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The release leads with 146 tons of gold, more than most central banks hold, and $1.5B in net operating profit. The number that matters sits further down: an excess reserve buffer of $4.11B, down from $6.8B at the last report before S&P downgraded Tether to “Weak” in November.

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Yesterday, ten European banks did the same thing with blockchain. ABN AMRO, DekaBank, DZ BANK, LBBW, Natixis and five others launched Regulated Layer One (RL1), a Luxembourg cooperative that takes over SW…

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The Senate has two floor windows left before the August recess. This one, and next.

The merged text is done. The coalition isn’t.

One ethics clause about the president’s crypto income now decides a decade of market structure.

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I watched DTCC’s live updates on Wednesday like a product launch. In a way, it was one.

At 8:30am, JPMorgan converted QQQ shares into tokens. By late morning, it posted tokenized assets to meet a margin call at CME.

Real securities. Real margin. Live production.

DTCC just shipped what crypto spent a decade promising. Let’s unpack.

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197 executives have already registered for our next webinar. Attendance is capped at 250, and registration will close once capacity is reached.

I’ll be joined by the people advising banks on stablecoin strategy—and building the infrastructure those institutions will ultimately use.

Designed for CEOs, board members, and senior leaders across banks, financial market infrastructures, asset managers, and custodians.

📅 23 July, 11am EST

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What happened

On July 15, DTCC converted securities held at its DTC depository into tokens and used them in live production trades. The firm calls it the largest tokenization production event yet by use cases, asset classes, and participants. More than 30 firms took part, including BlackRock, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Vanguard, Citadel Securities, Circle, and CME Group. Trades settled on Hyperledger Besu, DTCC’s private network, and Canton, a public network built for regulated finance.

The workflows were pure back office: collateral pledges, securities lending, Treasury repo, equity trades, and clearinghouse margin. JPMorgan tokenized Invesco QQQ holdings, then posted tokens to meet margin requirements at CME. Societe Generale pledged tokenized Treasuries to Citadel Securities. Microsoft and Circle shares, SPY, and Treasuries across maturities were tokenized during the day.

These tokens are digital twins. Each one is the DTC-held security itself, with identical ownership, dividend, and voting rights, convertible back on demand. The event lands seven months after the SEC’s December No-Action Letter (our analysis) and eleven weeks before the full service launches in October.

Why it matters

1. Collateral is the product. Ignore the 24/7 stock trading headlines and look at what the banks actually demonstrated: margin, repo, securities lending, pledges. The U.S. repo market runs $12.6 trillion in daily exposures, and 69% of it is collateralized by Treasuries. DTCC’s own clearing arm, FICC, already handles $4.4 trillion of that every day. When collateral moves in minutes instead of hours, banks post less and free billions in capital. We made this call in December: speed, not slicing, is the payoff. Wednesday proved it in production. The first real use of a DTC token was a margin call.

2. Digital twins squeeze the wrapper issuers. A DTC twin is the security. Kraken’s xStocks and Robinhood’s EU tokens are synthetic claims on price exposure, and the SEC drew that line in writing in January. The wrapper firms saw this coming. Ondo joined DTCC’s working group and now builds distribution on top of DTC twins instead of competing with them. Once October gives allocators a choice between a claim on QQQ and QQQ itself, no compliance officer debates it.

3. Tokenization has decoupled from crypto. Bitcoin trades near $65,000, roughly half its October peak. On-chain RWA value still hit a record $33.5 billion this month, up from $6.6 billion in March 2025, and DTCC’s working group grew past 100 members. This is an infrastructure cycle running on its own clock. “Crypto exposure” and “settlement infrastructure exposure” are now two different board decisions.

You know what happened. PRO goes deeper.

The complete member analysis examines:

• Why DTC digital twins put pressure on synthetic token issuers

• Which businesses gain and lose when the underlying security itself becomes tokenized

• Why tokenization is now moving independently of crypto prices

• What could prevent the October launch from reaching meaningful volume

• Our take

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We want to make our CEO Notes maximally useful for you.

