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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.
🚨 Member Spotlight 🚨
Meet Zack Brenner, a standout builder in the Introduction.com community who is helping redefine how onchain products reach the masses.
Zack previously served as Marketing Lead at Rally, the pioneering platform for creator tokens and community-owned economies. When Rally was acquired by OpenSea, Zack played a pivotal role in leading the go-to-market strategy for the transition, bridging the gap between social tokens and the broader NFT landscape.
Clearly, OpenSea liked what they saw.
Huge congratulations to Zack on stepping into his new role as Director of Product Marketing at OpenSea 🚀
After successfully navigating the Rally integration and spearheading major token trading initiatives, Zack’s leadership and tactical execution earned him this massive promotion. He’ll now be guiding product marketing for one of the most influential marketplaces in the ecosystem.
Zack represents the very best of the Introduction.com community: builders who don't just watch the market evolve, they actively shape what comes next.
Congratulate Zack on the role👇
Back in New York for summit week, and back to what we do best: two private, invite-only dinners in the West Village for the founders, allocators, and operators who define the industry.
Dinner I: takes place in an intimate West Village cocktail bar, co-hosted with Aptos and powered by Arcadia.
Expect a tightly curated room of founders, fund managers, and ecosystem leaders exchanging real playbooks across infrastructure, capital formation, and go-to-market strategy.
Dinner II: moves to a luxurious Italian restaurant in the West Village, where founders and LPs gather for a more intimate, capital-focused evening.
Hosted by Introduction.com and powered by Arcadia, this room is designed for alignment, not optics, bringing together operators and allocators who are actively deploying, raising, and scaling at meaningful size.
Thoughtful introductions, intentional seating, and the kind of candid dialogue that turns relationships into rounds, partnerships, and long-term leverage.
Access is earned. Take the first step.
Events
Thursday, March 5
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
The Copper Shaker Ybor
Tampa, Florida
Tuesday, March 10
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Pubkey
New York, New York
Thursday, March 12
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Boston, Massachusetts
Top Headlines
Member Activity
VC
Tether made a massive $200M strategic investment into the digital marketplace Whop at a $1.6B valuation.
The partnership aims to bake stablecoin rails directly into the creator economy, utilizing Tether’s Wallet Development Kit (WDK) to power instant, global USDT payouts for over 18M users.
Huge shoutout to Marco Dal Lago and the team at Tether for spearheading this massive push to bring stablecoin settlement to the global creator economy!
STS Digital secured $30M in strategic funding led by CMT Digital to expand its institutional-grade crypto options and market-making infrastructure. This capital injection reinforces their balance sheet and scales a unified platform supporting over 400 tokens across spot and exotic derivatives.
Huge win for our member Colton Conley at Arrington Capital for participating in the round!
Bluprynt closed a $4.25M seed round led by Valor Capital Group to scale its compliance operating system for on-chain finance. The platform bridges the gap between off-chain regulatory requirements and on-chain programmability, enabling institutions to meet global disclosure standards at machine speed.
Shout out to our members Jonathan King at Coinbase Ventures, Alfredo Sanchez at Crypto.com, and the team at Robinhood for their participation!
Kash raised $2M in pre-seed funding led by The Spartan Group and Big Brain Holdings to integrate prediction markets directly into social media ecosystems.
The protocol allows users to create and trade markets on real-world events through simple interactions with an X-native bot.
Non-Member Activity
VC
Non-Member Activity
Flying Tulip completed a $206M round to launch Andre Cronje's new DeFi ecosystem, which merges spot, credit, and derivatives into a single architecture. The project introduces a "Perpetual Put" mechanism designed to provide principal protection for institutional liquidity providers.
Massive congrats to the teams at Amber Group and Paper Ventures for their participation!
t54 Labs closed a $5M seed round led by Anagram and Franklin Templeton to build "Know Your Agent" (KYA) trust infrastructure for the agentic economy.
The platform provides identity verification and real-time risk assessment for AI agents, facilitating secure settlement across the XRPL, Solana, and Base ecosystems.
TruFin received a strategic investment led by SC Ventures to establish its protocol as the institutional yield standard for on-chain markets.
The capital will be used to expand beyond liquid staking into tokenized RWA yield and risk-defined vault strategies, providing the governance and transparency required for regulated digital asset treasuries.
Markets
Macro Spotlight: Operation Epic Fury & The Energy Reshuffle
The conflict around Iran and the Strait of Hormuz is rapidly reshaping global energy flows and triggering both a scramble for oil security and a flight into digital assets.
Eastern Energy Shock
The Strait of Hormuz disruption is hitting China and Russia’s shadow oil trade, forcing Beijing to lean on its 900M barrel strategic reserve, roughly 80 days of imports. The buffer is meant to offset the potential loss of ~1.4M bpd from Iranian shadow tanker flows.Russia’s Oil Redirect
Russia is reportedly rerouting ~800K bpd that previously went to India toward Chinese pipelines, effectively bypassing Hormuz. The shift allows Moscow to maintain export volumes while charging a war premium to Chinese buyers.Asian Market Divergence
Japan’s Nikkei fell 2.7% due to its heavy ~90% reliance on Gulf crude, highlighting the region’s exposure to shipping disruptions. Meanwhile the Shanghai Composite rose 0.47%, supported by state-backed buying in energy firms such as Sinopec (+10.1%).Bitcoin’s Escape Hatch
Crypto outflows from Iran reportedly surged ~700% on the Nobitex exchange immediately after the first strikes. At the same time Bitcoin climbed above $68K, reinforcing its narrative as a hedge against war-driven inflation and capital controls.
