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The Briefing Memo

June 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.

Company Updates

Multiliquid shipped Liquid Treasury, an instant stablecoin sweep that turns idle balances into T-bill yield with instant liquidity — aimed at fintechs, payments companies, and the on-chain LPs already routing through Multiliquid. Will Beeson and the Uniform Labs crew keep stacking product.

Squid became the cross-chain layer for Ripple's RLUSD, wiring the stablecoin into 100+ chains through a single swap.

Flyra announced Coinbase Ventures is on the cap table. Oneal Bhambani and team are building stablecoin-powered remittances on top of a programmable, AI-enabled ledger. Onward.

Xweave took the stage at Point Zero Forum in Zurich to announce it's adding Solana as a settlement layer for real-time, no-pre-funding stablecoin treasury flows across Asia — USD, SGD, PHP, IDR, and AED, live and expanding into the hardest corridors. Fittingly, Milind Sanghavi was also our June Founder Spotlight guest (more below). The man is everywhere.

Superstate is back in the SEC's filing cabinet, this time with Invesco filing to register a tokenized stablecoin-reserve fund built on Superstate's FundOS, with Superstate named as sub-transfer agent keeping the shareholder registry onchain. That's a second mandate from a $2T+ manager running on Robert Leshner's rails. The "tokenization is a science project" crowd is getting quieter by the month.

alfred plugged into the Borderless.xyz network as a participating financial institution, instantly extending its Latin America last-mile rails (11 countries, from Colombia to Argentina to El Salvador) to every Borderless customer with no new integration. The LatAm dollar-demand story keeps writing itself.

Predicate filed a comment letter with the U.S. Treasury on how to build AML/CFT and sanctions screening into stablecoins under the GENIUS regime. Compliance infrastructure is exactly what the next chapter needs, and it warms our former-regulator hearts to see a portco helping write the playbook.

Dept. Updates

Somehow, TVD was only on the road for a couple days this month, traveling to Dallas for some fundraising. And steak.

The Venture Dept. and Brogan Law co-hosted a panel on the state of play in Congress and upcoming legislative moves, featuring Greg Xethalis of Multicoin, Amanda Tuminelli of DeFi Education Fund, and Nick Gersh of Paxos.

At least we hope they’re upcoming. The panel was relatively sanguine about whether Clarity would pass. As of now, Polymarket is giving it around 50%, but the panel seemed to think that’s pretty high. Ethics seems to be the sticking point and even if the Senate can come up with something Democrats can get behind, there’s little chance that Trump would sign a bill with strong ethical rules. And if Congress can’t get Clarity across the line by the summer recess, chances plummet regardless. It’s not a priority for Democrats if they take one or both houses, so we are becoming concerned that we might not see a bill until 2030. If anyone comes across a genie in a bottle, please use one wish on this.

We hosted portco Xweave’s founder, Milind Sanghavi, in New York for our June Founder Spotlight and the Knicks' city-wide celebration.

Regulatory Developments

The SEC issued its draft strategic plan for 2026-2030. First up: Digital asset regulations. The Commission wants to have a firm regulatory foundation based on a rational, principled approach, provide pathways for founders to access capital, and grounded in economic analysis. Sounds reasonable. If we’re not going to get Clarity, issuing rules is the next best thing. We’re hopeful that by the time Gensler Jr. or whomever gets installed won’t be able to undo the foundations Chair Atkins lays.

The SEC is preparing to rescind Regulation NMS Rules 611 and 610(e), the order-protection (trade-through) and locked/crossed-market rules. Those rules are impossible to comply with if you’re in a DeFi environment, so getting rid of them gives a big boost to the tokenized securities space. 

We’re losing Commissioner Peirce to semi-retirement in Virginia Beach, where she’ll become a professor. On her way out, she laid out principles for the SEC to follow when considering how to regulate the industry. She argues that code is speech, blockchains are versatile technologies that shouldn't be regulated as if they were centralized intermediaries, and that regulations must respect the reality of decentralization. This is all fair and good, and hope that Gensler Jr. respects it.

