SEC advances an exemption for 24/7 tokenized stock trading
Tether passes its first audit, publishes nothing
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE
Robinhood's head of product on 200M transactions in 30 days
Tempo wires yield around the stablecoin interest ban
Securitize's first public quarter
Coinbase's Abu Dhabi license; Circle's cirBTC; Robinhood's retail private-market fund
REGULATION / TOKENIZATION
SEC Advances Exemption That Could Allow 24/7 Tokenized Stock Trading
Two SEC actions on tokenized securities landed this week:
The Commission is advancing an "innovation exemption" for tokenized listed securities, a framework Chair Paul Atkins says would let market participants run compliant onchain trading while long-term rules get written. Bloomberg reported it could open the door to 24/7 trading of stock tokens.
So far the exemption exists in speeches. Atkins said the SEC was "on the cusp" of releasing it in April and called it "forthcoming" in May, both times speaking for himself, with no legal form, date or conditions published. SIFMA has already asked for notice-and-comment plus investor limits, transaction caps and duration limits.
The relief lets FOBXX, the $726.6 million fund whose shares live on Stellar as BENJI, work as an internal cash vehicle without forcing its digital ownership record into custody rules written for paper certificates. The conditions read like the new plumbing manual: a segregated wallet per fund, daily reconciliation, three independent checks a year, two of them unannounced.
Our take
The tokenization regime taking shape in Washington is a stack of carve-outs: an exemption promised here, a staff letter granted there, each narrower than a rule and each revocable. Franklin's relief binds staff to Franklin's facts alone, and Atkins's framework remains a speech until the Commission votes on text. US market structure has started this way before — alternative trading systems ran on exemptive relief for years before Reg ATS made them a category.
STABLECOINS
Tether Passes Its First Audit and Publishes Nothing
Chief financial officer Simon McWilliams put the audited result at $6.814 billion in reserves above liabilities, $476 million above the BDO attestation for the same date; the two rest on different frameworks, US GAAP against IFRS. KPMG physically counted every gold bar, per the announcement, checking $17.45 billion in precious metals alongside $8.43 billion in bitcoin and $17.04 billion in secured loans.
Tether's cushion has also thinned since the audited date; equity of $4.11 billion at June 30, down from $8.23 billion at the end of March, with its own tables showing a negative $3.171 billion financial result for the half.
Our take
The milestone is real. "No auditor will touch it" was the oldest line against Tether, and it died Thursday. But the deliverable of an audit is the statements, and what shipped was a press release; an audit you cannot read works like an attestation with better letterhead.
THIS WEEK'S INTERVIEW
Robinhood Crypto's Head of Product on 200M Transactions in 30 Days
Robinhood's Head of Product Reveals How Robinhood Chain Hit 200M Transactions in 30 Days
Seong Lee, head of product at Robinhood Crypto, joins Chris Storaker on Robinhood Chain's first month: 200 million transactions in 30 days, stock tokens engineered to stay redeemable even if Robinhood disappears, and the insured DeFi lending behind the app's yield product. Five weeks ago our lead was the chain's memecoin-heavy first week; this is the answer from the person who runs it.
Tempo launched Tempo Earn on Aug. 12, letting fintechs pay rewards on idle stablecoin balances and keep part of the return, with payroll platform Deel first: its DLUSD runs Stripe's full stack (Bridge issuing, Privy wallets, Tempo settling) with Morpho vaults generating a promotional target of up to 4% APY.
The design routes around Section 4(a)(11) of the GENIUS Act, which bars issuers from paying holders yield; here the issuer never pays the holder, a lending protocol does. Regulators did see this pass-through coming; the OCC's proposed rule would presume yield paid through a "related third party" is the issuer's, the FDIC proposed matching text, and bank groups want both widened. The addressable pool is small for now, with about $29.9 million of stablecoins on Tempo.
Record average tokenized assets of $4.3 billion, up 16%, arrived alongside revenue down 5% to $14.4 million, tokenization revenue itself down 12%, operating costs up 56% and a net loss that widened to $21.7 million.
