating this cycle is which dollars are real: revenue propped up by the seller’s own balance sheet tells you less than revenue that walked in on its own. Watch the committed column. The announced one is marketing.

Part 1, last edition, covered Korea’s leveraged-ETF unwind. This week it found its trigger. The Information reported that Shanghai Yuliangsheng has begun mass production of immersion DUV lithography machines, the chipmaking tools ASML held a near-monopoly on and Washington spent a decade fencing off with export controls. ASML fell to its lowest since June and dragged US chip stocks down with it. It is a single-outlet report, unconfirmed by ASML. The tape traded it as true anyway.

Then the contagion. Tuesday’s session sank the Kospi 10.84% and tripped a circuit breaker, and Wednesday brought the first back-to-back circuit breakers in Kospi history, with the index falling as much as 12% intraday before closing at 5,663.24. The selling spread to Tokyo, where the Nikkei lost nearly 4% Tuesday and slid again Wednesday. Samsung now sits more than 40% below its June all-time high. New York held: the S&P and Dow rose Tuesday as oil slid, and the Nasdaq erased an early drop.

The tell is SK Hynix. It reported Q2 revenue of ₩79.3 trillion, up 257% year over year, and a 76% operating margin, the most profitable quarter in the history of the memory industry, with HBM4 mass shipments underway. The print missed estimates and the stock kept falling, now roughly half its June high. When the best quarter an industry has ever produced gets sold, the argument has moved on from earnings to what was already priced in.

Alphabet’s Q2 filing shows revenue of $119.8 billion and operating income of $40.8 billion, a 34% operating margin, up from 32% a year ago. The eye-popping numbers are elsewhere: net income of $112.1 billion reflects a $99 billion net gain on equity securities, primarily its SpaceX stake, worth $94.1 billion after the June IPO, and Anthropic, whose valuation moved from $350 billion to $965 billion. Google Cloud grew 82% on a $514 billion backlog, and the stock still fell after Alphabet raised capex guidance to a range of $195 to $205 billion. None of the $99 billion is cash, and none of it has been sold.

Moonshot released Kimi K3’s weights on Hugging Face on July 27: 2.8 trillion total parameters, a 1-million-token context window, a 1.56-terabyte repository, and a bespoke license Moonshot itself does not call open source. Model-as-a-service operators above $20 million in revenue need a separate agreement. The timing sharpened a fight in Washington: Jensen Huang used his first-ever X post to promote a joint letter, signed by Nvidia, Microsoft and Meta among dozens of others, opposing restrictions on open-weight models as the administration weighs limits on Chinese ones. The models at issue are the ones your engineers are already downloading.

Stablecoin market cap is down roughly $10 billion since May, the first sustained contraction since 2022, as capital rotates out of crypto’s cash layer and into equities. Bitcoin shrugged off the AI selloff, holding near $64,000 while chip stocks fell, with $13 billion to $14 billion in bitcoin and ether options expiring Friday and the Fed decision an hour after this email as the week’s two catalysts. The cash layer is shrinking. The coins are holding their value anyway.

The FOMC decision lands Wednesday at 2:00pm ET, about an hour after this edition. Markets price roughly a one-in-three chance of a 25bp hike from the current 3.50% to 3.75% range, up from about 11% two weeks ago. It is Kevin Warsh’s second meeting as chair, and a hold would be the fifth in a row.

The case for moving: oil topped $100 earlier this month on the US-Iran campaign, fresh 10% to 25% tariffs add price pressure, and nine of eighteen officials penciled in a 2026 hike in June. The case for waiting arrived late. June CPI cooled to 3.5% from May’s 4.2%, and oil collapsed into the meeting: WTI fell about 8% Monday to the low $80s as the US paused strikes on Iran and talks resumed.

Futures put the better odds, about 56%, on a September hike, so the likeliest print is a hold with hawkish language. Either way, the hike case was built on $100 oil that no longer exists. By the time you read this, you’ll know.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune said on July 23 that the CLARITY Act’s pre-recess window is effectively gone: “I would like to at least get Clarity started. We’ll see where the votes are.” The August 7 target is missed; the Senate leaves after early August and returns for roughly three weeks in September. White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt said he was “perplexed” by Thune’s read and still thinks the first week of August is live.

The other half of the plan hasn’t landed either. SEC Chair Paul Atkins put “Regulation Crypto,” a package of temporary registration exemptions for developers launching crypto investment contracts plus a safe harbor as managerial control winds down, on the agency’s agenda for July. As of July 27, the SEC’s last three press releases were a small-business capital-formation report, a roundtable on 24-hour trading, and an enforcement personnel departure. Nothing crypto.

The sticking points are not technical: government-ethics language restricting senior officials’ crypto activity, and stablecoin yield provisions that split Republicans. With the statute stalled, the SEC proposal is the only near-term vehicle, and a proposal still has to clear a comment period and a final vote before it binds anyone. September is the next real date on either track.

FinCEN, the OCC, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC and the NCUA have a joint proposed rule out implementing the GENIUS Act’s customer identification requirements for permitted payment stablecoin issuers. It was published in the Federal Register on June 22, and comments close August 21.

