This week was all about institutional adoption accelerating from every angle: tokenization kept moving into traditional finance, regulators pushed crypto further into the financial system, major brokers expanded access, and the race to build onchain capital markets and payment infrastructure continued.

🔎 Recent Updates & Developments

— DTCC launched tokenized stocks, ETFs & Treasuries infrastructure.

— Japan cleared the path for spot Bitcoin ETFs.

— SBI partnered with Solana to build onchain financial markets.

— Interactive Brokers expanded crypto trading and stablecoin withdrawals.

— BlackRock surpassed $15.3T in assets under management.

— Coinbase opened registration for mainland China users.

— ECB selected providers for the digital euro pilot.

— LayerZero executor wallets compromised, $2.4M drained.

Visa is rolling out the Visa Stablecoin Platform, an internal system letting banks and fintechs handle stablecoins within their existing Visa payment and treasury workflows.

The platform will launch with OUSD (Open Standard USD), the new stablecoin backed by 140+ companies including Visa, Stripe, Mastercard, BlackRock, and Coinbase, widely seen as a potential rival to Circle's USDC. Businesses will be able to mint and redeem OUSD without fees or volume limits.

Visa already supports Circle's USDC and Paxos' USDG, and the new platform will serve as an umbrella for all of Visa's stablecoin services going forward.

Mastercard has also introduced stablecoin settlement for card transactions, starting with six regulated dollar-backed assets, and both Mastercard and American Express have joined the Open Standard consortium behind OUSD.

Polygon Labs is laying off employees as it completes its acquisition of Coinme and transitions from operating as a blockchain foundation to a blockchain-enabled payments company, with a target of reaching profitability in 2027.

The Coinme team will be integrated into Polygon Labs as part of a broader merger and restructuring effort. The company says the layoffs reflect a shift in organizational structure and talent needs, not the performance of departing employees.

Polygon cites strong momentum behind the move, record stablecoin volume, a growing customer pipeline, and a fast-tracked launch of its on-chain payments solution.

The move marks a significant strategic shift for Polygon Labs, moving further from its foundation-era identity toward becoming a payments-focused business built around stablecoin infrastructure.

Roughly $40M of depositor funds are stuck in isolated Morpho lending markets after Main Street Finance’s msUSD stablecoin depegged to ~$0.27, dragging down linked tokens msY, AVLT and AZND.

Morpho’s contracts weren’t hacked — the damage traces to curators. The AlphaUSDC Delta V2 vault (curator AlphaPing) alone had ~$18M stuck in the frozen msY/USDC market, which hit 100% utilization and ~138% borrow rates. AlphaPing also held $10M+ of AVLT exposure and pulled ~$8.5M out before the token slid ~11% — a stark reminder of curator and collateral risk in permissionless lending.

The New York-based startup raised $9M in a Series A led by Union Square Ventures to build a more “pro-grade” prediction market platform, adding to a $6 million seed round from Wintermute Ventures and DBA raised last August.

Founded by Ivo Crnkovic-Rubsamen (former dYdX CEO) and Matthew Downey, Pascal positions itself as a more refined, perpetual futures-style alternative to Kalshi and Polymarket — built for serious traders and institutions rather than casual bettors.

The startup launched in June and remains in private beta, focusing on lower fees, faster execution, eliminating "phantom fills," and better liquidity incentives for professional market makers.

Volvo Group is testing an in-house cryptocurrency to settle payments across its supply chain, a senior logistics exec revealed on a Cardano Foundation podcast. It runs as an enclosed, permissioned network between Volvo, its material suppliers and its transport partners.

The token targets real operational pain — trust gaps between suppliers, slow payment reconciliation and compliance tracking — with a shared onchain ledger logging every transportation order in the network. No public or tradable token was disclosed; the crypto is internal-only, not for speculation. It builds on Volvo’s blockchain work dating back to a supply-chain traceability push it started in 2018.

Payments giant MoonPay has acquired Glide, a Y Combinator-backed crypto-deposits startup, in an all-equity deal. Glide’s tech lets apps accept crypto deposits and wallet funding from any chain, wallet or exchange.

The buy extends MoonPay’s rapid M&A run — after deals like Decent, DFlow and Sodot — as it builds a full-stack crypto payments and on-ramp platform. The all-equity deal’s financial terms were not disclosed. Founded in 2023, Glide plugs pre-built funding flows into apps; folding it in deepens MoonPay’s push to make moving money onchain feel seamless for developers.

BlackRock hit a record $15.3T in AUM this week (+22% YoY). But its crypto products, $48.8B, were the one segment that shrank, losing $3.1B in Q2 while everything else hit records.

Zoom out and it's starker: only BlackRock and Fidelity (~$12B) hold meaningful crypto. Vanguard, the #2 manager at $11.6T, holds exactly $0 and has no plans to change that.

Crypto is 0.3% of BlackRock's book. For TradFi's giants, it's still a rounding error.

In a confessional post, Base creator Jesse Pollak admitted his two-year bet on onchain social — Farcaster, Zora and creator coins — largely missed and even “disintegrated completely,” leaving Base trailing in perps and prediction markets.

He is handing the Base app to Cobie (Jordan Fish, whose Echo launchpad Coinbase bought for ~$375M) and refocusing Base’s infrastructure on three 2026 bets: trading, stablecoin payments and AI agents.

DTCC has gone live with its DTC Tokenization Service, running the first production trades of tokenized Russell 1000 stocks, major ETFs and US Treasuries — and Ondo Finance issued the first tokenized shares built on it.

The initiative spans 40+ firms, including BlackRock, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Nasdaq and NYSE. DTCC turns DTC-held securities into onchain “digital twins” that keep the same ownership, dividend and governance rights and convert back at will. Limited production trades are starting now, with a full commercial launch slated for October — a milestone in moving Wall Street’s core settlement plumbing onchain.