There was a version of this story...told many moons ago that gets told as a prediction. Some future moment when the old guard of finance finally meets crypto on equal footing, when the suits and the degens find common ground, when a BlackRock executive and a DeFi protocol share the same balance sheet. Well that story is now pretty outdated...it's no longer some vision of an oracle peering into a crystal ball. We are already living in it. The future is here.

 

What we are seeing happen in global finance with tokenization is not some pilot program or a hedge. It is a structural transformation, and it is accelerating faster than most people outside of these two worlds seem to understand. Wall Street is no longer on the outside looking in, just dipping their toes in, to test the water. They have taken the plunge.

 

The Old System Was Always Broken

Here is something traditional finance never really wanted to say out loud: the infrastructure holding it together is ancient, slow, and held up largely by institutional inertia. Settlements that take days. Liquidity locked to six-and-a-half-hour trading windows. Layers of intermediaries, each one clipping a fee, each one adding time. For the largest players, those inefficiencies were baked into the cost of doing business. For everyone else, especially retail investors in markets outside the U.S., they were just walls.

 

Blockchain does not fix all of this overnight. But it offers something that legacy systems fundamentally cannot: a shared, programmable, real-time record of ownership that does not require three middlemen to reconcile. The World Economic Forum, in its 2025 report on asset tokenization, described the transition as potentially the next major phase in the development of financial market architecture, drawing a comparison to the shift away from paper certificates in the 1960s. That is not a crypto inside touting to his followers on X. That is the WEF stating how tokenization could transform finance. 

 

When even the most establishment-facing institutions are framing this as a generational infrastructure shift, it's probably worth paying attention to.

 

The Institutions Are Not Coming. They Are Here.

BlackRock has a tokenized fund on Ethereum. JPMorgan launched a second tokenized money market product backed by U.S. Treasuries. Fidelity brought its own Digital Interest Token on-chain. Franklin Templeton has been quietly building its tokenized money market fund, BENJI, across multiple blockchains for years. These are live products managing real capital. 

 

The total market for tokenized real-world assets crossed $75 billion in 2025. Projections from market analysts put the long-term ceiling at $18.9 trillion by 2033, and some estimates, citing the total addressable market of traditional finance, go much higher. Larry Fink has publicly stated, more than once, that he believes every financial asset can eventually be tokenized. When the CEO of the world's largest asset manager says that with conviction, the rest of the industry listens.The total crypto market sits at just shy of $2.6 trillion right now, to add some perspective to the type of volume tokenization can bring to the space.

 

And the whole idea behind this is not ideological. It is practical. Blockchain cuts settlement time, removes redundant intermediaries, enables fractional ownership, and allows assets to be composable across different financial products. For institutions moving hundreds of billions, those efficiency gains compound into something very significant, very quickly.

 

xStocks and the Part Where It Gets Really Interesting

Tokenized treasuries and money market funds are the institutional on-ramp. But the development that best captures where all of this is truly heading is xStocks, and it is worth understanding why it matters as much as it does.

 

Launched in June 2025 by Backed Finance, a Swiss RWA issuer, xStocks put more than 60 fully collateralized U.S. equities on Solana as SPL tokens. Apple. Tesla. Nvidia. Amazon. Each one backed 1:1 by real shares held under regulated custody. Not synthetic. Not a derivative. The actual stock, on-chain. Available the same day on Kraken and Bybit to users in over 185 countries, and within hours, live across Solana's DeFi ecosystem on Raydium, Jupiter, and Kamino.

 

The numbers since launch have been hard to argue with. Over $25 billion in total transaction volume. More than 80,000 unique on-chain holders. The platform has since expanded to 100 fully backed listings, and xStocks recently launched xChange, a unified execution layer for tokenized equities running 24/5 across Ethereum and Solana with atomic settlement built in. And we'll go back to the numbers. xStocks is amazing. It's done over $25 billion in volume. But daily stock market volume just in the U.S. is roughly $500-700 billion. Daily. Just in the U.S. Starting to get the big picture here? The much, much bigger picture?

