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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.

Meet Ethan Schneider 👋

Huge congrats to Ethan on joining Rain in BD & Partnerships, where he is helping build global payment infrastructure for tokenized money.

It marks an exciting next chapter after his time as Head of Sales and Business Development at Guardrail, which is now part of Rain.

His path has been focused on the commercial side of crypto, risk, and on-chain finance.

→ Head of Sales and Business Development at Guardrail
→ Rose from Account Executive to Senior Sales Director at Halborn
→ Enterprise Account Executive at EverC

From blockchain security and risk intelligence to real-time security for on-chain finance, Ethan has built across the parts of the market that institutions need most.

Now at Rain, he is bringing that experience into one of the most important areas of the next financial system:

Tokenized money. Global payments. On-chain infrastructure.

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

Show Ethan some love 👇

ETHConf brought builders, protocols, capital, and institutional conversations back through Manhattan.

For Introduction.com, it was another opportunity to do what we do best.

We closed the week with XDC Foundation at an intimate gathering overlooking the city.

Golden hour over the Hudson. Manhattan below.

Canapés, cocktails, and a room designed to move naturally from handshake to follow-up.

For a network focused on trade finance, RWA tokenization, and enterprise blockchain adoption, the setting felt fitting.

Huge thank you to XDC Foundation for helping bring the room together.

As a network built for trade finance, RWA tokenization, and enterprise-grade blockchain applications, XDC brought the right thesis to the right city at the right time.

The room included leaders from S&P Global, Stripe, Citi, Wells Fargo, Amazon Web Services, Fireblocks, Tether, Paxos, KPMG, CoinFund, CertiK, Galaxy, GSR, Yuga Labs, The Graph, and others operating at the front edge of institutional adoption.

As always, we operated under Chatham House Rule. The identities remain behind closed doors, but the relationships, insights, and opportunities are already moving through the industry.

These rooms are reserved for the few.

Whether you are seeking a seat at the table or looking to engineer an environment of this caliber for your own ecosystem, the standard remains absolute.

You might have missed ETHConf.
Don’t miss what’s next.

Access is earned.

🏆 Massive win for the Introduction.com network 🏆

Huge thank you to ElevenLabs for giving our community access to one of the best AI audio platforms in the world.

ElevenLabs helps teams create realistic speech, AI voice agents, dubbing, transcription, sound effects, and voice-powered products.

From customer support and AI tutors to media, gaming, creator tools, and enterprise workflows, audio is becoming a core part of how people build and interact with software.

Eligible Introduction.com members and community startups receive:

→ 12 months of free ElevenLabs access
→ 33 million characters of usage
→ 600+ hours of AI audio
→ Tools to build AI voices, agents, and audio products

Apply through the ElevenLabs Startup Grants Program and select Introduction.com.

Use code: 11introduction494

Grant access is available for full-time founders with startups under 25 employees. One grant per company. Existing enterprise customers are not eligible.

Canada’s largest Web3 and AI event 🇨🇦

Introduction.com is proud to be a Community Partner of Blockchain Futurist Conference, taking place July 21–22 at Rebel & Cabana in Toronto.

As always, our core members get first access to complimentary tickets and VIP perks.

Now, we’re opening this one up to the greater Introduction.com community.

As a valued member of the Introduction network, readers can access a complimentary ticket to Blockchain Futurist Conference.

Limited quantities available.

Use code INTRODUCTION or register here:

https://futuristconference.com/register?discount=INTRODUCTION

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 👇

Canton Network

Digital Asset (the developer behind the Canton Network) closed $355M in strategic funding at a roughly $2B valuation, oversubscribed against a $300M target.

The round was led by a16z crypto, with participation from Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Apollo Funds, BNP Paribas, Citadel Securities, HSBC, CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Optiver, Polychain Capital, S&P Global Ratings, SBI Group, SoFi, Tradeweb, Broadridge, and William Blair.

Proceeds will fund Canton's next phase as the on-chain infrastructure layer for capital markets, bringing more institutional assets, applications, and regulated workflows onto the privacy-first L1 already used by major financial institutions for tokenized bonds, cash, and atomic cross-app transactions.

Love to see the growth coming out of a16z! Lets go Pyrs Carvolth and the rest of the a16z team.

AI Pay with Crypto

AI Pay with Crypto (APC) raised $10M in strategic funding.

The round was backed by Animoca Brands, Titans Ventures, Castrum Capital, Adaverse, and M2M Capital.

Proceeds will scale APC's AI-native payment infrastructure for the agent economy, where autonomous AI agents settle transactions using programmable stablecoins and connect to real-world merchants via QR codes, POS terminals, and on/off ramps for machine-to-machine commerce.

