Issuant Articles

Why Tokenization Is Outpacing US Regulators

Carter Bray — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 20:10:50 GMT

In brief: Asset tokenization is expanding faster than United States rulemaking can keep pace. The market for programmable, real-world assets grew from roughly $6 billion in early 2025 to more than $30 billion by April 2026, according to analytics provider RWA.xyz, yet the federal framework remains a patchwork of stablecoin law, agency guidance, and temporary exemptions rather than a single statute. Institutions that treat this gap as a reason to wait risk ceding ground to peers already issuing against clear rules abroad.

Tokenization is the practice of recording ownership of a financial asset, a Treasury bill, a money market fund share, a bond, as a programmable digital record that settles and transfers on shared infrastructure. The technology has moved well past pilot stage. The pace of adoption now runs ahead of the pace of federal legislation, and that mismatch is the defining feature of the current market.

The scale is no longer trivial. Tokenized US Treasuries and money market products dominate current volumes because liquid, low-volatility instruments tokenize most cleanly, as Investax noted in its 2026 outlook. BlackRock's tokenized money market vehicle, the USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund issued through transfer agent Securitize, crossed $1 billion in assets within a year of launch and has since grown into the billions. When the largest asset manager in the world builds a franchise on programmable fund shares, the question for other institutions is no longer whether to engage but under which rules.

What has Washington actually delivered?

More than critics allow, but less than a full framework. The single most concrete piece of legislation is the GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, which established the first federal regime for payment stablecoins. Guidance from Mayer Brown describes it as the first comprehensive federal stablecoin statute, and implementing rules followed, including an OCC proposed rule and an FDIC rulemaking in 2026. Stablecoins, the settlement layer for much of this activity, now have statutory footing.

Securities are a different story, and here the guidance arrives without new law. In early 2026 the SEC and CFTC issued a joint interpretation on crypto asset classification, and SEC staff separately made clear that, as Morgan Lewis put it, a tokenized security is still a security. Under Chairman Paul Atkins the agency launched an initiative it calls Project Crypto, and in September 2026 it approved an Innovation Exemption permitting limited trading of tokenized National Market System stocks on qualified on-chain venues. The CFTC, for its part, launched a tokenized collateral initiative in late 2025.

The common thread is that almost none of this is durable statute. Exemptions can be withdrawn, joint interpretations can be revised, and a temporary framework is by definition temporary. That is the substance behind the observation, made in a September 2026 CoinDesk opinion piece, that tokenization is moving faster than Washington: the market is building on scaffolding that Congress has not yet turned into a building.

How do the major frameworks compare?

The cleanest way to see the gap is to line up what governs each layer of a tokenized issuance today, its legal status, and how settled it is.

Layer	Governing instrument	Type	Durability
Payment stablecoins	GENIUS Act (2025) plus OCC and FDIC rules	Federal statute with rulemaking	Settled
Tokenized securities classification	SEC and CFTC joint interpretation (2026)	Agency guidance	Interpretive, revisable
Tokenized equity trading	SEC Innovation Exemption (Sept 2026)	Temporary conditional exemption	Time-limited
Tokenized collateral in derivatives	CFTC initiative and staff guidance (2025 to 2026)	Agency guidance and pilot	Developing
Comprehensive market structure	CLARITY Act and related bills	Pending legislation	Unresolved

What the table makes plain is that only the stablecoin row rests on firm statutory ground. Everything above the settlement layer, the actual issuance and trading of programmable securities, currently depends on interpretation, exemption, or pilot. For an issuer, that distinction matters more than any headline growth figure, because it determines whether a structure built today survives a change of Commission or a court challenge tomorrow.

The contrast with other jurisdictions sharpens the point. The European Union has a common framework operating across 27 member states, while the United States, as the CoinDesk piece observed, has yet to reconcile competing bills between two houses of Congress. Capital and issuance activity are mobile. A framework that is comprehensive, even if imperfect, can attract business away from one that is faster on the technology but slower on the law.

Where do the real gaps sit for an issuer?

The gaps are not where casual observers assume. The technology works, and settlement and custody solutions exist. The unresolved questions are legal and operational, and three stand out.

The first is market structure. There is no single statute defining when a programmable instrument is a security, a commodity, or something else, and how it moves between venues. The pending CLARITY Act would address this, but as of its progress through Congress it remained unresolved. Until then, classification rests on interpretation that a future Commission could revisit.

The second is the durability of the exemptive relief now enabling much of the equity activity. The Innovation Exemption is real and useful, but conditional. Firms building distribution on it should assume conditions may tighten and should structure accordingly.

The third is the persistent distance between adoption in liquid instruments and everything else. Tokenized equity trading volumes still sit below 1 percent of conventional market activity, per market data reported by Parameter, even as tokenized Treasuries and commodities scale rapidly. The composable, auditable rails are proven; the depth of use beyond cash-like assets is not yet there.

What should an institution do with this?

Treat the regulatory gap as a design constraint, not a reason to sit out. The prudent path is to build where the law is settled, stablecoin-based settlement and tokenized cash-equivalent instruments, while structuring securities issuance so it survives the shift from exemption to statute. That means insisting on the same investor rights a traditional share carries, auditable smart contracts on public infrastructure, and governance that can absorb a change in agency posture without unwinding the instrument. Programmable and composable assets reward issuers who make auditability a first principle rather than an afterthought, which is precisely the discipline Issuant is built to support. The institutions that win the next phase will be those that moved deliberately while the rules were still forming, not those that waited for a certainty Washington has not yet supplied.

What Are Tokenised Deposits? UK Bank First

Carter Bray — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 16:06:34 GMT

In brief: On 24 September 2026, seven of the UK's largest banks completed the world's first interbank customer transactions using tokenised sterling deposits, moving money between institutions on a shared platform. A tokenised deposit is a claim on commercial bank money recorded on programmable infrastructure, spendable at par and carrying deposit protection. The live transactions covered remortgaging and digital asset settlement, and mark the point where the UK's tokenised-deposit work crossed from experiment into production.

A tokenised deposit is a claim on commercial bank money, held at a regulated bank, that is recorded and moved on programmable ledger infrastructure while remaining spendable at par and eligible for deposit protection. On 24 September 2026, that definition stopped being theoretical. According to CoinDesk, the UK's largest banks executed the world's first customer transactions using tokenised sterling deposits that moved between separate institutions on a shared platform. The distinction that matters for institutions is the word interbank: earlier trials kept the money inside one bank, while this run proved that programmable commercial bank money can settle across firms.

The transactions were delivered through the Great British Tokenised Deposit (GBTD) initiative, convened by UK Finance. Barclays, HSBC UK, Lloyds Banking Group, Monzo, Nationwide, NatWest, and Santander took part. The platform was built by Quant, project management came from EY, and the legal framework and rulebooks were drafted by Linklaters. Two remortgage transactions were carried out by Lloyds Banking Group, NatWest, and Barclays, with funds locked during the property process and released automatically on completion, and the pilots explored connecting to HM Land Registry to speed future conveyancing.

How is a tokenised deposit different from a stablecoin?

Both instruments promise digital pounds that move on programmable rails, but they sit on different balance sheets and answer to different rulebooks. That difference determines whether a treasury team can hold the instrument as ordinary cash or must treat it as a separate exposure. The comparison below sets out the distinctions that shape how each is used in wholesale and retail settings.

Feature	Tokenised deposit	Stablecoin
Issuer	A regulated commercial bank	A payment or crypto firm, sometimes a bank subsidiary
What it represents	A claim on your existing bank deposit	A separate liability backed by a reserve of assets
Deposit protection	Covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, up to the standard limit	Not a protected deposit, holder relies on the quality of the reserve
Redemption	At par, as normal money in an account	At par in principle, subject to the issuer's reserve and terms
UK regulatory home	Existing bank prudential regime	The joint Bank of England and FCA framework for systemic issuers, set out in the July 2026 consultation
Effect on bank funding	Money stays as a deposit on the bank's balance sheet	Money can leave the banking system for the reserve

The last row explains why the Bank of England has leaned toward the deposit model. Governor Andrew Bailey has repeatedly voiced caution about banks issuing their own stablecoins, warning in comments reported by CoinDesk in July 2025 that stablecoins could pull funding out of the banking system and weaken credit creation. A tokenised deposit keeps the money where it already is, which is precisely why the GBTD design appeals to a central bank protective of monetary and financial stability.

Why does the interbank milestone matter?

The leap from single-bank pilots to cross-institution settlement is the whole point. A programmable pound that only works inside one bank is a closed loop. A programmable pound that can move between Barclays, NatWest, and Lloyds while preserving the singleness of money, the principle that a pound is a pound wherever it is held, is the foundation of a national payment system.

The path here was deliberate. UK Finance ran the Regulated Liability Network experimentation phase in 2024, when eleven institutions including Barclays, Citi UK, HSBC UK, Lloyds, Mastercard, NatWest, Nationwide, Santander UK, Standard Chartered, Virgin Money, and Visa tested tokenised deposits across five use cases and concluded, per Ledger Insights, that the network was a viable innovation platform. The live GBTD pilot followed in September 2025, targeting three use cases: marketplace person-to-person payments, remortgaging, and digital asset settlement, with the programme scheduled to run until mid-2026. Monzo joined as the seventh participant in January 2026. The September 2026 transactions are the payoff from that sequence.

For issuers, the digital asset settlement use case is the one to watch. A tokenised deposit that settles atomically against a programmable security removes the settlement lag and counterparty risk that sit between trade and finality today. That is the mechanism by which delivery-versus-payment becomes instant rather than aspirational, and it is why the same infrastructure that clears a remortgage is relevant to anyone issuing or raising capital against programmable instruments.

Where do UK regulators stand?

The supervisory backdrop has moved in step with the industry. In May 2026 the FCA and the Bank of England set out a shared vision for tokenisation in UK wholesale markets, signalling that programmable settlement infrastructure has official backing rather than mere tolerance. The Digital Securities Sandbox continues to admit new participants, giving firms a supervised venue to run tokenised securities and settlement together.

The deposit route also has a legal skeleton, not just working code. Linklaters drafted the GBTD rulebooks, which matters because programmable money without an enforceable framework governing who owes what to whom is an operational novelty rather than a settlement asset. That rulebook work, combined with the ISO 20022 messaging standard underpinning the Quant-built platform, is what lets the output plug into existing payment infrastructure rather than sit alongside it.

What should an institution do now?

Treat this as a signal to prepare, not to wait. Map where your own settlement, treasury, and issuance workflows carry lag, counterparty exposure, or reconciliation cost, because those are the points a tokenised deposit is built to compress. Read the GBTD use cases as a preview of what your counterparties will soon expect, and read the FCA and Bank of England wholesale tokenisation vision as the direction of the rulebook you will operate under. The banks have proven that programmable commercial bank money can move between institutions and settle against digital assets. The open question for issuers and asset managers is whether their instruments are composable and auditable enough to meet that money when it arrives, which is exactly the readiness Issuant is built to support.

Why Does the ECB Want to Change MiCA's Stablecoin Deposit Rule?

Carter Bray — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 17:44:00 GMT

In brief: The European Central Bank and the national central banks that form the European System of Central Banks want Brussels to replace MiCA's minimum bank-deposit requirement for stablecoin reserves with liquidity thresholds. In its response to the European Commission's targeted review of MiCA, published on 22 September 2026, the ESCB argues that forcing issuers to park large shares of their reserves in bank deposits concentrates risk in the banking system rather than removing it, and that a redemption rush could drain those deposits at the worst possible moment.

The supervisors that write the rules for the euro now want to rewrite one of them. According to Cointelegraph, the ECB and EU central banks are asking the European Commission to scrap the fixed bank-deposit floors that MiCA imposes on stablecoin reserves and put liquidity requirements in their place. The concern is not that issuers hold too little at banks. It is that they may hold too much, and that a sudden wave of redemptions could pull those deposits out of lenders precisely when funding is scarce.

What does MiCA currently require issuers to hold at banks?

MiCA, formally Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, came into force on 31 May 2023, with its stablecoin provisions applying from 30 June 2024. The regulation splits payment-style stablecoins into two categories: e-money tokens, which reference a single official currency such as the euro or the dollar, and asset-referenced tokens, which track a basket or other values.

The deposit rules sit inside the reserve regime. Under Article 54, funds received in exchange for e-money tokens must be safeguarded, and at least 30 percent of those funds must always be deposited in separate accounts at credit institutions, as Crypto Times sets out in its reading of the text. For tokens the European Banking Authority classifies as significant, the floor is higher still: the additional rules drawn from the asset-referenced chapter can require a deposit floor no lower than 60 percent of the amount referenced in each official currency. The EBA's technical standards layer concentration limits on top, capping any single credit institution at 25 percent of the cash reserve for ordinary tokens and 10 percent for significant ones.

Put plainly, the design assumes that the safest home for a large slice of stablecoin reserves is a bank. The central banks now dispute that assumption.

Why do the ECB and EU central banks want the rule changed?

The central banks want mandatory deposit thresholds replaced with liquidity requirements because the current design pushes stablecoin risk into the banking system rather than away from it. Their argument, filed in the ESCB response to the Commission's MiCA review, runs on two fronts.

The first is concentration. Requiring issuers to place a fixed, large portion of reserves in bank deposits makes lenders reliant on a funding source that behaves nothing like ordinary retail money. Stablecoin reserves can move fast, in size, and in one direction. The second is the run problem. If holders lose confidence and redeem at once, the issuer has to pull its deposits to meet them, withdrawing wholesale funding from banks exactly when the system is under stress. In the ESCB's framing, a rule meant to protect stability could instead transmit it.

The proposal fits a longer line of ECB commentary. In its Financial Stability Review coverage, the bank warned that significant growth in stablecoins could cause retail deposit outflows, diminishing an important source of bank funding and leaving lenders with more volatile balance sheets. The primary vulnerability, the ECB has said repeatedly, is that investors lose confidence they can redeem at par. ECB board member Piero Cipollone has made the deposit-erosion point directly, arguing that stablecoin adoption weakens the banking deposit base, per Cointelegraph's reporting of his remarks.

How large is the risk the ECB is worried about?

