Exodus Movement Inc. (NYSE American: EXOD), a publicly traded financial technology company and developer of the Exodus wallet, has partnered with Ondo Finance to launch Exodus Markets, a platform for trading tokenized assets.

 

 

With Exodus Markets, users can now buy and sell more than 200 tokenized stocks, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and real-world assets directly in the Exodus wallet app on the Solana blockchain.

 

"Tokenized stocks are one of the most important developments in modern finance," said JP Richardson, CEO and co-founder of Exodus.

 

"For the first time, our customers can trade and hold tokenized equities with the same direct control and global access they expect from crypto. Exodus is becoming the front door to every asset you hold, without compromising on trust and control."

 

The launch of Exodus Markets aligns with Exodus’s goal of transforming from a custodial wallet into a full financial platform that allows users to trade, earn rewards, send, spend, and manage money.

 

As part of its efforts to become a comprehensive financial app, Exodus launched Exodus Pay, a self-custodial payment feature within the Exodus app that enables users to transact with digital assets, including stablecoins, for everyday purchases. The company also launched XO Cash, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar.

 

The Tokenization Space

The tokenization space, particularly real-world assets (RWAs), has experienced significant growth over the past 1 to 2 years. Excluding stablecoins, the tokenization sector grew from roughly $5 billion to $6 billion at the start of 2025 to $27 billion to $31 billion or more by mid 2026, representing an increase of more than 400% over a period of 15 to 18 months.

 

Several institutions are also entering this growing sector, with Bitget most recently launching Reality, its real-world asset (RWA) platform. Kraken has also launched xChange, an on-chain trading engine designed for trading tokenized equities. MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Blockchain.com, and Robinhood have also made strategic moves to enter the sector, partnering with RWA firms and rolling out tokenized assets and stocks.

 

Given the level of growth and adoption the real-world asset and tokenization sector has seen so far, several projections have been made regarding its future potential. The Boston Consulting Group and Ripple have projected that the sector could be worth more than $15 trillion by 2030.

 

 

Digital Asset, the firm behind the Canton Network, has closed a $355 million funding round led by a16z crypto, pulling in a sprawling cast of Wall Street names and at least one sovereign wealth fund along the way.

 

Digital Asset, the company quietly building out the plumbing for tokenized capital markets, has just pulled off one of the bigger raises in cryptos institutional corner this year. The firm announced Thursday that it closed a $355 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz's crypto arm, a16z crypto, which alone wrote a $100 million check. The size of the raise, and the names attached to it, say a lot about where smart money thinks blockchain infrastructure is headed next ... and it's not toward retail trading apps.

 

The round's backer list reads like a who's who of global finance. Citadel Securities, Apollo, BNP Paribas, HSBC, S&P Global, CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Optiver, SoFi, Tradeweb and SBI Group all participated, alongside a subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the world's largest sovereign wealth funds. Smaller but notable names like 7RIDGE, Polychain, Broadridge and William Blair rounded things out. It's a genuinely odd mix of old guard TradFi and crypto native venture money, which is sort of the whole point of Canton in the first place.

 

What Exactly is Canton, and Why Does Wall Street Care

Canton is a layer-1 blockchain, but it doesn't look much like the chains most crypto users are familiar with. It was designed from the ground up for regulated finance, with built-in privacy controls that let institutions keep sensitive transaction data hidden from competitors while still settling on a shared, synchronized ledger. Digital Asset describes it as a network of networks, meaning banks and asset managers can run their own permissioned systems that plug into the broader Canton ecosystem without giving up control over their own data or compliance processes.

 

This is basically the opposite of how chains like Bitcoin or Ethereum work. There's no anonymous validator set, no permissionless access, and institutions retain authority over the assets they issue. Some purists aren't thrilled about that. TD analyst Lance Vitanza wrote back in February that some experts consider Canton a glorified database in the cloud, and not really consistent with the open, trustless architecture that defines Bitcoin. Fair point, maybe, but it also might be missing why banks are actually showing up.

 

Since launching nearly two years ago, Canton has reportedly supported around $6 trillion in tokenized issuance, and the network now counts more than 700 ecosystem participants according to Digital Asset CEO Yuval Rooz. That's a big number for a network most retail crypto traders have probably never interacted with directly. Its native token, CC, was trading around 16 cents at the time of the announcement, up roughly 12% over the prior week, though still well below its February all time high near 19 cents.

 

A Valuation That's Climbing Fast

This isn't Digital Asset's first rodeo with a16z. The new $355 million round comes on the heels of a previously reported $300 million raise from just a month earlier, which valued the company at close to $2 billion, again with a16z leading. Before that, in 2025, Digital Asset raised $50 million from backers including Nasdaq and Bank of New York Mellon. Add it all up, and Digital Asset has now raised somewhere north of $800 million across its various rounds, a pace that's hard not to notice in a sector where many infrastructure plays are still pre revenue.