So, before this week’s note, here is the calendar that will move this market.

It is the busiest macro-plus-policy week of the summer, and almost all of it lands on Tuesday.

The Week Ahead

• Tuesday, July 14 — CPI and five megabank earnings, same morning. June CPI hits at 8:30 AM ET, w…

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I almost missed the biggest number of the month. Tokenized stocks traded $3.4 billion in June, almost as much as the previous eleven months combined.

Everyone is calling it the win for 24/7 trading. The flow data says the opposite.

So what actually drove it? One IPO. And a broken allocation machine.

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This is our CEO Note for PRO subscribers. Download the PDF below.

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Hey, it’s Marc!

I watched Robinhood announce a blockchain, global stock tokens, and AI trading agents in one keynote. Everyone covered the chain, I keep coming back to that quieter line:

US users can now lend dollars at an estimated 7%, one tap from their brokerage account. The engine is a DeFi protocol most of them have never heard of.

What’s happening

• Robinhood took Robinhood Chain, a Layer 2 built on the Arbitrum stack, to public mainnet with Uniswap deploying a dedicated AMM, Pleiades running a proprietary trading venue, and Alchemy, BitGo, and Chainlink live from day one. Robinhood covers gas fees for the first 90 days. New Stock Tokens launched in 120+ countries as tokenised debt securities issued out of Jersey. They trade 24/7 and work as DeFi collateral. US persons are excluded.

• Robinhood Earn is the US product. Eligible customers buy USDG, Paxos’s Global Dollar Network stablecoin, and lend it from a self-custody wallet into a Morpho vault curated by Steakhouse Financial, settling on Robinhood Chain. Morpho holds $11B+ in deposits. Borrowers post collateral from Spark (spUSDG), Ethena (USDe), and Maple (syrupUSDG); their interest funds the estimated 7% APY. Lloyd’s of London and RELM insure covered losses from cyber or smart-contract exploits.

• The rest of the keynote: commodity, ETF, and FX perpetuals at up to 10x leverage in the EU, maker fees as low as 0% in the US, a Canada launch built on the WonderFi acquisition, a Singapore capital markets services licence, and Agentic Accounts for crypto through Robinhood’s Trading MCP. MORPHO rose about 12% and Standard Chartered initiated coverage the same day. HOOD traded near $108, up about 7%, on strong June volumes rather than the keynote.

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I’m sitting down with the people dvising the banks and building the stablecoin rails those banks will plug into.

For CEOs, board members, and heads of strategy at banks, FMIs, asset managers, and custodians.

📅 23 July, 11am EST

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Why it matters

1. The DeFi mullet is now the default retail playbook. Coinbase ran this play first: crypto-backed loans in January 2025, then USDC lending in September, both on Morpho with Steakhouse curating. That stack ended 2025 with $960M in active loans, $1.7B in collateral, and $450M in USDC earning yield, and Morpho’s user base grew from 67,000 to 1.4 million. Crypto.com, Gemini, Bitget, Ledger, Trust Wallet, and World built their own versions; Société Générale runs its MiCA stablecoins on the same rails. Aave is running the opposite play, going direct with its own consumer app. Robinhood’s choice is a vote that distribution beats protocol brands, and Standard Chartered initiating coverage on MORPHO the same morning tells you institutions now underwrite the protocol as infrastructure, not as a token.

2. Robinhood engineered around the yield war. The GENIUS Act bars stablecoin issuers from paying yield, and banks want the workarounds dead: the Bank Policy Institute published a brief on the “payment of interest loophole,” 40+ banking associations asked Congress to extend the ban to affiliates and exchanges, and the OCC has proposed rules targeting rewards on white-label stablecoins. Draft fixes like the RFIA would restrict yield to “identifiable activities” by the holder. Robinhood’s structure reads like it was built against that test: the customer holds a self-custody wallet, initiates the loan, and earns interest paid by borrowers. Coinbase’s reserve-share rewards program is the structure the bank lobby is aiming at. Robinhood picked the architecture most likely to remain standing. Flag: that is our reading of draft text, not a prediction of how Congress votes.