In the euro area, the exposure is still modest, but the trajectory is what alarms supervisors. Global stablecoin capitalisation has roughly doubled since 2023 to around 300 billion dollars, with dollar-denominated instruments accounting for close to 99 percent of the market, according to Ledger Insights. Euro-denominated issuance sits near 395 million euros against that backdrop, a rounding error by comparison.

Scale matters because the largest issuers are no longer peripheral. The ECB has noted that major stablecoin issuers now hold reserve portfolios comparable to the world's biggest money market funds and rank among the top recent buyers of US Treasury bills. A disorderly redemption at that size would not stay contained to crypto markets; it would ripple into short-term funding and sovereign debt. The European Systemic Risk Board reinforced the point in its October 2025 recommendation, flagging systemic risk from stablecoins and, in particular, from multi-issuance schemes where the same token is issued by both EU and non-EU entities.

How would liquidity thresholds differ from deposit floors?

Feature	Current MiCA deposit rule	Proposed liquidity approach
Anchor	Fixed percentage of reserves held as bank deposits (30 percent, or 60 percent for significant tokens)	Liquidity thresholds calibrated to redemption behaviour
Primary aim	Ensure safeguarded, segregated backing at credit institutions	Ensure issuers can meet redemptions without draining bank funding
Side effect flagged by ESCB	Concentrates issuer risk in the banking system	Reduces the channel through which a run hits banks
Flexibility	Rigid floor regardless of reserve mix	Tied to how quickly reserves can be converted under stress

The distinction is between a static rule and a dynamic one. A deposit floor asks where reserves sit. A liquidity threshold asks how fast they can be turned into cash to honour redemptions, and whether meeting that demand forces destabilising withdrawals from lenders. The central banks argue the second question is the one that actually maps to the risk.

What happens next in the MiCA review?

The request lands inside a live process. The European Commission opened a targeted consultation on the MiCA review earlier in 2026, with the response window extended to 30 September 2026, as Norton Rose Fulbright has documented. The ESCB submission is one input among many, and any change to Article 54 or the significant-token regime would require legislative amendment rather than a supervisory notice. Nothing shifts overnight.

What institutions can take from this is a signal about direction. Reserve composition, redemption mechanics, and the interplay between issuer liquidity and bank funding are moving to the centre of the European debate, and the fixed-percentage deposit rule that has anchored compliance since June 2024 is no longer treated as settled. For issuers building programmable, redeemable instruments against real reserves, the premium is increasingly on demonstrable liquidity and transparent, auditable backing rather than on a single deposit ratio, which is precisely the ground Issuant is built to serve.

ECB to Buy Tokenized Bonds With Its Own Funds

Carter Bray — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 16:05:33 GMT

In brief: On 21 September 2026 the European Central Bank said it will invest a small portion of its own funds in tokenized securities, with settlement in central bank money through its newly launched Pontes platform. The initial focus is euro-denominated euro area public sector and European supranational debt. The move makes the ECB an investor in the same programmable instruments it wants private markets to adopt, not merely a plumber providing the settlement rails.

The European Central Bank has decided to put its own balance sheet behind the technology it has spent two years testing. In a press release dated 21 September 2026, the ECB confirmed it has begun preparatory work to invest a small portion of its own funds in tokenized securities, with those transactions settling in central bank money on Pontes. The first purchases will concentrate on euro-denominated euro area public sector and European supranational securities, the safest and most liquid corner of the market. It is a modest allocation in size and a large statement in intent.

Tokenized securities, in the ECB's usage, are conventional debt instruments issued and recorded on distributed-ledger infrastructure so they can be transferred, settled, and serviced programmatically. The significance of the announcement is that the central bank will hold them as an investor. The stated purpose is practical: to build institutional expertise and gain firsthand experience of what it is like to buy, settle, and hold a programmable bond rather than simply to run the pipes underneath it.

What is Pontes and why does it matter?

Pontes is the settlement bridge that makes the investment possible. Launched the same day, it is described by the ECB as the first initiative under a broader Eurosystem programme to make central bank money fit for a digital future, and it went live at 9:15 a.m. Central European Time on Monday, 21 September, according to reporting from CoinLaw. The platform connects distributed-ledger platforms to the Eurosystem's existing TARGET Services, so that the cash leg of a wholesale trade in tokenized assets settles in central bank money rather than in a stablecoin or a commercial-bank deposit. CoinDesk framed it plainly: Pontes offers an alternative to private settlement assets for wholesale transactions.

That distinction carries real weight for institutions. Settlement in central bank money is the safest form of settlement available, because it carries no issuer credit risk. By routing programmable securities through TARGET rather than through a private stablecoin, the ECB is trying to preserve that safety while letting the instruments themselves become composable and auditable. Pontes currently operates on a limited window, roughly 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Central European Time, with the ECB signalling a move toward continuous operation by 2028.

How did the ECB get here?

The launch did not appear from nowhere. Between May and November 2024 the Eurosystem ran an extensive round of exploratory work, testing the settlement of distributed-ledger transactions in central bank money across three interoperability solutions. That programme drew 64 participants across central banks, market firms, and platform operators, and ran more than 50 trials and experiments. The Eurosystem processed over 200 transactions worth a combined 1.59 billion euros during the exercise, according to the ECB's December 2024 summary.

The three tested approaches came from national central banks: the Deutsche Bundesbank's Trigger Solution, which links ledger platforms to TARGET2 through a trigger chain and a transaction coordinator; the TIPS Hash-Link from Banca d'Italia; and a Full DLT Interoperability solution from the Banque de France. The Bundesbank's own Trigger Solution documentation describes the aim as settling ledger-based wholesale transactions directly on participants' existing accounts in central bank money, without minting a new digital currency.

In July 2025 the Governing Council settled on a two-track path, and Pontes is the near-term track. The longer-horizon track is Appia, an integrated ledger-native settlement ambition set out in the Appia roadmap the Eurosystem published in March 2026. Where Pontes bridges new market platforms to legacy Eurosystem infrastructure, Appia looks toward a more fully integrated European ecosystem for programmable finance, tied explicitly to the bloc's ambitions for a savings and investments union and greater strategic autonomy.

Why is the ECB investing rather than just settling?

The own-funds decision is what separates this from earlier plumbing work. The ECB maintains a non-monetary policy portfolio, its own funds, which generates income to help cover operating expenses outside its supervisory tasks. By channelling part of that portfolio into tokenized public sector and supranational debt, the central bank becomes a live participant in the market it is trying to seed. Piero Cipollone, the executive board member who has led the Eurosystem's digital-money agenda, has repeatedly argued that tokenized central bank money is central to an efficient digital finance system, and as Ledger Insights reported ahead of the launch, he has coupled that push with calls for harmonized European securities law to remove the legal fragmentation that still slows issuance.

The investor role matters for a reason institutions will recognise. A settlement rail with no assets flowing across it proves little. By committing capital, even a small amount, the ECB creates demand, tests the full lifecycle from purchase through custody, and signals to issuers and asset managers that the infrastructure is more than a pilot. It also positions the euro's public money as a settlement anchor at a moment when dollar-referenced private settlement assets are expanding, part of the wider European effort to reduce dependence on foreign infrastructure that ran through the Appia work covered by CoinDesk.

What to watch next

The near-term questions are concrete. The first is scale: the ECB has described its allocation as small, and the pace at which it grows, or does not, will tell markets how much conviction sits behind the announcement. The second is participation. Reporting around the launch pointed to major banks preparing to transact through Pontes, and the breadth of issuers willing to bring euro area public and supranational debt onto ledger platforms will determine whether Pontes becomes a venue or stays a demonstration. The third is the operating window. A platform that runs only during business hours cannot yet support the continuous, atomic settlement that programmable finance promises, and the 2028 target for extended operation is the milestone to track.

The larger open question is legal rather than technical. Cipollone's call for harmonized securities law points to the gap that remains: the rails and the central bank money are now in place, but the rulebook governing issuance across twenty jurisdictions is not uniform, and Appia's fuller vision depends on closing it. For institutions weighing whether to issue or hold programmable, auditable instruments in euros, the ECB has just removed one of the oldest objections, that public money would never touch the new infrastructure. What remains is to see whether the law, the liquidity, and the operating hours catch up to the ambition. For issuers building on programmable and composable assets, that is the ground worth watching, and the ground Issuant is built to serve.

What Does the SEC 24-Hour Trading Roundtable Mean?

Carter Bray — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 18:20:01 GMT

In brief: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission convened a public roundtable on September 17, 2026, to plan for around-the-clock equity trading, the schedule that foreign exchange, gold, and crypto markets already run. Chair Paul Atkins told participants that clearing, market data, and price-protection plumbing are being rebuilt to support overnight sessions, and that DTCC has already gone live with a 23-hours-a-day, five-days-a-week clearing model. The direction of travel is a near-continuous U.S. equity market, and the open question is how far it goes before the last gaps in oversight and liquidity are closed.

The SEC has begun formally preparing for a market that never closes. On September 17, 2026, the regulator hosted a roundtable on preparations for 24-hour trading, a day-long session that gathered exchanges, clearing houses, asset managers, and trading firms to work through what it takes to run U.S. equities overnight. The framing was deliberate. Continuous trading is already the norm in foreign exchange, gold, and digital-asset markets, and the Commission is now studying how to align listed equities with what it calls an always-on global economy.

Twenty-four-hour equity trading means investors can buy and sell exchange-listed shares and funds at almost any hour of the day, five days a week, rather than only during the traditional 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Eastern session. That is the destination the industry is building toward, and the roundtable was the point at which the SEC put its own name on the process rather than leaving it to individual exchange filings.

Why is the SEC holding a roundtable now?

The timing follows a run of concrete steps, not a sudden shift. In February 2025 the SEC granted accelerated approval to NYSE Arca to lengthen its trading sessions, clearing the path to roughly 22 hours a day for listed equities and funds. Later that year, 24X National Exchange opened as the first SEC-approved 23/5 stock exchange, beginning its first stage of operation in October 2025. Nasdaq then filed to extend its own U.S. equities trading to 23 hours a day, five days a week, a proposal the SEC approved in April 2026, with the exchange later setting a December launch for the near-continuous schedule.

Those approvals created a policy problem the SEC could no longer route around. Once multiple venues are matching trades at 3:00 a.m., the supporting infrastructure, the clearing, the consolidated market data, and the safeguards against runaway prices, has to keep pace. The roundtable was the Commission's attempt to coordinate that build-out in public rather than approve it piece by piece.

Chair Paul Atkins had already signaled the direction a year earlier. In a September 2025 joint statement with the acting head of the CFTC, Atkins wrote that the two regulators should "collaborate to consider the possibility of further expanding trading hours, where appropriate," citing operational feasibility and liquidity alongside investor protection. The statement named foreign exchange, gold, and digital assets as markets that already trade continuously, and argued that longer hours could better align U.S. markets with a global economy.

What did SEC officials say about the plumbing?

The most substantive material came from the officials describing the infrastructure. In his remarks at the roundtable, Atkins said the settlement layer is already moving. The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, he noted, has gone live with 23-by-5 trade-capture systems to support clearance and settlement, a claim confirmed by DTCC's own announcement that its National Securities Clearing Corporation extended clearing hours to a 24x5 model in June 2026. That matters because a trade executed overnight is not truly complete until it can be cleared and settled through the same pipes that handle daytime volume.

Atkins also pointed to two other pieces. The industry has adopted a plan to establish overnight price bands, requiring every trading center active during overnight hours to maintain written policies and procedures that prevent trades outside those bands, a guardrail against the thin-liquidity air pockets that can send an overnight quote wildly off fair value. And work is ongoing to prepare the Securities Information Processor plans, the systems that publish a consolidated national price, for overnight dissemination. Without a reliable overnight tape, an investor trading at 2:00 a.m. cannot see where the whole market is, only where one venue is.

Commissioner Hester Peirce struck a measured tone in her own remarks, observing that the equity market is "not breaking new ground" and can learn from markets that already run through the night. She noted that certain index options trade overnight and that futures markets generally follow a 23/5 schedule close to where equities are headed. The message was that the model is proven elsewhere, and the task now is disciplined translation rather than invention.

Who was in the room?

The panelist list read as a cross-section of the market's core operators, which is itself a signal of how seriously the industry is taking the shift. According to the SEC's agenda and panelist announcement, the sessions drew NYSE, Nasdaq, Cboe, and MEMX among the exchanges, BlackRock, State Street, and Invesco on the asset-management side, and Citadel Securities, Virtu, and Jane Street among the market makers, alongside DTCC, FINRA, and retail-facing firms including Robinhood, Charles Schwab, and Interactive Brokers. Jamie Selway, director of the SEC's Division of Trading and Markets, joined Atkins in opening the day.

That breadth reflects the reach of the change. Extended hours touch execution venues, the firms that price risk into overnight quotes, the custodians and clearers that settle the trades, and the platforms where retail orders originate. Getting the schedule right requires all of them to move together.

What does this mean for institutions?

For asset managers and issuers, the practical stakes are less about the headline hours and more about the machinery underneath. A near-continuous market changes how net asset values are struck, how corporate actions and news are absorbed, and how operational teams staff a trading day that no longer has a clean close. Firms preparing for 24x5 equities in 2026 have flagged the loss of the overnight maintenance window as a genuine technology and controls problem, since systems that once relied on a quiet period now have to run and be supported around the clock.

The move also sharpens a longer argument about programmable and composable market infrastructure. The appeal of a market that settles and reprices continuously is that assets become easier to move, finance, and audit across time zones without waiting for a bell. The risk, which the roundtable exists to manage, is that liquidity and oversight thin out precisely when a retail investor is least equipped to notice. That tension is why investor-protection advocates have pressed the SEC to pair any expansion with strong disclosure and safeguards, and why the price-band and market-data work Atkins described is not a footnote but the substance.

What to watch next

The near-term markers are concrete. Nasdaq's move to a near-23-hour schedule is the next major venue to go live, and how its overnight sessions trade, whether spreads hold and volumes materialize, will shape how quickly other exchanges follow. The SIP overnight tape and the industry-wide price bands are the load-bearing pieces to track, because a continuous market without a consolidated overnight price and without protection against off-band trades is a market with visible gaps. And the SEC's own posture matters: the roundtable produced a supporting-data memorandum and a public comment file, and the Commission's read of that record will influence whether it lets the venue-by-venue expansion continue or moves toward a more unified framework.

