[███░░░░] Meeting with the SEC's Crypto Task Force

Welcome to the TAC's Progress Bar, where we combed through 233 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).

I spent last week in DC meeting with the SEC's Crypto Task Force and other divisions within the Commission. Tokenized Asset Coalition and the Digital Securities Initiative presented on how tokenized securities could potentially trade in DeFi environments and be used as collateral in decentralized lending protocols. The discussion centered on two parallel financial systems: the intermediated system (brokers, exchanges, FDIC, SIPC) that is mature and serves important functions, and the disintermediated system, DeFi, which may offer something economically interesting for users who want to self-custody their assets.

I even walked the staff through Aave as a live case study, where at the time of the meetings the borrow rate was a mere 100 basis points over the risk-free rate, to show how efficiently priced disintermediated finance can be. The conversations explored whether forms of limited relief could create careful, measured pathways for tokenized securities to interact with DeFi, without replacing or undermining the existing system. The staff we met with were curious, highly intelligent, and working around the clock to get ambitious things done. They want crypto to have clear rules that can actually be followed.

Honestly a 10/10 experience. I never thought I'd be giving such a stellar review to the government agency we've all been terrified of for a decade, but here we are. We discuss the implications in more detail on the podcast.

Meanwhile, the White House convened a meeting between banking committee members, crypto companies, and banking lobbyists to try to break the stalemate on the Clarity Act, specifically around the stablecoin yield question. Still deadlocked, but the White House is actively pushing to get it done.

📈 RWA market cap: Small contraction, holding around $24 billion
🏆 Biggest RWA winner: Syrup USDC added 10% to reach $1.4 billion
🏆 Biggest network winner: Avalanche C-Chain added 6% to reach $970 million

📈 Stablecoin market: Essentially flat
🏆 Biggest stablecoin winner: USD1 added a few hundred million to reach $5.3 billion (winner two weeks running)
🏆 Biggest network winner: Aptos added ~$2 million to reach just under $1 billion in stablecoins

📈 Onchain risk free rates:

• Short term treasuries (1m): 3.7%
• Aave / DeFi: 2.9%

Stories we're tracking this week

• Fidelity entered the stablecoin arena with FIDD on Ethereum. The strategic logic is straightforward: Fidelity manages trillions in retirement assets with massive amounts of cash sitting at rest. A stablecoin becomes another revenue line, especially if it finds its way into DeFi yield opportunities. At this point, if you're a financial institution of any scale and you haven't explored launching a stablecoin, you're behind.
• CME Group CEO Terry Duffy told a Morgan Stanley analyst on an earnings call that the exchange is exploring launching a "CME coin" on a decentralized network. Our best guess: a yield-bearing settlement token for CME's institutional customers, similar to what Figure did with Yield. The gap between earnings call musing and live token is enormous, but CME has been in blockchain longer than most.
• Ondo announced a perpetual futures trading platform at their summit in New York offering 24/7 trading of US stocks with up to 20x leverage, targeted at non-US traders. The platform accepts tokenized securities including OUSG and USDY as collateral, putting Ondo squarely in competition with Hyperliquid and Ostium in the RWA perpetuals space.
• Jupiter, Solana's dominant DEX, launched a global payments platform with virtual fiat accounts, USDC cards, and multi-currency on/off ramps, becoming the first decentralized exchange to make a serious play for the "everything app" throne. The decentralized everything app wars have officially started.

TAC Member Shoutouts: Congrats to our friends at: Avalanche (C-Chain up 6% in RWA TVL to $970M), Maple/Syrup USDC (up 10% to $1.4B), Fidelity for launching FIDD, and Ondo for shipping yet another major product at their summit.

And Now We Build

While markets are bleeding, the infrastructure buildout hasn't slowed down. Fidelity launched a stablecoin, CME's CEO dropped a "CME coin" bombshell on an earnings call, Ondo shipped perpetual futures, Jupiter pioneered DEX payments, and DeFi rates collapsed below the risk-free rate for the first time since the FTX era. Bear markets are when the real work gets done.

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

Stay ahead of the curve

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Until next time,

The TAC Team