Summer Doldrums and the Clarity Countdown

August is supposed to be quiet in crypto. It never really is. This week brought a sobering update on the Clarity Act's chances, a first-ever sovereign wealth fund tokenization, two major payments platforms going all-in on stablecoins, and Ondo quietly rewriting its entire chain strategy.

Market KPIs (brought to you by RWA.xyz)

📈 RWA market cap was up ~3% WoW to $36.9 billion
🏆 Biggest RWA winner: xDocs added ~$115M (nearly 50% increase to $380M total, with much of that growth on Solana)
🏆 Biggest network winner: Solana added $186M to reach $3.7 billion

📈 Stablecoin market cap was down ~0.5% WoW to $297 billion
🏆 Biggest stablecoin winner: AUSD (Agora) added $33M
🏆 Biggest network winner: Monad added $150M to reach $1.1 billion

📈 Onchain risk free rates:
Short term treasuries (1m): Flat WoW (tracking SOFR with ~30bp fee spread)
Aave / DeFi: Flat WoW (broadly in line with tokenized treasury yields)

New from RWA.xyz: Performance and Yield Charts Go Live

Before we got into the news, Charlie shared something that shipped literally the day before we recorded: a major overhaul of the RWA.xyz homepage. The site has always been the go-to for total RWA AUM, but the team has now pushed deep into performance and yield data. You can filter by asset class, look at three-month or year-to-date performance, and see a live SOFR comparison layered against the average yield of tokenized US treasuries. The gap between the two is almost always around 30 basis points, which is exactly what you'd expect from the average fee load across the funds they track.

There's also a net flows chart that Charlie mentioned was a direct request from large traditional finance institutions who just want to know, simply, who is winning. Who is adding AUM fastest? The chart answers that in about two seconds. It is clean, it is simple, and it is exactly what the buy side wants to see.

I tried building something like this animated net flows view myself using the RWA.xyz API a while back. Never got it clean enough to post. Charlie and the team just did it better. Congrats on shipping.

Hester Peirce Drops a Cryptic Parting Shot on Lending Protocols

During my hiatus last week, outgoing SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce published a statement titled "Headstands and Somersaults," which is nominally about crypto vaults and lending strategies. Peirce has been one of the most thoughtful and consistently supportive voices at the SEC for our industry, so when she drops something on her way out the door, you read it carefully.

Most of the piece is exactly what you'd expect: a methodical walkthrough of how vaults work, what goes into them, and what securities law considerations may apply. But buried in the middle is a single sentence that leapt off the page: "Lending strategies also can carry significant federal securities law implications that do not turn on the assets involved."

No detail. No elaboration. Just that sentence sitting there.

In the nerdy policy Telegram channels I'm in, people immediately started asking the obvious question: if you supply USDC into a lending protocol like Aave and earn a yield on that deposit, is that a securities transaction? The asset itself (USDC) isn't a security. But Peirce's framing suggests the transaction structure might be what triggers scrutiny, not the underlying asset.

I don't have an answer. Nobody does right now. But when we refer to the "onchain risk-free rate," even that framing carries more legal weight than we've historically acknowledged. Investing in Treasuries means investing in a security. Supplying into a lending protocol for yield... might be closer to that than the industry has wanted to admit. I think Peirce just mic-dropped a genuinely cryptic signal as she walks out of the building. We'll keep following it.

Clarity Act Update: The Most Bearish I've Been

I'll be honest with you. When I put together my Clarity Act dashboard back at the end of May, I set the Fourth of July as my target date for the bill to at least hit the Senate floor and get into the agenda. We are now 26 days past that target and Clarity still isn't on the calendar.

Senator Thune has been loading the Senate agenda with other priorities. Clarity needs 60 votes to clear. It doesn't appear to have them. The hard cutoff that most people have in mind is August 8th, which is literally one week from when we recorded this. If it doesn't move by then, it goes into summer recess and comes back in September against a full fall planning docket. Congress does its quarterly and annual planning in the fall. The odds of a crypto bill cutting the line are not good.

Polymarket had Clarity at around 25% likelihood of passage by end of 2026 when I pulled the data to prep for the episode. By the time Charlie and I started recording, it had dropped another 5 points.

The sticking points are still the ethics provisions around the Trump administration's crypto holdings (World Liberty Financial, the Trump meme coin, the Melania meme coin) and the question of whether stablecoin yield gets treated in a way that the banking industry can live with. The banking industry has largely come around on that last piece. The ethics fight is where it bogs down. And here's the additional complication: even if Republicans in the Senate eat the concessions needed to get to 60 votes, Trump could still veto it. So we could win the Senate and lose the war.

My honest take: if Clarity doesn't move in the next week, the odds probably fall into the single digits. I was keeping the hope alive right through last week. I've flipped. This is the most bearish I have felt about Clarity's passage since I started tracking it. That said, it's not over until it's over, and we'll keep monitoring.

(For what it's worth, Coinbase has a blocker screen in their app right now that prompts users to call their senator before entering the UI. That's tens of millions of users getting nudged. Good for them for trying.)

Ramp Launches Stablecoin Accounts for All Business Customers

Ramp has made stablecoin accounts generally available to all of its business customers. Any company on Ramp can now hold balances, earn rewards, pay vendors, and pay off their Ramp card, all in stablecoins. This is not a waitlist. It's live.

I want to be concrete about why this matters, because I've lived this problem. Last year, I took TAC member dues onchain. People could pay via wire or USDC. Every USDC payment was a multi-step nightmare: test transaction, real transaction, gas costs, dragging inflows out of a multi-sig, copy-pasting into accounting software. The Circle dashboard, which is what most people end up using for this workflow, is not a joy to operate and doesn't integrate with standard bookkeeping tools.

Charlie had an even better story: Ramp received roughly $80K in a USDC payment once, the sender used the wrong token standard (V2 instead of V3), and Circle's support team told them there was nothing they could do. They ended up emailing the CEO directly to get it resolved.

Ramp solves all of this by wrapping stablecoin operations into the same interface that already syncs with your accounting software. International payouts become cleaner. Crypto-adjacent companies like RWA.xyz get a much smoother onramp. I'm currently on Mercury at TAC, and I'm actively considering a switch.

Visa Launches VSP with Stablecoin Minting

Visa has introduced the Visa Stablecoin Platform (VSP), which now includes the ability for businesses to actually mint their own stablecoin. They're launching alongside Open USD, which we've covered previously on the show. The platform also includes wallet-as-a-service infrastructure.

Honestly? This sounds a lot like Bridge for the issuance layer and Privy for the wallet layer. Which, given the connection to Open USD and Stripe's history with these players, wouldn't actually surprise me if some of this is powered commercially by those exact services. I have zero information confirming that. Zero. But the architecture rhymes.

The broader observation is that Visa is a massive ship that moves slowly, and dropping all of this in a single press release, stablecoin minting, wallet infrastructure, a new platform brand, is significant. They're clearly playing catch-up to Stripe's pace, and they know it. Charlie put it cleanly: every Visa stablecoin announcement seems to lag Stripe by a few months. That's a real dynamic.

Securitize Completes Full RIA Registration

Securitize announced that they have fully registered as a Registered Investment Advisor under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. They previously operated as an Exempt Reporting Advisor, which is a lighter-touch version that caps you at roughly $120 million in AUM before you have to upgrade. Now there's no cap.

What this actually unlocks is the ability to build and manage separately managed accounts at scale. That means if Securitize has a major distribution partner, they can now carve out a dedicated, compliant account structure for that partner and their end clients, at any size. They can also construct new investment strategies more freely: mixed asset products, themed funds, you name it. (I half-jokingly floated a "Guns and Gold Fund" as an example of the kind of thing they could now actually build and distribute.)

When you stack this on top of what Carlos and the Securitize team have already assembled, an ATS, a broker-dealer, a transfer agent that tokenizes assets, and a fund administration business that is both their most boring and their most reliable revenue line, they now have a complete regulatory toolkit. Any regulated financial activity in the US, they can do it. This feels like one of the last pieces of the puzzle.

The market didn't care. The stock was down on the week. But long-term, this is a really significant move.

Charlie also flagged a separate report that Ondo is exploring acquisitions of wealth tech and wealth advisory businesses, which puts them on a similar full-stack trajectory. And I'll put a bug in the ear of anyone racing to build that full stack: trust companies are currently trading at something like 20x forward earnings multiples on acquisitions, because trust company customers have essentially zero churn. The only time a client leaves a trust company is if they or their trust company go out of business. Once one of these tokenization platforms acquires a trust company, the rest will follow. I'd watch for that move from Figure, Securitize, or Ondo next.

OCC Denies Wise's National Trust Bank Application

The OCC has denied Wise (formerly TransferWise) its application for a national trust bank charter under the Genius Act framework. This appears to be the first denial under that regime. The basis: longstanding AML and CFT deficiencies at Wise US, resulting in a $4.2 million fine for Bank Secrecy Act violations.

This is a cautionary tale that I think applies broadly to anyone building in the payments space. The way you scale a payments business fast is typically by operating in high-risk corridors, cross-border, high-velocity, gray-area. And that means your compliance posture is under elevated scrutiny whenever a regulator looks closely. Wise is an OG in this space. They've been around forever. And yet when the OCC came looking, the AML program wasn't clean enough to support a charter application.

The message to anyone with ambitions of eventually getting a charter, an MTL portfolio, or any kind of regulatory stamp of approval: listen to your chief compliance officer from day one. Your terminal state depends on having good hygiene along the way. Shortcuts in year two become rejections in year six.

Mubadala Tokenizes a Private Markets Strategy via Cayo

Mubadala Capital, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund with $430 billion in AUM, has tokenized a private markets strategy through Cayo (formerly Libre). The fund is live on Base, Solana, and Sui. Coinbase has taken the first investor position, putting the exposure directly on their balance sheet.

This is the first time a sovereign wealth fund has tokenized a strategy, and it matters a lot. In the survey I ran a few months ago for TAC, sovereign wealth funds came up repeatedly as the most sought-after category of demand-side capital for tokenized assets. Everyone in this industry is trying to get a SWF interested. Mubadala is one of the most prestigious names on that list.

Working at Tradable, I spent time trying to generate interest from sovereign wealth funds in the deal flow we were producing. The challenge isn't capital with these institutions. They generate more capital than they can deploy into high-quality opportunities. Their problem is allocation velocity: finding enough good places to put it fast enough. Tokenization helps with that. Mubadala is clearly starting to see it that way too.

Ondo Pivots from L1 to Execution Layer (and Perps Are the Reason)

About a year and a half ago, Ondo announced Ondo Chain, framed as a dedicated Layer 1 blockchain. This week, they announced a significant reframe: instead of a full L1, they're now building what they're calling an execution layer, a decentralized architecture using Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) for clearing and settlement. The first use case is Ondo Perps, their perpetuals product.

The timing is excellent. Hyperliquid has been on an absolute tear, and Trade XYZ, which specializes in RWA-based perpetual markets on Hyperliquid, is now seeing more volume on its RWA perps than on its crypto ones. SK Hynix perps have traded $1.7 billion in volume with $600M in open interest. The S&P 500 perp has $550M in open interest. Samsung, Brent Oil, WTI, Micron, these products are generating hundreds of millions in open interest and billions in volume. It is genuinely staggering.

Ondo plugging into that narrative with their own infrastructure play is smart. What I also noticed reading through the architecture is that it rhymes with Canton Network in certain ways. Canton is powered by Broadridge and money markets; Ondo is coming from the crypto-native perps direction. But both are building decentralized, permissioned execution environments for regulated assets. Haseeb from Dragonfly had a line a while back about how crypto needed more Canton and Canton needed more crypto. Ondo might be the answer to that framing, arriving from the crypto side.

One caveat: TEEs and secure enclaves have a meaningful track record of vulnerabilities. The bar to call something a "secure enclave" is lower than many people realize, as anyone who sat through an early Bitcoin cold storage demo knows. Ondo almost certainly has world-class security spend behind this. But the debate between TEE-based and consensus-based settlement is legitimate, and it will play out in public. Charlie flagged that modern AI tools are actually making secure enclave vulnerabilities easier to find, not harder, which is a real concern worth watching.

Either way: Ondo's token is up 35% in the last month. The market voted.

Shoutouts

Congrats to the Obligate team, Benedict and crew, on launching their strategy. They've been on a shipping tear lately and it's great to see them getting product out into the world.

Watch or listen to the full episode on Spotify.