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Meet Duke Kim 👋

This week we want to celebrate Duke and the Securitize team on a major milestone: Securitize going public and listing on the NYSE.

Duke is Director of Institutional Solutions at Securitize Fund Services, where he works across fund administration, RWA tokenization, and transfer agent solutions.

His path has been focused on bringing institutional digital assets into the real world.

→ Director of Institutional Solutions at Securitize
→ Former SVP Revenue at The Block
→ Former Head of Institutional Solutions at Ledgible
→ Former Director of Institutional Client Solutions at The Giving Block

Now at Securitize, Duke is part of a team helping define what public-market tokenization can look like.

Securitize has become one of the leading platforms for tokenized assets, including BlackRock’s BUIDL.

Today, the company supports more than $4 billion in tokenized assets, with BUIDL alone reported around $2.5 billion in AUM.

Its NYSE listing raised roughly $400 million and brought Securitize public under the ticker SECZ.

NYSE floor.
Opening bell.
Tokenization going public.

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

Show Duke and the Securitize team some love 👇

Securitize

Securitize listed on the NYSE under the ticker SECZ at a $1.25B valuation, raising roughly $400M in the offering.

The BlackRock-backed tokenization firm goes public with an existing investor base that spans BlackRock, Jump Crypto, ARK Invest, Morgan Stanley, Hamilton Lane, ParaFi Capital, Aptos Labs, Circle Ventures, Paxos, and Tradeweb.

Proceeds will scale Securitize's digital securities issuance and management platform, which underpins onchain versions of BlackRock's BUIDL fund and a growing list of tokenized RWA products, as public-market capital flows into the tokenization stack for the first time.

LFG Duke Kim and the Securitize team! When a member wins, we all win 😤

Venice AI

Venice AI raised $65M in Series A funding at a $1B valuation.

Dragonfly Capital led the round, with Coinbase Ventures and North Island Ventures also participating.

Proceeds will scale Venice AI's privacy-first platform that gives users access to 200+ AI models across text, image, audio, and video with client-side encryption and no server-side data storage, as the team builds out end-to-end encrypted subscriber models and customizable AI characters.

Love seeing Pia Maria Szabo and the coinbase team getting involved! Keep it up.

Mercado Bitcoin

Mercado Bitcoin secured $20M in strategic funding from Tether.

The investment builds on Mercado Bitcoin's existing backer base (SoftBank Latin America Fund, Parallax Ventures, Banco Genial, Evora Fund) and pairs the LatAm crypto unicorn with the largest USDT issuer as its balance sheet partner.

Proceeds will accelerate Mercado Bitcoin's rollout of onchain financial infrastructure across Latin America (stablecoin payments, tokenized assets, and cross-border settlement), leveraging its position as Brazil's largest crypto exchange to bring USDT rails deeper into the region.

Congrats to our friends at Tether!

Arcus (dYdX)

Arcus is launching as a decentralized exchange built by dYdX Labs in strategic partnership with Robinhood, with financial terms undisclosed.

Robinhood is the anchor partner behind the launch, providing the underlying Robinhood Chain infrastructure that Arcus will run on.

Proceeds and partnership will fund Arcus's build-out of a 24/7 self-custodial trading venue for tokenized stocks, cryptocurrencies, commodities, indices, and perpetual futures (with up to 50x leverage on perps and unified cross-margin accounts), positioning it as the DeFi execution layer for Robinhood's onchain push.

Thanks for the inside scoop on this Robinhood!

Ionic Digital

Ionic Digital raised $400M in a private funding round ahead of its planned Nasdaq listing.

The raise comes as Ionic's AI and high-performance computing leasing revenue overtook its bitcoin mining revenue for the first time.

Proceeds will fund the expansion of Ionic's Ward County, West Texas facility to as much as 700 MW of capacity, alongside consolidating its remaining mining operations across four Midland-area Texas sites as the company completes its pivot from BTC mining to AI/HPC infrastructure landlord.

EDX Markets

EDX Markets closed $76M in a Series C funding round led by SBI Holdings.

SBI Group anchored the round for the Charles Schwab-backed institutional digital asset exchange, which already counts Citadel Securities, Fidelity Digital Assets, Sequoia, Pantera Capital, GSR, Miami International Holdings, Hudson River Trading, and GTS Ventures among its backers.

Proceeds will scale EDX's institutional-grade digital asset infrastructure (non-custodial matching, trading, and settlement rails) as it expands its Asia footprint following SBI's investment and deepens its position as a regulated alternative to CEX venues.

Sunscreen

Sunscreen was acquired by Fhenix in an undisclosed deal.

