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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.

Private rooms. High signal conversations.

On June 9th, Introduction.com and XDC Network will bring together a highly curated group of founders, executives, investors, and operators for a private evening in New York.

Applications have already been submitted by leaders from frontier AI, Fortune 500 technology, global finance, venture-backed innovation, and institutional capital.

Attendance is intentionally limited.

Applications are reviewed individually.

Acceptance is not guaranteed.

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.

This week we want to celebrate a member helping make crypto payments, wallet connectivity, and on-chain finance feel ready for the real world.

Meet Jess Houlgrave 👋

Jess is CEO of WalletConnect, the financial connectivity layer helping wallets, apps, and users interact securely across the new internet.

Her career has followed the same thread for more than a decade: finance, payments, crypto, and the infrastructure that makes new forms of value movement possible.

→ Started in traditional finance at Credit Suisse and OPTrust
→ Helped shape crypto strategy and GTM at Checkout.com
→ Served on the Bank of England CBDC Engagement Forum
→ Contributed to UK fintech and digital money working groups
→ Founded and built early crypto infrastructure through shEOS and Codex Protocol
→ Leads Reown, helping developers build better onchain UX across wallet connection, payments, compliance, onramps, and swaps

Now at WalletConnect, Jess is bringing that experience into one of crypto’s most important connectivity layers.

The network supports 700+ wallets, 70,000+ applications, 22+ node operators, and hundreds of billions of dollars in value movement.

And what a milestone week.

At Money20/20 Europe, Jess is taking the stage for two featured sessions:

→ Crypto is Finally Ready for Commerce
→ The Future of Global Money Movement

The timing could not be more relevant.

Crypto payments are moving out of the “innovation lab” phase and into real products built for businesses, users, and global commerce.

Payments. Connections. Message signing. Compliance. Wallet infrastructure.

The connective layer for the financial internet.

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

Show Jess some love 👇

NY Tech Week is well underway

On June 4, Introduction.com and TechDollar are hosting a private VIP soirée at The Ritz-Carlton.

The room is already full. Only 35 guests.

S&P Dow Jones Indices. Citi. Cantor Fitzgerald.
AWS. NVIDIA. Anthropic. Palantir.
Stripe. Brex. Deel. Paxos. Grayscale.

If you didn’t make the room, access is still available to the guest list, debrief, meeting notes, follow ups, and the conversations forming around the table.

If you know, you know.

If you didn’t make the VIP dinner, there’s still a door open.

Assets & Access NYC: Tech Week takes over PubKey for our founder, operator, and investor meetup.

Open to the public, which is rare for us.

You never know where one introduction might lead.

As always, Chatham House Rule applies.

The names stay behind closed doors.
The value moves through the network.
The loudest moments will not be the most important ones.

You might miss the noise.
Don’t miss the room.

Access is earned.

NYC Tech Week is live. ETHConf is next. Miami is calling.
Public rooms. Private tables. VIP experiences.

Busy season starts now 👀
Builders Welcome.

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 👇

Coinone

Coinone secured a combined $106M (160 billion won) strategic investment from OKX Ventures and Korea Investment & Securities (KIS), with each buyer taking roughly $53M for a joint 19.6% stake structured as a mix of secondary share purchases and new share issuance.

The South Korean cryptocurrency exchange will lean on the partnership to expand security token offerings and stablecoin-related services ahead of Korea's second phase of digital asset legislation, with CEO Myung-Hun Cha remaining the largest shareholder while OKX and KIS become joint third-largest holders behind existing backer Com2uS Holdings, pending regulatory approval.

Love the win for OKX. Huge shout out to Arik and the rest of the team! Keep it up.

Superior

Superior picked up a $1M co-investment from Animoca Brands and its affiliates through Animoca's recently launched Minds Investment Programme, becoming the first recipient under the up-to-$10M initiative.

The agentic trading protocol built on Minds by Animoca Brands turns natural-language trading ideas into fully executable strategies, with the new capital backing development of a platform that pairs trade-only agent wallets routed through Hyperliquid with automated backtesting and live execution, fully separating execution from custody so AI agents can trade without ever touching user funds.

Can’t stop Animoca! Congrats to David and the Animoca team for their continued growth.