 

What makes this genuinely different from everything that came before it is composability. With a brokerage account, you own a stock and that is more or less the end of the story. With xStocks inside Solana's DeFi ecosystem, you can use Nvidia as collateral in a lending protocol, provide liquidity with Apple against a stablecoin, or swap Tesla for SOL without touching a broker, a clearinghouse, or a trading window. That kind of programmable financial infrastructure does not exist in traditional markets. It simply never has.

 

Who This Actually Opens the Door For

For investors in the U.S., this is interesting. For investors everywhere else, it is potentially transformative. Access to U.S. equity markets has historically required meeting regulatory hurdles, working through licensed brokers, and navigating banking infrastructure that many parts of the world simply do not have. xStocks changes that math entirely. Trading starts at one euro. Dividends reinvest automatically. No broker required. No minimum account size. Just a wallet and a connection.

 

Franklin Templeton's partnership with Kraken, announced in early 2026, is another data point worth noting here. The two are exploring on-chain versions of Franklin's financial products, including tokenized stocks, yield instruments, and compliant custody solutions. A legacy asset manager and a crypto exchange building joint infrastructure is the kind of thing that a few years ago would have sounded like a very optimistic projection. Now it is a press release.

 

The Narrative Has Shifted. Permanently.

Crypto spent a long time fighting to be taken seriously by traditional finance. That fight is over, and crypto won it on the merits. What is replacing it is something more interesting: a negotiation over what the merged system actually looks like, who controls it, and how fast it scales.

 

The regulatory environment is improving. Interoperability between chains is being worked out. Liquidity in tokenized asset markets is growing month over month. The WEF framed the barriers as real but solvable, pointing to legacy infrastructure integration, inconsistent global standards, and cross-chain friction as the remaining friction points. None of those are permanent problems. They are engineering and coordination challenges, and the talent and capital now focused on solving them is enormous.

 

The General Manager of xStocks said it about as cleanly as it can be said: the question is no longer whether equities belong on-chain, but how fast they can be scaled. With 100 listings and $25 billion in volume already behind the platform, the model is proven. The next stage is expansion to every major U.S. equity and, eventually, global equities across international markets.

 

That is not a roadmap for some distant future version of crypto. That is the roadmap for the next few years. And if the last twelve months are any indication, it will probably move faster than anyone is currently projecting, including myself. As bullish as I am on all of this, I have a feeling that the transition to tokenize the world will be bigger than anything I could ever imagine.

 

THORChain, the decentralized cross-chain liquidity protocol that enables asset swaps between blockchains, has paused trading on its platform following reports by security researchers, including ZachXBT and PeckShield, that the platform was exploited for more than $10 million.

 

 

Following alerts from security researchers, THORChain halted all trading activities, citing abnormal and suspicious behavior it had detected. According to the team, one of its six Asgard vaults was compromised, resulting in a loss of approximately $10 million.

 

However, the team said in a post on X that user funds were safe and that only protocol-owned funds were affected.

 

 

“Investigation is still ongoing to determine the root cause. Contributors are actively working on the issue and we will report updates as we progress toward a solution,” the team said.

 

“We are asking all node operators to immediately review their infrastructure, hosts, key management systems, and operational security for any signs of compromise or abnormal behavior, and to report anything suspicious in Discord.”

 

Following the team's confirmation of the exploit, RUNE, the native crypto asset of THORChain, fell by nearly 15%, wiping out more than $27 million in market capitalization. Its market capitalization dropped to around $182 million. At the time of writing, RUNE was trading at $0.50, down 13.8% from its pre-hack price of $0.58.

 

Latest of Several Attacks

This is not the first time THORChain has been exploited by attackers. In 2021, it suffered three separate exploits, resulting in losses of over $16 million.