The open question is where the line finally settles. Nearly every proposal on the table stops just short of a true 24/7 market, leaving a short daily pause for maintenance and reconciliation. Whether U.S. equities close that last gap, and on what terms, is the decision the September roundtable set in motion rather than resolved. For institutions building toward programmable, composable, and auditable assets, the direction is now clear enough to plan around, and Issuant is watching the same infrastructure signals that will determine how far the always-on market extends.

What does the CLARITY Act Senate vote mean for issuers?

Carter Bray — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 16:51:52 GMT

In brief: The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (CLARITY) faces a Senate cloture vote scheduled for September 15, 2026, and its fate turned on eleventh-hour Democratic demands that Republicans and industry allies characterized as moving the goalposts. The bill would split federal oversight of digital assets between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission, but it needs 60 votes to advance, and the late wrangling over ethics language and consumer protections leaves institutional issuers facing continued uncertainty about the rulebook they will operate under.

The most consequential piece of U.S. digital-asset legislation in a generation reached a procedural cliff this week, and the negotiating dynamics around it tell institutions more about the timeline than any single vote will. The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act would create the first comprehensive federal framework for classifying, issuing, and trading digital assets, dividing supervision between the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Hours before a key Senate cloture vote set for September 15, Senate Democrats pressed a fresh set of demands, a move Republican staff and industry groups described as shifting the terms of a deal they thought was largely settled.

What is the CLARITY Act, and what would it actually do?

The CLARITY Act is a federal bill that establishes a comprehensive regulatory framework for the classification, offering, trading, and supervision of digital assets. That single sentence is the substance institutions need, and the mechanics follow from it. The bill replaces the current patchwork, in which the boundary between a security and a commodity has been litigated case by case, with a defined structure: a three-category classification system, a test for whether a network is sufficiently decentralized, and registration requirements for exchanges and intermediaries, as BIT's explainer lays out.

Under that structure, assets whose value is intrinsically linked to the use of a blockchain fall to the CFTC as digital commodities, a category that the Congressional Research Service notes would exclude securities, derivatives, and stablecoins. Tokens sold through fundraising rounds, where a centralized team raises capital against a promise to build, remain investment contracts under SEC jurisdiction. Payment stablecoins sit with banking regulators, complementing the separate GENIUS Act regime. For an issuer, the practical value is a graduation pathway: a project that begins as an SEC-supervised investment contract can migrate to commodity treatment once the underlying network reaches what the bill calls blockchain maturity, a threshold that Arnold & Porter's analysis describes as removing security status once an asset trades in genuine secondary markets rather than being distributed by the issuer.

How did the bill get to a Senate floor vote?

The path has been long and unusually bipartisan by the standards of the sector. The House passed H.R. 3633 by a vote of 294 to 134 on July 17, 2025, with more than 70 Democrats crossing over, making it the most bipartisan digital-asset measure to clear a chamber to that point, according to a legislative timeline maintained by eco.com. The Senate then took its own route. Chairman Tim Scott and Digital Assets Subcommittee Chair Cynthia Lummis circulated discussion drafts through the second half of 2025, and after roughly a year of delays the Senate Banking Committee advanced the bill on May 14, 2026, by 15 to 9, with two Democrats joining all Republicans, per the Latham & Watkins U.S. Crypto Policy Tracker.

That committee vote came with a caveat that matters now. The Democrats who supported it signaled that their committee votes did not guarantee floor support without further movement on outstanding issues, chiefly an ethics provision addressing government officials' ties to the digital-asset industry. In August the Senate opened the first procedural stage of floor consideration, setting up the September test. The bill needs 60 votes to clear cloture, which means Republican leadership must find a handful of Democrats, and that arithmetic is precisely what gave the minority its leverage this week.

What did Democrats change at the last minute?

The flashpoint was ethics language and, secondarily, consumer-protection provisions. In the run-up to the vote, the White House agreed to stricter rules restricting government officials' financial ties to digital-asset ventures, a concession The Washington Post reported was intended to win Democratic support. Republicans then released what they called a final draft incorporating most of those provisions, as The Block described.

E what happened next is the story in the headline. With the concessions apparently banked, Democrats pressed additional demands hours before the vote, and Senator Elizabeth Warren prepared to argue against the bill on the Senate floor ahead of the preliminary tally. To supporters, agreeing to the ethics package and then raising the bar again looked like negotiating in bad faith. To the bill's critics, the additional asks reflected legitimate gaps in a framework that will govern trillions in eventual activity. Either reading leaves the same operational fact for institutions: the text was still moving the day before the vote, and prediction markets tracked by Forbes put passage odds well short of a coin flip even after the ethics deal.

Why does the outcome matter for issuers and asset managers?

Because almost every downstream decision an institution makes depends on which regulator holds the pen. The classification of an instrument determines its disclosure regime, its custody requirements, the venues on which it can trade, and the capital treatment it receives. Without the CLARITY Act, that classification remains a matter of enforcement posture and litigation rather than statute, which is a poor foundation for a product roadmap or a capital raise. The bill's appeal to established finance is that it makes programmable, composable instruments auditable against a defined federal standard rather than an inferred one.

The stakes are concrete. A missed cloture vote does not kill the bill outright, but it compresses an already tight calendar, and several trackers have warned that a failure here pushes meaningful action well into the future, with crypto.news noting the risk that the window closes for this Congress. For issuers weighing whether to structure a new instrument under a coming statutory regime or under today's uncertain caselaw, the difference between passage this autumn and a multi-year delay is the difference between planning and guessing.

What should institutions watch from here?

Three things. First, the cloture count itself: 60 votes advances the bill, anything less sends negotiators back to the table and resets the timeline. Second, the final ethics and consumer-protection text, because the provisions that secured Democratic votes will shape how supervisors and issuers read the rest of the framework. Third, the graduation mechanism, since the maturity threshold that moves an asset from SEC to CFTC oversight is where most issuer economics will ultimately be decided, and late amendments to definitions can quietly reshape it.

For now, the prudent posture is to build for the framework's logic without betting the calendar on any single vote. Institutions that design instruments to be classifiable, auditable, and portable across the SEC and CFTC boundaries will be ready whichever way the count falls, and that readiness, rather than a headline, is what turns a contested Senate vote into a manageable planning input.

Anchorage Digital adds fUSD access for institutions

Yonier Bellido — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 17:38:06 GMT

In brief: On September 11, 2026, Anchorage Digital opened institutional access to Frgmnt's fUSD and its staked variant sfUSD, letting clients hold, mint, redeem, stake and unstake the yield-bearing dollar instrument from within a federally regulated custody platform. Frgmnt is a stablecoin protocol built on Base that issues fUSD one-for-one against USDC and routes the backing into audited dollar-lending strategies. The arrangement removes the need for a separate wallet or protocol relationship, folding a programmable yield instrument into workflows a regulated institution already recognizes.

Anchorage Digital has begun offering institutional clients direct access to Frgmnt's fUSD, a yield-bearing dollar instrument, through its custody platform. The integration, announced on September 11, 2026, covers both fUSD and its staked counterpart sfUSD, and it lets clients hold, mint, redeem, stake and unstake the asset without standing up a separate custody arrangement. That single sentence carries the weight of the deal: a federally chartered bank has wrapped a programmable yield product in the operational controls an asset manager or treasury desk is already permitted to use.

What exactly did Anchorage Digital agree to support?

The support is practical rather than promotional. Rather than requiring institutions to manage wallets, key material and interactions with several separate protocols, Frgmnt packages access to dollar-lending markets inside a stablecoin structure that can plug into existing institutional workflows, according to a report published the same day. Custody, minting, redemption and staking all sit behind one regulated counterparty.

That matters because the friction in composable dollar instruments has rarely been the yield. It has been the plumbing. A treasury team that wants exposure to a programmable dollar has historically had to accept direct wallet management, bespoke legal review of an unfamiliar protocol, and a custody question with no clean answer. Anchorage Digital's proposition is to collapse those steps into an account relationship that already clears internal risk committees.

What is Frgmnt, and how is fUSD constructed?

Frgmnt is a stablecoin protocol built on Base, Coinbase's Ethereum layer-2 network, that issues fUSD against USDC and deploys the backing across audited dollar-lending strategies. Put plainly, fUSD is a dollar-denominated instrument minted one-for-one against USDC whose reserves are put to work rather than left idle. The protocol describes fUSD as pegged to the US dollar and backed by a diversified reserve of audited stablecoins, an approach it says reduces dependence on any single asset while preserving liquidity. On DeFiLlama's protocol page, Frgmnt is characterized as a multi-collateralized stablecoin on Base, with fUSD minted one-for-one against USDC and reserves routed into dollar-yield strategies.

The motivating premise is a familiar inefficiency. Frgmnt's own materials note that more than 60% of stablecoins sit idle in wallets, generating nothing for their holders while centralized issuers capture the return on the underlying reserves. That gap is not trivial. Traditional stablecoins pay holders nothing even as short-term dollar rates hover near 4 to 5%, a spread that left holders forgoing an estimated $9 billion in annual yield, by one 2025 estimate. Tether alone earned more than $13 billion across 2024 and 2025, largely on the spread between its reserves and what it pays out, which is to say nothing. fUSD's design is a wager that institutions will increasingly decline to leave that money on the table.

Why does the custodian carry as much weight as the instrument?

The distributor here is not incidental. Anchorage Digital is home to Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A., which on January 13, 2021 became the first digital-asset firm to receive a national trust bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. As a condition of that approval it entered an operating agreement covering capital, liquidity and risk-management expectations, and it has remained the only crypto company holding a full federal banking charter. In August 2025 the OCC terminated a 2022 consent order tied to anti-money-laundering controls, a step the firm framed as moving from first-chartered to fully proven.

Founded in 2017 by security engineers Nathan McCauley and Diogo Monica, Anchorage Digital provides custody, trading, settlement and staking to institutions, and is backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Goldman Sachs, KKR and Visa. Its recent activity has clustered around exactly this kind of role. In October 2025, U.S. Bank was selected to custody the reserves backing Anchorage Digital Bank's payment stablecoins, and in August 2025 the bank positioned itself as the first federally chartered stablecoin issuer under the newly enacted GENIUS Act. Adding fUSD extends a deliberate pattern: the bank is assembling itself as connective tissue between regulated balance sheets and programmable dollar instruments.

How does fUSD sit against the wider yield-bearing dollar market?

fUSD arrives in a segment that has stopped being a curiosity. Yield-bearing stablecoins grew from roughly $1 billion in supply in 2023 to more than $19 billion by September 2025, according to the Bank for International Settlements, with instruments such as Ethena's sUSDe, Sky's sUSDS and BlackRock's tokenized liquidity fund together accounting for over half the category.

The instruments are not interchangeable, and the distinctions are what an institution actually underwrites. A conventional payment stablecoin like USDC holds its backing in a government money-market fund and bank deposits and passes the holder no yield; a fund-based instrument such as BlackRock's BUIDL, which crossed roughly $2.5 billion in assets in late 2025, is a registered securities wrapper over short-dated Treasuries. fUSD sits in a third bucket: a minted dollar whose return comes from lending strategies rather than a passive Treasury portfolio. Higher potential yield, different risk. The question a diligence team will ask is not whether fUSD pays, but what it is lent against, how the reserve is audited, and what a redemption looks like under stress. Anchorage Digital's role answers the custody piece of that question. It does not answer the credit piece.

What should institutions watch from here?

The near-term signal to watch is uptake through the regulated channel: whether treasury desks and asset managers who were structurally blocked from composable dollar instruments actually mint at scale now that the custody and operational objections are gone. A second signal is regulatory. The GENIUS Act drew a sharp line on stablecoins that pay interest directly, and the boundary between a payment stablecoin and a yield-bearing instrument routed through a separate staking wrapper like sfUSD is precisely where supervisory attention is likely to land. How that line is drawn in practice will shape which structures survive.

The open question is durability. A programmable, composable dollar becomes genuinely institutional only when its yield source is as auditable as its custody, and when redemption holds in a drawdown rather than only in calm markets. Anchorage Digital has supplied the regulated wrapper. Whether fUSD earns a permanent line on an institutional balance sheet, or remains a tactical allocation, will be settled by the quality of what backs it. For issuers weighing how to bring programmable, auditable dollar instruments to institutions, that is the standard worth building toward, and the one Issuant keeps in view.

Why Are EU Groups Fighting the Tokenized Securities Cap?

Carter Bray — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 18:50:55 GMT

In brief: A coalition of European exchanges, banks, and market operators is pressing the EU to remove the volume cap on digital securities under the DLT Pilot Regime, or to raise it to at least 1.5 trillion euros. Roughly 40 firms, including Nasdaq and Boerse Stuttgart, argue that the current 6 billion euro ceiling is too small to justify institutional participation and risks pushing digital-securities activity toward the United States. The request lands as the European Commission negotiates a broad overhaul that would lift the cap to 100 billion euros.

The DLT Pilot Regime is the EU framework that lets exchanges and settlement systems trade and settle securities that qualify as financial instruments on distributed-ledger infrastructure. It began applying on 23 March 2023 under Regulation (EU) 2022/858, and it was designed as a temporary sandbox so that regulators and market operators could gain experience with programmable, ledger-based securities before writing permanent rules. Three years in, the industry's verdict is blunt: the sandbox is too small to be useful, and a group of about 40 firms has now asked Brussels to say so in law.

What are the DLT Pilot Regime caps, and why do they matter?

The binding constraint is a set of volume limits. Under the regime as it stands, digital securities admitted to a single venue cannot collectively exceed 6 billion euros in market value, and once that figure reaches 9 billion euros an exit threshold forces the operator to wind activity down. On top of the aggregate ceiling, each instrument must clear per-issuance thresholds: shares are eligible only where the issuer's market capitalisation is below 500 million euros, bonds only where the issue size is below 1 billion euros, and fund units only where assets under management sit below 500 million euros.

Those numbers were meant to contain risk while the experiment ran. In practice they excluded the instruments institutions most want to issue and settle on a ledger: large sovereign and corporate bonds, blue-chip equities, and money-market instruments at scale. As Ledger Insights put it, large incumbents chose to sit out the regime because the caps were prohibitively small for institutional usage. A framework that cannot accommodate a single benchmark government bond issue is not a framework a bank builds a business on.

Who is asking for the change, and what exactly do they want?

