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🌟 While the timeline was debating if hot air actually rises, the actual foundations of the next financial system were being quietly (sometimes loudly) laid down. We’re talking $50M rounds for stablecoin infra, real-time audits backed by PwC, Cosmos veterans being scooped by Wall Street refugees, and NVIDIA chips whispering truths (cryptographic) to Hedera’s Hashgraph like it’s the blockchain version of George Michael.

Meanwhile, Congress just greenlit the most significant crypto legislation in U.S. history, Coinbase launched a product designed to become the next Facebook, and Plasma sold $50M worth of tokens while $PUMP sold a $600M ICO in seconds.

MOMENTUM IS HOT. And if you’re looking for signals in the noise, this week’s closing section is where the breadcrumb trail becomes a blueprint. Let’s get into it. 🌟

Agora just announced massive $50M Series A funding round led by Paradigm. This was followed by the announcement of white label stablecoin minting as a service.

Agora raised $12M in April of 2024 and announced their stablecoin offering AUSD. AUSD is backed 1:1 by cash, U.S. Treasuries, and overnight repos. Reserves are backed by State Street Corporation (over $40 trillion in auc) and their reserve manager is VanEck ($100B in AUM).

By October of 2024, they had achieved multi-chain deployment and “tens of billions” in cumulative transaction volume. Their demand is bolstered by their yield sharing program ❗ and infra as a service value prop. Also AUSD is audited in real time and backed by PwC. Their immediate multi-chain launch and targeting of non-U.S. markets with institutional infrastructure and compliant reserve management signaled their vision was wider than just a shiny new coin drop.

⏩ Fast forward to today ⏩ they just received a $50M infusion from Paradigm. Yup. 5x increase. And with those funds, Agora announced they will be adding white label stable coin minting. If you ran out of celsius, let me explain why this matters. If USDC is iphone, USDT is xiaomi (did I pronounce that right?), then AUSD is android, just fashionably late to the party. Agora offering white-lable stable coin minting is like Google offering android as customizable software to others. Now any third party can have their own digital economy, all backed by Agora’s infra, AUSD, and immediately usable on chain.

Paradigm is poised to secure a huge win as this infusion comes in the midst of Crypto Week and the passing of the GENIUS Act (covered below). The list of gains are many but just to name a few:

Since inception, AUSD has exploded into ~$300M a day in CEX volume. While,yes, this is orders (plural) of magnitude lower than UDSC and USDT, Paradigm’s involvement and the announcement of white label stable coins shows things are really just getting started.

(And a special shoutout to Introduction.com Member and Head of LATAM @ Agora, Facundo Werning)

Huge level up acquiring Strangelove Labs setting themselves up to become the RWA tokenization juggernaut.

Proof of Concept:

Founded in 2021 by former Goldman Sachs VP Nathan Allman, Ondo originally focused on “vaults” aimed at mimicking TradFi yields on DeFi protocol in addition to LaaS. The vaults gave users a choice between “Fixed Income” and “Variable Income” tranches in structured liquidity products. These allowed depositors to tailor their risk-return profile. The kicker, the yield was based on solely on-chain activity. Purely Web3/DeFi. Backers like Founders Fund, Pantera, and Coinbase Ventures bought in early.

RWA lite and Vertical Integration:

Since then, Ondo has rolled out USDY — a yield-bearing token backed 1:1 by short-term U.S. Treasuries and cash equivalents. It’s now listed on Coinbase, trading globally, and serving as a foundational RWA primitive. More recently, Ondo launched Ondo Global Markets, offering compliant access to these assets across jurisdictions. And just this year, they acquired Oasis Pro, giving them a registered broker-dealer and ATS for compliant secondary trading. 🔼

Next Evolution:

The acquisition marks the latest chapter in Ondo’s expansion story. Strangelove is one of the original Cosmos ecosystem builders. They were part of the pioneering team that built IBC protocol, contributed to the Cosmos SDK, and shipped production-grade infra for appchains like Osmosis, Akash, and Celestia. They’re not just a validator, not just a dev shop — they’re core infrastructure builders. And it looks like their CEO and CoFounder Jack Zampolin is tagging along for the ride as Vice President of Product, overseeing technical roadmap, omnichain issuance, and integrating Strangelove tech into Ondo’s RWA strategy.🌶️

What's Next?:

Strangelove isn’t your average hire. They’ve shipped Hermes (the standard IBC relayer), Packet Forward Middleware (used for async composability), and maintain active validator infrastructure across the interchain. They’ve already worked with protocols like Celestia, dYdX, and the Interchain Foundation — and now all that muscle is dedicated to making Ondo the RWA layer across Cosmos, Ethereum, and beyond. With this acquisition, Ondo becomes more than just a token issuer. They’re now a full-stack RWA infra company. 🏭

Investors responded positively, driving a ~4% pump in ONDO’s price on announcement day. The move cements Ondo’s position as the institutional bridge between RWA and Web3. Let's keep an eye on them to see how this shakes up the space.

