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The Briefing Memo

February 2026 - If you’re new here, welcome to The Briefing Memo, which features the latest insights and updates from The Venture Dept., the friendly former regulators on the cap table. If this newsletter has been forwarded to you, you can subscribe here.

A Note About Bitcoin

Well, we are sure you are following Bitcoin’s up and down (and recently, just down) ride over the last several months, and we wanted to provide some broader perspective. As the ecosystem matures, we see it splitting into distinct categories: Bitcoin as a digital gold macro asset, the blue chip utility tokens, the long tail of speculative coins, and, most importantly to us, new financial infrastructure.

The Venture Dept. continues to focus our conviction on that final category, which is the base level of how assets are created, stored, transferred, and protected. While we are believers in Bitcoin and expect its continued success, the systemic financial revolution we are investing in, specifically tokenization and stablecoin rails, is no longer predicated on the price of a single token.

Whether BTC hits $1mm or $1, the substrate of global finance is being permanently remade. Institutions are already integrating these technological developments into core products and services, treating this layer as the new standard for efficiency and transparency. Our conviction remains in the technology that makes the entire financial system more efficient.

Company Updates

The Venture Dept. recently invested in Rhythmic, which enables businesses to embed stablecoin infrastructure, with things like cards and rewards. We’re excited about the team, Aaron Marks and Joseph Hayes, who are late of Wal-Mart, Visa, Amex, and Mastercard, and what they’re building. 

Check out the Fortune article on them.

ETHDenver gave several TVD portco founders an opportunity to show off their big brains. Predicate founder Nikhil Raguveera was featured on a panel on institutions’ barriers to entry in the crypto space:

Stable Sea founder/CEO Tanner Taddeo also got to talk on “Building Stablecoin Rails for Enterprise Payment & Treasury Operations.” The company also recently announced a partnership with dLocal to power low-cost B2B cross-border stablecoin payments. The collaboration connects Stable Sea’s programmable stablecoin rails with dLocal’s emerging markets payout network, targeting faster settlement and materially lower costs for international treasury flows.

Our buddy Will Beeson of Multiliquid chatted about “The Future of Tokenized Yield.”

Multiliquid also announced its institutional liquidity facility on the Solana network, allowing stablecoin holders to instantly convert back and forth in institutional, on-chain MMFs, private credit, and alternative funds. Ad astra, Will!

Squidrouter has become an XRP validator, deepening its commitment to the network and giving it further visibility within the community as a serious player.

Dept. Updates

Speaking of Rhythmic, Matt and Aaron had a fireside chat on the convergence between crypto and fintech. Short story: They’re made for each other. 

As part of our ongoing Founders Spotlight series for LPs and Advisors, we hosted portco Valinor’s founders, Connor Dougherty and Lily Yarborough, on what they’re building: a modern merchant bank that originates and finances short-duration private credit for high-velocity fintech, payments, and FX businesses using digital infrastructure. Their platform compresses funding cycles from weekly to daily while improving transparency and real-time risk monitoring, positioning them to become core rails for institutional digital private credit. Let us know if you’d like to attend the next session.

Matt and Jon took a road trip to the Midwest for some business and got to see a part of the country they’d previously only seen from an airplane window. Among the highlights, they got the best McDonald’s they’d had in decades.

While neither can be sure of why it was so good (Midwestern pride in their work? Not slammed because they’re not inundated with DoorDash orders so they could actually cook the fries to golden brown? Being beyond starved due plane issues leading to scheduling snafus?) Regardless, if you’re ever cruising I-35 south of Wichita, definitely hit the rest stop. 

Matt and Jon made it with minutes to spare to meet with Emprise Bank and enjoyed sitting with Chair and CEO Matt Michaelis and team, thinking about the hard questions banks face with these major technological and regulatory changes. We appreciate their not mentioning how we smelled like Mickey D’s.

With upcoming trips to Buffalo, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Stamford, the boys are hitting all the hot spots (and will report back any Briefing-Memo-mention-worthy rest stops).

Regulatory Developments

The SEC tooted its horn at ETHDenver, with Chair Atkins and Commissioner Peirce giving a laundry list of the Commission’s achievements since last year. The list reflects an all-fronts crypto legitimacy push and the foundations of Federal digital assets regulation. We highlight dropping SAB 121 (which inhibited publicly held banks from participating in the digital assets markets), the cross-agency cooperation (including the digital assets taxonomy), and meeting with industry leaders and early-stage founders (see the blurb on Johnny' Reinsch’s engagement below), to understand the problems they’ve faced in getting registered and operating in this space. The Commission’s approach here has been fundamentally sound: Digging in with those on the ground and addressing their concerns; working cooperatively with sister agencies; and making actual decisions to issue rules-based, common-sense frameworks so those who are building know where the guardrails are beforehand, rather than being subjected to post-hoc regulation by enforcement. 