 

Speaking of revenue, that's another detail buried in the announcement worth pulling out. According to reporting from ChainCatcher, Digital Asset says it has now reached profitability following this latest raise. For a blockchain infrastructure company, that's a fairly rare claim to make, and it's likely one reason institutional investors who don't typically touch crypto, like Apollo or HSBC, felt comfortable writing checks.

 

Where The Money is Going

Digital Asset says the fresh capital will go toward three buckets, forging new partnerships, pursuing mergers and acquisitions, and expanding the broader Canton ecosystem. There's also a developer angle here. Rooz has been fairly vocal about wanting to deepen engagement with the people actually building on Canton, not just the institutions issuing assets on top of it.

 

"Blockchain adoption will be defined by practical, production-grade applications in the world's largest markets," Rooz said in a statement tied to the announcement. "For capital markets to move onchain, institutions need infrastructure that reflects how they actually operate, with privacy, compliance, scale, and interoperability built in from the start."

 

Notably, this round also marks the formal start of a partnership between Digital Asset and a16z crypto, not just a check. Ali Yahya, a general partner at a16z crypto, framed it as a bet on a thesis that's been floating around crypto circles for years finally becoming real, real world assets and institutional workflows actually moving onchain, rather than just being talked about at conferences.

 

The bigger picture for RWAs

Zoom out a bit and this raise fits a pattern that's been building for a while now. Tokenization of real world assets, things like bonds, money market funds, equities and commodities, has gone from a niche talking point to something BlackRock, Franklin Templeton and a growing list of traditional asset managers are actively building around. Canton's pitch is that it can be the settlement layer underneath a lot of that activity, handling the messy parts around privacy and regulatory compliance that public chains generally weren't built to handle.

 

Whether Canton ends up being the dominant rail for this kind of activity, or just one of several competing standards, is still very much an open question. Other institutional focused networks and consortia are chasing similar territory, and banks have a long history of building their own private ledgers rather than relying on shared infrastructure. But with this round, Digital Asset has clearly bought itself runway, credibility, and a deep bench of new institutional relationships, which in this market counts for a lot.

 

Financial Technology Partners served as the exclusive financial advisor on the deal, according to the company's release. For now, the immediate market reaction has been modest, with CC ticking higher alongside a broader crypto rally this week, but the more interesting story here probably isn't the token price. It's the growing list of names from Citadel to ADIA who are now, at least on paper, aligned with Canton's success.

 

Bitget, a global cryptocurrency exchange, has launched Reality, a real-world asset (RWA) platform that gives users access to tokenized traditional financial assets.

 

With Reality, Bitget aims to bring tokenized U.S. stocks and exchange-traded funds into its trading ecosystem, enabling access to financial instruments that have traditionally been difficult to access due to geographic restrictions, market hours, and settlement barriers.

 

 

The launch aligns with Bitget’s Universal Exchange (UEX) roadmap, which aims to transform Bitget from a crypto exchange into a global trading platform that allows users to trade cryptocurrencies, tokenized stocks, exchange-traded funds, commodities, forex, and other real-world assets through a single account using cryptocurrencies.

 

“Reality is built around Bitget’s 10% vision: by 2030, nearly 10% of financial assets could exist in tokenized form,” said Gracy Chen, Bitget CEO. “Stablecoins, faster blockchain settlement, and growing interest from major exchanges are pushing RWAs from experiment to market infrastructure. Reality is Bitget’s step toward making that future accessible to global users.”

 

How Reality Will Work 

Reality will be natively integrated into Bitget and serve as the exchange’s specialized arm for tokenizing traditional financial instruments. It will also serve as the primary layer for standardizing traditional market value in the crypto economy.

 

The Reality platform will issue rTokens to users, which are on-chain representations of publicly traded equities and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Each rToken will be backed 1:1 by real shares held with a FINRA-registered, SIPC-protected U.S. broker-dealer.

 

To ensure the highest level of transparency, the Reality platform will be regularly audited by third-party auditors. These audits will provide a live proof-of-asset dashboard and CPA-level audit reports to ensure verifiable asset integrity at all times.

 

Reality will initially focus on providing tokenized exposure to selected U.S. stocks and ETFs, with the team introducing additional tokenized assets as the platform expands. However, access to the platform, including user eligibility, product availability, and trading features, will depend on applicable geographical laws and regional restrictions.

 

Bitget’s entry into the RWA tokenization industry comes as several institutions, including Payward, Bitwise, and Nasdaq, are tapping into the growing sector. The RWA tokenization market is currently valued at around $34 billion, with the Boston Consulting Group projecting it to reach $16 trillion by 2030.

 

 

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.