Drama
The Jane Street Saga: From Market Maker to Market Mover
The "10 AM Dump" that has haunted Bitcoin’s price action for months is facing a violent narrative shift as legal and mechanical scrutiny converge on Jane Street.
The drama centers on a newly unsealed lawsuit from the Terraform Labs estate, alleging the HFT giant utilized a clandestine chat group, infamously titled "Bryce’s Secret”, to coordinate a massive short-selling campaign that accelerated the $40B LUNA/UST collapse.
By reportedly leveraging insider access to Terraform’s algorithmic "backdoor" via a former intern, the firm is accused of front-running the de-peg, transforming a market-making role into a predatory short-covering frenzy.
This legal fallout has provided a convenient villain for the "10 AM Sell-Off" theory prevalent in the IBIT era. Analysts argue that Jane Street, as an Authorized Participant for BlackRock, has utilized the U.S. open to execute programmatic "basis trades", selling spot Bitcoin while longing futures to harvest arbitrage premiums. This mechanical pressure created a reliable daily liquidity drain that suppressed spot prices even amidst record ETF inflows.
The pattern abruptly broke this week following the lawsuit's filing, sparking debate over whether the firm is "stepping back" under legal pressure or if the trade has simply become too crowded to remain profitable.
Total StableCoin Market Cap vs BTC Price
Adoption
On-Chain Commerce: The New Global Settlement Standard
Visa and Stripe-owned Bridge are expanding stablecoin-backed card issuance from an 18-country pilot to 100+ nations by year-end. This rollout enables consumers to spend stablecoin balances across Visa’s 175M+ merchant locations under a unified compliance framework. Shout out to our guy Cuy Sheffield at Visa for the inside scoop on how this scale-up is bridging digital assets with legacy commerce.
The infrastructure uses Stripe’s Bridge platform to issue cards backed by on-chain treasuries, with real-time conversion and settlement occurring behind the scenes via the Solana blockchain. Adoption is scaling rapidly, with Visa’s stablecoin settlement volume recently hitting an annualized run rate of $4.6 billion, a 460% increase since late 2025.
Headlines
PayPay (Binance Japan Owner) Eyes $1.1B Nasdaq IPO The SoftBank-backed payments giant, which owns 40% of Binance Japan, is targeting a $10B+ valuation for its U.S. debut, signaling a massive bridge between Japanese fintech and global markets.
Morgan Stanley Applies for National Trust Bank Charter In a bid for federal oversight of its digital asset services, the bank has applied to the OCC for "Morgan Stanley Digital Trust," aimed at providing bank-grade custody, trading, and fiduciary staking.
Nasdaq Files for "Outcome Related Options" Platform Wall Street’s second-largest exchange operator is officially moving into the prediction market sector, filing for binary contracts on the Nasdaq-100 to capture the exploding volume in event-based trading.
Stripe Valuation Hits $159B Amid PayPal "Merger of Giants" Rumors Following a massive tender offer, rumors of preliminary "merger of giants" talks between Stripe and PayPal have sent shares of the latter surging 10% as the payment sector eyes total consolidation.
SEC Grants Relief for 24/7 Trading of WisdomTree’s Money Market Fund In a landmark move for intraday liquidity, WisdomTree received approval for continuous trading and instant settlement of its tokenized Treasury fund (WTGXX), a first for registered U.S. mutual funds.
Stablecoins Projected to Overtake Foreign Nations in T-Bill Holdings A Standard Chartered report predicts that stablecoin issuers will hold over $1T in U.S. Treasuries by 2028, potentially surpassing the sovereign holdings of China and Japan.
Hong Kong to Launch "HKMA Digital Bond" Infrastructure The HKMA is building a native platform to move tokenized bond settlement from pilot programs into core market infrastructure, linking it with regional digital hubs across Asia.
Regulation Roundup
United States 🇺🇸
The Senate advanced the "21st Century ROAD to Housing Act," featuring a critical amendment that bars the Federal Reserve from issuing a CBDC until at least 2031. By codifying this delay, U.S. lawmakers are effectively sidelining a state-controlled digital dollar to prioritize personal privacy and private-sector stablecoin alternatives.
Indiana’s HB 1042 mandates that state retirement plans offer crypto investment options via self-directed accounts by 2027. However, the state simultaneously moved to ban crypto kiosks (ATMs) to curb local fraud. This "top-down" strategy encourages institutional exposure while aggressively stripping away retail-focused physical on-ramps.
Missouri’s HB 2080 has moved to the House Commerce Committee, proposing that the State Treasurer hold Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset in cold storage. Following the state's elimination of capital gains tax on Bitcoin, Missouri is positioning itself as a "Bitcoin Capital" by adopting a sovereign-style accumulation strategy.
International 🌏
The ruling AK Party unveiled a draft law introducing a 10% withholding tax on crypto trading gains and service provider fees. This move is a strategic attempt to formalize the industry and exit the global financial "grey list," betting that tax-compliant legitimacy will attract stable institutional capital.
A government report warns that Australia is on track to capture only $1B of a potential $24B digital finance windfall due to "regulatory friction." In response, the Digital Economy Bill 2026 was introduced to streamline oversight, signaling a desperate pivot to remain competitive against hubs like Singapore.
HMRC has set an April 2026 deadline to prohibit the addition of crypto Exchange-Traded Notes (ETNs) to tax-advantaged Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs). This policy effectively removes the tax "shield" for retail crypto exposure, tightening the UK’s regulatory perimeter for individual investors.