WonderFi

WonderFi was acquired by Robinhood in an all-cash deal valued at approximately $180M (C$250M), closing June 1 and giving Robinhood its first crypto footprint in Canada.

The Canadian digital asset operator owns and runs regulated brands including Bitbuy, Coinsquare, SmartPay, and Bitcoin.ca, bringing roughly C$2B+ in assets under custody and around 300,000 customer accounts onto Robinhood's platform alongside CIRO-approved regulatory licenses, in-market technology, and an established Canadian team.

Happy to see Robinhood making major money moves. Thank you Will and the Robinhood team for the inside scoop on this one!

Dunamu

Dunamu, the operator of Korea's largest cryptocurrency exchange Upbit, picked up a roughly $204M (306.373 billion won) strategic investment from Samsung Securities, which is acquiring 697,487 existing shares for a 2% stake.

The deal follows Hana Financial Group's $670M investment in Dunamu earlier this month and extends the wave of major Korean financial institutions accumulating equity in licensed exchanges ahead of regulatory easing that would loosen the separation between traditional finance and virtual assets, with Samsung Securities targeting tighter integration of its brokerage stack with Dunamu's digital asset infrastructure.

JPYC

JPYC closed the second tranche of its Series B at $19.5M, with Life Design Fund, IHD STRATEGY FUND, Awagin Capital, and Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance Company joining the round and bringing total Series B financing to roughly 5 billion yen (approximately $31.4M).

The Japanese fintech issues JPYC, a yen-pegged stablecoin used for on-chain payments, settlements, and digital commerce, with proceeds going toward expanding the platform's ecosystem across the financial and Web3 sectors as Japan's regulated digital asset framework continues to mature.

PopDEX

PopDEX raised $30M in a strategic seed round led by Foresight Ventures.

The trader-first perpetual DEX, still in invite-only testing, pitches capital efficiency and trader-aligned token economics that route platform revenue back to active traders rather than passive holders, with the new capital going toward providing liquidity, product development, security audits, and global team expansion as PopDEX takes aim at a perp market currently dominated by Hyperliquid, Lighter, and edgeX.

GAMEE

GAMEE was acquired by Nasdaq-listed Alpha Compute (NASDAQ: ALP), which picked up a 60% controlling interest from Animoca Brands at an implied $18M valuation for total consideration of up to $11M in cash, equity, GMEE tokens, and EBITDA-linked earn-outs.

The blockchain mobile gaming platform (which logged 88.5M game plays and 5.57M users in Q1 2026 alongside $926K in revenue, up 56% year-over-year) becomes the foundation of Alpha Compute's new Alpha Games AI gaming division under GAMEE founder Bozena Rezab, with the deal pairing GAMEE's gaming distribution reach with Alpha Compute's Blackwell B200 and B300 GPU clusters powering Telegram's Cocoon AI confidential compute network.

Flybit

Flybit was acquired in an undisclosed deal by WeHub and JM Coffee Group chairman Yang Jae-seok, with WeHub taking a 40% stake, Yang taking 25%, Flybit CEO Kim Seok-jin retaining 15%, and the remaining 20% spread across other investors and management.

The South Korean virtual asset exchange registered as a VASP in 2021 before withdrawing from won-denominated trading after failing to secure a domestic bank real-name account partnership, and the new ownership group plans to use Flybit's regulated license as the launchpad for WeHub's expanded blockchain services in Korea.

ZKPassport

ZKPassport was acquired by Aztec Labs via the purchase of parent company Obsidion in an undisclosed deal, with co-founders Michael Elliot and Theo Madzou joining Aztec Labs alongside the rest of the team.

The privacy-preserving digital identity protocol uses NFC chips embedded in passports and government IDs from over 130 countries to generate zero-knowledge proofs of age, nationality, and humanity locally on a user's phone, with Aztec committing to keep the codebase open source after the protocol solved a Sybil-attack problem on Aztec's testnet that had been throttling validator set growth.

There are now roughly 1.97 million home sellers facing just 1.34 million buyers, a record 630,000 gap that has pushed the active buyer count to a new low, undercutting even the early pandemic floor set in April 2020.

