[███░░░░]: Crypto mom lays the path for DeFi

Welcome to the TAC's Progress Bar, where we combed through 619 relevant tokenization news stories from the week, analyzed the key stories on our weekly podcast, then distilled what you need to know into a few hundred words in this newsletter. Delivered to your inbox in time for Friday happy hour in NYC (usually).

Commissioner Hester Peirce (our beloved Crypto Mom) just gave the template for DeFi to reach its full potential.

Speaking at SIFMA's Digital Assets Conference on Wednesday, in her second-to-last week at the SEC, Peirce took aim at the "data go up" mindset behind today's KYC and AML regime: make every institution collect more personal data from more people, then hope law enforcement finds the needles in an ever-bigger haystack. Her alternative is attribute-based verification:

• Prove the fact, not the data. "Attribute-based credentials could greenlight individuals holding verifiable credentials that attest to specific facts: age, citizenship, accredited investor status, absence from sanctions lists, without revealing the underlying data that generated those facts."
• Verify once, rely everywhere. "If a customer has already been verified by one regulated, trustworthy entity, why not make it the norm for every subsequent institution to rely on that work?"

That is the Global Access Protocol. For the past year, TAC and the Digital Securities Initiative have been quietly designing GAP with input from various regulators, including the SEC, to deliver exactly what Commissioner Peirce describes. It's a reusable, privacy-preserving credential that lets an investor onboard once and access tokenized assets across DeFi, instead of getting whitelisted again at every issuer, venue, and smart contract. Compliance lives in the smart contract layer, and personal data stays out of the haystack.

We've kept our heads down since publishing the GAP white paper in April, so consider this your first peek. We'll be announcing much more publicly in the coming weeks. In the meantime, you can dig into the framework here.

Elsewhere, the building blocks kept stacking up. BlackRock strategies got wrapped into single Ondo tokens, Cathie Wood's venture fund landed on Ethereum, and the CFTC opened the wallet door to every front end in the country. Then a $352 million hack reminded everyone to stay humble.

First, the metrics.

Market KPIs (brought to you by RWA.xyz)

📈 RWA market cap was up slightly WoW, still sitting just under $40 billion
🏆 Biggest RWA winner: Tokenized SECZ (Securitize) added $140M to reach $400M, riding a roughly 120% run in the underlying stock over the past month
🏆 Biggest network winner: Liquid Network (Blockstream's Bitcoin sidechain) added $100M

📈 Stablecoin market cap was up 0.7% WoW to $306 billion, closing in on the prior all-time high of roughly $310 billion
🏆 Biggest stablecoin winner: USDC added $1.5B to reach $74 billion, one of the largest weekly mints in a long time
🏆 Biggest network winner: Solana added $900M

📈 Onchain risk free rates:
Short term treasuries (1m): 3.87% (up 25 bps WoW as the long end of the curve ran hot)
Aave / DeFi: 3.94% (up ~10 bps WoW, still tracking just above SOFR)

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Stories we're tracking this week

• Ondo launched Intelligent Portfolios, three portfolio tokens built on BlackRock-designed strategies: High Income (BLKHIon), Diversified Growth (BLKDIGon), and High Growth (BLKGRWon). Each token gives eligible non-U.S. investors exposure to a weighted basket of Ondo Global Markets assets, with holdings, weights, and rebalances visible onchain. BlackRock supplies the model strategies, and Ondo handles issuance, custody, and operations. It's ETF-style packaging with DeFi composability built in.
• ARK Invest tokenized its roughly $1.3 billion ARK Venture Fund (ARKVX) through Securitize on Ethereum. The fund holds private and public names including OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, and Databricks. Securitize plans to publish a daily NAV and let the tokenized interests trade on blockchain-based markets. If a real secondary market develops, it could take pressure off quarterly redemptions and become a template for other semi-liquid funds.
  
  Our friends Jon and Steve at Fission covered this in depth earlier in the week. You can check it out here.
• CFTC staff extended Phantom's wallet no-action relief to every provider of "passive software". Under Staff Letter 26-25, non-custodial front ends that route users to CFTC-registered FCMs, introducing brokers, or designated contract markets, without discretion or advice, don't have to register as introducing brokers. Together with the SEC's recent moves, it opens a path to wallet-based "super apps" that offer regulated derivatives next to securities.
• Bitget lost $351.6 million from its hot and warm wallets in a hack detected at 18:31 UTC on September 24. CEO Gracy Chen says attackers compromised a backend wallet system, spoofed transaction data, and triggered Bitget's own signing process. Private keys were not compromised, cold storage is intact, and investigators found IP addresses tied to VPNs previously used by a North Korean hacking group. Withdrawals are paused with no committed timeline, while trading and deposits remain open. Bitget says its $464 million User Protection Fund covers the full loss.
• Agora received preliminary conditional OCC approval for Agora National Trust Bank, one of three national trust charters the OCC conditionally approved on September 18. The charter would bring Agora's AUSD issuance, custody, and transaction infrastructure under direct federal supervision. Congrats to the team on an early win.

Tweet of the week

"Introducing Ondo Intelligent Portfolios, the first three portfolios powered by BlackRock. Ondo Intelligent Portfolios introduces a new onchain product category: curated investment portfolios delivered as single onchain transferable tokens."
-- @Ondo (Ondo Finance)

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Don't Forget to Blink

This week on The First Trillion, Johnny and Charlie covered the CFTC's expansion of its wallet no-action relief and what it means for developers building the "super app," Chairman Selig's mass tokenization keynote, and TAC member Ondo's BlackRock-powered portfolio tokens (plus why DeFi's old playbook finally makes sense with real-world assets underneath). They dug into ARK's tokenized venture fund and why secondary market liquidity may matter more than the tokenization itself, gave Agora a shoutout for its OCC charter, and Johnny explained how AI nearly broke his eyeballs. Don't forget to blink.

The episode is available below and we've summarized it for you here.

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Stay ahead of the curve

Be sure to follow us on X, LinkedIn, and Spotify for real-time updates, behind-the-scenes insights, and the occasional hot take that didn't make it into the Progress Bar or the First Trillion podcast episode or summary.

Until next week,

The TAC Team