3. USDG lets Robinhood get paid twice. Robinhood co-founded the Global Dollar Network with Paxos, Kraken, and Galaxy in November 2024. GDN shares reserve economics with distribution partners instead of keeping them at the issuer, and analysts now put USDG supply at roughly $3B. So every Earn dollar pays Robinhood on the float, then gets lent through a vault settling on a chain Robinhood owns. The customer gets 7%. Robinhood earns on the money layer, the settlement layer, and the relationship. Kraken runs the same play; it pays its 2% stock-transfer bonus in USDG.

The big picture

Three stories collided this week, and we think they are the same story. On 30 June, 140+ firms including Visa, Mastercard, and Coinbase launched the OpenUSD consortium to take Circle’s reserve economics. On 1 July, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire fired back with 80% volume share. Hours later, Robinhood shipped the working version of the idea OpenUSD is still pitching: a partner-owned dollar (USDG), lent through neutral credit infrastructure (Morpho), settling on a chain Robinhood owns, sold to 28 million customers inside an app they already trust.

The stablecoin fight has moved from issuance to distribution economics. Whoever owns the customer now demands the float, and issuers who refuse to share it get routed around. Robinhood assembled a bank from parts: Paxos issues the money, Morpho clears the credit, Steakhouse prices the risk, Lloyd’s takes the tail. The one part it kept is the only part that compounds: the relationship. Coinbase built the same anatomy on Base and USDC. Kraken is building it on Ink and USDG. The US now runs three parallel shadow-bank stacks, none of which needed a charter, all of which the bank lobby is fighting symptom by symptom while the structure gets built underneath them.

The Robinhood money stack, 20 months in the making

“Decentralized finance technology works best as infrastructure.”
— Paul Frambot, co-founder and CEO, Morpho (1 July 2026)

Where the money is

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Circle stock fell more than 12% on Tuesday, its worst day in four months, and I think most of the coverage is about to miss why. The trigger was Open USD, a new stablecoin from a group of 140 companies that includes Stripe, Coinbase, Visa, Mastercard, BlackRock, BNY and Google.

It’s built to do the one thing Circle does for a living: collect the interest on the reserves. Unlike USDC, it hands reserve income back to the businesses that distribute it and keeps only a management fee. The token is not live yet. The threat already is.

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What Happened

A consortium of more than 140 companies launched Open USD on Tuesday, a dollar stablecoin issued by an independent entity called Open Standard. Founding partners include Stripe, Coinbase, Mastercard, Visa and BlackRock, alongside BNY, Standard Chartered, DBS, U.S. Bank, Shopify, Google, IBM, Klarna, Chime, Fireblocks, Anchorage, MetaMask, Aave, Solana, Polygon and Ripple.

The model goes straight at Circle. Partners mint and redeem without fees, and the reserve income flows back to the businesses using it, minus a management fee. No single issuer controls it; the members share governance. Zach Abrams, who co-founded Stripe-owned Bridge, runs it as interim CEO, and it goes live later this year. And notice who isn’t in the room: USDC, USDT and PayPal’s PYUSD.

The market reacted fast. Circle (CRCL) dropped more than 12% to a four-month low near $66, down from a 52-week high of $263, and it did that on a day the Nasdaq rose. For scale: USDC sits around $73 billion and Tether’s USDT around $145 billion, the whole market is past $300 billion, and Citi thinks it reaches $4 trillion by 2030. And this isn’t the first time we’ve seen the move. Paxos already built USDG to split reserve income with Robinhood and Kraken, and a group of European banks did the same with a euro stablecoin called Qivalis.