Shares fell about 16% after hours. It is the first print since SECZ listed on July 2, and the early verdict: tokenized assets are growing faster than anyone's ability to charge for them.
The FSRA permission clears Coinbase to arrange deals and custody assets for what it calls its international tokenization hub, with ADGM-issued tokens backed by underlying shares and carrying dividends and voting rights. Only "Vested Holders" vote or redeem, dividends auto-reinvest, and cashing out requires exactly the bank or brokerage account the wallet was supposed to replace.
Circle re-pitched cirBTC as neutral institutional collateral on Aug. 12, but the token has been live on Ethereum since June 8 and holds about 40 BTC against WBTC's 116,000 and cbBTC's 97,000. Bermuda-regulated issuance, custody at Circle National Trust and Chainlink Proof of Reserve in place of monthly attestations make it the most institutionally dressed bitcoin wrapper on the market. Distribution is the entire question.
RVII priced 8 million shares at $25, listing on the NYSE Aug. 13 with no minimums and no accreditation gate, holding 80 private companies with a Y Combinator tilt. The structure is a business development company charging 2% of net assets plus 20% of realized gains, with leverage permitted and some exposure held through illiquid vehicles carrying their own fees. Retail access to private markets keeps arriving in fee-heavy wrappers.
Rain acquired the merchant-wallet startup behind branded prepaid balances — the "Starbucks wallet" pitch — its second acquisition in nine months at a $1.95 billion valuation, with Ansa founder Sophia Goldberg becoming head of payments. The claimed prize is an unpublished Mastercard arrangement letting closed-loop balances spend on terminals merchants already own. Rain frames stored value with spend rules as the same primitive as the scoped cards it sells for AI agents.
On Monday, Fomo had ranked tenth in the US App Store’s Finance category, alongside mainstream banking, payments, and investing apps. That's insane for an app that couldn't even do $1M weekly volume in March.
What is it? Fomo.family is a social-first, self-custodial trading app. It's focused on memecoins and multi-chain, so it's on Robinhood, Solana, BSC, and more.
Why was it so successful? The social trading thesis.
It says that trading behavior is increasingly shaped by social discovery, community signals, and shared identity rather than isolated research and execution. The younger generation experiences trading and investing as a social activity, not something deeply professional that only experts did at their cubicles.
Everyone knew social + trading = holy grail. There were many attempts at it. Even the Base app from Coinbase was a stab at that niche.
But it remained elusive. Social and trading remained separate. Users discovered assets on X, Telegram, or TikTok. The trading happened on a different venue, maybe via a crypto wallet or via tradfi brokerage.
Fomo finally seemed to have cracked the code. It combines social and trading seamlessly.
This contributed to the viral growth of the application as well. Many KOLs who were publicly trading on the platform in front of their massive audience brought in a lot of users. (They're also accused of taking losses on their public account while profiting on side wallets, but I won't get into that topic here.)
Now, there's another important factor as well: venture backing.
Fomo raised a $75 million Series B less than two months ago. That's a lot of money. I suspect they're using that money to attract influencer traders to use their platform.
If you want exposure, fomo doesn't have any token. And I'm not a fan of memecoin trading, so I'm not buy any memecoin either.
Will this stay successful?
Honestly, I don't know. I've hated memecoins forever. Still, pump.fun has been making millions every week since forever. Clearly the market doesn't care about my thoughts on memecoins.
As long as memecoins continue to attract the volume, fomo will have a piece of it.
I'm still a bit old school: doxxing yourself while trading used to make no sense unless you want to dump on your followers.
So personally, I'm not trading on it.
News
BIP-110: The Failed Bitcoin Coup
Source: bip110.orange.surf
A group of Bitcoin developers tried to change Bitcoin's rules on August 8th. Thankfully, the coup only lasted two blocks.
What happened? The proposal was called BIP-110, or the Reduced Data Temporary Softfork. It wanted to restrict how much non-financial data (think Ordinals, inscriptions) could get crammed into Bitcoin blocks.