A pool of sellers this much larger than buyers is the textbook definition of a buyer's market, and Redfin has classified the US as one since May 2024, conditions that historically precede flat to falling prices, longer days on market, and real negotiating leverage for anyone willing to transact.

The retreat is being driven by 30-year mortgage rates that have stayed above 6% all year, home prices that have climbed nearly 55% nationwide since the start of 2020, and a cocktail of layoffs and political uncertainty keeping would-be buyers on the sidelines.

Most economists are not calling for a 2008-style crash given tighter lending and constrained supply, but J.P. Morgan now sees US home prices flatlining at 0% in 2026 and Bankrate's economist survey describes a "gummed-up" economy with rising recession risk, since low transaction volume drags on brokerage, mortgage, construction, and the adjacent industries that historically lead the broader cycle.

The strain is starting to surface in credit data, with overall mortgage delinquencies climbing to 4.44% in Q1 2026, up 40 basis points year over year, and FHA loans hitting an 11.52% delinquency rate, the highest since 2021, as pandemic-era relief programs expire and inflation keeps outrunning wages for lower-income borrowers.

Forecasters now expect median sale prices to rise just 1% in 2026 and monthly payments to decline for the first time since 2020 as wages finally outpace price growth, suggesting the long delayed housing reset is starting to translate runaway appreciation back into affordability.

The Trump administration kicked off the first of three USMCA renegotiation rounds with Mexico on June 1, leaving Canada out over what USTR Jamieson Greer called "significant differences" on tariffs, even though Canada still supplies more than 60% of all US crude oil imports and is the country's single largest energy partner.

The freeze lands as US residential electricity bills are already up roughly 40% since 2021 and Goldman warns AI data center demand will keep pushing power prices higher, with grid regions feeding hyperscalers seeing rates jump by triple digits over the past five years.

Meanwhile Brent crude is trading near $97 a barrel and is up almost 50% year over year on a geopolitical risk premium tied to renewed US-Iran strikes, so a trade fight that destabilizes America's largest crude supplier would pile straight onto an energy bill that consumers can barely absorb.

United Texas Bank Lands a National Charter to Become Crypto's Operating Bank

United Texas Bank announced on May 28 that it had satisfied the final conditions of its OCC charter conversion, completing the transition from a Texas state chartered bank to a nationally chartered institution.

UTB, which says it already clears roughly $10B per month for global crypto firms and processes over $120B in annual crypto-related transactions, is using the new charter to launch UTB Atomic, a 24/7 AI-driven payments network it pitches as the round the clock liquidity rail the industry lost when Silvergate and Signature failed.

The closing lands squarely in the middle of Senator Elizabeth Warren's pressure campaign against the OCC over its chartering of crypto firms, underscoring that the federal banking on ramp the industry has been chasing is moving from contested theory into operating reality.

Kalshi Sues Minnesota as the CFTC's Federal Preemption Fight Goes Multi-Front

Kalshi filed a federal lawsuit against Minnesota on May 29 to block a new state law signed by Governor Tim Walz on May 18 that would make it a felony to operate or advertise prediction markets, with the ban set to take effect August 1.

The complaint argues Minnesota's law is preempted by the Commodity Exchange Act, intrudes on the CFTC's exclusive jurisdiction over designated contract markets, and unlawfully restricts advertising in violation of the First Amendment, and lands less than 24 hours after the CFTC's own federal suit seeking a preliminary injunction.

Minnesota is the first state to criminalize event contracts outright and the sixth front in the CFTC's preemption campaign alongside Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, and Wisconsin, with the agency openly betting the courts (not state legislatures) will decide whether Kalshi and Polymarket get regulated as federal derivatives venues.

New Hampshire Sends "Blockchain Basics" Compromise Through Both Chambers

The New Hampshire House and Senate agreed on May 27 to a compromise version of HB639, the Blockchain Basics bill, which would explicitly protect the rights to use cryptocurrency for payment, operate a blockchain node, and engage in mining under state law, and exempt those activities from state money transmitter licensing.

The compromise retains the bill's core safe harbor for node operators and miners, who otherwise face exposure under state securities and money transmission regimes, while leaving DeFi, staking, and broader stablecoin oversight to future legislation.