(P.S. Congratulations to long-time Introduction.com Member and VP of Partnerships at Ondo, Katie Wheeler)

Plasma

Huge demand for XPL during $50M public sale as Plasma looks towards Mainnet Beta.

FinTech expert Paul Faecks and Solana ecosystem strategist Ben Sparango founded Plasma in late 2023. Paul previously led derivatives research at Deribit and co-founded Alloy, a digital asset platform for institutions. These experiences shaped Paul’s understanding of crypto market structure and stablecoin utility eventually leading him to the belief that stablecoins are the largest opportunity in crypto and one of the most important in global finance. This belief ultimately culminated into Plasma’s current mission: Plasma will be to stablecoins what Linux is to servers or Swift is to international wires - invisible infrastructure moving global value. Plasma believes this is a 👏 Trillion 👏 dollar opportunity (yes, with a T) and aims to supersede both TradFi and DeFi players to become the go-to financial rails of the future.

In October of 2024, Plasma announced its $3.5 M seed round led by Bitfinex, with participation from prominent investors like Ardoino, Angermayer, and Anthos. Having Bitfinex and Tether leadership in the seed round signaled strong backing from major stablecoin infrastructure players while establishing early financial credibility and momentum ahead of the much larger $24 M series-A round in Feb 2025.

In early interviews following Plasma’s seed round, Paul emphasized the project’s foundational philosophy: “The conviction we have, on one hand, is Bitcoin isn’t going to change.” His framing positioned Plasma as a stablecoin-native blockchain secured by Bitcoin’s immutability. Paolo Ardoino, CTO of Bitfinex and CEO of Tether, echoed this strategic direction, stating: “Plasma is designed to provide essential rails for stablecoin adoption by leveraging Bitcoin as its security layer.” These endorsements validated Plasma’s technical and market thesis from both an infrastructure and liquidity standpoint. Together, they offered early proof of conviction from top-tier figures in Web3, bolstering investor and developer confidence ahead of Plasma’s broader rollout.

⏩ Fast forward to today ⏩ Plasma’s vision just took a massive leap forward with their public sale of XPL token.

XPL will function as the core asset underpinning the Plasma network. It secures the PlasmaBFT consensus mechanism, powers execution through the Reth-based EVM, and underpins the trust-minimized Bitcoin bridge. Just as sovereign currencies and central bank reserves underpin traditional finance, XPL safeguards the integrity of this new system and aligns long-term incentives as stablecoin adoption scales.

Plasma is selling 10% of XPL total supply (1,000,000,000 XPL) at a $500M valuation effectively raising $50M in capital to be deployed toward the development of the ecosystem. Even amid their social media being hacked (don’t worry, the vaults are safe 😮‍💨), day 1 of the public sale had more than 211% in overcommitment from their community.

ou can see a full breakdown of the public sale on their website but for us the mechanics of the sale are as follows:

The sale is being conducted in a trustless, decentralized manner using Sonar by Echo, an on-chain sale mechanism. Participants earn allocations by depositing stablecoins into the Plasma Vault, with a time-weighted system rewarding early and committed supporters. These funds are locked for a minimum of 40 days, and buyers receive their XPL upon the launch of Plasma’s mainnet beta. Sorry U.S. buyers, you are subject to a 12-month lockup for compliance 😝

The sale checks all the usual boxes: providing the first wave of true decentralized stakers, allocating governance participants, and providing greater liquidity. While XPL is not yet listed on exchanges, the overwhelming demand and fast sell-out triggered strong bullish sentiment across crypto markets. On-chain observers and analysts (e.g., Arkham Intelligence) flagged the sale’s speed and scale as rare for a token launch, often a predictor of post-launch price momentum 📈

Talos

Flexes with underrated $100M acquisition of CoinMetrics signaling TradFi’s deepening colonization of Web3 infrastructure with data as a strategic asset 💪

