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Hosted at the Mandarin Oriental Penthouse, overlooking the Formula 1 track — the most sought-after venue in the country, the evening is designed for high-value connections and meaningful exchange.
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Attendance is strictly by invitation. Capacity is limited to a select circle of our global members, venture partners, and a handful of founders building in the most competitive sectors.
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👶 New Member Announcements:
The Introduction.com team is super excited to announce the newest additions to our community this week!
(We’d love to see you up here one day🤠)
Apply Today
We’re excited to welcome Chris (@cmclaughlin213) to the network. He is a Technical Product Manager at Ava Labs (@avax), where he leads development of Avalanche Core wallet and wallet infrastructure, focusing on chain abstraction and user-friendly crypto experiences. Previously, he worked at Messari, Fiserv, and Bloomberg, building a strong foundation across crypto data and traditional finance. With his experience scaling product teams in fast-moving markets and bridging TradFi and Web3, Chris offers another builder’s perspective within the community. Welcome, Chris!
Please join us in welcoming Joe (@joewadcan)! He runs Corporate Development at Phantom (@phantom), leading acquisitions and investments, and previously headed Business Development for the company. Joe brings deep experience from his time as Head of BD at GitHub and continues to teach Sales for Startups at UC Berkeley, mentoring the next generation of entrepreneurs. With a track record across M&A, partnerships, and scaling developer-focused platforms, Joe adds invaluable perspective at the intersection of Web2, Web3, and venture ecosystems. Thrilled to have him on board!
Follow Joe on X and LinkedIn!
Table of Contents
What We’re Looking at 👀
🌟 Crypto is growing up fast. From Visa-tapping unicorns to $500M raises, G-SIB stamps of approval, UN pension funds running on blockchain, and PayPal calling dibs on DeFi, the past week felt like watching TradFi and Web3 swap jerseys mid-game 🌟
Money Moves(Funding/M&A): 🤑
From Introduction.com Members 💳️
RedotPay
CoinBase and Crew Bet $47M on RedotPay 🚀
RedotPay just hit unicorn status with a $47M strategic raise 🦄
Coinbase Ventures joined the round, signaling that the crypto to fiat rails game is heating up fast.
Who Is RedotPay? 🤔
Founded in April 2023, RedotPay wants to make spending crypto as easy as tapping a debit card.
Michael Gao
Former VP of Product at ChainUp, leading crypto payments infrastructure strategy
Computer Science degree from National University of Singapore with prior stints in product and fintech
Jonathan Chan
Ex-Business Development Lead at ChainUp, focused on scaling B2B crypto services across Asia
Finance and Economics background from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, with roles in payments and financial services prior
Someone clearly made the right introduction at ChainUp… 👀
Company Milestones 📆
2023: Founded, built first crypto to fiat Visa card product
March 2025: Closed $40M Series A led by Lightspeed with Galaxy, Accel, DST, Vertex
June 2025: Launched Global Payout so users can send crypto that arrives as local fiat
September 2025: Raised $47M strategic round with Coinbase Ventures, Galaxy, Vertex, hitting unicorn status
How It Works ⚙️
You load $500 USDC into your RedotPay wallet.
You walk into a store, tap your phone for a $50 purchase.
Instantly, RedotPay swaps $50 USDC into fiat, Visa settles it, and the merchant sees dollars.
To you, it feels no different from a normal card.
What We Know / What We Do Not Know 🤷
What We Know ✅
RedotPay issues both physical and digital Visa-linked debit cards that let users spend crypto anywhere Visa is accepted.
Supports seamless conversion of crypto into fiat at point of sale with multi-currency settlement.
Offers additional features like cashback rewards, stablecoin settlement, and integrations with Apple Pay and Google Pay.
What We Don’t Know ❓
How liquidity and settlement work across all jurisdictions, especially outside Asia-Pacific.
Whether future features like lending or yield integration will be native to RedotPay or through partners.
How regulatory compliance will scale in regions with tougher restrictions such as the U.S. and EU.
The $47M Raise 💸
RedotPay pulled in $47M with Coinbase and others backing the round.