 

In the first exploit, it lost approximately $350,000 due to a vulnerability in the way the protocol handled ERC-20 deposits. In the second exploit, which occurred just one month after the first, THORChain suffered losses of between $4.9 million and $8 million. In the third exploit, the protocol lost about $8 million due to a refund logic vulnerability.

 

The THORChain exploits are among the latest and largest of the 11 decentralized finance exploits recorded this month. Exploits in decentralized finance remain widespread, with the previous quarter recording more incidents than the first quarter of 2025.

 

 

Payward, the parent company of the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, has partnered with Franklin Templeton, the leading global investment management company, bringing traditional financial products on-chain.

 

The partnership, which aims to converge traditional finance and digital asset markets and expand the utility of tokenized assets, leverages Franklin Templeton’s decades of experience as a global investment manager and leader in the tokenization space, alongside Payward’s crypto-native trading, custodial, and on-chain infrastructure.

 

Since tokenization is at the center of the partnership, the companies will explore launching several new actively managed investment strategies on xStocks, Payward’s tokenized asset platform. As a result, the two companies are expected to introduce tokenized yield-focused products and equities available to institutional clients through Kraken’s Prime and over-the-counter services. To offer the best investment experience, these tokenized products will be transparent, flexible, and programmable.

 

“Payward and Franklin Templeton are building toward a model of finance where the distinction between traditional assets and digital infrastructure no longer holds,” said Arjun Sethi, Co CEO of Payward and Kraken.

 

“The convergence between these two worlds is only going to deepen, and what collaborations like this one unlock is a new class of products that would not have been possible even three years ago: assets that carry the credibility of multi-decade managers and the programmability of digital infrastructure.”

 

BENJI Integration to Follow

Part of the partnership plans will involve integrating BENJI into Kraken's infrastructure. BENJI is a digital token created by Franklin Templeton that represents ownership of, or shares held by, an investor in a regulated money market fund. It is what investors actually hold and trade on-chain.

 

By integrating BENJI into Kraken, Franklin Templeton makes it easier for institutions to access and use the BENJI money market fund within its trading and custody systems, increasing capital efficiency and the fund's utility.

 

“The focus should be on making on-chain assets more functional for the full range of market participants once they are there,” said Sandy Kaul, Head of Digital Assets and Innovation at Franklin Templeton.

 

“By expanding the utility of BENJI and exploring new tokenized products, our work with Payward reflects the growing need to serve both digital native and institutional customers with solutions built for how capital increasingly moves on-chain.”

 

 

KRWQ, a stablecoin pegged to the South Korean won, is expanding to Solana following a recent announcement from IQ, the company behind the stablecoin.

 

The expansion, according to IQ, is aimed at enhancing KRWQ support for various Korean won-denominated trading applications on Solana, including perpetual futures, on-chain foreign exchange markets, arbitrage strategies, cross-margin trading, and other institutional and algorithmic trading systems and applications.

 

 

“The Korean won is a major global currency with substantial activity in offshore derivatives markets, yet it has remained largely inaccessible in crypto native trading systems,” IQ said in a statement to reporters. “KRWQ allows market participants to trade, hedge, and deploy capital using Korean won liquidity directly on chain.”

 

Regarding its decision to launch KRWQ on Solana, the IQ team cited Solana’s low latency and deep liquidity as key reasons for selecting the network.

 

“Solana provides the performance and ecosystem depth needed to scale KRW liquidity on chain,” said Dave Shin, chief operating officer of KRWQ. “We are seeing clear demand for non-USD trading pairs, particularly in derivatives.”

 

As KRWQ’s adoption continues to grow among both retail and institutional users, IQ expects increased usage of the stablecoin across a wide range of applications, including cross-border settlements and advanced trading systems.

 

About the KRWQ stablecoin 

KRWQ is a stablecoin developed by IQ in collaboration with Frax Finance, a notable decentralized finance project. It was created with the main goal of bringing the Korean won (KRW) onto the chain.