Talos was founded in 2018 by Anton Katz (CEO) and Ethan Feldman (CTO). Both brought deep Wall Street FinTech experience. Anton was previously Head of Trading Technology at AQR Capital Management. Ethan spent a decade at Broadway Technology, building trading tech for leading banks and asset managers. They initially aimed to launch a crypto hedge fund—then pivoted to create Talos upon spotting glaring infrastructure gaps in digital asset markets. Per their website: liquidity was highly fragmented, connectivity standards were lacking, and the concept of algorithmic best execution was non-existent. To put it lightly, a proverbial nightmare for institutional investors. During a CryptoNews interview (Aug 2023) Anton emphasized this belief “We’ve seen these kinds of events that have people at some point say, ‘We need a lot more protection here.’ …Well, the capital market side actually does that pretty well because it’s years of bad things that happened that created an ecosystem of safeties…”. Per their own admission, these safeties were albeit non-existent for institutional investors looking to enter the web3 space. With that in mind, Talos was born. The goal: “one integrated platform” for end-to-end digital asset trading. Essentially aiming to bridge the gap between TradFi institutional investing and web3.

Clearly emphasizing Talos’ TradFi roots, in May 2021, Talos raised $40 million in its Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz with notable participation from PayPal Ventures, Fidelity, Galaxy Digital. A year later, the company secured $105 million in a Series B round led by General Atlantic, bringing in fresh meat 🥩 like BNY Mellon, Citi, and Wells Fargo, all while early backers including a16z and PayPal doubled down—bringing Talos to a $1.25 billion valuation 💰💰 Investors clearly view Talos as the hopeful institutional backbone of digital-asset trading, offering a unified platform that bridges DeFi, CeFi, and TradFi with enterprise-grade execution, compliance, and reporting infrastructure.

Between 2023 and 2024, Talos made four strategic acquisitions to advance its vision of a unified institutional platform. It acquired D3X Systems in May 2023 (undisclosed) to enhance pre-trade portfolio construction and systematic strategy tooling. In April 2024, Talos bought Cloudwall (estimated $20M) to integrate advanced risk management capabilities into its PMS suite. A month later, it acquired Skolem ($35M) to unlock institutional-grade DeFi access and seamless on-chain liquidity integration.

⏩ Fast forward to today ⏩ Talos is hopeful their $100M acquisition of CoinMetrics represents their capstone piece. CoinMetrics, founded in 2017 by Nic Carter, Aleksei Nokhrin, Jacob Franek, Alexander Bich, and Tim Rice, is a leading provider of crypto financial intelligence. With roots in both crypto-native and TradFi roots (Circle, Tradeweb, IHS Markit, ConsenSys), the team built a platform that offers institutional-grade market data, on-chain analytics, benchmark indexes, and reference data. Think of it as the Bloomberg Terminal for Web3 / Crypto, just lacking an actual trading terminal and focusing solely on digital assets and blockchains. Talos described the deal as its largest acquisition ever and was a no-brainer win for the team and their broader vision.

Market sentiment was generally positive surrounding the announcement. The acquisition announcement coincided with, and arguably contributed to, a robust crypto market rally— record highs in BTC, an ETH bounce back, and growing expectations of institutional adoption. Media outlets like Fortune, Cointelegraph, and CryptoBriefing prominently framed this as a consolidation milestone clearly signaling TradFi deepening its reach within the broader Web3 / crypto landscape.

_IRL:

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_{Coinfest Asia, Bali; 8/21-8/22 🏄‍♂️}

_Virtual:

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Thursday, July 31 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM EDT} 💻

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Crypto Week 🧑‍⚖

🏈 Kicked off last week in the US House, led by House Leadership and Financial Services Chair French Hill along with Agriculture Chair GT Thompson.

With the stated goal, to advance major crypto legislation and pave the way for the US to lead the Web3 / Crypto guard, The GENIUS Act, Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, and Anti‑CBDC Surveillance State Act, were all approved by the 

House. The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, and the Anti‑CBDC Surveillance State Act are still waiting for Senate ratification.

