[███░░░░]: Europe's First Tokenized IPO and Iran's Crypto Tolls

Welcome to the TAC's Progress Bar, where we combed through 463 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).

Europe surprised everyone by beating the US to market with the world's first fully tokenized IPO. Iranian officials started demanding crypto for passage through the Strait of Hormuz. The Genius Act rulemaking machine keeps grinding, with FinCEN and OFAC dropping joint AML rules this week. And Broadridge, the $6 billion gorilla of investor communications, is taking proxy voting on-chain. It's hard to know how to navigate markets right now with everything going on, but the tokenization infrastructure keeps getting built regardless.

Market KPIs (brought to you by RWA.xyz):
📈 RWA market cap was up 4% WoW to $29.1 billion
🏆 Biggest RWA winner: SPQR SAFO added significant growth, up 40% to $210 million
🏆 Biggest network winner: zkSync Era added $500 million due to BCAP fund revaluation from Tether position markup

📈 Stablecoin market cap was up to $300.6 billion
🏆 Biggest stablecoin winner: USDC added $550 million, mostly on Ethereum
🏆 Biggest network winner: Ethereum captured most USDC growth

📈 Onchain risk free rates:
Short term treasuries (1m): 3.6% (down 6 basis points)
Aave / DeFi: Rising ~5 basis points, spread down to ~45 basis points

Stories we're tracking this week

A few major developments across regulation, geopolitics, and corporate governance:

• Required reading from Luca Prosperi's Dirt Roads: he applies Merton-style structural credit models (with Black-Cox first-passage, jump-diffusion, and rebalancing adjustments) to Morpho's on-chain lending markets and finds that depositors are being compensated 5-10x less than what rational risk-neutral pricing would demand. The mispricing is driven by depositor misperception, regulatory arbitrage from stablecoin legislation, survivorship bias, and token subsidies masking true credit risk. He's especially bearish on the push to extend this infrastructure to illiquid RWA collateral, where every assumption in the continuous-time framework (observable volatility, continuous monitoring, atomic liquidation, enforceability) breaks simultaneously.
• Europe's Lightning Stock Exchange completed the first fully tokenized IPO, listing French aerospace and defense parts manufacturer ST Group entirely on-chain under the EU's DLT pilot regime. LISE operates both a multilateral trading facility and a settlement system on Hyperledger Besu. The company is small (a few million in revenue), which allowed it to bypass heavier disclosure requirements and move fast. SuperState will likely still claim "first" when Project Opening Bell launches on Solana, since this wasn't on a public blockchain.
• Iranian officials reportedly demanding up to $2 million per ship for Strait of Hormuz passage, payable in their own currency, Bitcoin, or stablecoins. Iran's parliament formalized this in the "Strait of Hormuz Management Plan" at the end of March, charging $1 per barrel of crude on board. With even small tankers carrying around $100 million worth of oil, $2 million is more like a toll on the way to Long Island than a dealbreaker. The choice of USD stablecoins remains puzzling given the freeze function built into those tokens.
• FinCEN and OFAC issued joint proposed rules for stablecoin AML compliance, bringing payment stablecoin issuers officially under the Bank Secrecy Act umbrella. This is part of the massive Genius Act implementation effort that now spans NPRMs from the OCC, FDIC, NCUA, Treasury, FinCEN, and OFAC, with more still to come from the Federal Reserve Board and others. Most major issuers already operate under these requirements through enforcement precedent, but having it officially in regulation is the hunting license Fortune 500 treasuries need to adopt stablecoins without legal risk.
• Broadridge expanding their governance platform to support tokenized securities on a dedicated Avalanche L1, with Galaxy as the first customer for on-chain proxy voting. Broadridge already processes $8 trillion in assets per month and dominates investor communications. Anyone who's ever received hundreds of pages of incomprehensible proxy materials by mail knows the current system is broken. On-chain voting makes eligibility transparent, votes verifiable, and opting out painless.
• OCC conditionally approved Coinbase's stablecoin trust charter. The national trust bank charter gives Coinbase a single federal regulator in place of its patchwork of state money transmitter licenses. It's conditional, meaning Coinbase still needs to build out compliance systems and pass reviews before final approval, but it's a major step toward federally regulated digital asset custody.
• Franklin Templeton acquired 250 Digital and launched Franklin Crypto as their dedicated crypto subsidiary. The deal brings in crypto veterans Christopher Perkins and Seth Ginns from CoinFund's liquid strategies team. Part of the acquisition will be paid using BENJI tokens tied to Franklin's on-chain U.S. Government Money Fund, an experimental step toward using tokenized assets to settle M&A.

Tweet of the week

"@Coinbase has received conditional OCC charter approval. We're not becoming a bank, it's a trust company. We're bringing the infrastructure of crypto under federal regulatory oversight."
-- @brian_armstrong (Brian Armstrong)

Rates, Iran, and the First Tokenized IPO

Johnny and Charlie dive deep into Europe's surprise first tokenized IPO, discuss the implications of Iranian crypto tolls in critical shipping lanes, and break down the ongoing Genius Act implementation across multiple federal agencies. They also explore Broadridge's move into on-chain proxy voting, speculate about potential token-to-equity migrations as the industry matures, and debate whether on-chain lending rates are too low after Luca Prosperi's analysis on Dirt Roads. The episode is available below and we've summarized it for you here.

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