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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.
Introduction.com is the interface. But there is a system operating underneath it.
That system is Arcadia, the growth and distribution firm behind some of the most precision-led go-to-market campaigns in the industry.
Arcadia focuses on turning positioning into measurable market movement through narrative design, creator-led distribution, and ecosystem-level coordination.
Across recent work, that has included:
• Demand-Led User Acquisition: onboarding 500,000+ users for a single product launch by aligning audience mapping, creator selection, and message positioning into one coordinated system.
• Signal Amplification Systems: increasing smart reach by 400%+ through structured narrative deployment across high-trust creator networks rather than broad distribution.
• Perception Engineering: driving 300%+ lifts in sentiment by refining how products are framed before they reach the market and shaping early interpretation.
• Conversation Expansion Frameworks: scaling organic discussion by over 100% through positioning-led distribution that prioritizes relevance over volume.
What ties this together is control over how a product enters the market, who interprets it first, and how that interpretation compounds.
Arcadia operates at the layer between product and perception, where market understanding is formed.
For teams expanding into new markets or refining how their product is understood at scale, Arcadia functions as the execution system behind that process.
🌟 Member Spotlight 🌟
Meet Scott Gralnick 👋
Huge congrats to Scott on stepping into his new role as Global Head of Institutional Growth at IRACE Digital.
It is a natural next chapter in a career spent building across institutional digital assets, staking, security, and web3 infrastructure.
→ Global Head of Institutional Growth at IRACE Digital
→ Former Head of Institutional Growth at Marinade Labs
→ Former Director of Channel Partnerships at Halborn
→ Advisor to Elementus, Sherlock Protocol, and Unstoppable Domains
→ Co-Founder of Portis, later acquired by ShapeShift
Now at IRACE Digital, Scott is helping institutions access integrated banking infrastructure across traditional and digital assets.
Fiat rails. Custody. Execution. Digital assets.
A regulated institutional platform built for where finance is heading next.
This is what our network is all about.
Keep building.
Show Scott some love 👇
We’ve shown you what access looks like in the room.
Now let’s talk about what it looks like behind closed doors.
Inside the Introduction.com member platform:
→ Deal flow opportunities
→ Member directory
→ Market insights
→ Exclusive partner perks from ElevenLabs to Deel
The rooms matter.
So does the infrastructure behind them.
This is only the beginning.
More coming soon 😉
Membership has its privileges.
Access is earned.
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 👇
Sandy Climan
Ken DiCross
Michael Healy
Steve Khoshabe
Thursday, July 2
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
The Copper Shaker Ybor
Tampa, FL
Thursday, July 9
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Better Days
Miami, FL
Tuesday, July 14
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Pubkey
New York, NY
Top Raises
Member Activity
Seed
ORNN closed $33M in seed funding.
The round was led by a16z crypto, with Galaxy Digital, Nordstar, SV Angel, Crucible Capital, Box Group, Link Ventures, and Vine Ventures also participating.
Proceeds will scale ORNN's financial market infrastructure for AI compute, spanning institutional pricing indices, procurement tools, and risk management products that let enterprises price, hedge, finance, and trade GPU capacity the way commodity markets treat oil or electricity.
Hearty shoutout to CJ Huntzinger and Galaxy on the raise!
Canopy Network raised $8.5M in seed funding alongside the acquisition of Tanssi's infrastructure technology.
Arrington Capital, Fenbushi Capital, Borderless Capital, and SNZ Capital joined through the Tanssi transaction as key stakeholders, deepening Canopy's investor base.
Proceeds will fund the mainnet launch, expand engineering, and continue building Canopy's AI-native tooling that compresses full blockchain applications into roughly 200 lines of readable code (with 331K+ projects already launched on testnet).
Kevin Lehtiniitty and Borderless are showing their patriotism this season with the raise.
Orthogonal closed $4.3M in seed funding.
Pantera Capital led, with Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Decasonic, Blast, Outbound, Surreal Ventures, Rice Capital, and Batch Ventures also joining.
Proceeds will scale Orthogonal's unified API platform that lets AI agents discover, access, and pay for dozens of third-party APIs through a single integration, with built-in authentication, standardized formats, pay-per-request billing, and MCP compatibility for agent frameworks.
We love to see Lauren Stephanian and Pantera get in on the action.
Series A
Onyx Odds raised $20M in a Series A round at a $220M valuation.