GENIUS Act (Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins)

Digital Asset Market Clarity Act

Anti‑CBDC Surveillance State Act

In English what does this mean? Stablecoins now have a clear legal category and regulated reserve requirements. Regulatory authority is streamlined, the CFTC will now oversee commodity-like tokens reducing unpredictability from SEC enforcement. A U.S. ban on CBDCs signals confidence in decentralized digital money and assuages privacy concerns. Crypto is here to stay and the US knows it. 👑

Markets roared in response to Crypto Week. BTC surged past $123,000, hitting a new all-time high, while Eth rose over 6% to trade above $3,500. Stablecoin issuers like Circle and major crypto stocks including Coinbase and MicroStrategy saw strong gains, alongside DeFi tokens and infrastructure plays like Solana and Uniswap. Tether CEO, Paolo Ardoino, hailed the GENIUS Act as “an important step toward establishing a clear regulatory foundation…”. SEC Chair, Paul Atkins, praised the GENIUS Act as “a monumental advancement for digital assets and financial markets”. While some observers cautioned that implementation and Senate approval for pending bills may take months, the overall sentiment was bullish—industry leaders and investors alike viewed the legislation as a foundational step toward mainstream adoption and long-term legitimacy. ☑️

Coinbase Announces Base App and Base Pay

Coinbase made waves this week with the launch of its long-awaited Base App and Base Pay. The release cements their broader vision of becoming the Web3 super app for the next generation of digital users.

On July 17, Coinbase held a keynote led by Brian Armstrong, highlighting AI‑powered tools (video editing, smart feed) and focusing on Web3 monetization for creators. 

Base App is simply a redesigned version of Coinbase Wallet. The novelty here is, it now combines social, identity, payments, and AI features into a single on-chain experience. Base Pay, on the other hand, is a new payment protocol built on the Base L2 network. It enables users to send and receive payments instantly using their Base account. Amazingly, it’s already integrated into platforms like Shopify Checkout ‼️. For creators, it means monetization without middlemen. For developers, it offers programmable money rails that settle in seconds.

Through integrations with Zora, Farcaster, and the like, creators can mint content as NFTs, earn royalties from mints and remixes, and receive direct USDC payments — all without relying on ads or centralized platforms. 

So what does this mean for the average user or content creator? Every like, share, or remix becomes a monetizable event, with smart contracts automating payouts and royalty splits. By embedding value directly into content, Base empowers creators to own and earn from their work in real time, making virality not just social, but financial. 

Coinciding with Crypto Week, markets reacted accordingly. COIN surged to an ATH of $444 before settling near $418, giving Coinbase a record $101 billion market cap. Bitcoin, meanwhile, hovered just below its $123K peak, with daily trading volume topping $50 billion. Base Protocol (BASE) also hit an ATH of $0.64 on July 20, currently trading around $0.62. Ethereum followed suit, rising 4% on launch day, while the broader market cap pushed north of $3.78 trillion.

Coinbase’s current direction is now clear: position Base App as a crypto-native alternative to the likes of Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, OF… While taking on the tech giants (olagarchs?) sounds like a Web3 fever dream, the current picture does look a bit like Foreman vs Frazier. Meta, for example, has a market cap orders of magnitude greater than CoinBase (At time of writing). CoinBase is hoping its first mover advantage in the Web3 space will be enough to tip the scales.

Hedera Announces Partnership to Power the Future of AI Compute

At introduction, we talk a lot about signals. How does one cut through the noise? Get the right que, make the right call? Well, let me give you a hint. This is the signal…

Through EQTY Labs “Verifiable Compute”, the Hedera network is now embedded at a silicon level in compatible NVIDIA and Intel chips to ensure data integrity and AI compliance at scale. And what’s more? Accenture is shipping this to governments and enterprises across the world.

So what’s Accenture’s first move? A collaboration with EQTY Labs, NVIDIA, SCAN UK, and Hedera to enable trust for pre-certified sovereign AI systems with breakthrough on-silicon governance. In short, Verifiable Compute, built on Hedera, is now deployed on the NVIDIA Blackwell platform.

This means Hedera on NVIDIA Blackwell via Verifiable Compute to enable cryptographic proof of governance and policy compliance within its agentic AI solution for public sector and defense, creating a new standard for sovereign AI deployment that ensures all data and agentic workflows are aligned to mission-critical policies and then registered on Hedera’s cryptographic protocols.

To put this into perspective, EQTY Lab is partnered with NVIDIA and Intel to develop more secure and verifiable AI processes directly into the silicon of their chips. And what did these arbiters of integrity think was a good idea? Let’s slap the Hedera Hashgraph on top as the capstone piece 🚨

Hedera smells of the old guard. It's almost as if it was created in a government lab surrounded by red tape and bureaucracy. But like the good kind. Like the most sophisticated one on earth, kind. The company was founded in 2017 by Dr. Leemon Baird and Mance Harmon. Baird, a former U.S. Air Force Academy, invented their core technology: the Hashgraph consensus. Harmon brought deep institutional experience from his time in the U.S. Missile Defense Agency and consulting giant SAIC. And who would have guessed these two military buddies love, but of all things, security and predictability?! 😂 Their goal became to build a trust layer for the internet that meets the security, governance, and performance needs of global institutions. Hedera and its underlying Hashgraph technology are built by the bigwigs for the bigwigs.

Most people are familiar with blockchain by now. Even my Pappy on Medicare talks to me about it over tapioca pudding. For this analogy, though, blockchain is like that kid who peaked in high school. Hedera’s Hashgraph, on the other hand, is the strong silent type. That kid in the back of the class that you never noticed but somehow always set the curve. The underlying tech is nuts 🤯 Here's the 30k-foot view:  Hedera Hashgraph’s technology is built to prove that digital events happened exactly when and how they were supposed to. It starts with a unique consensus algorithm ”Hashgraph” which doesn’t use traditional blockchain blocks, but instead allows network participants to “gossip” about transactions. As each participant shares data with others, they build a complete picture of who said what and when, creating a cryptographic timeline called a “gossip about gossip” protocol. This process enables virtual voting, where consensus is reached quickly and securely without energy-intensive mining. Every event is time-stamped, ordered, and validated across the network. Once confirmed, it’s stored immutably on Hedera’s public ledger. EQTY Lab uses this to anchor their AI “receipts” to a globally distributed, tamper-proof record ensuring that AI actions can be independently verified by anyone, anywhere, in real time.

From both an institutional and technological standpoint, the company is rock-solid. And the market agreed. These nodes in their network are elite enterprises, universities, and infrastructure leaders across multiple industries. Many are Fortune 500 companies or globally significant institutions. From a TradFi and Institutional perspective, they are 👌. And yet, despite its technical superiority, Hedera has struggled to “cross the chasm” in the retail world. That’s not because it lacked use cases, but because it lacked hype. In crypto, memes and virality often matter more than technical merit.

That may be about to change. In early 2025, EQTY Lab, in collaboration with NVIDIA and Intel, unveiled Verifiable Compute, a new framework for anchoring AI workflows to a public ledger using cryptographic proofs issued directly from silicon. In English, the chip's architecture is built in such a way that they will now produce cryptographic attestations (proofs) that will be tied to specific AI compute operations (like model training or inference). These attestations are hardware-rooted, meaning they come from the silicon chip itself not the operating system or software layer. Once those hardware-level proofs are created, they’re submitted to the Hedera network. This provides the public, immutable ledger that timestamps and secures the record. This is mission critical for Government, Regulators, and Enterprises with audit/compliance needs because it enables public accountability for private AI compute, without needing to trust the chipmaker or the AI operator. In short: trustless DeFi for AI compute all backed by Hedera.

This is not theoretical. According to EQTY, the system is designed to scale to trillions of transactions per day, with real-world deployments already in motion. For Hedera, this is their breakout moment in a true trial by fire.

Like I said. This is the signal. 

While HBAR’s market price has yet to reflect this breakthrough, the underlying momentum is undeniable. Hedera has become the anchoring layer for verifiable, decentralized AI compute, with real backing from the largest names in chips and cloud infrastructure. This moment could finally mark the transition from Hedera as an underappreciated Layer 1 to Hedera as the bedrock for trusted digital systems. 

✨ If you skimmed, you just missed a week where the U.S. government passed the most crypto-friendly legislation in history, Coinbase declared war on Big Tech, and Hedera started logging AI truths straight from silicon. Meanwhile, Paradigm backed Agora to become the Android of stablecoins, Ondo scooped up the Cosmos brain trust, Plasma sold out their $50m token sale, and Talos made it very clear that the Bloomberg Terminal of Web3 will be theirs, thank you very much.

This isn’t just “up only” season — it’s infrastructure season. Rails are being laid, alliances formed, and market leaders chosen. The dots are getting connected across regulation, capital, and code. So while the rest of Crypto Twitter’s still debating JPEGs and memecoins, you’re here. Reading this. Watching the whole game shift under your feet.

We’ll see you next week, same time (ish) , same place (your inbox). Stay sharp. ✨