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Why It Matters

Circle’s moat was never the yield. It was distribution, and that just got attacked. Here’s what a lot of people don’t realize. Circle doesn’t actually keep the float. Coinbase takes 100% of the reserve income on any USDC sitting on its platform, and 50% of what’s earned anywhere else. Put numbers on it: in 2024, $908 million of Circle’s $1.01 billion in distribution costs went to Coinbase, about 54 cents of every dollar Circle made. And Coinbase’s slice keeps growing, from roughly 5% of USDC supply in 2022 to 22% by early 2025. So Circle is already renting its reach, from a single exchange. Now look at what Open USD brings: Stripe’s merchants, Visa and Mastercard’s networks, the banks, Shopify, Google. You can’t rent your way to that. Owning your distribution beats renting it.

The GENIUS Act was meant to be Circle’s moat. It became the on-ramp for everyone else. This one is almost ironic. Being regulated was supposed to be Circle's edge. But once regulation becomes the price of entry, Visa, Mastercard, BNY and the banks all issue on the exact same footing. The wall Circle was counting on turned into a door everyone walks through. And the Fed's mid-June proposal to put bank-style identity checks on issuers just raises Circle's costs without giving it anything its new rivals don't also have.

BlackRock wins no matter which token wins. This is our favorite detail, and it's the one the headline skips. BlackRock manages about 87% of USDC's reserves through the Circle Reserve Fund, and BlackRock is also a founding partner of Open USD. BNY custodies the cash today and will custody it tomorrow too. So whichever token you back, the same asset managers run the money and clip the fee. They're the house. The issuers are just fighting over a seat at the table.

In Their Words

Stablecoins represent one of the largest market opportunities in the world. We welcome continued innovation and competition and look forward to remaining laser-focused on building the best stablecoin infrastructure possible.

Jeremy Allaire, CEO, Circle, on X

Existing stablecoins have great strengths, but to use them at scale, businesses need something that’s open, low-cost, high-throughput, broadly accessible, and aligned to their interests.

Zach Abrams, interim CEO, Open Standard

The Big Picture

We think the float is being repriced from a private toll into a public utility, and Open USD is where that goes mainstream. Track the last nine months on the 51 Terminal and it reads as one story, not four:

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We’ve read every “AI agents will pay for things” press release for two years. They all promise. None ship.

Then June 10 happened. In one day, Mastercard, Visa, and Tether all shipped real infrastructure for machines to move money.

The interesting part: Mastercard put its agent credentials on Polygon, Solana, and Base. Public chains. Not a Ma…

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The Signal: Tokenized deposits won’t erase stablecoins. But they will push them out of enterprise B2B rails. JPMorgan already runs JPMD. HSBC, Citi, and BNY are building theirs. Expect three layers to co-exist: bank consortium tokens for wholesale settlement, regional networks like Cari for the mid-market, and USDC and USDT for permissionless global commerce, remittances, and DeFi.

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What happened

The Clearing House (TCH), the payments operator owned by 25 of the largest US banks, will run the network. It connects traditional rails (RTP, CHIPS) to blockchain infrastructure for 24/7 atomic settlement, with use cases spanning programmable treasury, real-time liquidity, cross-border payments, and agentic commerce. “A big move for the banks,” TCH CEO David Watson told the WSJ; the industry faces a “radically different” future in on-chain payments. The release names 17 participants, including BNY, HSBC, PNC, Truist, TD Bank, and U.S. Bank. One detail buried in the coverage: no blockchain partner has been selected yet. The build, in any meaningful sense, has not started. [RELEASE] [ANALYSIS]

The whole perimeter is mobilizing. In March 2026, five regional banks (Huntington, First Horizon, M&T, KeyBank, Old National) holding $600B+ in combined deposits launched the Cari Network on ZKsync, with a pilot set for Q3 2026. Eugene Ludwig, the former Comptroller of the Currency, founded it. In 2025, North Dakota partnered with Fiserv for a state-level token. The banking sector is fully mobilizing to keep enterprise capital strictly within the FDIC-insured perimeter. [NEWS]

The timing is no coincidence: The CLARITY Act cleared the Senate Banking Committee on May 14 carrying the Tillis-Alsobrooks compromise: stablecoins cannot pay passive, deposit-style yield, but rewards tied to actual usage stay legal. Banks wanted that loophole closed entirely. ABA members sent more than 8,000 letters to Senate offices. Jamie Dimon told crypto firms that want to pay yield to apply for banking charters. The TCH network is what banks build when lobbying stops working.