Funds are earmarked for scaling fiat corridors, expanding compliance coverage, and building out engineering capacity.
For Coinbase, the move is not a hedge but a strategic extension.
Even with its own card product, RedotPay already has coverage in regions and corridors where Coinbase wants more exposure.
The partnership gives Coinbase indirect reach into new markets while aligning it with a player focused on deep liquidity rails and regulatory clarity.
The Market 💹
The crypto to fiat payment race is crowded. Coinbase Card, Crypto.com, and Binance Card all push similar narratives of spend anywhere crypto, each layering on perks like cashback, staking rewards, or branded partnerships.
The offers overlap more than they differ, and the space is a knife fight for user loyalty and global coverage.
Looking Ahead 🔮
The winning move is not just another flashy card. It is becoming the first true global crypto payments network that can seamlessly translate tokens into compliant fiat in every major market.
RedotPay’s bet is that by locking in regulatory clarity and building deeper liquidity rails than competitors, it can outlast the hype cycles.
With heavyweight investors behind it, the question is whether it can execute at scale before the field crowds in.
Kraken
Kraken Secures $500M Amid Shifting Regulatory Winds 🌊
Kraken just pulled in $500M at a $15B valuation, signaling confidence that the exchange is ready to scale as U.S. regulatory skies begin to clear.
Quick Recap 🚀
Kraken is one of crypto’s oldest exchanges and continues to hold weight in the global market.
2024 revenue: $1.5B, driven by $665B in trading volumes
Assets on platform: $42.8B across 2.5M funded accounts
User base: Over 10M globally as of mid 2025
Coverage: 400+ assets supported across 190+ countries
Shifting Winds + Favorable Funding 🌬️💰
For years Kraken battled regulators, but the tide is turning. Each product once facing scrutiny is now benefiting from clearer rules or favorable outcomes.
Staking
Woe: In 2023, the SEC fined Kraken $30M and forced it to halt staking services in the U.S.
Resolution: With clearer guidance under new federal frameworks in 2025, staking services can restart under licensed entities, giving Kraken a pathway back in.
Derivatives
Woe: U.S. regulators previously limited access to leveraged futures and margin trading.
Resolution: Kraken secured a CFTC-regulated futures entity, now positioned to expand offerings within compliance.
Banking Arm
Woe: Efforts to launch Kraken Bank in Wyoming stalled under regulatory pressure.
Resolution: Tailwinds from 2024–2025 reforms allow special purpose depositories to resume buildout, with Kraken Bank expected to roll out phased services.
👉 The bottom line: regulatory hurdles that once looked existential now have clearer lanes forward, making this raise a well-timed bet on expansion.
The Raise 💸
Amount: $500M
Valuation: $15B
Investors: Reported participation from global institutional funds, though names remain undisclosed
Use of funds: Scaling product suite, expanding compliance infrastructure, and pushing further into international corridors
Looking Ahead 🔮
Kraken is raising in a moment of strength. With compliance tailwinds, resurging retail, and institutional interest at all-time highs, the exchange is better positioned to compete with Coinbase and Binance.
The key test: execution. If Kraken leverages this raise to deepen trust and scale new products, it could transform regulatory scars into long-term competitive advantage.
Industry Leaders 🤠
Elliptic
Elliptic Lands HSBC Backing, Extending G-SIB Seal of Approval 🏦
Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic just locked in fresh investment from HSBC, joining a list of global systemically important banks that see compliance as the key to scaling digital assets.
What Is Elliptic? 🤔
Founded in 2013, Elliptic set out to make crypto as safe and transparent as traditional finance by building forensic-level blockchain analytics.
Crypto Tracing Tools: Help regulators and banks spot illicit funds by mapping wallet addresses to real-world entities. Example: if hacked funds from an exchange move through mixers, Elliptic can flag them before they touch a bank.
Screening Services: Real-time checks to stop businesses from accidentally processing tainted crypto. Think of it as an anti-money-laundering filter, but for digital assets
Discovery Platform: Shows institutional exposure to crypto businesses. Example: a bank can see which exchanges or custodians its counterparties rely on and how risky they are.
