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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 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.

Meet Jordan Knecht 👋

Huge congrats to Jordan on stepping into his new role as Global Head of Strategic Integrations at KresusLabs, the tokenization platform.

It marks an exciting next chapter after his work leading institutional strategy and partnerships at GlobalStake, where he will continue as an advisor.

His path has been focused on the institutional side of digital assets, infrastructure, and tokenization.

→ Global Head of Strategic Integrations at KresusLabs
→ Institutional Partner & Advisor at GlobalStake
→ Adjunct Professor focused on blockchain, crypto, and digital assets

Now at KresusLabs, Jordan is helping institutions bring real-world asset workflows onchain through tokenization, wallet infrastructure, and custodian-integrated solutions.

Tokenization. Wallet infrastructure. Institutional adoption.

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

Show Jordan some love 👇

Earlier this year, Introduction.com and our partners hosted an ultra-private dinner inside the UK House of Lords, Palace of Westminster.

Lords. MPs. Institutional leaders. Founders.

A room shaping policy across blockchain, AI, and emerging technology.

Real access. Off-the-record.

We can’t name names.

That’s the point.

The value of these rooms is not in who gets photographed. It is in who gets seated, who gets heard, and what happens after the doors close.

Membership has its privileges.
Access is earned.

For members and partners, this is the standard.

Dates are now being set for future gatherings of this caliber.

If you are interested in sponsoring, partnering, or being part of a room like this, reach out for consideration.

We’re not giving away the whole playbook.

But we are opening the door.

If you know, you know.

  • Thursday, July 2

    7:00 PM - 9:00 PM

  • The Copper Shaker Ybor

    Tampa, Florida

Top Raises

Member Activity

Series B

Allium closed $40M in Series B funding.

The round was led by Amplify Partners, with Kleiner Perkins and Theory VC also participating, bringing the enterprise blockchain data platform's total funding to over $65M.

Proceeds will scale Allium's data infrastructure, which now spans 40+ chains and powers accounting, auditing, stablecoin, staking, NFT, and DEX trading workflows for institutional clients through its Developer and Explorer products.

Big win for Ankit Bhasin and the Allium team! Does this mean you’ll be getting a new office?

Series A

Trace Finance raised $32M in Series A funding.

CoinFund led, with Coinbase Ventures, HAUN Ventures, Jump Capital, Paxos, Chainlink Labs, HOF Capital, and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko also joining.

Proceeds will expand Trace's cross-border payments and banking infrastructure across Brazil and Latin America, covering fiat and stablecoin rails, FX services, PIX integrations, corporate accounts, and API infrastructure for enterprise treasury operations.

Coinbase is basically a house-hold name at this point. Love to see the continued growth from Pia Maria Szabo and the coinbase team!

Karta raised $15M in a Series A round alongside a $125M debt facility from CIM.

Galaxy Ventures led the equity round, with Illuminate Financial, Canary, and Clocktower Technology Ventures also participating.

Proceeds will scale the Miami-based fintech's WhatsApp-run US credit card product (issuing premium Visa cards with limits up to $200K to non-US residents holding assets at American banks or brokerages) as it deepens partnerships with 85+ private banks and wealth managers including Itaú, Raymond James, and XP International US.

Galaxy getting in on the action. Congrats to CJ Huntzinger and the Galaxy team!

Strategic

EarnOS secured $18.5M in strategic funding.

1kx led the round, with Circle Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and Social Graph Ventures also participating.

Proceeds will scale EarnOS (the Verona, ex-XION, native consumer rewards platform) as it builds out a UX-first Web3 layer where users engage with brands, verify interactions, and earn real rewards across the digital economy.

Cool to see circle getting involved. Glad to see our partners winning.

Re received an undisclosed strategic investment from Coinbase Ventures.

The deal pairs the onchain reinsurance protocol with one of crypto's most active institutional capital allocators as Coinbase Ventures doubles down on RWA infrastructure.

Re has accumulated $490M in premiums covering nearly 1M households and targets a $1B annual run rate by early 2027, with proceeds backing the rollout of its reUSD and reUSDe tranche tokens (live on Base) as the protocol attacks the $1.8T global reinsurance protection gap.

Can’t stop coinbase. Way to go Kevin Leffew and the coinbase team!

Seed

TurboFlow closed $6M in seed funding.

Pantera Capital led, with Digital Currency Group and Susquehanna Crypto also participating.

Proceeds will scale TurboFlow's on-chain trading platform combining prediction markets and perpetual futures on SVM-compatible infrastructure, with entry sizes as low as $2 and fast settlement designed for high-velocity event trading.

Pats on the back for Lauren Stephanian and the Pantera crew!

Acquisition

Entendre Finance was acquired by MoonPay in an undisclosed deal.

MoonPay (a Series B investor in Entendre's 2023 round) is bringing the AI-powered Web3 accounting and bookkeeping platform fully in-house.

The acquisition embeds Entendre's automated double-entry accounting engine for blockchain transactions into MoonPay's institutional stack, strengthening MoonPay's compliance, financial reporting, and treasury tooling as it scales its enterprise crypto infrastructure.

MoonPay! Halsey Huth and the MoonPay team are working on some exciting tech.

Non-Member Activity

Series B

FOMO raised $75M in a Series B round at a $550M valuation.

Index Ventures led, with Union Square Ventures, Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus, Discord CEO Humam Sakhnini, and Eventbrite co-founder Kevin Hartz also participating.