 

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.”

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

Leading startup accelerator Y Combinator will be holding the first-ever interview session in New York City, keenly focused on fintech builders developing projects around tokenization, stablecoins, prediction markets, and trading.

 

 

According to a YC spokesperson, the New York event will be the first of its kind, as it will focus on a specific sector, with accepted startups joining the Y Combinator Summer 2026 batch, which will begin on June 23 in San Francisco. Once a startup is accepted into the accelerator program, Y Coombinator will invest immediately in the company, even before the summer batch begins.

 

With New York becoming a major fintech hub in the U.S. and accounting for around 30% of all U.S. fintech investment in 2025, while also being home to roughly 1,500 crypto and fintech startups, Y Combinator is making this move to tap into this fast-growing sector and back more startups in the space.

 

Y Combinator Investing in Crypto

Through its funding, Y Combinator has helped support some of the most successful companies in the crypto space, with several reaching and surpassing unicorn status.

 

In 2012, Y Combinator invested about $150,000 into the crypto exchange Coinbase, acquiring an approximately 7% stake in the company. With support from Y Combinator and other early investors, Coinbase has grown into one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, with a market cap of around $52 billion.

 

Y Combinator also invested early in the decentralized exchange Uniswap, contributing about $120,000 in 2018. Like Coinbase, Uniswap has grown into one of the largest decentralized exchanges, with a valuation of around $2 billion.

 

The startup accelerator has also invested in the prediction market sector, backing Kalshi at an early stage. With support from early investors, including Y Combinator, Kalshi has grown into one of the leading prediction market companies and recently raised $1 billion in a Series F round, reaching a valuation of $22 billion.

 

Other crypto companies that have benefited from Y Combinator’s support include the NFT marketplace OpenSea, blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs, and the Solana-based trading platform Axiom, with all of these companies surpassing the $1 billion valuation mark.

 

 

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing division of Amazon, has integrated the data standards and services of the decentralized oracle network Chainlink into its platform, enabling connectivity between traditional cloud infrastructure and blockchain networks.

 

The integration, according to AWS, aims to address the blockchain oracle problem. Although blockchain networks operate as decentralized ledgers, they are not inherently designed to connect with external data sources, application programming interfaces (APIs), and other blockchains. This limitation presents a significant challenge for developers building digital asset solutions and tokenization products that depend on real-world data for operational efficiency.

 

 

By integrating Chainlink data standards into its marketplace, AWS addresses this connectivity problem, making it possible for blockchain networks to connect to its cloud infrastructure while maintaining the security, compliance, and reliability standards required by financial institutions.

 

The integration brings three Chainlink oracle services into the AWS Marketplace. These include Chainlink Data Feeds, which provide access to decentralized price and market data for asset valuation, assessment, and risk management; Chainlink Data Streams, which deliver fast and secure data that enables on-chain systems to respond to market movements in real time and manage risk dynamically; and Chainlink Proof of Reserve, which provides secure and verifiable on-chain reserve attestations for stablecoins and other tokenized assets.

 

Through this integration, enterprises will be able to build tokenization solutions that leverage AWS cloud capabilities alongside blockchain functionality without needing to independently solve the blockchain oracle problem. Developers will also be able to connect external data sources to blockchain applications through secure oracle networks while using AWS compute resources.

 

Platforms Integrate with Decentralized Oracle Networks

Decentralized oracle networks, which are blockchain-based middleware systems that securely bridge real-world data to blockchain networks using several independent nodes, have increasingly been integrated into platforms in recent times.

 

Just this month, Polymarket integrated Pyth Network into its prediction market platform. Through this integration, Polymarket enabled traders to place predictions on real-life commodities such as gold and silver, as well as U.S. stocks, including NVIDIA and Apple.

 

Allor Network, also this month, integrated the decentralized oracle network Band Protocol into its platform, allowing for the secure delivery of real-world data for its Web3 applications.

 

Chainlink decentralized oracles have also been integrated into traditional finance platforms, including SWIFT and SIX Group, the organization behind Switzerland’s principal stock exchange, the SIX Swiss Exchange, with plans underway to integrate them into the Australian Stock Exchange platform.

 

 

Wrapped XRP (wXRP) is now live on Solana, issued by regulated custodian Hex Trust and bridged securely via LayerZero, backed 1:1 of XRP that lets users trade, provide liquidity, lend, and earn yield across Solana’s DeFi apps. 

 

 

This is the latest piece of a multi-chain rollout that Hex Trust detailed back in December 2025, as the same wXRP infrastructure is already operating on Ethereum, Optimism, and HyperEVM, giving XRP holders regulated on-ramps into deeper liquidity pools wherever DeFi happens. RippleX SVP Markus Infanger, noted the move addresses growing demand to use XRP across the wider crypto ecosystem and it aligns with Ripple’s own RLUSD stablecoin work. LayerZero handles the bridging that has captured the majority of reliable cross-chain volume after earlier bridge exploits elsewhere.