The signatories run to roughly 40 organisations and read like a cross-section of European market plumbing rather than a crypto lobby. They include Nasdaq, Boerse Stuttgart, and other exchanges and financial-market infrastructures, alongside trade bodies. Their ask is twofold and deliberately sequenced. The first-best outcome is to remove the volume cap entirely, on the logic that a permanent, credible market cannot operate under a ceiling that triggers forced wind-downs. Failing that, they want the starting threshold set at no less than 1.5 trillion euros, a figure they argue reflects the real size of the markets the technology is meant to serve.

The competitive argument sits underneath the numbers. Tokenization firms have warned that the pilot's constraints risk pushing markets to the US, where digital-securities activity faces a different regulatory posture. For issuers weighing where to build programmable, composable instruments, a jurisdiction with a hard 6 billion euro ceiling is a difficult sell against one without.

How does this fit the Commission's own reform plan?

The request is not arriving in a vacuum. In December 2025 the European Commission launched the Market Integration and Supervision Package, a broad set of financial-legislative proposals that includes a section on the DLT Pilot Regime. As Taylor Wessing summarised, the package would make the regime permanent and materially expand it, lifting the 6 billion euro cap to 100 billion euros and widening the range of eligible instruments beyond the current shares, bonds, and funds.

That is a large increase, and it moves in the industry's direction. But 100 billion euros still sits well below the 1.5 trillion euro fallback the coalition is requesting, which is the crux of the disagreement. The firms are effectively telling Brussels that its own proposed expansion, though welcome, does not go far enough to make Europe a serious venue for institutional digital securities. The proposals now enter trilogue negotiations between the Commission, the European Parliament, and the Council, a process Bird & Bird expects to run through 2026, with any adopted rules potentially applying after a transitional period of 12 to 24 months.

Threshold on digital-securities value	Source and status
6 billion euros aggregate (9 billion euro exit trigger)	Current law under Regulation 2022/858, in force
100 billion euros	European Commission proposal, MISP, December 2025
Remove cap, or at least 1.5 trillion euros	Industry request, roughly 40 firms, September 2026

What has the regulator itself said?

The supervisory view is closer to the industry's than the current statute suggests. In a June 2025 report on the functioning and review of the regime, the European Securities and Markets Authority recommended making the regime permanent and proposed more flexible thresholds, acknowledging that the design as written had produced limited uptake. National regulators have pushed in the same direction: the French and Italian authorities published a joint position paper in April 2025 arguing for a more competitive European pilot. When the regulator, two national supervisors, and 40 market participants all say the same thing, the caps look less like prudent risk management and more like a ceiling the market has outgrown.

For institutions, the substance underneath the lobbying is what matters. The DLT Pilot Regime is Europe's live attempt to give securities the properties that ledger-based infrastructure makes possible: programmable settlement, composable instruments, and auditable records that reconcile in near real time. The cap fight is really a question of whether that infrastructure can carry meaningful size. The direction of travel, from a 6 billion euro sandbox toward a 100 billion euro floor and an industry ask measured in trillions, tells issuers where this is heading, even if the final number is unsettled.

Frequently asked questions

What is the current cap on digital securities under the DLT Pilot Regime? Digital securities on a single venue cannot collectively exceed 6 billion euros in market value, with a 9 billion euro exit threshold that forces the operator to wind down. Per-instrument limits also apply, including a 500 million euro market-capitalisation ceiling for shares and a 1 billion euro issue-size ceiling for bonds, under Regulation (EU) 2022/858.

Has the EU agreed to remove or raise the cap? Not yet. The European Commission proposed raising the cap to 100 billion euros in its December 2025 Market Integration and Supervision Package, but that proposal is still in trilogue negotiations expected to run through 2026. The industry's request to scrap the cap or set it at 1.5 trillion euros goes further than the Commission has committed to.

Why does the cap matter for issuers evaluating digital securities in Europe? The thresholds exclude large bond and equity issues from the regime, which is why major institutions have largely stayed out. A higher or removed cap would let issuers place benchmark-sized instruments on programmable, auditable infrastructure inside a regulated EU framework rather than routing that activity to other jurisdictions. This is precisely the institutional gap Issuant is built to serve.

Tether, Fasanara Launch $400M Private Credit Fund

Yonier Bellido — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 18:00:46 GMT

In brief: On 9 September 2026, Tether and Fasanara Capital launched StableFund, an evergreen private credit vehicle anchored by $400 million of co-investment from both sponsors and targeting up to $3 billion in third-party institutional capital. The fund lends to small businesses and consumers through fintech platforms in more than 60 countries, and it uses Tether's USDT as settlement infrastructure so loans can move across borders faster than traditional banking rails allow. It is one of the clearest signs yet that programmable settlement is being wired into an established institutional asset class rather than a speculative one.

What is StableFund, in one sentence?

StableFund is a jointly sponsored, evergreen private credit fund that directs institutional capital into short-duration, asset-backed lending to real-economy borrowers, with loan disbursements and repayments settled on stablecoin rails instead of correspondent banking. The launch was announced by Tether on 9 September 2026. The two firms bring complementary roles. Fasanara Capital, a London-based specialist manager the FCA authorises and regulates, manages the fund's investments and originates the underlying loans, drawing on a book that already spans SME loans, consumer credit, trade receivables, and supply chain finance. Tether acts as originator and advisor, sourcing USDT-linked financing opportunities and, crucially, supplying the settlement plumbing: on-ramp and off-ramp connectivity plus treasury rails that let capital cross borders more efficiently than legacy systems.

The fund is aimed at a specific gap. Its stated purpose is to channel institutional money toward small and medium-sized businesses, a segment Tether estimates faces a $5.7 trillion global financing shortfall. That is the demand side. The supply side is a private credit market that has grown into one of the largest destinations for patient institutional capital.

Why does a $3 billion target matter to private credit?

Because the pool it draws from is now enormous, and still expanding. The Alternative Credit Council, the private credit affiliate of AIMA, put the global market at roughly $3.5 trillion in its 2025 review, while Morgan Stanley pegged it near $3 trillion at the start of 2025 and projects roughly $5 trillion by 2029. A $3 billion raise is a modest slice of that, which is the point: StableFund is not trying to reinvent private credit, it is trying to attach a faster settlement layer to a mature one.

What separates this vehicle from a conventional direct-lending fund is not the credit itself but how money moves through it. In a traditional structure, a cross-border disbursement to a borrower in an emerging market can wait on correspondent banks, cut-off times, and multiple currency legs. Here, a loan can be funded and repaid on USDT rails, compressing settlement from days to near-immediate and giving the manager tighter control over working capital. The credit exposure, the underwriting, the covenants, and the recovery process remain recognisably private credit. The rails are the variable that changes.

How does StableFund compare with the structures institutions already know?

The table below sets StableFund against a conventional direct-lending fund and a bank trade-finance facility on the dimensions that matter to an allocator: who bears the credit, how settlement clears, and how the exposure is governed.

Feature	StableFund (Tether / Fasanara)	Conventional direct-lending fund	Bank trade-finance facility
Structure	Evergreen, jointly sponsored	Typically closed-end, fixed term	On balance sheet
Anchor capital	$400M sponsor co-investment	LP commitments	Bank capital
Underlying assets	SME loans, consumer credit, trade receivables, supply chain finance	Middle-market corporate loans	Receivables, letters of credit
Settlement rail	USDT, on and off-ramp connectivity	Correspondent banking	SWIFT and correspondent banking
Cross-border speed	Near-immediate	Days	Days
Manager	FCA-regulated (Fasanara)	Registered fund manager	Regulated bank

The comparison surfaces a point the table cannot fully carry on its own: sponsor co-investment changes the alignment. In a standard direct-lending fund, the manager earns fees on committed capital and may hold little of the risk. Here, both Tether and Fasanara have put $400 million of their own money alongside third-party investors, which ties the sponsors' outcome to the fund's rather than merely to its size. That does not eliminate risk. Private credit's rapid growth has drawn scrutiny, and the IMF has flagged the asset class for opacity in valuations and interconnection with the wider financial system. Faster settlement does not change underwriting discipline, and a stablecoin rail is only as sound as the reserves and controls behind it.

On that last point, the counterparty is more legible than it once was. Tether reported a record $187.3 billion USDT market cap in the fourth quarter of 2025, and it completed its first full financial audit, signed by KPMG, on its 2025 statements. For an allocator weighing a settlement dependency, an audited, Treasury-heavy reserve base is a materially different proposition than an unaudited one.

Where this fits in Tether's wider strategy

StableFund is not an isolated experiment. Tether has been redeploying the profits from its reserve base into hard assets and infrastructure, from a $23 billion gold stockpile it is lending against to stakes in energy, mining, and AI. Private credit is the logical extension of that arc: it puts the settlement network to work inside an asset class institutions already understand and allocate to at scale. Fasanara, for its part, has been building toward programmable finance from the other direction, having earlier launched a money-market fund on public infrastructure and partnered with the IFC to expand receivables finance in emerging markets. The two sides meet at the same conclusion: composable, auditable rails belong inside real-economy lending, not adjacent to it.

What an institution should do with this

Treat StableFund less as a headline and more as a template worth evaluating. If your mandate already includes private credit, the questions to ask are familiar ones applied to a new settlement layer: how is the underlying loan book underwritten and valued, what recourse exists if a fintech originator fails, and how are the stablecoin rails governed, reserved, and audited. If you issue or raise capital yourself, the more useful takeaway is directional. A regulated manager and an audited stablecoin issuer have shown that programmable settlement can sit under an institutional credit strategy without diluting its discipline, which lowers the bar for the next issuer to do the same. That is the shift worth tracking, and the one Issuant is built to help institutions act on: the moment programmable, composable, auditable assets stop being a category apart and become simply a faster way to run the strategies you already trust.

Why Is Circle Buying Tazapay for $400 Million?

Yonier Bellido — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 16:08:15 GMT

In brief: Circle Internet Group has agreed to acquire Singapore-based cross-border payments firm Tazapay for approximately $400 million in an all-stock deal, its largest acquisition since 2018. The purchase gives the USDC issuer a licensed payments platform processing more than $25 billion in annualized volume across 100-plus markets, and is expected to close in 2027 pending regulatory approvals, including from the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

Circle Internet Group (NYSE: CRCL) has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Tazapay, a Singapore-headquartered cross-border payments company, for roughly $400 million in stock, according to CoinDesk, which reported the deal on September 8, 2026. The transaction is Circle's largest since it bought crypto exchange Poloniex in 2018, and it moves the dollar-backed payment issuer from minting a regulated digital dollar into owning the rails that move money across borders. In plain terms: Circle is buying distribution and licenses rather than building them.

Tazapay is a business-to-business payments infrastructure provider that supplies collection, holding, and payout services to payment firms and financial institutions. That is the self-contained definition worth holding onto: it is a licensed money-movement layer, not a consumer app, and it is the piece Circle has been missing.

What exactly did Circle agree to buy?

The headline number is about $400 million, paid entirely in Circle stock. Per a regulatory filing summarized by CoinDesk, Circle will set the share count using its volume-weighted average closing price over the 20 trading days before closing, with the consideration adjusted for Tazapay's debt, cash, and transaction costs. Roughly 5 percent of the shares will be held back for indemnities, with a further 3 percent reserved for the same purpose, a structure that spreads risk on both sides of a deal that will not close until 2027.

What Circle gets for that price is scale it did not have. Tazapay processes more than $25 billion in annualized payment volume, works with over 60 banks and fintech partners, and maintains local payout rails across more than 100 markets, according to reporting by YourStory. Its coverage spans alternative payment methods, cards, virtual bank accounts, payouts, and stablecoin settlement, as the company described when Circle and Ripple first took strategic stakes in it, per a PRNewswire release.

Why does the regulatory footprint matter more than the volume?

The volume is the story that makes headlines. The licenses are the story that makes the deal. Tazapay holds a Major Payment Institution licence (No. PS20200638) issued under Singapore's Payment Services Act 2019 and regulated by the Monetary Authority of Singapore. That licence authorizes account issuance, merchant acquisition, domestic and cross-border money transfer, and e-money issuance, and it carries MAS obligations on safeguarding customer funds, anti-money-laundering controls, and operational resilience, as set out on Tazapay's licenses page.

For an issuer whose entire proposition rests on being the compliant, auditable dollar, acquiring a regulated payments entity is the point. Building a comparable licensing footprint market by market is slow and uncertain. Buying one that already clears MAS scrutiny compresses years of regulatory groundwork into a single transaction, which is why the deal is best read as a licensing acquisition wearing a volume acquisition's price tag.

How does Tazapay fit Circle's payments ambitions?

Circle spent the past year positioning the Circle Payments Network as connective tissue for institutional dollar settlement, and it has paired USDC issuance with distribution deals such as its arrangement with Nium to power global payouts. Tazapay slots directly into that plan, extending Circle's reach across the Asia-Pacific region and emerging markets where local payout infrastructure is the hardest part to replicate.

The two companies were already entangled. In March 2026, Tazapay closed a $36 million Series B extension led by Circle Ventures, which the firm said would fund licensing expansion, per Crowdfund Insider. The acquisition converts that strategic stake into outright ownership, a familiar pattern in which an investor buys the company it already knew from the inside.

It also fits a broader buying streak. Circle paid roughly $100 million for Hashnote, the issuer behind money-market instrument USYC, in 2025, and $209.9 million for Coinbase's remaining half of the Centre Consortium that controlled USDC's intellectual property, according to CoinDesk. The Tazapay deal is larger than any of them, and it points outward toward payments rather than inward toward the token.

What does the deal signal for institutions?

The signal is that regulated digital-dollar issuers now compete on distribution and licenses, not just on reserves. Founded in April 2020 by Rahul Shinghal, Saroj Mishra, and Arul Kumaravel, Tazapay built its network around payment protection and counterparty verification for cross-border commerce, according to a company profile. That programmable, verifiable approach to moving money is precisely what a composable settlement layer needs, and it explains why an issuer would pay a premium for it.

For asset managers, banks, and issuers weighing how programmable dollars fit their operations, the read-through is concrete. Settlement infrastructure is consolidating around entities that can prove their licensing and their controls, and the firms that own both the unit of value and the rails beneath it are assembling something closer to an end-to-end financial utility.

What happens next?