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Why it matters

1. The deposit math: McKinsey modeled it in May: when a corporation moves $1,000 into a third-party stablecoin, only $150 returns to the banking system as wholesale reserves. The other $850 buys T-bills off bank balance sheets. Tokenized deposits keep the full $1,000 on the bank’s balance sheet, preserving credit capacity. The Bank Policy Institute went further on May 8. Applying an industry-sponsored model to the projection that stablecoins reach ~$4T by 2030, BPI calculates deposits would first rise by $300B, then fall by $4T. Net result: $3.7T in destroyed deposits and a 19% decline in bank lending. A December Fed note by Jessie Jiaxu Wang points the same direction: credit supply likely shrinks, lending costs likely rise.

2. Regulation drew the moat, banks are now paving it. The GENIUS Act (signed July 2025) bars stablecoin issuers from paying interest, taking deposits, or making loans, and excludes them from deposit insurance. Tokenized deposits sit on the opposite side of every one of those lines: they live inside the banking system as a digital representation of bank deposits, pay interest legally, carry FDIC insurance up to $250,000, and fund loans. A corporate treasurer choosing between two on-chain dollars faces a simple test: one yields and is insured, the other is neither. That test decides the enterprise layer.

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For four decades, I’ve watched DTCC keep one record: who owns every U.S. share, bond, and Treasury. A $100 trillion ledger. None of it ever touched a public blockchain.

On May 27, that changed. DTCC chose Stellar to move DTC-custodied securities onto an open ledger by 1H 2027. In December 2025, DTCC tokenized U.S. Everyone assumed this moment would belong to Ethereum. Why DTCC went the other way is the real story. [RELEASE]

Let’s unpack.

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What happened

On May 27, 2026, DTCC announced that it will integrate DTC’s tokenization service with the Stellar network, with the initial scope covering Russell 1000 equities, major index ETFs, and U.S. Treasuries. The integration supports the full asset lifecycle, including corporate actions and reporting, rather than a wrapper or representation. Tokenized assets retain the same investor protections, entitlements, and safeguards as traditionally held securities.

The Stellar deal builds on the regulatory foundation laid in December 2025, when the SEC Division of Trading and Markets issued DTC a No-Action Letter authorizing a three-year tokenization pilot. The relief covers Reg SCI, Section 19(b) of the Exchange Act, and Rules 17Ad-22(e) and 17Ad-25, the rules that govern how a clearing agency operates. DTCC plans limited production trades in July 2026, broader service launch in October, and the DTC-tokenized assets on Stellar go-live in 1H 2027.

Zooming in: Stellar wasn’t picked at random. The network already has $1.82B in tokenised RWAs and hosts Franklin Templeton’s BENJI, the first U.S.-registered tokenized money market fund, which crossed $1.98B in AUM in April 2026.

Stepping back: On May 8, 2026, the DTCC publicly advanced DTC’s native tokenization service, and announced its commercial launch in October. More than 50 firms are already in the working group that helped DTCC build this platform, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Citi, Anchorage Digital, Circle, Ondo Finance, and Payward. [Read CEO notes]

What the SEC actually waived: The No-Action Letter exempts DTC from three core obligations every other systemically important utility must meet.

