The Briefing Memo

May 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.

Programming Note

We are co-hosting with Brogan Law a Crypto Colloquy at Pubkey near Washington Square on June 4. If you’re in town that night, please register and come hang out! Pubkey takes BTC, if you have some burning a hole in your pocket.

Portfolio Updates

Squid announced their most recent funding round of $6mm round led by North Island Ventures and Ripple. Squid allows users to swap assets and route transactions seamlessly across multiple blockchains through a single API and interface. 

Stable Sea entered a strategic relationship with friend-of-the-Fund WisdomTree. Stable Sea enables users (target market: SMBs) to invest their idle cash into WisdomTree’s tokenized money market fund. The ABA estimates retail and small businesses have $9.5 trillion at banks. SMBs have a notoriously difficult time in getting significant yield on their cash, so this could have significant impact. 

Multiliquid announced its launch of Carry, a turnkey liquidity management platform for institutional capital allocators. Now live with Metalayer, users will be able to set pricing and manage risk via a single dashboard, fine-tuning their exposures through customizable configurations.

Predicate recently shipped allow/deny lists, which help companies immediately update their onchain enforcement systems. They instantly add law enforcement flags, and alert humans in the loop about third party red flags for their review. Predicate has also become Centrifuge’s official compliance partner for RWA issuers. 

Rhythmic co-founder Aaron Marks was featured in Tech: NYC’s Companies to Watch: NYC Fintech Founders Shaping the Future of Finance. He quite correctly points out that New York is the center of the universe for this industry right now. He also uprooted his life and moved here from Cleveland because he puts his money where his mouth is. We salute you, Aaron. 

Dept. Updates

Another newsletter, and more travel to report on. Up first, Miami, where Matt and Jon went to not attend Consensus proper, but made it to Solana Accelerate and The Tie, along with far too many side events, coffees, and breakfasts/brunches/lunches/coffees/cocktails. Word to the wise: Not every event will let you wear shorts. At a crypto conference. In Miami. In a private space. And it was over 90 degrees. (Or 32, rest of the world.) The Venture Dept. hosted a founders dinner and got to spend time catching up and making new connections between portcos and friends.

Here you can see founders from Valinor (Lily Yarborough), Multiliquid (Will Beeson), Farooq Malik (Rain), Aaron Marks (Rhythmic), Martin Carrica (Mountain Protocol), and Manuel Beaudroit (Bello), as well as other friends. Everyone seems pretty fresh-faced, as this was only Monday; would like to have gotten another photo on Thursday morning to see the before-and-after.

The mood around town was quite upbeat, despite being in a bear market. Folks were buoyed by TradFi’s deepening foray into crypto and continued hope that Congress will get its act together and give us that market structure bill. Also, SoFi was giving out AirTags. Baller.

Matt and Jon took their talents to Europe in May, too. First stop, Amsterdam, where the boys moderated panels (and Matt sat on a panel, too):

TVD hosted a private dinner for founders and friends:

Great to spend time with Milind Sanghavi (Xweave), Jason Allegrante (Rhythmic), Justin Friedman (Stablecon, TVD), Matt Osborne (Ripple), Mike Featherstone (etherfuse), Oneal Bhambani (Flyra) and Anil Hansjee (Fabric). Good times had by all.

Matt and Jon then packed up for a jaunt to ETHMilan, held at The Leonardo da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology

Yes, we had pasta. This was at Langosteria, which was una favola: 

Europe remains, strangely, behind the curve, even with MiCA on the books. Why? Fragmented regulatory regimes, a lack of deep capital markets culture, and the good ol’ USD’s dominance came up as reasons. But the conferences and their attendees insist Europe is trying to play catch-up and we met several promising builders. Proost and Saluti to that.

Regulatory Developments

Crypto Twitter has been 4D Clarity Act. The Tillis amendments. The buildup to the Senate Banking Committee draft. The Banking Committee hearing and its passage of the draft. The constant refreshing Polymarket on whether Clarity become law. The president wants this thing signed by the semiquincentennial, so fingers crossed.

Ultimately, voters don’t care as much about crypto as they do other things. Sad! A Politico poll reflected that crypto legislation was at the bottom of issues voters care about. We care. And people should care - SEC Chair Atkins just said that everything will trade onchain in two years. Christina Lagarde is getting jealous. Someone who definitely cares is TVD Limited Partner Advisor Ji Kim, the head of the Crypto Council for Innovation. In this piece, Ji argues that this legislation is really about America’s future. Passing this legislation strengthens US competitiveness and allows us to shape the financial world’s future state.

There’s more legislation on the horizon: The Payments Access and Consumer Efficiency (PACE) Act. Two Reps (Young Kim (D-CA) and Sam Liccardo (D-CA) introduced the bill, which would allow nonbanks to access the Fed’s payment infrastructure more directly. Consumers could then bypass legacy providers and get paid faster, among other things. Democrats and Republicans working together? Mass hysteria! 

The White House issued through an EO a broad directive to federal financial regulators to modernize how fintech firms access the banking system, with a particular focus on streamlining chartering, licensing, supervisory coordination, and payment system access. The memo also notes that the order signals a philosophical shift in Washington: fintech innovation is increasingly being framed as a competitiveness and infrastructure priority rather than merely a source of regulatory risk. It’s terrific news; the more rules we have in place, the more institutional capital can (and will) flow into the space.

