An indispensable intermediary
Clearing houses and central securities depositories were built for a world in which financial market infrastructure was fixed, centralized, and slow to change. Blockchain has challenged that assumption directly. The most radical version of the argument holds that distributed ledgers eliminate the need for a trusted intermediary altogether, because settlement can be atomic, bilateral, and self-executing.
It is an elegant thesis, but in practice, unlikely. Clearing houses and CSDs remain essential precisely because they are the point at which legal finality, regulatory oversight, and systemic risk management converge. Blockchain does not dissolve that need, but it might reshape or relocate it.
It forces institutions DTCC and Euroclear to ask a harder question: what does their role look like when the assets are digitalized? Both are answering by expanding rather than retreating. DTCC is building a multi-chain tokenized securities platform. Euroclear has spent five years acquiring across fund distribution, private markets access, blockchain-based fund infrastructure.
And now, with today’s Uptevia deal, it has brought issuer services in-house. The acquisition is not a digitalization play, but it does extend Euroclear’s stack fully, keeping Euroclear relevant to the entire financial supply chain as it digitalizes.
Fujifilm is an instructive case: when digital cameras gutted its core business, it did not wait to die. It pivoted into chemical coatings, pharmaceuticals, and precision manufacturing, keeping itself thriving (long enough to see film-loving photographers rediscover analogue). The lesson is not that film was eternal. It was that the underlying competencies, such as precision chemistry, and materials science, had value beyond the original product.
For CSDs, the underlying competency is trust, legal finality, and systemic reliability. Those properties do not become less valuable in a digitalized financial system. They become more contested.
FINTECH BUSINESS NEWS
EDX Markets raises $76M led by SBI Holdings: the institutional crypto exchange is scaling globally
EDX Markets, the institutional-grade crypto exchange backed by Citadel Securities, Fidelity, and Charles Schwab, raised $76M in a Series B led by SBI Holdings as it expands its regulatory footprint and product range beyond the US.
EDX operates a non-custodial market structure, meaning it never holds client assets, which has been its core institutional selling point since launch. The SBI investment deepens ties to Japan’s largest financial conglomerate and gives EDX a distribution pathway into Asia ahead of planned market launches in Singapore and Japan.
Bloomberg: Former Tether investment chief is looking to sell part of his stake
Bloomberg reported that Paolo Ardoino’s predecessor as Tether’s investment head is exploring a partial sale of his stake in the stablecoin company, which has never published a full audit and has no plans for a public listing.
The report is notable because any secondary sale of Tether equity would be one of the few observable price signals for a company with $145B in stablecoin supply, approximately $13B in net equity on its own balance sheet, and more quarterly profit than most publicly listed banks. The identity of prospective buyers was not disclosed.
Coinbase secures UK MiFID authorization
Coinbase received a MiFID II investment firm licence from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, authorizing it to offer regulated investment services including stocks, ETFs, bonds, and derivatives to UK retail and institutional clients, making it the first crypto-native exchange to hold both FCA cryptoasset registration and MiFID II investment firm status in the UK simultaneously.
The dual licence positions Coinbase to build its “Everything Exchange” product suite in the UK market ahead of Robinhood’s planned UK stock trading launch.
Euroclear acquires Uptevia adding fund administration and transfer agency to its post-trade stack
Euroclear entered exclusive negotiations to acquire Uptevia, a leading French corporate trust services provider jointly owned by BNP Paribas and CACEIS, as part of its strategy to broaden issuer services capabilities across Europe.
Uptevia specialises in shareholder register management, general meetings, employee share plans, corporate actions, and debt instrument administration for listed and unlisted French companies. Through the acquisition, Euroclear reinforces its position in the French market and advances its ambition to build a pan-European issuer services proposition aligned with the EU’s Savings and Investments Union objectives.
Securitize slides 40% after SPAC debut
Securitize has fallen roughly 40% since its NYSE debut last week, down as much as 25% in a single session Tuesday, in a pattern typical of post-SPAC selling pressure, where early investors who locked in at a fixed price exit once liquidity opens.
Arca CIO Jeff Dorman said the selloff “appears to have little to do with Securitize’s fundamentals or any specific news,” noting that the tokenized asset market it operates in continues to grow. SECZ remains significantly above the $1.25B pre-money SPAC valuation on an adjusted basis; the drop appears to represent a painful near-term correction rather than a verdict on the tokenization thesis.
POLICY WATCH
SEC unveils three-part “Regulation Crypto” agenda
The SEC published its updated 2026 regulatory agenda Tuesday, setting a July target for its first major crypto rulemaking proposal, “Regulation Crypto”, which would establish temporary registration exemptions for early-stage crypto startups valued below $5 million in their first four years, allow fundraising of up to $75 million through qualifying crypto investment contracts, and create a safe harbor for issuers that have relinquished managerial control over a decentralized protocol.
Two companion rulemakings are also slated: one amending broker-dealer financial responsibility rules for crypto custody, and one overhauling how alternative trading systems and national exchanges handle crypto asset trading, together forming a three-part framework Atkins framed as bringing more digital asset activity onshore while providing investor protections. The proposals remain under White House OIRA review. The July window is aspirational but not guaranteed.
FCA oversight is reshaping how merchants pick payment providers
A Finextra analysis argues that the FCA’s latest payments priorities, covering safeguarding, Consumer Duty, financial crime controls, operational resilience, and governance, have fundamentally changed the criteria merchants should use when selecting a payment service provider, moving the decision upstream from a compliance check into a core commercial assessment.
The piece notes that using a PSP does not transfer a merchant’s own compliance obligations; a provider that cannot evidence how customer money is protected, how incidents are handled, or how regulatory change is tracked creates downstream regulatory exposure for the merchant, not just for the PSP itself.
BIS: uneven Basel III application fuels “uneven playing field” perception among G-SIBs
A BIS FSI Insights paper published Tuesday analyzes capital requirements for 29 global systemically important banks from 2014 to 2025, finding substantial heterogeneity in how jurisdictions implement regulatory buffers, supervisory add-ons, and risk-weighted asset computations, with evidence suggesting differences in required capital ratios partly compensate for different levels of conservatism in RWA calculations rather than reflecting genuine differences in risk.
The paper flags that current efforts to modernize national frameworks, including the US Basel III endgame and the EU’s CRR3, may simplify requirements but could also widen cross-jurisdictional comparisons, adding a new dimension to ongoing debates about whether regulatory divergence is creating competitive distortions between US and European