 

By enabling 24/7 trading, instant settlement, and low-cost on-chain transactions, KRWQ addresses major inefficiencies in offshore KRW trading, increasing demand for and use of KRW in global payments and decentralized finance, while reducing dependence on US dollar-pegged stablecoins.

 

Since its launch in October 2025, KRWQ has rapidly gained traction as the first on-chain settlement layer for Korean won trading, expanding beyond Base, its initial deployment chain, and going live on Fraxtal, Codex, Morph, and Hydrex. KRWQ was also recently listed on EDX Markets, an institutional-focused cryptocurrency exchange, across spot and perpetual futures.

 

KRWQ now has a spot trading volume of nearly $40 billion and a Non-Deliverable Forward (NDF) market worth about $60 billion.

 

 

Jupiter, the Solana-based decentralized finance platform, has partnered with crypto asset manager Bitwise Asset Management and decentralized lending infrastructure protocol Fluid to launch an Ethena (USDe) focused lending market on the Jupiter platform.

 

The partnership will see the launch of an institutional grade USDe lending market on Jupiter’s lending platform, with Bitwise serving as the curator of the new market, setting risk parameters and overseeing operations, while Fluid powers the lending infrastructure.

 

 

By assigning USDe lending curation responsibilities to Bitwise, a traditional finance asset management firm, Jupiter aims to achieve institutional grade credibility and easier access to large scale institutional capital, with the potential for the market to grow into the billions of dollars.

 

“USDe is an institutional grade savings product built for scale. By combining Jupiter Lend's advanced lending infrastructure with Bitwise's asset management expertise, we have created an efficient USDe market ready for DeFi and institutional adoption,” said Guy Young, founder and chief executive officer of Ethena Labs.

 

Before now, institutional capital and DeFi lending mostly operated separately. However, with the launch of this USDe lending market for institutional access, all entities involved, including TradFi and DeFi participants, can work together: Jupiter providing the lending market, Bitwise curating the market, Ethena supplying the asset, and Fluid powering the infrastructure.

 

“Now more than ever, it is imperative that we take DeFi risk seriously. That is precisely why we are excited to partner with Bitwise, who bring both the expertise and the institutional credibility needed to help scale on chain lending from a niche into the default way to do finance,” said Kash Dhanda, chief operating officer of Jupiter.

 

“And by working with Ethena and Fluid, two of the most technically innovative teams in the space, we are thrilled to deliver a product experience like no other.”

 

Institutions Double Down on DeFi

With DeFi growing rapidly and its TVL reaching new highs of around $150 billion to $225 billion in 2025, there has been an increase in the number of institutions entering and doubling down on DeFi.

 

Institutional capital reportedly made up around 11.5% to 20% of DeFi volume or lending TVL in parts of 2025, with institutions like BlackRock, Bitwise, and JPMorgan Chase doubling down on real world asset tokenization and stablecoins.

 

 

The Ethereum Foundation has appointed Will Corcoran, Kev Wedderburn, and Fredrik as co-leads of its protocol cluster, following the departure of some of its prominent engineers.

 

“While Barnabé and Tim are moving on from the Ethereum Foundation soon, and Alex Stokes will be on sabbatical, the Protocol cluster, as it exists today, is in large part due to their work. Under their coordination, Protocol launched tracks and helped to ship Fusaka to mainnet in December 2025, introducing PeerDAS and raising the mainnet gas limit on the path to 200M and beyond,” the foundation wrote in a blog post.

 

“Tim, Barnabé, and Alex shaped Protocol in ways that will outlast their time as cluster leads. We are grateful, and we are looking forward to what each of them takes on next.”

 

What to Know About the New Co-Leads

Will Corcoran is a research coordinator within the protocol, with experience working on zkVM proving, post quantum consensus, and the Fast Confirmation Rule. He has also facilitated numerous community calls, breakout rooms, and in-person protocol events, giving him a deep understanding of how the protocol works.