Fhenix, the FHE-focused L2, is bringing the Polychain-backed Sunscreen team in-house to consolidate the fully homomorphic encryption tooling stack.

The combination folds Sunscreen's FHE compiler and Secure Processing Framework (used for private DeFi, voting, AI, identity, and confidential data workflows) into Fhenix's L2 environment, positioning the merged entity as the leading FHE infrastructure provider across Web2 and Web3.

For the first time in three years, central banks and sovereign wealth funds around the world are saying they plan to hold fewer US dollars. OMFIF's Global Public Investor 2026 survey, covering 90 institutions with over $10T in assets, found that more central banks now expect to reduce than increase their dollar allocations over the next decade. The dollar is still the most-held reserve currency at 58%, but that number has drifted down from 60% in 2025.

Gold is taking its place. 82% of central banks now hold physical gold, up from 71% last year, with 51% naming geopolitical risk as the reason. Hong Kong began a trial run of a new government-backed gold clearing system on July 7, backed by HSBC, JPMorgan, Citigroup, UBS, and eight other major banks, and explicitly designed to challenge London's century-long grip on setting the gold price.

On the Treasury side, foreign official holdings of US Treasuries have fallen to roughly 12.5% of total marketable Treasuries outstanding, the lowest of this century and 24 percentage points below the 2009 peak. US Treasury debt grew $23T (+379%) over that period, but foreign government holdings only grew $1.5T (+63%). China's Treasury holdings have more than halved, now sitting at $651B, the lowest since September 2008.

Fewer foreign buyers at Treasury auctions means US yields have to rise to attract the buyers who do show up, and the money that isn't going into Treasuries is going into physical gold instead.

The dollar is still the world's reserve currency. It just isn't going to be the only one for much longer.

Jim Chanos, the short-seller who called Enron by reading its footnotes, argues the AI infrastructure boom is running the same accounting setup that hid the 2000 telecom bust. Chip makers like Nvidia and ASML book AI gear as immediate profit, while hyperscalers like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon capitalize the same purchases and depreciate them over five to seven years. Earnings look strong on both sides right up until the spending stops.

S&P 500 earnings rose about 30% into 2000 and then fell roughly 40% over the next twelve months, with no recession involved, once telecom firms cut orders because they had bought 10,000 routers and needed 2,000. Chanos says AI capex works the same way, especially given that some hyperscalers are depreciating GPUs over six to seven years when the useful life is closer to two.

Three data points landed within a few weeks. Mastercard agreed to acquire stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK for up to $1.8B, the largest stablecoin acquisition on record. Vanguard posted its first-ever Head of Digital Assets role after years of publicly refusing to touch crypto. And Coinbase received UK MiFID authorization to offer equities and derivatives alongside crypto.

The largest card network, the largest passive asset manager, and the largest US crypto exchange all cleared meaningful regulatory rails inside the same window. The last major institutional holdouts have folded.

A new academic paper from David Dai, Ruizhe Jia, and Shihao Yu (SSRN) found that traders on Binance are pushing Bitcoin's price in the final seconds before Polymarket's 5-minute Bitcoin contracts settle, deciding the outcome, and then letting the price snap back.

Retail traders on Polymarket lost $7.6M over two months. Market makers were mostly insulated because they could hedge in real time. The people buying these 5-minute yes/no bets are effectively subsidizing sophisticated traders with cross-venue order flow.

Robotics startups have raised $18.8B globally in the first half of 2026, already past 2025's full-year total of $15B and the prior 2021 record of $14.1B (per Crunchbase). Humanoid robot manufacturing costs have already dropped from $500K per unit in 2023 to $30K-$150K today, and IDTechEx projects the average selling price will fall another 68% to roughly $37K by 2030. The argument is that physical AI is now where software AI was three years ago.

For public-market exposure, the most-cited names are the robotics ETFs (BOTZ, $ROBO, $ARKQ), large caps with real robotics revenue (TSLA and AMZN), and pick-and-shovel plays like Ouster ( OUST) and Symbotic ($SYM).

The neobank market has never been busier, with top-ups hitting an all-time high near $245M in a single week. The problem is the compliance stack underneath. Card programs run on issuer-network relationships that can be pulled with almost no notice (Binance's Visa debit card in Europe was wound down in late 2023 after its card issuer, Contis, stepped back), on-off ramps are often built without per-transaction sanctions screening, shared vault structures commingle user funds, and yield products frequently lack isolated ledger entries.