Proceeds will scale the non-custodial mobile trading app (founded by ex-dYdX operators, currently onboarding ~3,500 users per day and pushing beyond spot crypto into perpetuals and tokenized stocks) as it tries to compete with Coinbase and Robinhood for the next wave of consumer onchain trading.

Strategic

Multipli received an undisclosed strategic investment from Coinbase Ventures via the Base Ecosystem Fund.

The investment lands alongside Multipli's existing roster of Pantera Capital, Sequoia Capital, Spartan, and Elevation Capital, with $21.5M in total funding raised to date.

Proceeds will deepen Multipli's positioning as the leading RWA protocol on Base by assets managed (~$300M AUM), backing its multi-chain delta-neutral yield engine and AlphaIQ allocation system across Bitcoin, ETH, stablecoins, and tokenized real-world assets.

Headlines

The KOSPI Crash

A wave of tech selling hit global markets on Monday, June 23, 2026, with the damage concentrated in Asia. South Korea's main stock index, the KOSPI, fell nearly 10% in a single day, a drop large enough to automatically pause trading on the exchange to prevent panic from feeding on itself. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, the two South Korean companies that supply most of the memory chips powering AI systems worldwide, each fell more than 12% in the same session. The selling spread quickly to Tokyo, Frankfurt, London, and US markets, where AI and semiconductor stocks led the losses.

The causes are nuanced, but they fall into two main buckets.

The immediate cause was a sudden change in sentiment toward AI stocks. South Korean retail traders had borrowed enormous amounts from their brokers to chase the year-long AI rally, and when prices started slipping, those brokers demanded the borrowed money back. To collect it, the brokers automatically sold the shares the traders had bought on credit, which pushed prices lower, which triggered more forced sales, which turned a normal correction into a fast, mechanical crash.

The structural cause is the slow-motion breakup of the global manufacturing system. The US has been steadily cutting China off from advanced semiconductors and the specialized machines used to build them, and China has retaliated by restricting exports of rare-earth metals like gallium and germanium, which are the raw materials needed to make those same chips. South Korea is stuck in the middle: it depends on the US for security and high-end technology, and on China for the raw materials that feed its semiconductor and battery industries. This month, Seoul accelerated a plan to source critical minerals from new countries and lower its dependence on China, but rebuilding a global supply chain takes years, costs a great deal, and pushes consumer prices up while it happens.

AI sentiment can recover in a day. The supply chain it depends on will take years to put back together.

Regulation Roundup

United States 🇺🇸

The Federal Reserve, Treasury, OCC, FDIC, NCUA, and FinCEN issued a joint proposed rule on June 18 applying bank-style customer identification and verification standards to GENIUS Act permitted payment stablecoin issuers, now open for public comment.

The rule pairs with the FinCEN/OFAC AML NPRM (closed June 9) and the FDIC's May 22 NPRM, locking interagency coordination into place before the July 18 GENIUS Act final-rule deadline.

For bank-affiliated stablecoin issuers preparing to ship product, the federal rulebook is finally coming into focus.

CME Group CEO Terry Duffy said on June 17 that the world's largest derivatives exchange plans to sue the CFTC over its approval of Kalshi's perpetual futures product.

Two days later, the WSJ reported that Charles Schwab is preparing to launch S&P 500 event-based options, pulling TradFi deeper into the same contest.

The combination sets up the next major fight over how the CFTC treats crypto-style derivatives across crypto-native and incumbent venues.

Illinois added a new digital asset tax in its June 17 budget covering the holding and transfer of crypto, drawing sharp industry pushback.

The same day, Kentucky's Republican AG opened a probe into Kalshi and Polymarket (clashing with the Trump White House's crypto stance), while Fairshake-backed Barry Moore won the Alabama Senate primary after $12M in PAC support.

The trio shows state-level crypto politics running on three tracks (tax extraction, prediction market opposition, and election spending) just as Congress tries to lock in federal market structure.

International 🌏

The EU formally confirmed this past week that Article 79 of Anti-Money Laundering Regulation 2024/1624 will prohibit credit institutions, financial institutions, and CASPs from maintaining anonymous accounts or handling anonymity-enhancing crypto-assets like Monero and Zcash, effective July 10, 2027.

The package also imposes a €10,000 limit on cash payments and stands up the new Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA), which will directly supervise up to 40 CASPs across at least six EU member states.

The finalization closes the door on offering privacy-preserving crypto products to EU clients and forces exchanges to delist privacy coins or risk losing CASP authorization once AMLA takes the wheel.

The EU's MiCA transition deadline hits July 1 with only ~210 of 1,200+ pre-existing VASPs converted to full CASP licenses, and unlicensed providers required to enter orderly wind-down.

Reuters reported on June 16 that Greece's HCMC is set to reject Binance's MiCA application, with Binance disputing the report and insisting its filing is fully compliant.

Whether Binance lands a license in another member state this week determines if the world's largest crypto exchange keeps serving 27 markets or scrambles for client transfers.

The Malta Financial Services Authority published a consultation paper on June 18 asking whether decentralization should be assessed as a spectrum rather than a binary under MiCA.

The framing would let regulators pull partially-decentralized DeFi protocols inside the MiCA perimeter while leaving fully-decentralized ones outside.

Malta's status as a major CASP-hosting jurisdiction means its position will shape the EU's ongoing MiCA review (open through August 31) and the eventual MiCA 2.0 text.

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