 

Kev Wedderburn leads the zkEVM team in the protocol and has experience working at the intersection of research and engineering, while Fredrik leads the protocol’s security and has been deeply involved in cross-cluster work.

 

About the Protocol Cluster 

The protocol cluster, often called the protocol, is the core group within the Ethereum Foundation responsible for designing, researching, coordinating, and developing Ethereum's base layer, or L1, blockchain protocol. After its rebranding in 2025, it had one goal: to tackle Ethereum's biggest challenges.

 

To address these challenges, the protocol prioritizes three main areas: enhancing Ethereum's scalability, improving user experience, and strengthening the security and resilience of the Ethereum blockchain network.

 

The protocol also oversees several technical domains, including AllCoreDevs meetings, cryptography, prototyping, security, zkEVM, and peer-to-peer systems. It is currently working on Glamsterdam, the next major Ethereum L1 upgrade, which will introduce features such as enshrined proposer builder separation, known as ePBS under EIP 7732, and gas repricing to support higher gas limits.

 

The restructuring of the Ethereum protocol comes shortly after key figures in the foundation, Josh Stark, last month, and Tomasz K. Stańczak, more recently, left the protocol. Other developers within the foundation have also departed to join other Layer 1 blockchain projects such as Tempo.

 

 

JPMorgan Chase filed paperwork Tuesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to launch a new tokenized money market fund on Ethereum, marking the bank's second push into blockchain-based investment products and the latest signal that Wall Street is serious about putting traditional finance on-chain.

 

The proposed fund, called the JPMorgan OnChain Liquidity-Token Money Market Fund and carrying ticker JLTXX, would issue digital tokens on the Ethereum blockchain representing shares backed by short-term U.S. Treasuries, cash, and overnight repurchase agreements. The fund's underlying blockchain infrastructure would be operated by Kinexys Digital Assets, the bank's blockchain unit that was formerly known as Onyx.

 

Built for the GENIUS Act

What makes this filing a bit different from typical money-market launches is who it's designed for. JPMorgan has structured JLTXX specifically to satisfy reserve asset requirements under the GENIUS Act, the U.S. legislation aimed at bringing stablecoin issuers under a regulatory framework. In short, the fund is positioned as a yield-bearing reserve vehicle for stablecoin firms looking for compliant, on-chain Treasury exposure.

That's a strategically significant market. Stablecoin supply has surged past $303 billion as of May 2026, with a large chunk of that liquidity sitting idle in exchange wallets generating nothing. When a bank the size of JPMorgan launches a regulated, on-chain money market product, this changes the game for institutional stablecoin issuers.

 

BlackRock Moved First, Then JPMorgan Followed Days Later

Just days before JPMorgan's Tuesday filing, BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager overseeing roughly $14 trillion, submitted its own pair of SEC filings tied to tokenized Treasury products. One of those filings outlined the BlackRock Daily Reinvestment Stablecoin Reserve Vehicle, designed to hold cash and short-term Treasuries and issue what the firm is calling OnChain Shares. Another filing proposed adding an Ethereum-based tokenized share class to its existing $7 billion Select Treasury-Based Liquidity Fund, with BNY Mellon maintaining official ownership records on-chain using ERC-20 token standards.

 

BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has been vocal about this for a while. He's argued publicly that blockchain-based settlement can compress transaction cycles, enable round-the-clock trading, and add transparency to capital markets. The firm is now acting on this, and at scale. BlackRock's existing BUIDL fund already manages more than $2.5 billion across eight blockchain networks including Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche, and is increasingly being used as collateral across crypto markets.

 

A Market That Has Tripled in a Year

The broader tokenized real-world asset sector has crossed $30 billion in total value, more than tripling over the past twelve months. Tokenized U.S. Treasuries alone represent $14 billion of that, with Ethereum holding over $8 billion of the total. These aren't little numbers anymore.