The proposal requires each issuer to maintain a written customer identification program scaled to its size and business, verify customer identity on a risk basis before opening an account, keep identification records for five years after closure, screen customers against government terrorist lists, and give customers notice. The effect is to treat issuers as Bank Secrecy Act financial institutions, pulling them into the same identity infrastructure as banks and money services businesses.

The unresolved question is what “customer” means for an asset that moves peer-to-peer after issuance. An issuer can identify whoever mints and redeems; it cannot identify everyone who subsequently holds the token. How the agencies draw that line in the final rule determines whether permitted stablecoins remain bearer-like instruments or become account-based ones. Three weeks of comment period left.

Executive Order 14409, signed June 2, set 60-day deliverables that come due August 1: a classified benchmarking process for assessing the advanced cyber capabilities of AI models, a voluntary framework giving the government pre-release access to “covered frontier models,” and expanded cybersecurity hiring. The Director of the NSA decides which models are covered.

Participation is voluntary and the order bars mandatory licensing; the review window is 30 days before release. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and Amazon are in. Meta is not, citing the architecture of open-weight models. You cannot run a pre-release review on weights anyone can download and modify.

The classified thresholds are the whole story. Labs will not know in advance whether a model is covered, which means they cannot schedule around the 30-day window, and outside researchers cannot check whether the benchmark measures anything real. Watch what actually publishes on August 1 versus what stays behind the classification line.

On July 23 the European Commission fined Google €890 million across two decisions. €460 million covers ranking its own shopping, hotel, transport and sports services above third parties in Search; €430 million covers stopping Play developers from telling customers about cheaper offers elsewhere. Google was ordered to bring the non-compliance to an end.

This is not the first DMA fine. Those landed in April 2025, against Apple (€500 million) and Meta (€200 million). It is the largest so far, and Google’s first. Google has 60 days to restructure search results and Play policies or face periodic penalty payments of up to 5% of Alphabet’s average daily worldwide turnover; Alphabet’s Kent Walker rejected both decisions and said the company is evaluating an appeal.

The number is small next to Alphabet’s quarter. The remedy is what bites: sixty days to redesign how Search ranks Google’s own verticals in the EU, with the 5%-of-daily-turnover backstop behind it. Appeals do not suspend the compliance order.

From August 2, four duties apply: systems that interact with people must tell them they are interacting with AI; generative outputs in audio, image, video and text must be marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as AI-generated; deployers of emotion-recognition and biometric-categorisation systems must inform the people exposed to them; and deepfakes plus AI-generated public-interest text must be disclosed unless a human editorially reviewed it. Systems already on the market before August 2 get until December 2, 2026 for the machine-readable marking.

The Digital Omnibus moved a lot of the AI Act, but not this. Standalone high-risk obligations slid to December 2027 and embedded systems to August 2028; Article 50 stayed on its original date.

Fines cap at €15 million or 3% of worldwide annual turnover, whichever is higher, and enforcement runs through national market surveillance authorities, so intensity will vary by member state. Anyone shipping a chatbot, a synthetic-media tool or AI-written news copy into the EU is in scope on Sunday.

After this week’s Kospi crash, the Financial Services Commission said it would review further measures to curb demand, including a cap on the total value of these investments per individual. That comes on top of the July 16 decision to halt new listings of single-stock leveraged ETFs, alongside a ₩10 million deposit requirement and a mandatory one-hour education session before trading.

The products are nine weeks old. Sixteen leveraged and inverse exchange-traded products from eight asset managers listed on May 27 at ₩20,000 a unit, capped at 2x and restricted to Samsung Electronics and SK hynix as underlyings, a deliberate policy choice to keep leveraged single-stock flows onshore. One SK hynix-linked ETF moved 40% in a single session, and Korea-linked leveraged ETF assets have fallen from about $50 billion at end-June to $26 billion.

Nothing has been decided: no cap level, no effective date, no consultation timetable. The halt applies to new listings, not the sixteen products already trading. The regulator is now trying to shrink positions it authorized in May, in a market roughly a third off its June high, which is the hardest possible sequence to unwind without becoming the seller of last resort.

The Bank of Japan meets Thursday and Friday, with the decision landing overnight Thursday into Friday morning ET, after this edition. Markets overwhelmingly expect a hold at 1.00%, the highest policy rate in 31 years, with swaps pricing only about a 9% chance of a July hike.

The backdrop is the problem. The yen is pinned near a 40-year low around 164 to the dollar, 10-year JGB yields sit near 30-year highs at about 2.77%, and the rate gap between the Fed and the BOJ keeps the carry trade running. BOJ officials are reported to see yen weakness itself as an upside inflation risk that argues for a faster hiking pace than one move every six months.

The real event is Governor Ueda’s guidance. A Reuters poll has 86% of economists expecting 1.25% by year-end, with October the favored date. A hawkish surprise is the main risk to the carry trade; a quiet hold keeps the yen pinned and the pressure building. By the time you read the result, this paragraph will tell you whether it mattered.