This fork was pushed by Bitcoin purists who thought stuff like Ordinals were a spam attack on the Bitcoin Network.
To activate, BIP-110 needed 55% of miners signaling support over a 2,016-block window. It got 2.53%. 51 blocks out of 2,016.
That didn't stop a small group of nodes from trying to enforce it anyway. At block 961,632, nodes running BIP-110 started rejecting any block that didn't signal for the change. Everyone else kept mining Bitcoin like normal.
That's called a fork. Two different sets of rules, two different "Bitcoin networks."
The BIP-110 chain only managed to produce two more blocks. Then it stopped. While the real Bitcoin chain kept moving, block after block, the breakaway chain sat there. Frozen.
Quick 80/20 on why it froze:
Bitcoin's mining difficulty adjusts based on how much hash power is pointed at the chain. The BIP-110 chain inherited Bitcoin's full difficulty on day one, because it split off Bitcoin's live chain state.
But it had almost none of Bitcoin's hash power behind it. Only a tiny sliver of Bitcoin miners were mining the new fork. Without the hash power, miners of the new fork couldn't solve the difficulty problem that needed to be solved to create the next block.
According to the BIP110 Situation Monitor, the chain would need roughly six years to naturally re-adjust its difficulty down to something it could actually mine at a normal pace. It didn't fork Bitcoin. It built a treadmill nobody was running on.
Why other Bitcoin forks worked, and this one didn't
Bitcoin Cash forked off Bitcoin in 2017 over a block-size fight, and it's still trading today. BIP-110 died after two blocks. Why was it successful and not this?
At the technical level, Bitcoin Cash wasn't trying to become "the real Bitcoin." It forked into its own chain, with its own name, its own difficulty reset, its own exchange listings, its own miners who wanted to mine it. It didn't need Bitcoin's hash power to keep moving because it wasn't fighting for Bitcoin's hash power. It built something adjacent.
BIP-110 tried something much harder: hijack the existing chain's rules while keeping everything else (the name, the ticker, the difficulty, the assumption that this is "real" Bitcoin) exactly the same. It was trying to "upgrade" Bitcoin, similar to how Ethereum upgrades itself. It wasn't launching a new asset. It was trying to override consensus on the one that already existed, without the miners who actually run that consensus agreeing to it.
One approach asks for opt-in. The other tries to force a rule change from the outside and hopes the network follows. Miners didn't follow. So the "fork" failed.
Who actually controls Bitcoin?
Everyone who runs a node and mines BTC. Bitcoin network is a consensus made by miners & nodes.
Or, from another perspective, nobody controls Bitcoin. Not the developers who write the BIPs. Not the guy with the loudest Twitter account. Not even a coalition of nodes with a good argument.
Luke Dashjr, one of the main people pushing BIP-110, was a Bitcoin Improvement Proposal editor. He wasn't some random troll. He was inside the system, with real technical standing. He got removed as BIP editor days later, after other developers flagged conflicts of interest and how the proposal was pushed through.
Being right, or being powerful within Bitcoin's dev circles, still isn't enough. The only vote that counts is the one miners cast with hash power, and the one node operators cast by choosing which software to run.
That's the entire point of decentralization, and it's easy to forget until something like this happens. Anyone can propose a rule change. Anyone can even try to enforce it. But if the people running the machines don't support the change, the rule change won't happen.
Bitcoin didn't need any government to defend it. The decentralized set of miners following their incentives defended it. And it's why decentralization is valuable.
🚀 DeFi Catalysts
Gnosis Chain is voting on transitioning to an Ethereum L2 that will be part of the Ethereum Economic Zone. EEZ is expected to be live in 2027.
Ether.fi split weETH into a pure liquid-staking token and weETHs, a new liquid-restaking token powered by Symbiotic.
Zcash's ecosystem just got a new arm: Zcash Labs, an independent org built to handle institutional integration and seed new projects in the space.
xStocks launched five tokenized equities, NVDAx, SPYx, QQQx, SKHYx, and MUx, as native spot markets on Hyperliquid's HyperCore, bridged in via Chainlink's CCIP.