The near-term picture is stable and slow. Tazapay's services, pricing, and support are expected to remain unchanged while the transaction is pending, per CoinDesk, and closing is not expected until 2027, subject to regulatory approvals that include MAS. That long runway is itself worth watching, because a payments acquisition of this size will draw scrutiny across every jurisdiction where Tazapay is licensed.

The open question is whether MAS and other regulators view a stablecoin issuer owning a Major Payment Institution as a natural evolution of dollar settlement or as a concentration that warrants conditions. The answer will shape not only this deal but the template for how the next issuer tries to buy its way into regulated payments. For institutions evaluating where programmable, auditable dollars actually settle, that ruling matters as much as the price. It is the kind of structural shift that firms building against composable, compliant assets, Issuant among them, will be tracking closely as the timeline unfolds.

How Did HDFC and ICICI Buy REC's Digital Bond?

Carter Bray — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 16:22:34 GMT

In brief: REC Limited, India's state-owned power financier, sold the country's first programmable corporate bond in early September 2026, raising 5 billion rupees (about $52.9 million) at a 7.30% coupon on notes maturing in May 2028. HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank were among roughly 20 buyers that included mutual funds and corporates, according to Bloomberg. The issue ran under a SEBI regulatory sandbox, cleared through the NSE electronic bond platform, and marks the first live test of India's plan to modernize its corporate debt market on distributed-ledger rails.

India's largest private-sector lenders have now bought a corporate bond that exists as a programmable, ledger-native security rather than a conventional paper-and-depository instrument. That single fact, more than the deal's modest size, is why the sale matters to anyone issuing or holding debt in one of the world's larger fixed-income markets.

What exactly did REC issue?

A programmable corporate bond is a debt security whose ownership, transfer, and lifecycle events are recorded and executed on a distributed ledger, while remaining a fully regulated instrument under existing securities law. REC's version is not a crypto product. It is a rupee-denominated bond with a fixed coupon, a defined maturity, and named institutional buyers, issued inside a supervised regulatory perimeter.

The economics were conventional. REC raised 5 billion rupees, roughly $52.9 million, on notes due in May 2028 at a 7.30% coupon, Bloomberg reported. The structure comprised a 100 crore rupee base issue with a 400 crore rupee greenshoe option, and the tenor ran one year and nine months, according to Indian PSU. Demand outpaced the paper on offer: the sale drew bids worth about 796 crore rupees against the 500 crore rupee ceiling, a comfortable oversubscription for a first-of-its-kind instrument.

The issuer is well chosen for a debut. REC Limited is a New Delhi-based state-owned lender to the power sector, and its domestic paper carries top-tier ratings, reaffirmed by ICRA and CRISIL in early 2026. Using a familiar, highly rated name removes credit uncertainty from a transaction whose real purpose was to prove the plumbing.

Which institutions bought it, and why does that matter?

About 20 investors took part, spanning banks, mutual funds, and corporates, with HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank among the buyers, per people familiar with the deal cited by Bloomberg. The participation of India's two largest private lenders is the signal here. When systemically important banks are willing to hold a ledger-native bond on their own books, the instrument stops being a lab experiment and starts looking like a fixture that treasury and fixed-income desks may need to accommodate.

Broad buyer diversity matters for a second reason. A pilot bought only by a single sponsor bank proves little about market appetite. A book of around 20 accounts across three institution types demonstrates that the settlement model, the custody arrangements, and the legal treatment were acceptable to a cross-section of the market at once.

How is the deal regulated and settled?

The sale was executed under the SEBI regulatory sandbox and routed through the NSE electronic bond platform (EBP), the same venue institutions already use for primary debt issuance, Indian PSU reported. Running the pilot on established market infrastructure, rather than a parallel system, is a deliberate choice that keeps the transaction inside familiar compliance and reporting channels.

The pilot is a joint effort between the Reserve Bank of India and the Securities and Exchange Board of India, Crypto Briefing noted. It also arrived alongside SEBI's broader "Demat 2.0" modernization push, which the REC issue was slated to help launch, according to Business Standard. The regulatory groundwork is not new. India's depositories, NSDL and CDSL, have run blockchain-based security and covenant monitoring since a 2021 SEBI circular, a starting point most jurisdictions attempting the same modernization simply do not have, as Blockhead observed.

Settlement is where India's approach becomes distinctive. The pilot was designed to use the RBI's wholesale digital rupee, its central bank digital currency, as the cash leg, Business Standard reported. That pairing lets both the security and the payment move as programmable objects, enabling delivery-versus-payment on a shared ledger and cutting the settlement lag and counterparty exposure that persist in conventional processing. The RBI has been building toward this for years, having launched wholesale digital rupee pilots in the call money market in 2023 and later expanding its e-rupee experiments into tokenized deposits.

How does India's model compare to a conventional bond issue?

The REC pilot keeps the parts of the market that work and replaces the parts that create friction. The table below sets the two approaches side by side.

Feature	Conventional corporate bond	REC programmable bond
Record of ownership	Depository book entry (NSDL / CDSL)	Distributed ledger under SEBI sandbox
Primary venue	NSE electronic bond platform	NSE electronic bond platform
Cash settlement	Interbank funds, T+1 cycle	Wholesale digital rupee (RBI CBDC)
Lifecycle events	Manual, intermediary-driven	Programmable on the ledger
Regulatory status	Established SEBI framework	Same framework, sandbox pilot

The point of the comparison is continuity. The issuer, the platform, and the legal character of the security are unchanged. What shifts is the settlement asset and the programmability of the record, which is precisely where auditability and operational efficiency improve.

What comes next for India's debt market?

The strategic prize dwarfs the pilot. Coverage of the sale framed it against India's roughly $624 billion corporate debt market, a market that a programmable settlement layer could make deeper and more liquid, as TechTimes reported. If ledger-native issuance moves from sandbox to standard, the addressable scope is the entire corporate bond stack, not a single 500 crore rupee test.

SEBI has signaled that tokenization and DLT settlement remain firmly on its agenda, with the regulator confirming its corporate bond pilot was actively moving through 2026, per Ledger Insights. For issuers, the near-term takeaway is that a credible, regulated path to programmable debt now exists in a major emerging market, validated by the buy-side names that matter most.

Frequently asked questions

Is REC's bond a regulated security or a crypto asset? It is a regulated rupee corporate bond. It was issued under a SEBI regulatory sandbox, cleared on the NSE electronic bond platform, and carries a fixed 7.30% coupon and a May 2028 maturity. The distributed ledger changes how ownership is recorded and settled, not the legal nature of the instrument.

How was the cash leg settled? The pilot was structured to settle in the RBI's wholesale digital rupee, the central bank's CBDC, allowing the security and the payment to move together on a shared ledger. That design supports delivery-versus-payment and reduces settlement lag relative to conventional interbank funding.

Can other issuers replicate this structure now? Not yet at scale. The REC sale ran inside a joint RBI and SEBI sandbox rather than an open, generally available framework. For issuers evaluating programmable, composable, and auditable debt, the deal is best read as proof that the model works in a major market. Building issuance infrastructure that can move from pilot to production is where the next round of work sits, and where firms such as Issuant focus.

Why the AMC Robinhood Stock Token Fight Matters to Issuers

Carter Bray — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 17:13:19 GMT

In brief: On September 4, 2026, AMC Entertainment chief executive Adam Aron publicly demanded that Robinhood cease trading a digital token that tracks AMC's share price, calling the practice "contemptible" and threatening a complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The dispute is not really about one instrument. It is about whether a broker can manufacture programmable exposure to a company's equity without the company's consent, and what that means for issuers who expect to control their own capital structure.

What actually happened between AMC and Robinhood?

The facts are narrow and the stakes are broad. Robinhood offers a product it calls a Stock Token, a blockchain-recorded instrument that follows the price of a listed share. AMC's shares are among the roughly 2,000 names now covered. Aron says AMC was never asked, never consented, and has "no connection to this at all." When Robinhood founder Vlad Tenev replied to the initial criticism with a two-word question, "What's the concern?", Aron answered that the list of concerns was "almost existential" and called on the firm to voluntarily cease and desist.

Here is the definition that clarifies the whole episode: a Robinhood Stock Token is a price-tracking derivative recorded on a blockchain, not a share, and it conveys no legal or beneficial ownership in the underlying company. Robinhood's own European support pages say so plainly. "When you buy Stock Tokens, you are not buying the actual stocks," the firm states, "you are buying tokenized contracts that follow their price." The instruments are offered under the EU's MiFID II framework as derivatives, issued through a Robinhood entity domiciled in Jersey. Aron seized on exactly that point, writing that the "quasi-fake market you are creating on the island of Jersey sows distrust amongst the public about financial markets in general."

Why does a synthetic share upset the issuer?

Because a company's control over its equity is not incidental to its business. It is the business of being a public company. Aron's sharpest line went to that nerve: setting up "some kind of fictitious synthetic equity market decouples stock token ownership from a company's ability to control its own capital raising efforts." That is the institutional heart of the complaint, and it deserves to be read slowly.

An issuer that raises capital, manages dilution, communicates with holders of record, and defends against market manipulation relies on a single premise: that exposure to its equity flows through instruments it recognizes. AMC is an acute example, having issued hundreds of millions of new shares in recent years, so its management is unusually sensitive to anything that muddies the relationship between price, float, and the register. A parallel market in price-tracking contracts, sitting outside the transfer agent and outside the issuer's line of sight, does not dilute the company in the accounting sense. It does something subtler. It creates a pool of economic interest in the name that the company can neither see nor address, and that can move on venues and hours the company does not govern.

This is not a new fault line. When Robinhood first launched these tokens in Europe in mid-2025, it distributed tokens tied to OpenAI and SpaceX, and OpenAI publicly disowned them, stating it had not partnered with Robinhood and that the tokens did not represent OpenAI equity. The pattern is consistent: a distributor builds programmable exposure to a company's value, and the company objects that its name is being used without its involvement.

Do the tokens confer any shareholder rights?

No, and that is precisely what makes them awkward for everyone. For private-company tokens, the economic exposure is typically routed through a special purpose vehicle that holds, or claims to hold, the underlying shares, an arrangement one analysis of the SpaceX structure summarized bluntly as "the asset owner owns the asset". The token holder gets price movement. The token holder does not get votes, does not get direct dividends as a shareholder, and cannot redeem for the security itself.

For a retail buyer, this can feel like a distinction without a difference until it matters, at a tender offer, a governance vote, or a bankruptcy. For an issuer, the gap between exposure and ownership is the entire problem, because the instrument imports the reputational weight of the company's stock while stripping out the rights and obligations that normally travel with it. European regulators noticed early. Shortly after the 2025 launch, the Bank of Lithuania, Robinhood's lead EU regulator, said it was seeking clarification on the structure and messaging of the tokens following OpenAI's warning. The questions raised then are the questions AMC is raising now, only louder and from the issuer's chair.

Where do regulators and the market stand?

Ambiguously, which is the story. Robinhood has been pushing in two directions at once. In the United States it has petitioned the SEC for a formal framework for tokenized real-world assets, arguing that programmable securities deserve clear rules rather than enforcement by ambiguity, while a US exemption for the tokens themselves has stalled. In Europe it launched first and answered regulators after. AMC now says its "high-priced securities counsel" will examine whether it can compel Robinhood to stop, and that it is weighing a formal SEC complaint.

The market response was telling. AMC shares jumped sharply, rising roughly 20 percent in premarket trading as the feud drew attention, a reminder that disputes over the plumbing of equity exposure now move the equity itself. That reflexivity is the point institutions should sit with. When the wrapper around a share can trade independently of the share, the wrapper starts to influence the thing it was supposed to merely track.

What institutions should take from this

Strip away the personalities and the single lesson is about consent and design. The AMC dispute is what happens when programmable exposure to an asset is built without the issuer in the room. The instrument may be perfectly legal under one jurisdiction's derivatives rules and still be intolerable to the company whose name it carries, because legality and legitimacy are not the same test.

The thing that matters most, for any bank, asset manager, or issuer evaluating this space, is that programmable equity is only durable when the issuer's consent and the holder's rights are engineered in from the start, not bolted on after a chief executive posts a cease and desist. An instrument that is auditable back to a real security, issued with the company's knowledge, and clear about exactly what rights it conveys, is one an issuer can defend rather than disown. That is the standard the next generation of composable, auditable assets will be judged against, and it is the standard worth building to rather than around.

Standard Chartered Opens Institutional Crypto Trading in the UAE

Yonier Bellido — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 18:54:05 GMT

In brief: Standard Chartered has begun offering institutional Bitcoin and Ether spot trading in the United Arab Emirates through its DIFC entity, which is supervised by the Dubai Financial Services Authority. Announced on September 3, 2026, the bank describes itself as the first Global Systemically Important Bank to provide regulated digital asset spot trading in the region, delivered through the same platform its clients already use for foreign exchange.

Standard Chartered now lets institutional clients buy and sell Bitcoin and Ether on a spot basis in the United Arab Emirates, and it is doing so from inside a regulated bank rather than a crypto exchange. The service runs through Standard Chartered DIFC, an entity authorised by the Dubai Financial Services Authority, and it sits on the bank's existing foreign-exchange rails so that a treasury or fund can access digital assets through the same interface, the same credit relationship, and the same settlement plumbing it uses for currencies. The bank says the launch, announced on September 3, 2026, makes it the first Global Systemically Important Bank to offer institutional digital asset spot trading in the UAE, and the only global bank currently providing the capability there.

The distinction that matters here is not the two assets involved. It is who is standing behind the trade. For most of the past decade, an institution wanting exposure to Bitcoin or Ether had to route through a native crypto venue, accept that venue's counterparty risk, and reconcile it against a separate banking relationship. Standard Chartered is collapsing that gap by treating a digital asset as one more line item a regulated dealer can price, execute, and settle. That is a smaller conceptual leap than it sounds, and a larger operational one.

What exactly did Standard Chartered launch, and where does it sit?

The offering is institutional spot trading in Bitcoin and Ether, provided out of the Dubai International Financial Centre and regulated by the DFSA. Retail is not the audience. The clients are asset managers, funds, and corporates that already deal with the bank's markets desk, and the trading capability has been folded into the foreign-exchange platform they know, rather than presented as a separate crypto product with its own onboarding and its own risk framework.