The SEC announced it would shortly offer an innovation exemption for tokenized stocks, before pausing to shore up some sticky details on how this would work with synthetics. See more about tokenizing stocks and the issues that synthetics bring in the Listens and Reads section, where you’ll find a couple good podcasts where Superstate founder Robert Leshner provides education and insight on a quickly-tokenizing world.

The White House’s new executive order, Integrating Financial Technology Innovation into Regulatory Frameworks is a declaration that the government wants fintechs, digital asset firms, and regulated banks playing on the same field with fewer bureaucratic moats protecting incumbents. The order directs federal financial regulators to streamline rules and reconsider barriers to payment system access, signaling a materially more permissive posture toward stablecoins, fintech-bank partnerships, and potentially even Fed payment rail access for nonbank financial firms. 

And wow - someone got a Bitlicense, and it’s Mastercard! While the company hasn’t explained their grand plan for NY licensure, it’s certainly a signal that they’re going to be diving deeply into the stablecoin space.

News

A big month for news beyond the Clarity fight, especially among the incumbents.

The DTCC will begin live pilot trades of tokenized securities in July, with a broader launch planned for October. The project will allow stocks, ETFs, and Treasuries held inside the traditional custody system to move across blockchain rails without losing their existing legal protections or market structure. 

SWIFT has moved its blockchain-based shared ledger project from design into MVP implementation, aiming to enable interoperability between banks’ tokenized deposits and support 24/7 cross-border payments across its global network. This is notable because the incumbent plumbing of global finance is now quietly adopting tokenized settlement rails without throwing out the correspondent banking system that pays the bills.

Moody’s granted Fidelity a AAA-mf rating for its tokenized treasury fund, FILQ and BlackRock for its own, BUIDL. JPM filed to launch its own, JLTXX. Lots of options out there.

As expected, Western Union is launching on Solana its own stablecoin, USDPT. (Why not USWU? USS-woo. Fight me, Western Union.) This is part of their larger plan to build out a digital network that would connect into its existing, massive network that reaches more than 200 countries and territories. 

The SEC has granted HQLAx no-action relief. This is the consortium project to create a network to settle instruments using blockchain, but without moving the assets. The members send each other onchain “digital collateral records,” which they can use as collateral. You will not be surprised at who’s leading the charge:

Those who have a lot to lose are moving to blockchain. Check it out: 

Then there’s Meta, which is going to start letting content creators get paid with stables across Polygon or Solana. It’s only in beta (Philippines and Columbia) but holy hell there are 300 million creators on their platforms. And four billion users. 

SoFi has become the first national bank to issue its own stablecoin. There’s been a lot of debate on how many stablecoins we’ll have when we reach a stable state, but certainly makes a lot of sense for a bank to become an issuer. Looking forward to more.

Leave it to Brian Armstrong to make it simple for us: 

It’s bigger than just remittances, though. McKinsey reported last year that payments “generat[ed] $2.5 trillion in revenue from $2.0 quadrillion in value flows, supported by 3.6 trillion transactions worldwide.” That’s 12.5 basis. (I’d like to charge that management fee.) We’re talking about moving to a system that’s better than an order of magnitude better. In our view, we will reach a tipping point where the old system can’t hold back the floodgates and we rapidly move to slippery, low cost rails.

It’s happening in real time, with stablecoin monthly transaction volumes hitting $10 trillion this year, up 93% from 2025 averages:

Coinbase Asset Management announced a new institutional credit fund called CUSHY that will generate yield from stablecoin lending, private credit, and other onchain credit strategies while offering investors a tokenized share class through Superstate’s FundOS infrastructure. The fund will operate across Ethereum, Solana, and Base, pairing crypto-native settlement rails with traditional institutional infrastructure from firms like Northern Trust and Coinbase Prime. 

Securitize has received FINRA approval to custody tokenized securities inside a traditional broker-dealer structure and to underwrite tokenized IPOs. The approval allows Securitize to facilitate atomic settlement between tokenized securities and stablecoins onchain, potentially collapsing the fragmented, multi-step settlement processes that currently define how things work now.

Finally, some M&A news we like to read about: Kraken is buying Reap for $600mm. According to this post, that makes $3.5bn in stablecoin infra acquisitions in the last 18 months. Keep it up!

Listens and Reads

Someone’s mapped out how fast companies are emerging in the new stack:

The good ol’ US of A leads the pack, as I think we all would have expected. Also maybe unsurprisingly the largest category of companies is the agentic payments space. That train is coming.

Here’s a deep dive on money transmission and how the government is applying laws to DeFi devs.

Portco alfred dropped a piece on USD demand in LatAm. This is being driven by inflation an volatility and is being abstracted away for easy use. Right on.

Finally, Superstate founder Robert Leshner went on 51 Insights to explain what’s going on with tokenized securities. Big takeaway - we’ve got $300bn onchain now, but can expect we will get to $700 trillion. You can also catch Robert on Crypto in America’s recent podcast. He’s everywhere.

Kalshi: LA Mayor market ends June 2. Bass 68%, Pratt 27% — odds shifting daily. