Welcome to the TAC's Progress Bar, where we combed through 747 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).

The most important thing that happened in tokenization this week wasn't a clean win. It was a botched allocation that proved a thesis anyway.

When BitGet offered $13 million in SpaceX pre-IPO shares through its wallet, the allocation went 4x oversubscribed in 30 minutes on Solana. Then the bad news landed: xStocks didn't actually have the SpaceX allocation, and BitGet, Bybit, and Binance all had to walk it back. Users didn't get their shares.

But look at what the failure revealed. Tens of millions of crypto natives, sitting on capital, primed for risk, moved in minutes for a chance at the biggest IPO in history. That is a distribution channel. Wall Street spends decades and fortunes building access to retail demand like this. It already exists onchain, and it's hungry for the public markets cycle that's coming.

Now zoom out to what this IPO actually assumes. Pricing SpaceX near 100x sales isn't a bet on rockets. It's a bet that an entire space economy is about to be born and that SpaceX owns a meaningful slice of it. That economy can't run on five-day weeks, nine-to-five hours, and settlement systems that close on weekends. Commerce in space needs ownership records and payment rails that operate 24/7 with high resiliency across time and distance. It needs blockchains. The people who go to space will hold their shares onchain and get paid in instruments that move across networks, not through Friday-afternoon wires.

Whatever you think of the share price, this is the beginning. Tokenization is going to provide the financial infrastructure that pays the talent and finances the equipment required to will the space industry into existence.

A bunch of other stuff happened too. Metrics first, as always.

Market KPIs (brought to you by RWA.xyz)

📈 RWA market cap was down 1% WoW to $31.0 billion
🏆 Biggest RWA winner: JAAA added $240M (up to $664M, driven by Ethena's allocation of USDE backing into JAAA)
🏆 Biggest network winner: Solana added $150M (up to $2.8B)

📈 Stablecoin market cap was down ~1% WoW to $297.0 billion
🏆 Biggest stablecoin winner: USDGO added $140M (up to $450M)
🏆 Biggest network winner: Hyper EVM added $900M (up to $5.2B, third consecutive week as biggest chain winner)

📈 Onchain risk free rates:
Short term treasuries (1m): 3.59%
Aave / DeFi: 3.61% (essentially in lockstep with SOFR this week)

Stories we're tracking this week

• Mastercard announced always-on stablecoin settlement on Solana, bringing its network of 3.7 billion cards and 210-plus countries onchain for real-time settlement. This is one of the largest payment networks on earth making a concrete infrastructure commitment to onchain rails, not a pilot or a press release. Stablecoin settlement at Mastercard scale would represent a meaningful step toward the kind of institutional throughput that validates the broader onchain payment thesis.
• A16Z Crypto led a $355 million raise for Digital Asset, the developers of Canton Network. Canton has been building enterprise-grade permissioned blockchain infrastructure with serious financial institution adoption, and this raise reflects strong conviction that institutional blockchain rails are a durable and scalable business.
• Securitize received an SEC declaration of effectiveness for its SPAC registration statement, sponsored by Cantor Fitzgerald. The shareholder vote is set for June 29th with the merger expected to close shortly after. The ticker is SECZ, which may be the greatest ticker in the history of capital markets. This is a significant capital markets milestone for one of the core tokenization infrastructure players.
• Aave's Llama Risk governance proposal introduced a new multi-dimensional risk management framework that goes well beyond the market-simulation-only approach that failed during the Kelp DAO incident. The new framework adds continuous monitoring of operational, counterparty, and infrastructure risks for listed assets. As Charlie put it on this week's Podcast, we are speedrunning all the lessons of traditional finance. Turns out even in crypto, math and simulations alone aren't sufficient once the money gets big enough.
• Ethena allocated a portion of its USDe backing into JAAA, the Janus Henderson Anemoy tokenized treasury fund, contributing to JAAA's $240 million weekly gain. Ethena represents a second significant onchain buyer for tokenized treasuries alongside the Sky/MakerDAO ecosystem.
• BitGet offered $13 million in SpaceX pre-IPO shares through its wallet via a partnership with xStocks with the allocation going 4x oversubscribed in 30 minutes on Solana. The demand signal is real and worth watching as it signals degen capital is actively looking for a pivot to the public markets IPO cycle. Unfortunately, xStocks ultimately didn't actually have allocation and Bitget's program (along with other similar ones from Bybit and Binance) had to communicate bad news to users 😬.

Tweet of the week

"BREAKING: Mastercard is introducing always-on stablecoin settlement on Solana. 3.7 billion cards. 210+ countries. One of the largest payment networks on earth, now settling onchain."
-- @solana (Solana)

The Roadmap to $140 Trillion

This week on The First Trillion, Johnny and Charlie were joined by Adam Blumberg, CFP, co-founder of Protocol Wealth, a firm that advises crypto founders and foundations on asset allocation. Adam recently published a piece on the TAC Research Hub that reads like a product menu for any builder trying to unlock the RIA channel. The conversation covered why a genuinely bullish financial advisor still can't allocate client capital to tokenized assets (fragmented KYC, siloed reporting, inconsistent yield treatment, no standardized due diligence data), the BitGet SpaceX pre-IPO offering and what it signals about DGen capital pivoting toward public markets, and Aave's new risk framework as a case study in the speed at which DeFi is being forced to absorb TradFi risk management lessons. The episode is available below and we've summarized it for you here.

Wrappers Are 78% of Tokenized Assets

Tokenization has a dirty secret: 78% of tokenized assets are just wrappers, a digital facade bolted onto the same T+2 settlement, transfer agents, and intermediary stack the industry promised to disrupt. Benedikt Schuppli of Obligate makes the case that wrapping off-chain assets recovers almost none of the real prize, which is collapsing enforcement costs by originating debt natively onchain and moving the $100T+ debt market onto rails where the chain itself is the ledger. The number to watch is whether native issuance starts taking share over the next twelve months, or whether tokenization settles for being a better distribution channel rather than a rebuilt stack.

You can read his full thoughts 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