One point deserves care, because the bank operates under more than one licence in the country. A separate Standard Chartered UAE consumer-facing description notes that the bank is licensed by Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority to facilitate the purchase and sale of virtual assets. That is a different licence and a different entity from the DFSA-supervised DIFC desk described above, and the two should not be read as the same product. The institutional spot service announced this week is the DIFC one.

Why does the DFSA framework make this possible now?

The timing tracks a regulatory shift rather than a change in market sentiment. The DFSA introduced a dedicated crypto-token regime in the DIFC in 2022 and then rewrote important parts of it, with updated rules that came into force on 12 January 2026. The revised framework does something consequential for a bank: it moves the burden of assessing whether a given token is suitable away from a regulator-led approval process and onto the authorised firm itself, alongside new governance, disclosure, and risk-management obligations.

Legal analysts have read the change plainly. Under the updated regime, responsibility for crypto-token suitability now sits directly with firms, placing greater emphasis on firm-level judgement and accountability. For a global bank with existing controls, that is a workable trade. It gets a clearer path to market in exchange for owning the diligence, which is roughly the arrangement banks already operate under in every other asset class they touch. A jurisdiction that hands institutions that responsibility, rather than gatekeeping each instrument, is a jurisdiction where a G-SIB can actually build.

How does this fit the rest of Standard Chartered's digital asset build?

Spot trading is the visible surface of a much deeper infrastructure programme, and reading it in isolation understates what is happening. The bank launched digital asset custody in the UAE in September 2024, under a DFSA licence within the DIFC, with Brevan Howard Digital as its first client. It secured a Luxembourg custody licence under the European Union's MiCA regime in early 2025, and it has extended custody into Hong Kong. Across these venues, the bank's institutional custody now supports over 75 cryptoassets and tokenised assets, which is a far wider surface than the two coins on offer for spot trading in Dubai.

The custody piece is the load-bearing wall. Trading is easy to announce and hard to make institutional without a safekeeping model that a fiduciary can accept. Standard Chartered has spent two years assembling that model, including moving to fold its digital asset custody venture Zodia into its own corporate and investment bank so that safekeeping runs inside the regulated perimeter rather than beside it. It has also built adjacent machinery for using digital assets as collateral, most notably a collateral arrangement with GFO-X that lets clients post digital assets as collateral in a centrally cleared derivatives model, and an earlier collateral-mirroring programme run with OKX.

Seen together, custody, collateral, and now spot execution describe an institution assembling the full lifecycle of a programmable asset inside bank-grade controls: hold it, price it, trade it, and pledge it against exposure, each step auditable and each step supervised. The UAE launch is not a standalone product. It is the trading layer clicking into a stack the bank had already been building.

What should institutions take from this?

The useful reading is not that a bank is now willing to touch Bitcoin. It is that the venue for institutional digital asset activity is migrating from crypto-native platforms toward regulated intermediaries operating under named supervisors. When the counterparty is a Global Systemically Important Bank, when the regulator is the DFSA, and when execution shares the same rails as foreign exchange, a digital asset stops being an exotic allocation requiring a separate operational apparatus and starts behaving like any other instrument on the book. That is the shift worth watching, and it is the same shift that makes programmable, composable, and auditable assets legible to the institutions Issuant works with: the infrastructure catches up to the demand, and the asset simply becomes something a bank can hold, price, and settle.

What did the G20 say on digital assets in 2026?

Carter Bray — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 18:38:16 GMT

In brief: The G20 finance ministers and central bank governors committed on September 1, 2026 to advancing regulatory frameworks that establish clear pathways for sound digital asset innovation while preserving financial stability. The statement, issued under the United States' G20 presidency, recognized that digital assets can support broad-based economic growth, but reserved specific judgment on stablecoins pending further work from the Financial Stability Board. For institutions, the signal is directional rather than binding: the world's largest economies now frame programmable, composable assets as a growth question, not only a risk question.

When the G20 finance track met in Asheville, North Carolina, at the end of August, the resulting communique read differently from the cautionary language of recent years. In its Chair's Statement, released on September 1 by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the group wrote that it would advance frameworks that "establish clear pathways for sound digital financial and digital assets innovation, while considering cross-border opportunities and challenges as appropriate." That single clause, buried in a long text spanning trade, growth, and financial stability, is what markets seized on.

The phrasing matters because of who wrote it. The G20 accounts for roughly 85 percent of global GDP, and its finance track sets the tone that standard-setters and national regulators tend to follow. A shift in that body's vocabulary, from containment toward calibrated encouragement, is a shift in the direction of travel for every institution weighing whether to issue, custody, or lend against programmable instruments.

What exactly did the G20 commit to?

The commitment is a statement of intent, not a rule. G20 officials said they recognize that digital financial innovation, including digital assets, can support broad-based economic growth, and they acknowledged the private sector's role in driving it, according to reporting from The Crypto Times on the meeting. The operative promise is to build regulatory and supervisory frameworks that do three things at once: preserve financial stability, support economic growth, and open clear routes for legitimate innovation.

That balance is the whole point. Previous G20 language treated digital assets primarily as a source of systemic risk to be monitored and fenced. The Asheville text keeps the stability concern but pairs it with an explicit growth rationale, a framing that established financial press covering the meeting read as the strongest global policy backing the sector has received. The statement was delivered under the United States' 2026 presidency, with Bessent chairing the finance track and presenting the group's conclusions.

Notably, Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh attended, returning to the G20 as a Fed official for the first time since the financial crisis and telling the meeting that the economic debate itself has changed, per an account in Axios. The presence of the US central bank at the table, alongside a Treasury that has driven the innovation framing, is part of why the language carried weight.

Why were stablecoins treated separately?

Stablecoins got their own, more cautious paragraph. Rather than endorse any particular arrangement, the G20 said it is waiting for further work from the Financial Stability Board. The group expects the FSB to publish findings on the cross-border implications of global stablecoin arrangements, together with analysis of stablecoin data sources, their availability, and the gaps in what regulators can currently see, according to coverage of the statement.

That deference is deliberate. The FSB already sets the baseline the G20 relies on. In July 2023 it published its global regulatory framework for crypto-asset activities, built on the principle of "same activity, same risk, same regulation." That framework pairs high-level recommendations for crypto-asset markets with a revised set of recommendations for global stablecoin arrangements, which turn on whether an arrangement has a credible stabilization mechanism, functions as a means of payment or store of value, and could reach across multiple jurisdictions.

The complication is implementation. In October 2025 the FSB reported that it had found significant gaps and inconsistencies in how member jurisdictions have applied those recommendations. In other words, the global standard exists, but its adoption is uneven, and the G20 knows it. Reserving judgment on stablecoins until the FSB delivers more analysis is a way of not getting ahead of the standard-setter it depends on.

For institutions building or holding stablecoin reserves, the practical reading is straightforward. The reference framework is settled in principle, the data and cross-border questions are still open, and the supervisory bar will rise as the FSB's next round of work lands. Reserve composition, redemption mechanics, and disclosure quality are the terms on which these instruments will be judged.

How does this fit the longer regulatory arc?

The Asheville statement is a continuation, not a rupture. The G20 has been steadily building a policy scaffold for digital assets since it endorsed the FSB and IMF recommendations in the New Delhi Leaders' Declaration in September 2023, which welcomed the joint IMF-FSB Synthesis Paper and its roadmap for coordinated regulation. Each subsequent cycle has added detail through the group's crypto-asset policy implementation roadmap and its status reports.

What changes in 2026 is emphasis. The scaffolding was defensive: monitor risks, close gaps, apply consistent standards. The new language layers a growth thesis on top, positioning well-regulated digital assets as infrastructure that can serve capital formation rather than merely a hazard to be contained. That is the shift that matters for anyone deciding where to commit balance sheet or product roadmap.

The distinction institutions should hold onto is between a communique and a rule. Nothing in the statement changes a single national regulation. It does, however, tell you which way the wind is blowing across the jurisdictions that write those rules, and it tells you that the framing prizes assets that are auditable, that carry clear supervisory treatment, and that can move across borders without becoming a stability problem. Programmable and composable instruments that are built to be examined, rather than to evade examination, are the ones this direction favors.

What to watch next

The near-term signal to track is the FSB's promised work on global stablecoin arrangements: the cross-border implications, the data-quality findings, and any tightening of the reserve and disclosure expectations that follow. That work will convert the G20's directional language into concrete supervisory pressure, and it will do so unevenly across jurisdictions, given the implementation gaps the FSB itself has flagged.

The medium-term question is whether the growth framing survives contact with the next stability scare. The G20 has committed to clear pathways in a calm moment. The test is whether that commitment holds when a stablecoin depegs, a large issuer stumbles, or a cross-border settlement fails, and the old instinct to fence rather than to build reasserts itself.

For institutions, the open question is one of positioning. If the world's largest economies now treat programmable, composable, auditable assets as a growth channel worth clear rules, the advantage will accrue to issuers and allocators who are already building to that standard rather than waiting for the standard to arrive. That is the wager Issuant is built around, and the G20's language, for the first time, points in the same direction.

Why Did 21 Global Banks Form a Stablecoin Venture?

Yonier Bellido — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 17:21:41 GMT

In brief: Twenty-one global banks and asset managers, among them Citi, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank and UBS, said on September 1, 2026 that they will establish a jointly owned company to issue a US dollar stablecoin, with the product targeted for the first half of 2027. The as-yet-unnamed venture is expected to be incorporated in the second half of 2026, subject to closing conditions, and brings 17 global systemically important banks together with asset managers Fidelity Investments and WisdomTree. It marks the clearest sign yet that the incumbent banking system intends to issue programmable dollars on its own terms rather than cede the ground to independent issuers.

A consortium of twenty-one leading financial institutions has committed to build a shared stablecoin issuer, according to a statement released through PR Newswire on September 1, 2026. The group plans to start with a single dollar-denominated instrument and bring it to market in the first half of 2027, CoinDesk reported. A stablecoin is a digital token designed to hold a fixed value, typically one US dollar, and backed one-for-one by cash and short-dated government securities so that holders can redeem it on demand. What sets this effort apart is who stands behind it: not a fintech, but the core of the international banking system.

Who is in the consortium, and why does the roster matter?

The membership reads like a directory of the world's largest lenders. Across North America it includes Bank of America, Capital One, Citi, Goldman Sachs, PNC Financial Services, Scotiabank, TD Bank Group and Wells Fargo, alongside asset managers Fidelity Investments and WisdomTree. The European contingent brings Banco Santander, BBVA, Commerzbank, Credit Agricole, Deutsche Bank, Lloyds Banking Group, Rabobank and UBS. Rounding out the group are MUFG Bank from Japan, Standard Bank from South Africa and Abu Dhabi's Sirius International Holding.

That composition is the story. According to Ledger Insights, seventeen of the members are global systemically important banks, the tier of institutions whose failure regulators treat as a threat to the wider financial system. Eight of the original ten banks that seeded the idea remain, including Santander, Bank of America, Citi, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, MUFG, TD and UBS. Pulling that many G-SIBs into a single issuing entity is unusual, and it signals that the participants see more value in a shared, interoperable dollar than in a field of competing house-branded ones.

The presence of Fidelity and WisdomTree is worth pausing on. Both are asset managers with existing digital-asset businesses. Fidelity launched its own Fidelity Digital Dollar earlier in 2026, so their participation suggests the venture is meant to complement, not simply replace, individual initiatives already in flight.

What is the venture actually building?

The company itself is still unnamed and, per the group's statement, will be established in the second half of 2026 once closing conditions are met. The first deliverable is a dollar stablecoin aimed at a first-half 2027 launch. The framing throughout the announcement is deliberately conservative: a regulated instrument, fully reserved, issued by an entity the members own collectively.

The logic is defensive and offensive at once. Stablecoins have grown into a meaningful settlement layer, with the total market capitalization climbing past $290 billion in 2026 and concentrated largely in a handful of non-bank issuers. For banks, that growth represents deposits and payment flows migrating toward instruments they do not control. A shared issuer lets them offer clients a programmable dollar that settles around the clock while keeping the reserves, and the relationships, inside the regulated perimeter.

How does the GENIUS Act shape the design?

None of this happens without a legal foundation, and the consortium has one. President Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law on July 18, 2025, creating the first federal framework for payment stablecoins in the United States. The statute defines a payment stablecoin as a digital asset issued for payment or settlement and redeemable at a fixed amount, and it restricts issuance to permitted issuers overseen by a federal or state regulator.

Two provisions explain the structure the banks have chosen. First, the White House fact sheet confirms the Act mandates 100 percent reserve backing in cash or short-term Treasuries, with monthly public disclosure of reserve composition. Second, as Mayer Brown noted, the Act generally keeps insured depository institutions from issuing stablecoins directly, steering them toward dedicated subsidiaries or affiliated entities instead. A jointly owned company sitting alongside the banks, rather than inside any one of them, fits that requirement cleanly. Regulators have since moved to fill in the detail, with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issuing proposed rules in early 2026 to implement the framework.

How does this fit the wider scramble among incumbents?

The consortium is not acting in a vacuum. Incumbents have spent the past year testing several models at once, and the September announcement is best read as one branch of a broader repositioning.

The same core of large US banks has separately explored a shared tokenized deposit network. JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo, working with The Clearing House, are planning a blockchain-based deposit network targeted for 2027, a design that keeps money as insured bank deposits rather than converting it into a stablecoin. Elsewhere, the bank-owned operator behind Zelle unveiled ZelleUSD in June 2026 for cross-border remittances, and a separate coalition of payments and asset-management firms including Visa, Mastercard and BlackRock backed Open USD, a stablecoin launched with roughly 140 partners.

Set against that backdrop, the twenty-one-member venture is distinctive for its international reach and its concentration of systemically important banks. Where the tokenized deposit effort is largely American and preserves the deposit itself, this consortium is explicitly building a stablecoin, and it spans North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

What comes next, and what remains unresolved

The near-term milestones are concrete. Watch first for the company to be incorporated and named in the back half of 2026, and for the closing conditions, which the members have not detailed, to be satisfied. The 2027 launch window then becomes the real test. Between now and then, the open questions are governance and reach: how twenty-one competitors, several of them direct rivals, will agree on operating rules, fee economics and who has priority access to the rails. A shared issuer only delivers on its promise if it is genuinely interoperable across the members rather than a lowest-common-denominator compromise.