Risk Scoring Models: Assigns a “risk level” to wallets or transactions based on behavior patterns, giving compliance teams an early warning system.
The Space 🌍
The blockchain analytics market is crowded, with each firm carving out a niche around regulation, coverage, and institutional reach.
Chainalysis
Focuses heavily on government contracts, especially U.S. law enforcement.
Known for investigative tools used in cases like darknet takedowns and ransomware tracking.
TRM Labs
Serves both regulators and fintechs with real-time transaction monitoring.
Has deep traction in the U.S. and Latin America, often positioned as the agile startup alternative.
CipherTrace (Mastercard-owned)
Tailored for banks and payment processors, integrated into Mastercard’s compliance stack.
Stronger in traditional payments than in the DeFi or exchange space.
👉 The state of play: Everyone wants to be the compliance standard, but coverage, regional credibility, and trust from institutions decide who leads.
The G-SIB Backing Stepping Stone 🪜
Global systemically important banks (G-SIBs) are the 30+ megabanks whose moves set the tone for finance worldwide. Each Elliptic round backed by a G-SIB has acted as a stamp of approval and a springboard into new markets.
Santander (2019): Helped Elliptic expand into Europe and Latin America, scaling coverage to stablecoins that mattered for cross-border payments.
Wells Fargo (2020): Brought credibility in the U.S. and supported the launch of Elliptic Discovery for counterparty risk mapping.
J.P. Morgan (2022): Coincided with expansion of analytics coverage to nearly the entire crypto market cap, boosting Elliptic’s appeal to institutions entering tokenization.
HSBC (2025): Deepens Elliptic’s bridge into Asia-Pacific, where HSBC dominates, aligning its compliance rails with regional growth in tokenized finance.
👉 This isn’t about one check, it is about piecing together global legitimacy. With four G-SIBs on its roster, Elliptic is signaling that blockchain analytics is no longer niche but essential to the financial system, globally, at the corporate level.
Our Take / Looking Ahead 🔮
Elliptic’s G-SIB path is one way to legitimacy: secure endorsements from the world’s largest banks and bake compliance into the financial mainstream.
The alternative paths are top-down regulation, where governments dictate standards, or bottom-up DeFi experiments that try to automate trust on-chain.
Each has strengths, but only the G-SIB route has so far delivered both credibility and market access at scale.
If Elliptic can leverage its G-SIB network to dominate regional footholds while expanding coverage across new asset classes, it could cement itself as the Moody’s or S&P of crypto.
Events 📆
Introduction.com x Acquire.fi Members Only Soirée Powered by Arcadia
IRL:
Singapore; 10/2 🇸🇬
Wednesday, October 8th; NY 🇺🇸
Marina Bay Sands, Singapore 10/1 - 10/2 🇸🇬
London; 10/13 - 10/15 🏴
Tobacco Dock, London UK; 10/21 - 10/22 🇬🇧
Las Vegas, Nevada; 10/26 - 10/29 🇺🇸
Top Stories 📰
UN Pension Fund Tests Blockchain for Identity 🌍
The UN Joint Staff Pension Fund has piloted a blockchain-based system to modernize identity verification, replacing its legacy paper process.
The fund manages over $88B in assets and serves more than 220,000 participants across 190 countries, making it one of the largest pension funds in the world.
Any efficiency upgrade here signals serious implications for how critical global services can be administered.
What Happened 📰
Enter Hyperledger, the UN of enterprise blockchain.
It is a foundation backed by the Linux Foundation and a global consortium of corporations and governments, specializing in building open-source frameworks for permissioned blockchains.
The UN tapped Hyperledger to design an internal Layer 1 system tailored for identity verification, bringing one of the world’s largest pension funds firmly into the Web3 era.
Efficiency Gains ⚡
40% reduction in paper processing
95% decrease in archiving costs
76.5% lower overtime expenses
Added biometric and AI verification, plus offline kiosks for low-infrastructure regions
Why It Matters 🔮
The UN case study highlights blockchain’s role as infrastructure for efficiency, security, and scale. By applying enterprise-grade solutions, blockchain is being validated as a practical tool for global administration, not just financial markets.