 

Goldman Sachs and BNY Mellon have also announced tokenization initiatives in recent months. Just last week, JPMorgan's Kinexys platform joined Mastercard, Ripple, and Ondo Finance in completing the first cross-border, cross-bank redemption of a tokenized U.S. Treasury fund, settling the transaction on the XRP Ledger in under five seconds. This is another huge step... it's one thing to file an SEC registration, quite another to actually run a live settlement across borders in the time it takes to read this sentence.

 

The Race Is On

For context on how quickly this space is evolving, a Boston Consulting Group and Ripple joint projection estimates the tokenized asset market could reach $18.9 trillion by 2033. Whether or not that number proves accurate, the direction is pretty clear. Major banks are not waiting for the market to come to them.

 

JPMorgan seeded its first tokenized fund, the OnChain Net Yield Fund (MONY), with $100 million of its own capital after launching it through its $4 trillion asset management unit. JLTXX represents the bank's next step, this time aimed squarely at the emerging stablecoin compliance market rather than traditional qualified investors.

 

The filings from JPMorgan and BlackRock within days of each other are not a coincidence. Regulatory clarity, combined with the sheer scale of idle stablecoin liquidity looking for a compliant home, has created an opening. Wall Street is moving quickly to fill it, and the tokenization race is looking less like a crypto experiment and more like the next phase of institutional finance.

 

Stablecoin startup Boundary Labs is preparing to launch USBD, a “verifiable” institutional-grade stablecoin, following its most recent successful fundraising round.

 

The $2 million preseed funding round, which began last year, was led by Galaxy Ventures, with other investors, including First Block Capital and BlackWood, also participating in the round.

 

 

Following its recent fundraising success, the Boundary Labs team aims to create a stablecoin whose reserves are completely verifiable on-chain, including the stablecoin’s net asset value and protocol performance. This marks a sharp contrast with other stablecoins that depend on trust-based off-chain reporting and attestations.

 

“The Boundary protocol provides daily reporting on system state, including overcollateralization levels and real-time NAV calculations. USBD is engineered with explicit over-collateralization and delta neutral hedging to protect against market direction risk and volatility,” said Matthew Mezger, co-founder and CEO of Boundary Labs, about the USBD stablecoin.

 

Because trust is important for enhancing institutional adoption of USBD, especially for treasury management, collateral, and fiduciary use cases, Mezger said the team is building the entire USBD infrastructure with advanced smart contract code that moves the industry from monthly off-chain attestations to daily on-chain verification. By doing so, Boundary aims to transition from common trust-based stablecoin systems to a trustless one. 

 

“This shift provides the structural resilience and auditability required for safe, permissionless staking and institutional fiduciary use cases, effectively transforming stablecoins into robust financial infrastructure,” Mezger said.

 

Boundary Lab’s Yield-Generation Strategies

Unlike other yield-generating stablecoins, USBD will not be a yield-bearing stablecoin. Nevertheless, Boundary Labs will create sUSBD, a separate staked token that will enable institutional clients to earn yield from the protocol’s decentralized finance strategies.

 

The revenue generated by the protocol will be used to build treasury reserves, fund operations, and will also be distributed to sUSBD stakers through an on-chain allocation system. The reward system will be fully on-chain and available for users to track and audit.

 

To onboard early institutional clients, Boundary Labs is planning to launch a private placement campaign with the goal of reaching $100 million in total value locked (TVL). Both USBD and sUSBD will be launched on Ethereum.

 

 

Global crypto asset manager Bitwise will be taking full control of Superstate’s Crypto Carry Fund (USCC), a tokenized private fund that provides qualified purchasers with exposure to crypto-based strategies.