After taking a well-deserved victory lap, the Chair Atkins stated his staff will be working to answer open questions that will start us down that regulatory promised land. Those questions include shaping out what constitutes an investment contract with respect to crypto. You’ll recall that we’ve all been living under the Howey test since the late 1940s, when orange groves were apparently all the rage. While this won’t be the law of the land, what the SEC thinks is likely to influence Congress as it works through the market structure act (and works through it, and works through it. Enough). They’ll also work on modernizing transfer agent rules on digital asset recordkeeping, custody, and an innovation exemption. 

Let’s hear it from the Chair: “Tokenization could transform the financial system as we know it by, for example, shortening settlement cycles, facilitating the movement of collateral and dividends, facilitating proxy voting, or making it easier for people to construct and manage bespoke, diversified portfolios of investments. We stand ready to work with entrepreneurs who are building for a better future.” Amen.

Separately, Commissioner Peirce sounded off on the haircuts broker-dealers give to proprietary stablecoins. Currently, some are taking a 100% haircut when calculating compliance with 15c3-1 requirements; Commission staff have indicated in their FAQs a 2% haircut is fine, just fine, and she agrees with that approach. 

News

Prediction markets are red hot, sure, but they’re also working to upend state regulation in favor of the Federal variety. Nevada, among others, argue that prediction markets are in its purview when they offer exposure to sports gambling (predictions?). Crypto.com sued Nevada in June over it, lost in district court, and now the CFTC has weighed in with an amicus brief at the Ninth Circuit on the appeal. The CFTC argues it has exclusive jurisdiction for event contract markets, which happen to include sports, and goes deep on the Commodity Exchange Act’s legislative history and decisional law that make it plain that this is the CFTC’s turf. The Ninth Circuit just rejected Kalshi’s stay request to stop Nevada’s blocking its website in the state. Seems like these cases will end up at SCOTUS at some point.

Listens and Reads

The Venture Dept. LPA Justin Friedman hosted a podcast with Paxos Labs co-founder Bhau Kotecha and discussed stablecoins, tokenization, and the future for these technologies. Come for the blockchain, stay for the Shania Twain references.

The RWA desk held a panel featuring, among others, DTCC’s head of strategy and market solutions, who laid out how tokenization transitions from experimentation to infrastructure. 

For those thinking about the coming agentic revolution, here’s an interesting piece about why AI needs crypto, namely for payments: “What you need is programmable money: payments authorized by code, settled in seconds, priced in fractions of a cent. Stablecoins on low-fee networks already do this.”

We also recommend this forward-looking piece from Citrini Research, which apparently got A LOT of attention, on agentic commerce and the implications for card networks. The article sketches a plausible near-term scenario in which autonomous agents, optimizing for cost in machine-to-machine transactions, route around traditional 2–3% interchange fees from card networks in favor of stablecoins on low-fee networks. Whether or not the timeline proves accurate, the core thesis is directionally aligned with what we are seeing with programmable money and stablecoin rails.

For sure check out this podcast with Johnny Reinsch and portco RWA.xyz’s CTO Charile You. The guys talk about Johnny’s interactions with the SEC’s Project Crypto reps, who he calls smart, hard-working, and ambitions. “Five stars.” As we said above, this is what we want to see. They also discuss Fidelity launching its stablecoin, FIDD (as Johnny points out, “FIDDY” was right there), and the CME launching a “token,” and assume that means their own stablecoin. (As an aside, CME is also launching 24/7 trading for crypto futures and options.) Wondering at what point there are enough tokens; not to say these tokens won’t serve important uses, but how many coins do we need?

And if you really want to get deep, here’s a lengthy dive, Stablecoins: A Law and Economics Analysis, which concludes that stablecoins could complement sovereign currencies and digital payment infrastructures if subject to robust legal, prudential, and transparency safeguards. You’re speaking our language.

Disclaimer

The information in this newsletter is provided solely for general informational purposes and reflects the author’s personal views at the time of publication. Nothing herein should be construed as investment advice, legal advice, or a recommendation to engage in any transaction or strategy. Readers should consult their own professional advisors before making any financial, legal, or other decisions. All information is provided “as is,” without any representation or warranty of any kind.

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