The deeper question is whether a bank-issued dollar can win share from established issuers on anything other than trust and regulatory standing. It will arrive later than the incumbents it hopes to challenge, and it will need to prove that programmable, fully reserved and auditable are advantages clients will pay for. For institutions weighing how to issue or raise against digital dollars, the signal is clearer than the timing: the reserved, disclosed, regulated model is becoming the default, and the infrastructure to support composable, auditable assets is where the next phase of competition will be decided.

How Do European Issuers Reach US Investors With Programmable Assets?

Juan Sanchez — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 14:28:37 GMT

In brief: Issuant is partnering with Brickken to give institutions a clear, compliant route into the US market. Issuant brings the broker-dealer and registered investment adviser framework needed to place an instrument with US investors, while Brickken brings the infrastructure to issue and operate it. Together, the partnership consolidates capabilities that issuers have historically had to source, assess, and implement separately.

Reaching US investors with a programmable, real-world asset takes two distinct competencies that rarely sit under one roof: the ability to structure and operate the instrument, and the ability to clear the regulatory bar to distribute it. The Issuant and Brickken partnership brings both together under a single engagement. Issuant supplies the regulatory side, broker-dealer and registered investment adviser capability held in-house rather than outsourced. Brickken supplies the issuance engine, compliance execution, investor onboarding, and lifecycle management that run across private credit, debt instruments, fund units, equity, and commodities.

The timing matters. The market for tokenized real-world assets reached roughly $24 billion by mid-2025, up 380% over three years according to CoinDesk, and climbed past $35 billion by the end of November 2025 on RWA.xyz data. As institutional capital moves into the category, the gap between building a compliant instrument and actually distributing it becomes the constraint that decides who reaches US allocators.

What problem does this partnership solve?

A compliant instrument still needs a legal path to US investors before it can reach them. Getting there requires two separate skill sets: structuring the asset itself, and clearing the regulatory bar to distribute it. Most providers in this space are built for one or the other, not both.

The distinction is not cosmetic. A registered investment adviser and a broker-dealer are regulated under different statutes and serve different functions: the adviser owes a fiduciary duty and manages assets, while the broker-dealer transacts in securities and is supervised through FINRA. Placing a programmable security with US investors touches both. That regulatory perimeter is exactly why leading issuance platforms have been building toward it. In July 2026, Securitize registered with the SEC as a full investment adviser, adding a licensed function to a stack that already issues digital securities, and Prometheum has expanded its own SEC-registered broker-dealer and transfer agent infrastructure to close the same gap.

The Issuant and Brickken partnership addresses both sides in one engagement. Issuant contributes the regulatory layer: broker-dealer and registered investment adviser capability, held in-house rather than outsourced. Brickken contributes the operating layer, an institutional-grade platform to issue, manage, and operate programmable instruments across asset classes, delivered through Issuer Studio for direct access, White Label Infrastructure for branded deployment, and the Brickken API for embedded workflows.

Why does this gap exist in the first place?

An issuer that solves only the technical side ends up with an instrument it has no legal way to distribute in the US. One that solves only the regulatory side has a compliant path to market and nothing to issue on. Historically, closing that gap has meant running two vendor searches, two diligence processes, and reconciling two implementation timelines, work that falls on the client by default.

The reason is structural. Issuance technology and regulated distribution grew up as separate businesses, with separate cost bases and separate approvals. Brickken has been explicit that it is the technology provider and not the issuer, supplying the compliant infrastructure while the regulated functions sit elsewhere. That division is efficient for the platform, but it leaves the issuer to assemble the missing regulatory pieces itself. Prometheum has argued the same point from the other direction, that the real missing link for scaling programmable securities is distribution, not technology. Pairing a licensed distributor with an issuance platform is how that missing link gets supplied.

Who does this partnership serve?

The engagement is built for two groups whose needs mirror each other across the Atlantic.

European issuers	US clients
European companies pursuing US market entry get a route in that does not require assembling a US regulatory stack from scratch, which for most issuers otherwise means either a long vendor search or building internal capability they would not need for a single market.	US clients get technical and regulatory support from one point of contact, rather than managing an infrastructure provider and a regulatory partner as two separate relationships on two separate timelines.

For a European issuer, standing up US broker-dealer and adviser capability for one market rarely justifies the cost or the calendar. For a US client, coordinating an infrastructure vendor and a regulatory partner across two contracts introduces exactly the friction that slows a launch. Consolidating both under one engagement removes that overhead on either side.

What comes next?

On 3 September at 15:00 UTC, Issuant CEO Juan Mari will be joined by Brickken's Head of Business Development, Rodrigo Palacios, for a conversation on what it takes to bring programmable capital into the US market.

The discussion will cover how Issuant's regulatory framework and Brickken's infrastructure fit together, what opening the US market means operationally for institutional clients, and how clients can use programmable issuance to move into the US market.

Frequently asked questions

Why do issuers need both a broker-dealer and an issuance platform to reach US investors? Because structuring a compliant instrument and legally distributing it are governed separately. An issuance platform builds and operates the asset, while a broker-dealer or registered investment adviser provides the regulated path to place it with US investors. Neither function substitutes for the other.

What can be issued through this partnership? Brickken's platform supports programmable financial instruments across private credit, debt, funds, equity, and real-world-asset-backed instruments, delivered through Issuer Studio, White Label Infrastructure, and the Brickken API within confirmed scope.

Is programmable issuance a large enough market to justify US entry? The evidence points that way. Independent trackers put the category at over $35 billion by late 2025, with institutional participation rising through the year. For issuers weighing US distribution, that is a market worth reaching through a single compliant route rather than a fragmented one, which is the route Issuant and Brickken have set out to provide.

What Does Schwab Adding Solana, Avalanche, Chainlink Mean?

Carter Bray — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 17:55:17 GMT

In brief: Charles Schwab, the $13.1 trillion custodian, plans to add Solana, Avalanche, and Chainlink to its Schwab Crypto platform, expanding a lineup that launched in May 2026 with Bitcoin and Ether. The move places three more programmable assets inside a bank-custodied, FDIC-member wrapper priced at 75 basis points a trade. For institutions, the signal is less about the tokens than about the distribution channel: mainstream custody infrastructure is now the venue where digital assets change hands.

Charles Schwab said it intends to broaden the digital assets available in Schwab Crypto accounts to include Solana, Avalanche, and Chainlink, according to a company announcement reported by Cointelegraph. The three additions join a spot offering that Schwab opened to retail clients on May 13, 2026, beginning with Bitcoin and Ether. Read plainly, one of the largest brokerages in the United States is widening the set of programmable assets its clients can buy and hold directly, inside accounts that sit at a chartered bank rather than at a native digital-asset exchange.

What is Schwab actually adding, and how does the platform work?

Schwab Crypto is a spot trading and custody service for digital assets, offered through Charles Schwab Premier Bank, SSB, a Member FDIC institution. Clients trade through familiar Schwab surfaces, including Schwab.com and the thinkorswim platform, at a flat fee of 75 basis points per trade. Assets are custodied at Schwab's own bank, with Paxos providing sub-custody and execution. At launch the service was available across most of the United States, with New York and Louisiana excluded.

The three new names extend that framework rather than change it. Solana and Avalanche are high-throughput settlement networks, and Chainlink supplies the data feeds and cross-network messaging that many programmable contracts depend on. What matters here is not the marketing language that usually surrounds these assets, but the fact that a bank-custodied account will now hold them. The wrapper is the story. Schwab is applying the same reserve, disclosure, and custody discipline it uses across its other regulated products to a broader slice of the digital-asset market.

Why would a $13.1 trillion custodian keep widening its crypto shelf?

Because the demand and the regulatory runway both arrived at once. Schwab reported $13.1 trillion in client assets and 39.8 million brokerage accounts alongside its most recent results, and management has been candid that client interest was running well ahead of what the firm could offer. During the company's third-quarter 2025 earnings call, chief executive Rick Wurster told CNBC that visits to Schwab's crypto pages had climbed 90% year over year, a level of traffic that is hard to leave unserved when a competitor is capturing it.

Wurster has framed the opportunity in competitive terms. "If they're buying their crypto at Coinbase, we would love to see them bring their crypto back to Schwab," he told Cointelegraph in July 2025, adding that Schwab is "absolutely" looking to compete with native exchanges. Each asset Schwab adds narrows the reasons a client would keep a separate account elsewhere. Solana, Avalanche, and Chainlink are among the more actively traded assets beyond Bitcoin and Ether, so adding them is a direct response to where retail flow already goes.

What changed in the rules to make this possible?

A sequence of regulatory reversals in 2025 removed the accounting and supervisory frictions that had kept large banks on the sidelines. In January 2025, the SEC rescinded Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 by issuing SAB 122, eliminating a rule that had forced custodians to carry customer crypto as a balance-sheet liability, an accounting treatment that made the business economically prohibitive for publicly traded banks. Over the same year, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the FDIC, and the Federal Reserve withdrew earlier restrictive guidance that had discouraged banks from touching the asset class after the FTX collapse.

Wurster had signaled for more than a year that Schwab was waiting on exactly this shift. "We've been waiting for a change in the regulatory environment in order to do that," he said in a November 2024 interview cited by Ecoinimist, and by the firm's 2025 Spring Business Update he had put a timeline on it, telling investors Schwab expected to launch direct spot crypto within twelve months. The plumbing has kept pace. In December 2025 the OCC conditionally approved several digital-asset firms, including Paxos, for national trust bank charters, pushing the custody and settlement layer that firms like Schwab rely on further inside the federal perimeter.

What should institutions read into the expansion?

The useful takeaway for asset managers and issuers is about channel, not price action. When a custodian of Schwab's scale extends bank-grade custody to Solana, Avalanche, and Chainlink, it treats those assets as instruments to be safekept, reconciled, and reported on like any other holding, rather than as speculative positions parked at a venue outside the regulated system. That is the version of digital-asset access an institution can underwrite: known custodian, disclosed reserves, an FDIC-member entity, and a fee schedule that reads more like an index product than a trading desk. Schwab's flat 75 basis points has itself been compared to index-fund pricing, a deliberate signal that these assets are being folded into ordinary wealth-management economics.

There is also a market-structure point worth holding onto. Schwab has been building outward on more than one front: alongside the spot platform, its thinkorswim unit rolled out 24/7 futures on Bitcoin, Ether, Solana, and XRP in mid-2026, and the firm has said it intends to bring spot access to advisors. Each of these steps moves digital assets closer to the composable, auditable framing that institutions already apply to traditional securities, where an asset can be custodied, financed, and reported within a single supervised stack. The addition of three more assets is a small headline, but it points at a larger reordering: the venues that already hold trillions in client assets are becoming the default place programmable instruments are issued against, held, and traded, and the infrastructure that makes those assets legible to institutions, from reserve attestation to clean custody records, is now the ground on which the next phase of capital formation will be contested.

Bitwise Automated Portfolios Built on Coinbase Stocks

Carter Bray — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 17:05:12 GMT

In brief: Bitwise has launched Automated Token Portfolios (ATPs), rules-based baskets of AI, robotics, and technology stocks built on Coinbase's newly issued tokenized U.S. equities and rebalanced automatically by portfolio platform Glider. The distinction that matters is structural: investors keep the tokenized shares in their own wallets rather than handing custody to a pooled fund, according to CoinDesk. Bitwise held roughly $9 billion in client assets as of July 1, 2026.

Bitwise Asset Management has turned Coinbase's programmable equities into managed strategies that never leave the investor's wallet. On August 25, 2026, the firm introduced Automated Token Portfolios, also branded as Strats, built on the tokenized U.S. stocks Coinbase put into circulation a day earlier. An Automated Token Portfolio is a rules-based basket of equities, designed by Bitwise, that an eligible investor holds directly and that a third party rebalances on a set of published weights. The first strategies concentrate on artificial intelligence, robotics, and technology, according to CoinDesk.

The launch is worth attention less for the themes than for how the strategy is delivered. To see why, it helps to separate the three functions that a traditional fund normally bundles into one legal entity, then look at what Bitwise has pulled apart.

What is an Automated Token Portfolio?

An Automated Token Portfolio is a managed equity strategy that runs inside the investor's own custody rather than inside a pooled vehicle. The manager still sets the holdings and the weights, and the investor still bears the market exposure, but the underlying shares are represented as programmable tokens that sit in a non-custodial wallet the whole time.

That is the entire point. Bitwise describes the ATP structure as one that, unlike a traditional investment fund, does not require investors to transfer their assets into a commingled vehicle or hand custody to a portfolio manager, according to Yahoo Finance. The portfolios are rules-based and created by Bitwise Investment Manager, then implemented through Glider, a portfolio automation platform. After the first deposit, Glider rebalances the strategy in the background to the weights Bitwise sets, and the tokenized stocks remain in the investor's wallet throughout, as Glider sets out in its own description of the product.

How is the strategy split across three firms?

Each participant owns one job, and none of them takes possession of the client's assets. Bitwise builds the strategy and decides what it holds and at what weights. Coinbase issues each holding as a tokenized U.S. stock. Glider handles the mechanical work of buying and rebalancing to Bitwise's model, per Glider.

The design decouples three things a mutual fund or an exchange-traded fund normally fuses together: the investment decision, the custody of the assets, and the administration of the vehicle. In a conventional fund, all three live inside a single pooled structure, and the investor owns a claim on that structure rather than the securities inside it. Here the investor owns the securities, in the form of composable tokens, and simply subscribes to a set of rules that acts on them. Glider, for its part, reached this point after a strategic funding round earlier in its life led by a16z, as reported by Business Wire, and had already partnered with Ondo Finance on a direct-indexed technology basket, per The Defiant.

What makes the underlying Coinbase equities different?

The building blocks matter because they are meant to be real equity, not synthetic exposure. Coinbase's tokenized U.S. stocks went live on its Base network on August 25, 2026, beginning with four technology names, NVDAc, METAc, AAPLc, and GOOGLc, tracking Nvidia, Meta, Apple, and Alphabet, according to The Defiant. Chief executive Brian Armstrong has framed the offering as one that provides direct equity ownership rather than derivative or synthetic exposure, as CoinDesk reported when the plan was first disclosed.