Payward (Kraken's parent company) led, with Xfund and Breyer Capital also participating.
Proceeds will scale the free-to-play social sports prediction platform where users make picks with virtual Onyx Coins across major sports leagues, building status through gameplay and participating in promotional sweepstakes for redeemable cash prizes.
Payward (Kraken) stays growing. High-fives all around for Daniel Berman and the Kraken team!
Pre-Seed
TechDollar closed $3M in pre-seed funding.
The round was backed by No Limit Holdings, Reforge, and Curve founder Michael Egorov.
Proceeds will scale TechDollar's blockchain-based private credit platform, which lets founders, employees, venture investors, and family offices borrow against private tech equity through stablecoin-style issuance, unlocking non-dilutive liquidity against pre-IPO technology assets.
When one of us wins we all win. Great stuff from Terence McMenamin and the TechDollar family.
Strategic
AllScale received an undisclosed strategic investment from Animoca Brands.
Animoca joins AllScale's existing investor roster (YZi Labs, Informed Ventures, Generative Ventures, Aptos Network) with a specific focus on stablecoin payment infrastructure and agentic payments.
Proceeds will scale AllScale's self-custody stablecoin neobank (offering invoicing, payroll, and checkout for USDC and USDT to microbusinesses, freelancers, DAOs, and Web3 teams) and accelerate its build-out of autonomous AI agent transaction rails.
And why should this week be any different..? Congrats to David and the Animoca team for continuing to build. LFG!
Non-Member Activity
Acquisition
Bitbank was acquired by SBI Holdings for approximately $289M (~40 billion yen).
SBI, one of Japan's largest financial services groups, is absorbing the FSA-licensed Japanese cryptocurrency exchange into its expanding digital asset stack.
The deal deepens SBI's dominance across Japan's regulated crypto market, adding Bitbank's spot, margin, lending, and institutional services (covering BTC, ETH, XRP, and dozens of other assets against JPY) to a platform that already includes SBI VC Trade.
Suilend was acquired by Bluefin in an undisclosed deal.
Bluefin, the Sui-native derivatives exchange, is bringing the largest lending protocol on Sui in-house.
The combination folds Suilend's money market for Sui-native lending and borrowing into Bluefin's stack, creating a unified DeFi platform spanning spot, derivatives, and lending on Sui.
Headlines
Visa, Mastercard, and 100+ Others Are Building Their Own Stablecoin
On June 26, Visa, Mastercard, and Coinbase, along with more than 100 other banks and payment companies including American Express, Stripe, BlackRock, US Bank, BBVA, and Standard Chartered, announced they are jointly launching a shared stablecoin called Open USD. It is aimed directly at the two web3-native heavyweights that dominate cross-border and B2B stablecoin settlement today: Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC.
Here is how it really breaks down. The consortium is building instant-settlement rails inside the infrastructure the banks already own, with the goal of cutting the web3-native issuers out of the fee stack. For a business paying an overseas supplier or running a global payroll, that means one balance, seconds to settle, and no more pre-funding correspondent bank accounts.
The timing matters. The EU is pushing forward a state-backed digital euro and US regulators are finalizing GENIUS Act rules for who can legally issue a payment stablecoin. The regulatory perimeter is closing at the exact moment the incumbents are trying to sit inside it.
Stablecoins used to be a way to move money outside the banks. Open USD is the banks doing it themselves.
Chip Stocks Are Having the Year Big Tech Should Be Having
Chip makers (Nvidia, TSMC, ASML, AMD, Broadcom) have driven the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index up roughly 79% year to date. The Magnificent Seven, the companies actually spending the money on those chips (Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and even Nvidia, which has lagged the broader sector this year), have mostly stayed flat or fallen. Investors are still paying up for the shovels, but they are starting to doubt the buyers will ever earn back what they are spending on AI.
Apple and the EU Are Fighting Over Whether Siri Can Launch in Europe
Apple is refusing to ship the new AI version of Siri in the EU. Apple blames the Digital Markets Act (the law forcing big tech to let outside developers plug in and share data), while the European Commission says Apple is the one dragging its feet. Tim Cook and EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen met this week to try to find a middle ground. Whatever they agree on becomes the template for how every US big tech company brings AI to Europe.
