The Plumbing Goes Live
On Wednesday, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation processed its first live production trades in tokenized stocks, ETFs, and US Treasuries. More than 30 firms participated, including BlackRock, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Nasdaq. The trades ran on both a private Hyperledger Besu network and Canton, a public blockchain, using assets already held in DTC custody.
DTCC custodies more than $114 trillion in securities and processes roughly $4.7 quadrillion in transactions annually. It is the central nervous system of the US capital markets. Every stock trade, every bond settlement, every securities transfer ultimately flows through its infrastructure. When DTCC moves, the entire market moves with it.
So the market has been reluctant to tokenize at scale without DTCC’s participation. A tokenized bond that cannot settle through the same infrastructure as a conventional bond creates a parallel system rather than an improved one.
Wednesday’s trades demonstrated that tokenized assets can move through DTCC’s existing infrastructure while preserving the same legal ownership rights as their underlying securities. This means wholesale financial markets themselves can be digitalized, rather than needing a separate system. The digitalized assets can be programmable, using algorithms that are composable, with settlement that is atomic. The opportunities here go well beyond efficiency.
Wednesday was a limited production run, stress-testing settlement flows ahead of the full commercial launch in October, when participation and asset classes expand significantly. The October event is the scale milestone. Wednesday was proof that it works.
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FINTECH BUSINESS NEWS
Stripe and Advent make an unsolicited $53B bid for PayPal
Stripe and private equity firm Advent International made an unsolicited joint offer of $60.50 per share to acquire PayPal, valuing it at over $53 billion, the largest fintech acquisition ever attempted.
The strategic logic is stablecoin infrastructure: a deal would pair Stripe’s Bridge stablecoin rails and Tempo blockchain with PayPal’s PYUSD ($2.8B supply) and 439 million consumer accounts, creating the most vertically integrated dollar-token payment company in the world and $3.7 trillion in combined annual volume. PayPal shares jumped 18% on the news; its board has not accepted.
BNY’s AI and blockchain bets are paying off
BNY’s Q2 results and client impact disclosures confirmed that its AI and blockchain investments are producing measurable outcomes. AI tools now automate significant portions of client onboarding, trade matching, and risk reporting, generating efficiency gains the bank quantified as equivalent to several hundred additional analysts.
Meanwhile, its tokenized deposit platform, USDC custody partnership with Circle, and Baillie Gifford BAGEY fund administration roles are generating new revenue lines. CEO Robin Vince said the bank’s blockchain activities are embedded in the bank’s core service architecture, calling blockchain “the future inside the banking system, not a parallel system alongside it.”
Cantor and Securitize partner to put IPOs onchain
Cantor Fitzgerald and Securitize announced a collaboration to build blockchain-native IPO infrastructure, enabling public companies to raise capital and issue securities onchain with digital ownership records from day one rather than tokenizing after the fact.
Cantor will be contributing its equity capital markets and trading capabilities; Securitize will be providing tokenization, distribution, and transfer agent services. The partnership puts Cantor’s investment banking relationships alongside Securitize’s SEC-registered broker-dealer and transfer agent infrastructure for the first time.
Anthropic begins investor meetings for an October IPO; OpenAI has pushed back to 2027
Anthropic has begun “testing the waters” meetings with institutional investors for a potential October IPO at its $965B May valuation, with Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan leading the offering.
Anthropic now looks poised to reach the public markets before OpenAI, which has reportedly pushed its listing to 2027 after advisers told Sam Altman he faced a choice between a smaller number or a 2027 debut, with Altman calling any valuation reduction a “non-starter.” 2026 IPO issuance has already hit $227.5B, the strongest year since 2021.
Mastercard launches software for companies to build custom digital wallets
Mastercard released a commercial SDK and API suite allowing banks, fintechs, and enterprises to build fully branded digital wallets with customizable UX, payment features, and loyalty integrations, reducing the development overhead of building a wallet from scratch to a configuration and compliance exercise.
The product is part of Mastercard’s broader digital issuer solutions push, placing it in direct competition with white-label wallet providers including Marqeta and i2c for enterprise wallet infrastructure mandates.
POLICY WATCH
Trump meets senators today as Clarity Act enters its final hours
President Trump is set to meet with a group of senators at the White House Thursday afternoon, with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles expected to attend, to try to resolve the ethics section of the Clarity Act, with the merged Banking-Agriculture Committee draft due to drop imminently and Majority Leader Thune committed to a floor vote before August 7.
Senator Tillis said he hopes to reach an agreement “by the end of this week”; Senator Moreno said the group will brief the president on the bill’s “path to success” as negotiations remain open on ethics restrictions, stablecoin rewards, DeFi developer protections, and Section 1960. The bill needs at least seven Democratic votes to clear the filibuster with the Republican majority now at 52 following Senator Graham’s death. Polymarket puts 2026 passage odds at 37%.
Senate unanimously tells Trump: no pardon for Sam Bankman-Fried
The Senate passed S.Res.772 by unanimous consent Wednesday, formally declaring that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried should “under no circumstances” receive a pardon, commutation, or any form of executive clemency, a rare moment of bipartisan consensus driven by Senators Lummis and Gallego, who introduced the resolution after Bankman-Fried filed a formal clemency petition with the DOJ’s Office of the Pardon Attorney following the Second Circuit’s June 12 affirmation of his 25-year sentence.
The resolution is non-binding and cannot block a presidential pardon, but puts every senator on record. Trump said in January he has no plans to grant clemency, and prediction markets put the odds of a pardon in the single digits.
Japan passes landmark crypto reclassification
Japan’s House of Councillors passed the amended Financial Instruments and Exchange Act on Wednesday in a 211-31 vote, moving crypto assets from the Payment Services Act to the same financial product framework governing stocks and bonds.
The reform introduces mandatory insider trading prohibitions, annual disclosure requirements for certain issuers, raises prison terms for unregistered operators from three to ten years, and clears the legal path for spot crypto ETFs on the Tokyo Stock Exchange as early as 2027.
A companion tax reform cuts the top rate on crypto gains from 55% to a flat 20%, applying from January 2028, conditional on the FIEA reclassification taking effect in fiscal 2027.
South Korea rewrites 76-year-old national asset law to include crypto
South Korea’s Ministry of Economy and Finance unveiled a National Asset Basic Act on Wednesday that would replace the 1950 State Property Act and formally classify virtual currencies and intellectual property as national assets, governing roughly 1,400 trillion won ($940 billion) in state holdings.
The roadmap also confirms a 2027 pilot for tokenized government bonds linked to the Bank of Korea’s wholesale CBDC, legal recognition of blockchain-based ledgers as security registries under the Capital Markets Act from February 4, 2027, and preparatory work on spot crypto ETFs and a won-pegged stablecoin framework under the still-pending Digital Asset Basic Act.
EU prepares hundreds of millions in DMA fines against Google
The European Commission is finalizing enforcement decisions against Google under the Digital Markets Act, expected before the European Parliament’s July 27 summer recess, covering allegations that Google illegally favored its own shopping and travel services in search results over those of competitors, the same conduct that drew a €2.4 billion antitrust fine in 2017.
The fine is expected to reach several hundred million euros and would mark one of the first major DMA enforcement actions, coming two weeks after the European Court of Justice upheld the €4.1 billion Android antitrust fine in full and after Sweden’s courts ordered Google to pay $1.97 billion in follow-on damages to PriceRunner.