Starling Bank was fined £29M by the FCA in 2024 after its financial sanctions screening system had, for years, been checking customers against only a fraction of the sanctions list. Wirecard, FTX, and Ready all followed the same pattern of growing fast on top of compliance that could not survive institutional or regulator scrutiny.Apply Today

Mamdani's Two-Year Rent Freeze Passes for 1 Million NYC Apartments

New York City's Rent Guidelines Board voted 7-1 on June 26 to freeze rents on roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments for two years, the first time in the board's history that both one-year and two-year lease terms landed at 0%.

The freeze takes effect October 1, 2026 and runs through September 30, 2027, delivering on Mayor Zohran Mamdani's central campaign promise six months into his term.

Real estate industry groups have already flagged legal challenges, and the freeze puts direct pressure on rent-stabilized building owners, small landlords, and the regional mortgage lenders that finance them.

Housing Bill With CBDC Ban Set to Become Law by Default After Trump Refuses to Sign

The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act passed Congress in late June with veto-proof supermajorities (85-5 Senate, 358-32 House) and was transmitted to President Trump on June 29.

Trump refused to sign the bill, demanding Congress pass an unrelated elections bill first, but Speaker Mike Johnson confirmed the president will not veto it either, meaning the bill becomes law automatically around July 10.

The bill's Title X permanently bans the Federal Reserve from developing a US CBDC (a government-issued digital dollar that would let people hold money directly with the Fed instead of through a bank) through December 31, 2030.

The crypto industry has fought a US CBDC for years because it would compete directly with private stablecoins like USDC and USDT, and give the government real-time visibility into every transaction Americans make. Blocking it through 2030 delivers a longstanding industry priority through the back door of the biggest housing affordability package in a generation.

SEC Publishes 2026 Regulatory Agenda as House Sets July 17 CLARITY Hearing

SEC Chair Paul Atkins released the agency's 2026 regulatory agenda on July 7, formalizing Project Crypto priorities around clear rules for onchain capital raising, tokenized securities custody, and how DeFi trading platforms register.

The House Financial Services Committee separately scheduled a July 17 hearing in New York on the CLARITY Act, giving the House a parallel legislative track while the Senate version stalls.

Together they signal that even if CLARITY doesn't pass this session, the SEC will keep building rules under its existing authority to bring more crypto activity onshore.

MiCA Transition Deadline Hits: 244 Licenses Issued as Binance Suspends Trading Across France, Italy, Spain, and Poland

The EU's MiCA transition period expired July 1, and Binance suspended spot, margin, and futures trading across France, Italy, Spain, and Poland after failing to secure a MiCA license, locking roughly 2M French users out of trading (withdrawals still allowed).

Only 244 crypto-asset service providers received MiCA authorization by the deadline against roughly 3,000 applications, an ~8% approval rate.

Firms without licenses must now cease serving EU clients or implement wind-down plans, reshaping who can operate in the EU crypto market for the second half of 2026.

Ripple Wins Full MiCA CASP Authorization From Luxembourg

Ripple secured full MiCA CASP authorization from Luxembourg's CSSF this week, upgrading from the preliminary approval issued in late June and giving the company full passporting rights across all 27 EU member states.

The license covers Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin operations and its broader crypto-asset services (trading, custody, and transfers).

The full authorization lands as Binance and other major exchanges scramble for EU licensing, positioning Ripple as one of the first non-EU crypto firms to fully clear the MiCA bar.

Bank of England Publishes Sterling Stablecoin Policy Statement and Draft Code of Practice

The Bank of England published its full policy statement and Draft Code of Practice for sterling-denominated systemic stablecoins on June 22, formalizing the UK's regulatory framework ahead of a 2027 launch window for regulated GBP stablecoins.

The updated rules impose a temporary £40B per-issuer cap, require 70% of backing assets in short-term UK gilts and 30% in unremunerated Bank of England deposits, and split supervision so the FCA handles consumer conduct while the BoE keeps systemic oversight.

Feedback is due September 22 with the final Code expected by year-end 2026, teeing up UK stablecoin issuance to launch alongside the finalization of GENIUS Act rules in the US.

South Korea's First Institutional Won Stablecoin Pilot Completes on Kaia Chain

South Korea's BNK Busan Bank successfully tested a Korean won stablecoin (a digital version of the won pegged 1-to-1 to the local currency) on July 6. The pilot ran on Kaia, a Korean-native blockchain, and validated the core mechanics of issuing, spending, and settling the token.

BNK is one of six banking consortia in Korea racing to launch the country's first regulated won stablecoin. Their target is the pending Digital Asset Basic Act, the law that will finally let Korean banks legally issue stablecoins tied to the won.

President Lee Jae-myung has framed the won stablecoin push in explicit monetary sovereignty terms, arguing that letting dollar stablecoins dominate the Korean market amounts to "letting national wealth leak overseas."