PayPal Signals DeFi Dominance with Spark Announcement 🚀
PayPal is tapping Spark to pump $1B of liquidity into its stablecoin PYUSD through DeFi lending markets, making a bold statement about where it sees the future of liquidity.
Quick Recap 🧩
PYUSD
Launched in August 2023, PayPal’s dollar-backed stablecoin has grown into one of the most recognizable regulated stable assets, now integrated across Coinbase, Venmo, and global payment corridors.
Spark
Founded in 2023 by the MakerDAO community, Spark is a DeFi lending protocol that lets users borrow and lend directly against stablecoins.
💰It is backed by Maker governance and deeply tied to the $5B+ DAI ecosystem 💰
Spark vs the Competition ⚖️
Spark takes in deposits, pools them, and lends them out through smart contracts that everyone can audit on-chain, with lenders earning fees from borrowers but also carrying the risk of losses if loans default.
It is essentially DeFi’s answer to the big market makers.
The Competition
Wintermute: A global market maker with massive reach across centralized and decentralized venues. It excels at scale and efficiency, but its model is off-chain and less transparent compared to Spark’s protocol-driven design.
Jump Crypto: Known for deep liquidity and trading infrastructure. Its strength is execution speed across markets, though reliance on centralized systems means less on-chain visibility.
GSR: Strong in derivatives and stablecoin markets with a significant presence in Asia. Its edge is specialization, but it still operates more like a trading desk than an open lending pool.
👉 Spark’s distinction lies in its transparency and governance-first model, which directly aligns with PayPal’s need for stable, programmatic liquidity.
Who Gets What 🤝
What We Know
Spark lists PYUSD as a borrowable and lendable asset, opening a new $1B liquidity pool.
PayPal gains scalable, transparent liquidity for PYUSD, deepening adoption across DeFi.
Spark earns credibility and new inflows by aligning with one of the world’s largest payment networks.
Why It Matters 🔮
PayPal’s move signals that DeFi is not a side experiment but the liquidity backbone it wants PYUSD built on.
By anchoring to Spark, PayPal gains transparency, stability, and a scalable market infrastructure that complements rather than competes with traditional market makers.
Good on PayPal and team. We respect the hustle.
🧭 Regulation Roundup
🇪🇺 Euro Stablecoin Consortium: 9 Banks Back MiCA-Compliant Token
The banks involved are ING, Banca Sella, KBC, Danske Bank, DekaBank, UniCredit, SEB, CaixaBank, and Raiffeisen Bank International. 
They’ll form a Netherlands-based company and aim to seek e-money licensing under MiCA, positioning this as a European alternative to dollar-pegged stablecoins. 
🇺🇸 SEC’s Atkins Pushes “Innovation Exemption” by Year-End
SEC Chair Paul Atkins says the agency is working toward a new rule that gives crypto firms more room to launch new products under lighter regulation, targeting implementation by end of 2025. 
His regulatory agenda also includes clarifying crypto issuance, custody, and trading frameworks, including expanding recordkeeping rules (17a-3 / 17a-4) to cover crypto. 
⚖️ CFTC Launches Tokenized Collateral Pilot for Derivatives Markets
The CFTC is rolling out a new initiative to allow tokenized assets (digital collateral) in derivatives trading, which could integrate blockchains deeper into traditional derivatives infrastructure. 
This is a signal that regulators want on-chain stability and innovation, not just policing.
🤝 U.S. & U.K. Form Crypto Regulatory Task Force
The United States and United Kingdom announced a joint task force focused on aligning crypto regulation, especially in areas like stablecoins, custody, and market structure.
This move hints at more cross-border coordination ahead, potentially smoothing friction between U.S. and U.K. rules.
Wrap Up ✌
✨ The signal is clear: this is not fringe anymore. The smartest players are betting big, regulators are writing the rules, and legacy giants are leaning into Web3 rails.
The only real question is not if adoption happens, but which names will still be on the scoreboard when the buzzer sounds ✨