With Congress still slogging through CLARITY Act floor maneuvering, state-level safe harbors like HB639 are increasingly where node operators and miners get usable legal certainty, and reflect a clear trend of red and purple states staking out crypto-friendly policy ahead of any federal resolution.

Lummis Warns the Senate That Killing the Clock on CLARITY Means No Crypto Rules Until 2030

Senator Cynthia Lummis warned publicly on May 30 that if the Senate fails to pass the CLARITY Act before its August recess, the bill's prospects deteriorate so badly that the next realistic window for comprehensive crypto market structure law is 2030.

Lummis framed the bill as a question of whether the United States leads or cedes the next financial system to competing jurisdictions, pointing to Singapore, Hong Kong, the EU, and Japan rapidly building out regulated digital asset stacks while Washington stalls.

The escalating rhetoric comes alongside Galaxy Digital placing a $10M Polymarket bet on 2026 passage and Solana's policy chief calling June the make or break window, with Senate leadership under mounting pressure to actually schedule a floor debate before the calendar runs out.

STOP Corrupt Bets Act Lands in Congress, Aiming Squarely at Kalshi and Polymarket

A new federal bill introduced on June 2, the STOP Corrupt Bets Act, would ban prediction market wagers on sports, elections, and war contracts and pull Kalshi-style event contracts out of the CFTC's exclusive jurisdiction.

The proposal arrives from the opposite direction as the CFTC's own state preemption campaign, with Congress now openly considering whether to legislate prediction markets out of the federal derivatives regime that Kalshi and the agency have spent the past two years defending in court.

Combined with Minnesota's felony ban and the CFTC's suits against Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, and Wisconsin, the bill turns prediction markets into a three-front fight at the federal, state, and agency level, with the political contracts that helped legitimize the sector becoming the same surface area lawmakers now want to outlaw.

UK Drops a First-of-Its-Kind Crypto Sanctions Package on Russia's Evasion Network

The United Kingdom rolled out one of its most expansive cryptoasset-focused sanctions packages to date on May 26, deploying Regulation 17A of the Russia (Sanctions) (EU Exit) Regulations for the first time to designate crypto exchanges and infrastructure used to evade sanctions on Russia.

The package covers the A7A5 ruble-backed stablecoin, several Kyrgyzstan and Russia-based facilitator entities previously hit by OFAC in August 2025, and notably HTX (the exchange affiliated with Justin Sun) along with other networks UK authorities say have routed sanctions evading flows through backdoor channels.

The move runs in parallel with the EU's 20th sanctions package that took effect just two days earlier on May 24, signaling that Brussels and London are now coordinating to target the architecture of evasion rather than chase individual designations one at a time.

Banca Sella Becomes the First Italian Bank Cleared for Crypto Services Under MiCA

Banca Sella, a €34B Biella-based bank with roughly 1.4 million customers, completed the Bank of Italy notification process on May 27 to become the first Italian bank authorized under MiCA to offer custody and transfer services for digital assets.

The bank used MiCA's lighter notification path open to credit institutions (rather than the full licensing required of nonbank entities), filing 40 days in advance and clearing the process without a full licensing review, with custody and transfer services for corporate and institutional clients targeted to launch before year-end 2026.

The clearance is the first concrete test of MiCA's bank-friendly carve out and shows what the regulation actually looks like once a traditional European bank with a legacy fintech program decides to move, ahead of the July 1 transitional period deadline that will force every remaining EU crypto service provider into the new regime.

Japan Opens a Legal Path for Foreign Stablecoins

Japan's Financial Services Agency revised Payment Services Act enforcement ordinance and guidelines took effect on June 1, establishing the country's first concrete framework for how trust-based stablecoins issued outside Japan can operate within the Japanese legal system.

Qualifying foreign trust-issued stablecoins are recognized as electronic payment instruments under the PSA and explicitly exempted from securities classification under the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, with foreign issuers required to meet equivalent licensing, collateral management, audit, and home regulator cooperation standards to those Japan applies to its domestic issuers.

The framework arrived alongside a broader LDP-backed proposal for tokenized deposits and yen-denominated stablecoins tied to AI-driven financial infrastructure, positioning Japan to import USDT and USDC into the regulated payment stack while keeping the door open for an eventual yen stablecoin to anchor domestic on-chain settlement.