Can’t stop Animoca! LFG Luca Ioannis and team!

El Dorado

El Dorado closed $9M in Series A funding.

The round was led by Paradigm, with Coinbase Ventures and Verda Ventures also participating.

Proceeds will scale El Dorado's stablecoin-powered cross-border payments stack across 12 Latin American countries (100K+ active users, 5M+ transactions to date) and accelerate its new business unit built on Tempo (the L1 incubated by Paradigm and Stripe) that already serves 100+ business clients importing electric vehicles from China.

Huge win for our members, especially Kevin Leffew and the Coinbase team!

GSR Securities

GSR received FINRA approval to finalize its acquisition of Equilibrium Capital Services, completing the deal first announced in October 2025.

Equilibrium is an SEC-registered broker dealer and FINRA member based in Portland, Oregon, that will now operate as GSR Securities under the crypto market maker's umbrella.

The regulated broker-dealer foothold underpins GSR's push toward a web3 investment banking model spanning liquidity provision, issuer services, structuring, distribution, and capital markets activity for US institutions moving deeper into tokenization.

Siiibo Securities

Siiibo Securities is being acquired by Metaplanet for 2.1B yen (approximately $13M), with closing targeted for July.

Metaplanet (Asia's largest corporate Bitcoin treasury) will keep existing management and customer services intact while rebranding the firm as Metaplanet Securities.

The deal anchors Metaplanet's "Project Nova" plan to build a Bitcoin-centered financial ecosystem in Japan, with Siiibo's Type 1 Financial Instruments Business license (100+ bond offerings supporting 40+ companies) giving Metaplanet direct entry into the regulated securities market and a vehicle to launch Bitcoin yield products targeting roughly $7.1T in idle Japanese household cash.

Light Protocol

Light Protocol was acquired by Solana infrastructure firm Helius in an undisclosed deal.

The deal extends a multi-year collaboration between the two teams, with Light Protocol having authored Solana's original zero-knowledge syscalls and co-developed the ZK Compression framework that cuts on-chain state costs by up to 1,000x.

Post-deal, Light Protocol refocuses on its original ZK privacy thesis and will build the canonical privacy layer for Solana (private payments and private DeFi) on top of Helius' distribution and infrastructure, with developer access opening in the coming months.Apply Today

A cloud data center runs 5-15 kilowatts per rack on air cooling; today's AI factories target 500+ kilowatt racks, gigawatt facilities, and millions of GPUs on liquid cooling alone.

The bill is enormous. Goldman Sachs projects ~$7.6T of cumulative AI capex between 2026 and 2031, with annual spend climbing from $765B this year to $1.6T by 2031 and roughly two-thirds going into compute.

That capital is now flowing through corporate credit. Nvidia raised $25B in its first US bond issuance since 2021, Morgan Stanley expects AI-linked debt issuance to double to $570B this year, and Barclays sees US corporate bond issuance hitting $2.46T with hyperscaler capex flagged as the dominant upside risk.

The structure is also circular. Hyperscalers buy chips from Nvidia, Nvidia funds capacity to meet demand, AI startups rent that compute back from hyperscalers, and hyperscalers borrow more to build the next round. The loop only holds if adoption compounds fast enough to justify the spend.

If the revenue lands, this is the most important infrastructure buildout since the internet. If not, the repricing won't stop at AI startups.

SpaceX's $60B all-stock acquisition of Cursor was effectively funded by hours of post-IPO stock appreciation, days after the company's $75B public debut, making this the cleanest possible test of Musk's new public-market currency.

The funding mechanic is the story. Cursor shareholders will receive SpaceX Class A common stock priced off a seven-day VWAP at close, turning SpaceX's listed valuation into acquisition currency that buys strategic assets without draining cash or stacking on traditional debt.

That changes SpaceX's role inside Musk's empire. A liquid public valuation gives him usable financial power: stock that can buy companies, back loans, support refinancing, and manage capital across the broader portfolio spanning SpaceX, Starlink, xAI, and X.

SpaceX gets an AI coding asset already running roughly $2.6B in annualized B2B revenue, xAI gets a stronger developer layer, and Musk gets another tool in the race against OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft.

This is why SpaceX's valuation matters beyond rockets. Investors are pricing it as a platform spanning satellites, connectivity, AI, defense, payments, and global infrastructure. Whether the valuation holds is the open question. For now the market has handed Musk a currency.