 

Major Solana based players such as Ondo Finance which has expanded tokenized treasury and equity products onto the network, and Superstate whose leadership has publicly endorsed Solana as one of only two viable chains for RWAs work alongside Ethereum now operate in a way where they can integrate wXRP straight into liquidity pools lending markets and atomic settlement flows. 

 

At the same time, big institutions like BlackRock and Franklin Templeton are building on Solana with their own tokenized market funds. BlackRock brought its BUIDL fund  which holds cash and Treasuries to deliver dollar yields to Solana, giving qualified investors fast, low-cost access to on-chain returns. Franklin Templeton did the same with its on-chain US Government Money Market Fund. WisdomTree brought its tokenized funds covering money markets, stocks, bonds, alternatives, and balanced portfolios, VanEck launched its low-fee Treasury bill fund VBILL, Hamilton Lane added tokenized access to private infrastructure and secondary funds, and Apollo made its ACRED private credit product available as collateral in protocols like Morpho. This lets firms keep their traditional compliance and custody setups intact while plugging these assets straight into Solana, so institutions can easily use wXRP for liquidity, collateral, or quick settlements.

 

Solana has been scaling RWA activity with tokenized ecosystems on-chain surpassing two billion dollars in value and protocols like Kamino handling over one billion dollars in real world asset deposits across isolated lending markets, where institutions borrow against assets and earn yield from cash flows. Ripple has targeted these kinds of entities through its custody solutions and partnerships with banks, including BBVA, DBS Bank, DZ Bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, and more recently Kyobo Life Insurance, for on-chain settlement and staking capabilities that now extend naturally to Solana networks.

 

There’s support across Phantom wallet, Jupiter Exchange, Meteora, and Titan Exchange, ensures that the infrastructure is ready for immediate use, which removes one of the frictions that has kept payment assets like XRP siloed from builders who prefer Solana for its sub-cent fees and near instant finality.

 

 

 

Blockchain infrastructure company Paxos Labs has raised 12 million dollars in a strategic funding round led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from Robot Ventures, Maelstrom, and Uniswap.

 

According to Paxos Labs, the funds will be used to accelerate the development of Amplify, its new financial utility platform across three integrated modules: Earn, which offers institutional-grade yield on digital assets, Borrow, which enables digital asset-backed lending, and Mint, which supports branded stablecoin issuance.

 

According to Chad Cascarilla, chief executive officer of Paxos, Amplify is the infrastructure that makes it possible for users to benefit from the digital assets they hold, be it earning yields on stablecoins, offering crypto-backed borrowing or launching a branded stablecoin. So, by a single integration, Amplify allows users to use and benefit fully from the digital assets they own.

 

How Amplify Works

Amplify is Paxos Labs’ flagship product that enables enterprise fintech and crypto platforms to turn users’ idle digital assets into active on-chain crypto products. To use Amplify, enterprises need to integrate Amplify’s software development kit (SDK) into their platforms.

 

Once integrated, platforms can configure and activate any of the three modules available on Amplify. Paxos Labs, through Amplify, handles all behind-the-scenes activities, including compliance and enterprise controls, after which it programmatically shares a portion of the revenue generated from user activity back with the integrating platform.

 

Through this strategic seed round, Paxos aims to scale the Amplify suite, expand the platform’s capabilities, and onboard more partners, in addition to some of its institutional partners, including privacy-focused blockchain project Aleo, Toku, and neobanking platform Hyperbeat. Hyperbeat surpassed $510,000 in assets under management within days of going live on Amplify. Paxos Labs has processed over $180 billion in tokenization volume for its institutional clients.

 

Enterprise DeFi Utilities Face Growing Competition

DeFi lending has continued to gain momentum, particularly among institutions and large enterprises. At the start of the year, on-chain lending TVL reached $64.3 billion, accounting for 40 to 55 percent of the total DeFi TVL. Like Paxos, several institutional DeFi lending platforms have expanded their DeFi services.

 

In March of this year, Anchorage Digital expanded its Atlas institutional network to include full collateral management services for crypto-backed lending and credit providers. It also integrated with the Solana-based platform Kamino to allow institutions to use natively staked SOL as collateral without leaving qualified custody.

 

Maple Finance, an institutional DeFi lending platform, also launched on the Base network to bring institutional-grade on-chain credit and yield products to the Coinbase ecosystem, with the aim of targeting exchanges, fintechs, and neobanks within that ecosystem.

 

Most recently this month, Aave passed a binding “Aave Will Win” vote that granted Aave Labs $25 million to accelerate development, including V4 upgrades, permissioned markets, and institutional products.