The backing is where the auditability lives. Alpaca Securities LLC, an SEC-registered broker-dealer, buys and custodies the underlying shares in segregated accounts, and the issuing entity holds them as bare trustee for token holders under a deed of trust, per The Defiant. Coinbase has also named Chainlink as the official oracle infrastructure for the tokens, tying reference prices and corporate-action data to the on-record shares, according to PR Newswire. For an institution assessing the product, this is the chain of evidence that a token represents a claim on a specific custodied share rather than a bet on a price feed.

Why does the wallet-held structure matter to institutions?

Custody and composability are the two levers here, and both cut against the assumptions baked into pooled fund accounting. When a strategy lives in the client's wallet, the manager never holds the assets, which changes the counterparty exposure, the operational risk, and potentially the regulatory characterisation of what the manager is actually doing. A rules engine acting on assets the client controls is a different animal from a fund that takes subscriptions and issues units.

Composability is the second lever. Because each holding is a programmable token rather than a book entry inside a fund, a portfolio can in principle be rebalanced continuously, combined with other strategies, or used elsewhere without redeeming out of a vehicle first. That is the practical meaning of programmable and composable assets: the position is a piece of infrastructure, not a locked claim.

None of this removes the harder questions. The venue is early, and the numbers show it. At launch the four Coinbase tokens carried a combined on-record value of about $4.55 million, against roughly $3.06 million of exchange liquidity and $10.8 million of 24-hour volume, with NVDAc the largest at 1,745 holders, according to The Defiant. Those are seed-stage figures, and a rebalancing engine can only be as good as the liquidity it trades into. Access is also gated: the tokenized stocks are available to eligible investors outside the United States, and the U.S. regulatory path remains unsettled. The SEC has been preparing an innovation exemption to give tokenized equities a defined framework, a process CoinDesk reported in May 2026, but it is not yet a finished rule.

What Bitwise's move actually signals

Strip away the branding and one idea does the work here: the manager can run the strategy without ever taking custody of the assets. Bitwise, Coinbase, and Glider have each taken one slice of a job that funds have always performed as a single bundled entity, and the client keeps possession of the securities the whole way through. That is the structural break, and it is the part institutions should study before the themes, the tickers, or the size of Bitwise's $9 billion book.

For issuers and allocators weighing programmable, composable, and auditable exposures, the lesson is that the vehicle itself is becoming unbundled. When custody, administration, and the investment mandate can be separated and reassembled, the interesting question is no longer which fund to buy but which of those functions you want to hold yourself. That is precisely the shift Issuant is built to help institutions navigate.

Why Are Advocacy Groups Suing Over the Illinois Digital Asset Tax?

Carter Bray — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 17:39:22 GMT

In brief: Industry advocacy groups have gone to federal court to block the Illinois Digital Asset Tax Act, a 0.2% levy on brokers that exchange, transfer, or store digital assets for state residents, set to take effect January 1, 2027. The Blockchain Association and the Crypto Council for Innovation joined a suit filed by The Digital Chamber, arguing the tax is unconstitutional and preempted by federal law. The outcome will shape how far states can reach in taxing digital-asset infrastructure providers.

The Illinois Digital Asset Tax Act is the first state law in the country to impose a transaction-based tax specifically on digital-asset business activity, and it is now the subject of a coordinated legal challenge. Signed by Governor J.B. Pritzker as part of the state's fiscal 2027 budget, the measure applies a 0.2% tax to the value of digital assets that a broker exchanges, transfers, or stores on behalf of an Illinois customer, according to Jones Day. For asset managers, custodians, and issuers building programmable, composable products, the case is less about one state's revenue line and more about whether the machinery that supports these assets can be taxed differently from the machinery behind any other financial instrument.

What does the Illinois Digital Asset Tax Act actually tax?

The statute reaches the intermediary, not the investor. Under Senate Bill 3019, enacted as Public Act 104-0468, the tax is styled as a levy on the privilege of engaging in digital-asset business activity with Illinois customers, and it takes effect on January 1, 2027. Reed Smith describes the base as a 0.2% charge on the value of a digital asset that a broker exchanges, transfers, or stores. In practice that captures exchanges, transfer agents, custody providers, and wallet services, and analysts at BDO read the definitions as potentially wide-reaching, extending to custody and administration performed for others rather than to any single trade a customer initiates.

Two features drew immediate objection from tax practitioners. The first is that the tax attaches to gross value rather than to gain, which means a firm can owe the levy on activity connected to a customer who lost money, a point emphasized in Forbes. The second is procedural. The provision arrived inside a budget package that, according to Bitcoin.com News, grew from a two-page agricultural-finance bill into a sprawling package of more than 1,600 pages, with the digital-asset section occupying fewer than 20 of them and clearing both chambers within roughly a day. The state projects about $60 million in annual revenue, a rounding error against a $55.9 billion budget, per Crypto Briefing.

Who is challenging the tax, and on what grounds?

The litigation began in July 2026 when The Digital Chamber filed suit in federal court to block the law before it takes effect, as reported by CoinDesk. In August, two more industry bodies, the Blockchain Association and the Crypto Council for Innovation, joined the effort, broadening the coalition arrayed against the state.

The plaintiffs advance several theories. They argue the tax singles out one class of financial infrastructure for treatment no other asset class faces, which they frame as a discriminatory burden on interstate commerce under the dormant Commerce Clause. They also contend the measure runs into the federal Internet Tax Freedom Act, which bars states from imposing discriminatory taxes on electronic commerce. The complaint further raises the compressed legislative process, noting the limited public notice before passage. The Digital Chamber summarized its position plainly, stating that no one should be taxed differently for how they hold a digital asset. Separately, a bill to repeal what one sponsor called a punitive tax has been filed in the Illinois legislature, per Yahoo News, giving the industry a legislative track alongside the courtroom one.

How does the tax sit against Illinois's broader digital-asset rules?

The tax did not arrive in a vacuum. Illinois had already built a supervisory regime for digital-asset firms, and the two efforts pull in different directions: one licenses and protects, the other taxes. The contrast matters for any institution mapping its Illinois exposure, because a firm can fall inside the registration framework, the tax, both, or neither depending on what it does and for whom.

Measure	What it does	Who it reaches	Key date
Digital Assets and Consumer Protection Act (SB 1797, Public Act 104-0428)	Creates a registration and supervision regime administered by IDFPR, with custody and disclosure duties	Firms conducting digital-asset business activity with Illinois residents; excludes FDIC-insured banks and peer-to-peer activity	Registration compliance from January 1, 2027, full licensing July 1, 2027
Digital Asset Tax Act (SB 3019, Public Act 104-0468)	Imposes a 0.2% privilege tax on the value of assets a broker exchanges, transfers, or stores	Brokers serving Illinois customers	Effective January 1, 2027, now under legal challenge

The consumer-protection statute, signed in August 2025, grants the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation authority over exchanges and custodians, as the agency confirms on its own digital-assets page. Analysis by Mayer Brown notes that the framework carves out banks, peer-to-peer transfers, and software development, a set of exclusions that reflects a deliberate focus on intermediaries holding customer assets. The table makes the tension visible. A custodian that registers under the consumer-protection act and accepts the state's supervisory oversight would still owe the new tax on the assets it holds, a layering that the plaintiffs argue treats digital-asset custody as inherently suspect rather than as ordinary financial plumbing. That framing, more than the modest dollar figure, is what the industry is contesting.

What should an institution do with this?

Treat the tax as live and the litigation as unresolved. The law is scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2027, and a pending lawsuit is not a stay, so custodians, exchanges, and issuers with Illinois customers should be modeling the 0.2% charge into pricing and operating budgets now while tracking the docket for any injunction. The practical work is definitional: determine whether your activity meets the statute's broker and storage tests, whether the consumer-protection registration regime also applies, and where the two overlap. Institutions weighing where to domicile programmable, composable, and auditable assets will want to watch how the Commerce Clause and Internet Tax Freedom Act arguments land, because the ruling will signal how much room every other state has to tax this infrastructure. At Issuant, we build on the premise that these instruments should be governed by the same auditable standards as any regulated financial product, and cases like this one are precisely where that principle gets tested.

Can Canton Modernize US State Benefit Payments?

Carter Bray — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 18:26:52 GMT

In brief: Digital Asset and the American Idea Foundation, the nonprofit founded by former House Speaker Paul Ryan, plan to launch a benefit-distribution pilot called RISE on the Canton Network in 2027, according to an August 2026 announcement. The pilot aims to move state benefit payments onto programmable, auditable infrastructure, a direct response to a federal improper-payments problem the Government Accountability Office estimates reached about 186 billion dollars in fiscal year 2025. The intent is not a new currency, it is a compliant rail that carries eligibility rules and audit trails with the money itself.

What are Digital Asset and the American Idea Foundation building?

The two organizations are partnering on RISE, a benefit-distribution pilot that will run on the Canton Network beginning in 2027. RISE is a mechanism for distributing government benefits as programmable payments, so that the rules governing who qualifies, what a payment can be spent on, and how it is reconciled travel with the transaction rather than sitting in a separate system checked after the fact.

The American Idea Foundation is a 501(c)(3) founded by former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and based in Janesville, Wisconsin. Its stated work is to expand economic opportunity and to promote the use of data and evidence in policymaking, priorities Ryan carried through his years in Congress on welfare, poverty, and program integrity, as The Hill reported at the foundation's 2019 launch. Pairing that policy agenda with programmable settlement infrastructure is the point of the pilot: the foundation supplies the problem, Digital Asset supplies the rail.

Why do state benefit programs need better payment rails?

Because the amount of money leaving these programs incorrectly is enormous, and most of it is overpayment rather than clawback. The GAO estimates federal agencies made roughly 186 billion dollars in improper payments in fiscal year 2025, up 24 billion from the prior year, with about 82 percent of that total attributable to overpayments. Cumulatively, improper payments since fiscal 2003 now stand near 3 trillion dollars.

The concentration matters as much as the headline. The GAO reports that roughly 75 percent of improper payments sit in just five program areas, led by Medicare and Medicaid and including the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. On the state-administered side, the USDA reported about 10.1 billion dollars in SNAP improper payments nationwide in fiscal 2025, and the pandemic-era unemployment programs remain the reference case for what happens when controls fail: the GAO put likely unemployment-insurance fraud during the pandemic between 100 billion and 135 billion dollars.

These are the programs RISE is aimed at. Much of the loss stems from eligibility and documentation errors that surface only in retrospect, after funds have already moved. A rail that enforces eligibility conditions at the moment of payment, and that produces a continuous audit record, attacks the error at its source rather than through recovery.

What is the Canton Network, and why was it chosen?

The Canton Network is a public, permissionless blockchain built specifically for institutional finance, combining configurable privacy with the compliance controls that regulated activity requires. That definition is the reason it fits a benefits use case: the network was designed from the outset for participants who cannot broadcast their data to the world but still need shared, synchronized infrastructure.

Canton was created by Digital Asset, a firm founded in 2014, and its distinguishing feature is sub-transaction privacy. As the network's protocol documentation describes it, parties see only the portion of a transaction that applies to them, enforced through Digital Asset's Daml smart-contract language rather than bolted on afterward. For benefit distribution, that means a caseworker, a state agency, a merchant, and an auditor can each hold the exact slice of information their role requires, no more and no less, on the same rail.

The institutional backing is not theoretical. Digital Asset raised 135 million dollars in June 2025 from backers including BNP Paribas, DTCC, and Goldman Sachs, and a further 355 million dollars in June 2026 in a round led by a16z crypto. Canton's governance sits with the Global Synchronizer Foundation, organized under the Linux Foundation, and the network has already been used for regulated instruments: in December 2025 DTCC and Digital Asset partnered to represent DTC-custodied US Treasury securities on Canton. A benefits pilot draws on the same properties that made the network credible to capital-markets participants.

How would programmable distribution change the mechanics of a benefit payment?

Today, a state issues a payment and then relies on separate systems, and separate points in time, to verify that the recipient was eligible and that the funds were used as intended. The gap between disbursement and verification is where most improper payments live. Programmable distribution collapses that gap by attaching the conditions to the payment itself.

In practice, an eligibility rule becomes a constraint the payment cannot violate, a spending restriction becomes a property of the funds rather than a downstream audit, and reconciliation becomes a continuous record instead of a periodic reconstruction. The distinction between the two models is worth stating plainly.

Dimension	Conventional benefit rail	Programmable rail on Canton
Eligibility check	Verified before or after payment, in a separate system	Enforced as a condition of the payment
Spending controls	Monitored after funds move	Encoded into the funds themselves
Audit trail	Reconstructed periodically	Produced continuously and in real time
Data visibility	Broad access or siloed systems	Need-to-know, enforced per participant
Error correction	Recovery after loss	Prevention at disbursement

The practical claim behind RISE is that prevention is cheaper than recovery, and that an auditable, rules-bearing payment closes the window in which overpayments accumulate.

What should institutions take from a 2027 pilot?

Treat it as a signal, not a finished product. The 2027 timeline means the near-term value is in what the pilot demonstrates about programmable public-sector payments on compliant infrastructure, and in whether the privacy and audit model holds up against real eligibility rules and real state agencies. For issuers, asset managers, and public finance teams, the relevant question is architectural: can benefit programs be redesigned so integrity is built into the rail rather than chased after the fact.

That is the same design principle Issuant applies to programmable, composable, and auditable assets across regulated markets, and the RISE pilot is an early public test of whether it translates to government disbursement at scale.

Frequently asked questions

Is RISE a cryptocurrency or a stablecoin?

No. RISE is a benefit-distribution mechanism, not a currency. It is a way to move state benefit payments as programmable, rules-bearing transactions on the Canton Network, with the compliance and audit controls attached to the payment. The instrument being distributed is the benefit, and the innovation is the rail, not a new form of money.

When does the pilot launch, and who is involved?

The pilot is scheduled to begin in 2027, according to the August 2026 announcement from Digital Asset and the American Idea Foundation. The foundation, founded by former Speaker Paul Ryan, supplies the policy framing around program integrity, while Digital Asset provides the Canton Network infrastructure.

How does programmable distribution reduce improper payments?

By enforcing eligibility and spending rules at the moment of payment rather than verifying them afterward. Most of the roughly 186 billion dollars in federal improper payments the GAO recorded for fiscal 2025 were overpayments that surfaced only after funds had moved. Encoding the rules into the payment, and producing a continuous audit trail, is designed to prevent those errors instead of recovering them later.