Stocks Had a Weak June but a Strong Quarter
US stocks fell in June on the AI-chip selloff but still closed the strongest quarter in years, with the S&P 500 up ~14.9% and the Nasdaq up ~21.4% in Q2 (the Nasdaq's best since 2020). July depends on three things holding at once: AI spending paying off, the Fed not surprising on rates, and earnings coming in. Any one of them cracking takes a real bite out of the summer.
Oil Prices Are Calm Again, but the Iran Risk Hasn't Gone Away
Oil is back around $70 a barrel after the US and Iran signed a June 17 truce that ended nearly four months of war and reopened the Strait of Hormuz, the shipping lane that carries about 20% of the world's oil. The catch: the truce only lasts 60 days, Iran still controls the Strait, and shippers are moving slowly because of mines, high insurance premiums, and doubt over the peace deal. Any of that breaking sends Brent back through $100 fast.
Regulation Roundup
United States 🇺🇸
The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 on June 29 that President Trump cannot fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook without clear cause, keeping her in her role while her legal challenge plays out.
At the same time, the Court expanded presidential authority to fire the heads of other independent federal agencies at will, carving out the Fed as a unique exception based on its "historical status and role" in setting monetary policy.
The dual ruling protects the Fed and monetary policy from direct political interference, but hands the White House new leverage over the SEC, CFTC, FDIC, and FTC, reshaping the regulatory perimeter that fintech and Web3 firms operate inside.
The US Senate passed a housing bill on June 22 that carries a four-year statutory ban on the Federal Reserve developing a US CBDC, but President Trump refused to sign it on June 24, demanding Congress also pass a separate elections bill first.
The standoff freezes the legislative calendar and delays multiple crypto priorities including the CLARITY Act, which had already been struggling to secure Senate floor time before the August recess.
The irony is a bill that would formally block a US CBDC (a longstanding crypto priority) is now stuck behind an unrelated political fight just as CLARITY's passage window narrows.
Senate Democrats called on June 24 for hearings into a $500M investment by UAE officials in World Liberty Financial, the Trump family's crypto venture, questioning whether it influenced US policy decisions.
The probe stacks on top of existing Democratic concerns about ethics provisions inside the CLARITY Act and the president's growing personal crypto exposure through WLFI's USD1 stablecoin and the Trump-branded token.
Whether Senate leadership actually schedules hearings will be an early tell on how far the ethics fight travels into the CLARITY Act negotiation.
Crypto industry super PAC Fairshake spent $5.5M backing Adrian Boafo in Maryland's congressional primary on June 23, notching another win alongside advancing candidates in New York and Utah.
The Boafo victory follows last week's $12M-backed Alabama Senate primary win for Barry Moore, extending Fairshake's active spending into a broader down-ballot strategy.
The pattern shows the industry is treating 2026 primaries as the actual battleground for post-election crypto policy influence, not just November.
International 🌏
The European Parliament's Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON) Committee approved the digital euro legal framework on June 23 and mandated the immediate start of final trilogue negotiations between the Parliament and EU member states.
The vote ends three years of standoff between the ECB and commercial banks, and clears the ECB to launch both online and offline versions of the digital euro by 2029, with cash-like privacy for offline peer-to-peer transfers, strict holding limits to prevent bank deposit flight, and a 12-month pilot with select merchants.
ECB President Christine Lagarde framed the move as protecting European monetary sovereignty from US dollar-pegged stablecoin dominance (USDT and USDC), noting that two-thirds of eurozone card transactions currently run through Visa and Mastercard.
Ripple secured preliminary MiCA approval from Luxembourg's Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF) on June 23, positioning the company to passport its stablecoin and payments products across all 27 EU member states.
The Luxembourg license covers Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin operations and its broader crypto-asset services (trading, custody, and transfers), with plans to expand across the full European market as MiCA rules take effect this week.
The approval lands as Binance's parallel MiCA path in Greece collapses, highlighting the widening gap between crypto firms that can and cannot clear MiCA's authorization bar.
Binance formally withdrew its Greek MiCA license application on June 24, days after Reuters reported that Greece's HCMC was preparing to reject it.
The exchange committed to continuing its European push through applications in other EU member states rather than accepting a formal rejection that would have been harder to reverse.
With MiCA's July 1 transition deadline arriving this week, Binance's path to serving 27 markets now depends on landing an alternate CASP license fast, or its European users face a scramble to authorized providers.