 

The announcement, made via a Bitwise press release, will see the asset manager transition into the role of investment manager of the fund, with the fund renamed the Bitwise Crypto Carry Fund. Although Bitwise will assume management of the fund, Superstate will continue to operate the fund’s on-chain infrastructure, ensuring no disruption during the transition process.

 

 

"Capital markets are moving on-chain. It's happening fast, and tokenized investment strategies are a core part of this platform shift," said Hunter Horsley, Bitwise CEO.

 

"Traditional and crypto native institutions are increasingly using tokenized funds to benefit from their 24/7 trading, utility in decentralized finance, transparency, and efficiency. We're thrilled to join Superstate's best-in-class infrastructure with Bitwise's track record in crypto asset management to continue to expand access to the full range of opportunities for investors in crypto."

 

This partnership between Bitwise and Superstate will see Bitwise deepening its presence in the tokenized fund market, with Superstate taking a step back from tokenized fund management to focus on FundOS, its platform used to manage on-chain tokenized funds.

 

The transition is expected to be completed by June 1, 2026, with the fund’s ticker USCC remaining unchanged, as well as its smart contract and token address.

 

USCC and the Tokenized Funds Market

USCC is Superstate’s tokenized private fund that provides qualified investors exposure to crypto basis and cash and carry trading strategies, allowing them to earn yield from the persistent premium of crypto futures prices over spot prices.

 

The fund currently has assets under management exceeding $267 million, with over $100 million of the fund’s assets being deployed across notable decentralized finance platforms, including Aave and Kamino. Investors include hedge funds, venture capital firms, high-net-worth crypto users, and blockchain protocols.

 

The tokenized funds market has also grown remarkably, with the global tokenized and real-world assets market reaching $33.5 billion. The market is projected to reach $18.9 trillion by 2031 and has attracted several notable traditional finance companies, including BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and JPMorgan. 

 

 

MoonPay is not slowing down. The crypto payments giant announced Monday the acquisition of Dawn Labs, an applied AI research startup focused on autonomous trading tools for digital asset markets. Alongside the deal, the company launched Dawn CLI, a product that lets users build and execute trading strategies using plain-English prompts. No coding background required.

 

The move pushes MoonPay deeper into what it calls the "agentic" layer of crypto, where AI systems can reason, plan, and now, apparently, trade on your behalf. It also adds another chapter to the company's broader infrastructure buildout, which has been accelerating through 2025 and into this year.

 

Plain English, Real Trades

Dawn Labs founder Neeraj Prasad, who now serves as Chief Engineer of MoonPay Labs, put it bluntly: until now, building a systematic trading strategy meant being a developer, a quantitative analyst, and a portfolio manager all at once. Dawn CLI collapses all of that into a single interface. You describe what you want, the system writes the code, and then it runs.

 

The platform is launching first on Polymarket, the decentralized prediction market that has seen explosive growth over the past two years, attracting traders betting on elections, sports results, economic data, and geopolitical events. Prediction markets have gone from a niche crypto experiment to a mainstream information layer, and tools to actually trade them systematically have lagged badly behind the demand. That's the gap MoonPay is targeting.

 

"We're starting with prediction markets because they are one of the fastest-growing sectors, and many traders in the space are underserved by existing tooling," Prasad said. Additional trading venues and asset types are on the roadmap for the coming months.

 

Infrastructure First Model

The Dawn Labs deal sits within a larger strategic context. Earlier this year, in February, MoonPay launched MoonPay Agents, a non-custodial software layer built on its developer-focused command-line interface that lets AI agents access crypto wallets, execute trades, perform cross-chain swaps, and off-ramp back to fiat, all autonomously. CEO and founder Ivan Soto-Wright described the thinking in stark terms: "AI agents can reason, but they cannot act economically without capital infrastructure. MoonPay is the bridge between AI and money."

 

The service works through a one-time KYC process, after which an agent can transact on behalf of the verified user within preset permissions. Wallets are non-custodial and stored on the user's device, not held by MoonPay. It also supports the x402 standard, a machine-to-machine payments protocol that has been gaining traction across the industry, with Stripe and Cloudflare both adding support in recent months.