Washington Crypto Regulation Crashes Into a Single Week: CLARITY, Stablecoin Rules, DeFi, and Tax

The CLARITY Act dominated Washington with a June 7 industry coalition letter to Senate leadership, Banking Chair Tim Scott's June 8 endorsement, a two-day White House meeting June 9-10 on the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act developer protections, and Senator Cynthia Lummis tying Bitcoin to the $39.2T US debt on June 15, even as Eleanor Terrett confirmed the White House's reported July 4 passage target is "realistically impossible" given unresolved ethics provisions and a 60-vote cloture threshold.

Stablecoin rulemaking moved in parallel as Treasury's FinCEN/OFAC GENIUS Act AML proposal closed for comment on June 9 (with final rules due by the July 18 statutory deadline), New York DFS released a draft Part 202 aligning state stablecoin rules with the federal framework, and the Independent Community Bankers of America launched a June 11 ad campaign attacking the stablecoin reward provisions inside CLARITY.

On the same day, SEC Chair Paul Atkins backed self-custody as a "foundational American value" at the agency's "DeFi and the American Spirit" roundtable, while the House Ways and Means Committee opened a tax front with a discussion hearing on seven crypto tax drafts covering staking, mining, de minimis, wash sales, and stablecoin treatment (Republicans broadly supportive, Democrats slowing the walk on the mining provisions).

Kalshi Adds XRP Perpetual Futures to Its CFTC-Approved Derivatives Lineup

Kalshi launched XRP perpetual futures (XRPPERP) on June 10 under its new "American Perpetuals" product line, following CFTC approval of its bitcoin perpetual contract (BTCPERP) on May 29.

The launch builds on Kalshi's June 1 self-certification submission for 12 major altcoin perpetuals (covering ETH, SOL, DOGE, XRP, and others), with the CFTC maintaining its asset-by-asset review policy.

The contracts are now sparking active debate over whether they should be classified as futures or swaps under existing CFTC rules, putting Kalshi at the center of the next regulatory question on US crypto derivatives.

Strategic Bitcoin Reserve "Big Announcement" Still Pending as Witt Keeps Teasing Imminent Update

White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt continued teasing a "big announcement" on the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve covering its operations and legal framework, an update he first telegraphed at Bitcoin 2026 in late April and reiterated at Consensus Miami in early May.

Witt has said the executive branch can take a "big step forward" without Congress, though permanent reserve policy will require legislation, with US government holdings currently sitting around 328,372 BTC (~$25B, or ~1.6% of circulating supply).

The continued delay is fueling industry speculation over whether the announcement will introduce a new acquisition mechanism beyond seized BTC, or formal legal scaffolding ahead of CLARITY Act passage.

ESMA Confirms No Extension to MiCA's July 1 Deadline as Only 17% of EU Crypto Firms Have Converted

ESMA confirmed this week that it will not extend MiCA’s July 1 transition deadline, after which unlicensed CASPs must stop serving EU clients.

So far, only 210 of the EU’s 1,200+ pre-existing VASPs have converted to full CASP licenses, a 17% conversion rate. Kraken, Coinbase, Bitstamp, OKX, Crypto.com, and Bitpanda are among the firms now passporting across all 27 member states.

BitGo CEO Mike Belshe warned that the deadline could trigger a “massive stablecoin crisis” if major USD-backed issuers fail to clear compliance in the final two weeks.

South Korea's Won Stablecoin Race Fractures Into Three Competing Bank-Led Consortia

Kakao Pay confirmed on June 16 that it has opened formal talks with major commercial banks, including BNK and JB Financial, to form a fintech-led won stablecoin alliance.

The move follows Shinhan joining a KB-led coalition with Toss, IBK, BNK, and iM Bank on June 1, and Hana closing its $670 million Dunamu stake on June 15 to anchor a third camp alongside Naver and Upbit.

The split puts pressure on the Lee Jae-myung administration’s Digital Asset Basic Act to decide whether the Bank of Korea’s proposed ≥51% bank-led ownership floor survives or gets loosened for fintech players.

Hong Kong Doubles Down on Cross-Border Stablecoin Payments With PolyU/OSL Joint Whitepaper

PolyU Business School’s CADI and OSL Group released a joint whitepaper on June 16 arguing for regulated enterprise stablecoin adoption in cross-border trade payments under Hong Kong’s Stablecoins Ordinance.

The paper comes two months after the HKMA issued Hong Kong’s first stablecoin licenses to HSBC and the Standard Chartered/HKT/Animoca joint venture.

Together, the moves strengthen Hong Kong’s bid to become Asia’s regulated stablecoin hub, even as the EU’s MiCA framework reshapes who can issue dollar-pegged stablecoins in Europe.