The CFTC dropped an NPR on amending its regulations on what contracts may be listed, centered around the “special rule,” which gives the CFTC the power to prevent contracts that it determines are contrary to the public interest. So, probably kiss goodbye your ability to predict whether some scrub Mets starter will throw a ball or strike next, whether your kid’s little league team loses, or if some benchwarmer will check himself out of the game with an owie. And you can’t bet on if someone gets murdered, but you can bet on the trial’s outcome. In all, ridding prediction markets of simply, dumb stuff to bet on, hopefully makes them more viable as commercial markets. 

The CFTC also made comments that while 24/7 trading is good for crypto, it’s not really good for all markets, because they are built on blockchain technology and can just do that. Ok, fine, but what happens in a few short years when everything is trading onchain? Guess we will check back.

The OCC issued Fidelity Digital Assets an Interpretive Letter (IL 1192, May 12) confirming an OCC charter holder does not need to comply with state money transmitter license requirements. Not sure why we have to argue about preemption on this, but here we are. This interpretive letter serves as a regulatory benchslap, pointing out both the law itself and SCOTUS are pretty clear on this. Per the letter, “To conclude otherwise would, at a minimum, require the Bank to obtain Iowa’s permission as a condition precedent to exercising its federal power.” Guess Iowa decided it had to shoot its shot. Looked like the Spurs in the second half of Game 4.

FinCEN, the Fed, OCC, FDIC, and the NCUA issued a notice of proposed rulemaking around customer identification programs for stablecoin issuers. They will have to collect customer information, verify identities, maintain records, and screen against watchlists, folding the issuers into the core BSA envelope. 

News

How big are tokenized asset markets going to get? Citi bull case is now $8.2 trillion by 2030, with a $5.5 trillion base case. 

Their numbers are driven by an assumed increase in public market securities and liquid onchain capital, with a base-case assumed $1.9 trillion in outstanding stablecoins. I’m all tingly now. And there’s no real mention of agentic payments in here, which I’d assume would goose these numbers higher into the stratosphere.

Citi, JPM, BofA, and other major banks are going to launch a tokenized deposit system, trying to cut stablecoins off at the pass. Banks are coming around to the idea that the new rails are better rails and would like to keep as much as they can inside their systems.

On the other side of the aisle, Stripe, Visa, and Mastercard are reportedly backing a new consortium, with Coinbase said to be considering joining, to launch a new stablecoin to rival Circle and Tether. If Coinbase does jump in, the most interesting wrinkle for us is its big ol' relationship with Circle. Is this positioning for their agreement’s renewal or is this more than that?

Japan’s lower house passed a bill to regulate crypto like stocks, which would include dropping the tax rate down from up to 55% to 20%. Staying in the Land of the Rising Sun, major Japanese financial institutions MUFG, Mizuho, and Sumitomo are working to issue their own stablecoin and to settle actual commercial transactions this year. 

Paxos got a temporary (18-month) clearing agency registration from the SEC, becoming the only blockchain-native clearing agency. Kudos to Paxos for continuing to push here and to the DTCC for supporting it. All the pieces seem to be coming together for the industry more broadly, don’t they?

Listens and Reads

Portco founder Davis Hart of Omnia released a fabulous piece on stablecoins and banks. The paper argues that banks should begin treating stablecoins as a new form of money rather than as a novel asset class. The central thesis is that existing banking laws and supervisory frameworks are largely sufficient to support bank adoption of payment stablecoins, even if some implementation questions remain unresolved. It’s a terrific reference piece for foundational understanding of what banks are facing and the current lay of the land.

If you’re interested in nerding out and want to know how regulators make rules, check out this interview with Commissioner Peirce and Taylor Lindman of the Crypto Task Force.

If you or a  CTO, CRO, or Board you love is thinking about experimenting with crypto, you could do worse than read this report from BCG on The Future of Digital Assets, which breaks down what the hell we’ve been talking about here for a long time, where things may be going, and how to get involved. 

The BIS issued a paper arguing that stablecoin issuers face the same fundamental problem as banks: they issue liabilities redeemable on demand while investing reserves in a mix of cash and less-liquid assets, creating both run risk for holders and spillover risk for financial markets. Using a dynamic model of a stablecoin issuer, effective regulation requires a combination of liquidity requirements (to reduce forced asset sales and market disruption) and capital requirements (to absorb losses and lower default risk), with each serving a distinct prudential purpose. Let’s see if regulators move in this direction.

^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.}