Why it matters

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Privacy is underrated in the blockchain space. With institutional movement, this is changing. Bitwise just listed Europe’s second Canton Network ETP, and undercut the first mover by 165 basis points. The ETP is fully backed by CC, the native token of the Canton Network, a blockchain that is backed by JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas,…

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We’ve watched Wall Street lobby against crypto for a decade, but what happened in April was a masterclass in regulatory weaponization. Three U.S. federal agencies moved on digital assets within two weeks:

• The Department of Labor proposed opening $12 trillion in 401(k) retirement savings to crypto via a new fiduciary safe harbor.

• The Trea…

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Qivalis, the Amsterdam-based banking consortium building a regulated euro stablecoin, added 25 banks on Wednesday, pushing its membership to 37 institutions across 15 countries. This is the first biggest push of European banks after the US’s GENIUS Act was passed. The U.S. is turning stablecoins into a geopolitical weapon by making the U…

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The SEC is about to legalize the most disruptive shareholder-rights workaround in nine decades. This week, SEC Chair Paul Atkins is expected to release the agency’s Innovation Exemption, a 12-to-36-month sandbox that lets tokenized US stocks trade on public blockchains and DeFi venues, with the issuing company’s consent expressly not required.

Let’s unpack.

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What happened

On May 18, Bloomberg reported that the SEC is preparing to release its long-signaled Innovation Exemption for tokenized securities. The framework allows digital tokens linked to public-company shares, including tokens issued by third parties without the underlying company’s consent, to trade on decentralized platforms and automated market makers under lighter-touch registration. [NEWS]

The agency is targeting issuance on or around May 18, 2026, with full guardrails: KYC/AML, verified-buyer whitelists, exposure limits, and disclosure requirements during the sandbox window.

Zooming in: Tokenised stock is moving rapidly. Nasdaq won SEC approval for its tokenized-share order book on March 18, 2026. NYSE is building a separate 24/7 venue with BNY Mellon and Citi for tokenized deposit and stablecoin settlement. DTCC, which custodies over $114T in assets, is scheduled to begin limited production trades of tokenized stocks and ETFs in July 2026, with full platform launch in October.

The state of market: Tokenized equity value grew from $350M in mid-2025 to $1.43B by May 2026. The leading platforms include Ondo, xStocks, Securitize, WisdomTree and Superstate.

Kraken acquired Backed Finance (issuer of xStocks) in December 2025, capturing an AUM of $400M. But, tokenised stocks are not available to US persons due to US securities regulations. The day the exemption goes live, that wall comes down.

Why it matters

1. Issuer consent dies as the bedrock of US equity markets. The 1933 Securities Act gave public companies veto power over where their stock trades. The Innovation Exemption removes it. Backed Finance can wrap AAPL, NVDA, or TSLA, sell SPL-token versions on Solana, and Apple has no recourse. The token settles against shares Backed holds in a regulated brokerage account. Shareholder rights route through Broadridge’s ProxyVote platform, with Superstate and Ondo already passing through votes and dividends. Anthropic learned this last week. It publicly disowned tokenized versions of its stock and could do nothing to remove them. Every blue-chip name on a US exchange will face the same problem.

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VanEck and Grayscale filed amended S-1 registrations for the first spot Binance ETFs on the same day. This is not the first Altcoin ETF. In April, Bitwise launched a spot AVAX ETF and just four days ago, they launched a spot HYPE ETF. In January, VanEck debuted on NASDAQ with an AVAX ETF. The altcoin ETF wave has accelerated in 2026. Ins…

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Fidelity is working with JPMorgan to use blockchain to solve their own multi-trillion-dollar problem: idle liquidity. Fidelity International just put a Moody’s AAA-mf rated, $7B money market fund on Ethereum - live, operational, settling 24/7. The fund, Fidelity USD Digital Liquidity Fund (FILQ), was launched on May 6, 2026 and was rated…

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On May 11, 2026, Circle released its Q1 2026 report and it was more than just the revenue. Circle is evolving into more than a stablecoin company. With $21.5T in USDC quarterly transaction volume and the launch of the $3B Arc Network, Circle is betting everything on agentic commerce. They are building the Circle Agent Stack, an open, pro…

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