Pump.fun is reportedly offering FOMO's top traders a $20K signing bonus plus $30K a month to jump ship, on the condition they delete their FOMO accounts and stop trading on rivals like GMGN and Axiom entirely.
Galaxy Digital committed $50M to USHP, the first onchain asset tracking a US home-price index. The $55T housing market gets a token.
MetaMask launched Agent Wallet, a self-custodial wallet that lets AI agents trade DeFi on your behalf without holding your keys.
Trump Media killed its $6.4B CRO treasury deal with Crypto.com, along with a plan to bring prediction markets to Truth Social.
HKDAP, the Standard Chartered-backed Hong Kong dollar stablecoin, is live in beta for institutions and professional investors, with retail access potentially coming by year-end.
📊 Signal Check
Hyperliquid's HIP-3 markets crossed $4.1B in open interest for the first time, as traders pile into tokenized stocks and commodities instead of memecoins.
GSR finds nearly 70% of DAO treasury assets remain concentrated in native tokens. Most DAOs are sitting on a structural risk they haven't hedged.
a16z finds stablecoin-linked card spend hit $759M in July, up 2.5x year over year. USDC and USDT now make up 84% of that volume.
🚨 Rekt Report
Harmony confirmed an attacker minted 4 billion ONE tokens, 26% of total supply, crashing the price by over 30%.
BTCPay Server confirmed a critical flaw that let attackers steal Lightning node credentials and drain channels remotely, affecting every version before 2.4.2. Foundation, maker of the Passport wallet, confirmed its node got swept.
BitMart is winding down, and a market maker's co-founder is alleging insolvency over frozen withdrawals dating back to July 26.
📉 Down Bad
FlashTrade, the Solana perps platform, is winding down, citing a shrinking market and traders' fading risk appetite.
Fireplace, the pro trading terminal built on Polymarket, will stop supporting trading on August 15. Users have until September 30 to withdraw or migrate positions to Polymarket.
Ondo Finance is facing a messy succession fight. The late founder's mother is suing to oust CEO Ian De Bode and take control herself, after a board vote she orchestrated removed him last month.
Solana came within spitting distance of a halt after a bad route out of Teraswitch's Miami hub got propagated globally, taking out 28.83% of staked SOL.
Bitcoin Red Team, a volunteer team of 16 people working with AI agents, filed 4,962 security findings across 390 Bitcoin projects in about 30 hours. 720 of those were rated high or critical severity.
🪂 Airdrop Alpha
Solstice's Season 2 claims are live. Register before August 18 to lock in your vesting options, or lose them.
Konnex points farming is live ahead of its TGE. Max supply sits at 1B KNX, with 19.7% circulating at launch.
SHIFT closed out Season 1 points farming. The checker's live if you want to see what you walked away with.
Nado's weekly rewards pool is live, paying up to $100K in USDT0 to traders, split by maker/taker volume and open interest.
Variational's Trader Rewards Program splits $1M+ and 150K points among its top 10,000 perp traders. Referrals stack up to $15K on top.
📰 Industry News
MoneyGram's new Solana integration, Ramps, gives businesses one API for both directions of the cash-crypto conversion.
Bybit is suing North Korea and the Lazarus Group over the $1.5B hack, and has already secured a preliminary injunction freezing the stolen assets.
Russia's first comprehensive crypto law will take effect on September 1. Retail investors are capped at roughly $3,700 a year per intermediary; qualified investors face no limit.
Senate has a CLARITY Act vote scheduled for September 15. The market-structure bill has been pushed for later, and its passage has become more uncertain.
Wintermute joins Ripple, GSR, and Crypto.com in the crypto-market-maker-turned-broker-dealer club, after SEC and FINRA approval for its US entity. The line between crypto and TradFi keeps thinning.
DISCLAIMER: I'm NOT a financial advisor. This content is for education and information purposes only. Crypto and DeFi are risky and speculative. Please do your research before investing.
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