 

A Broader Industry Shift

MoonPay is not alone in this push. Gemini launched its own agentic trading feature for AI agents back in April, and Coinbase, Stripe, and Amazon have each rolled out AI-compatible stablecoin payment rails in recent months. Solana and Google have made similar moves. The pattern is clear enough: major players across crypto and fintech are racing to build the financial plumbing that AI agents will need to operate as independent economic actors.

 

For MoonPay specifically, it sees this as a natural extension of what it already does. The company, founded in 2019, serves more than 500 enterprise clients and 30 million users globally. Its core business has always been connecting fiat payment systems to blockchains. Extending that to AI systems is, in some ways, the logical next step.

 

Prasad said the company does not view AI agents and human traders as separate customer bases. "We've been building MoonPay around four pillars: fund, tokenize, trade, and spend," he explained. "Our agentic products put that same stack in the hands of both humans and machines."

 

What Comes Next

Following the Agents launch in February, MoonPay unveiled a Ledger integration in March, allowing AI-initiated transactions to be signed on a hardware device, a notable security step for users wary of handing autonomous control to software alone. The Dawn CLI launch now adds an execution layer on top of that infrastructure, specifically aimed at traders who want strategy-building capabilities without the technical overhead.

 

Whether retail traders will warm to the idea of an AI agent placing bets on Polymarket on their behalf remains to be seen. But MoonPay is clearly positioning itself well ahead of that question. If the agentic economy arrives on the timeline its backers expect, the company wants to be the rails it runs on.

 

OpenTrade, an institutional-grade stablecoin yield platform used by fintechs and exchanges, has raised $17 million to scale its stablecoin yield infrastructure.

 

The capital was raised in a strategic funding round led by Mercury Fund and Notion Capital, with other investors including a16z Crypto, AlbionVC, and CMCC Global also participating in the round, bringing the total funds raised to more than $30 million.

 

 

As part of its expansion efforts, the new funding will be used to scale OpenTrade’s permissioned and permissionless blockchain infrastructure, as well as support the growth of its Curation+ investment services. The funding will also be used to expand OpenTrade’s engineering, asset management, and trading teams, while building a dedicated customer support team to serve its growing client base.

 

OpenTrade was initially designed to provide plug-and-play infrastructure that enables financial institutions, including fintechs, exchanges, and neobanks, to offer multicurrency dollar and euro-denominated stablecoin yield products without having to build their own investment, custody, or infrastructure systems.

 

However, as the stablecoin yield market expanded, companies began seeking additional capabilities. Asset issuers started looking for distribution channels through decentralized markets. Non-custodial wallets and platforms also began seeking ways to enable users to earn yield without directly handling funds, all without having to build stablecoin yield infrastructure or internal investment teams from scratch.

 

To meet this demand, OpenTrade expanded its infrastructure to include its permission protocol layer and Curation+ services. Curation+ is a suite of sophisticated vault curation services designed to create and manage complex investment strategies, removing the operational burden associated with yield generation.

 

This infrastructure, together with OpenTrade’s broader platform, is currently used by companies including Littio, Midas Kripto, and Glim to deliver stablecoin yield products without having to build infrastructure or investment teams from the ground up.

 

“As we grew, it became clear that our infrastructure could also serve non-custodial platforms, treasuries, and asset issuers that all need the same thing: a safe, scalable way to connect stablecoins to diversified yield strategies,” said David Sutter, OpenTrade’s CEO.

 

“This raise allows us to scale that infrastructure and support a much broader range of use cases without compromising on risk management or quality of execution.”

 

OpenTrade recently surpassed $200 million in total value locked, or TVL, after processing more than $250 million in transaction volume last year. The team expects this volume to reach $1 billion by the end of the year and has already processed more than $300 million in transaction volume this year.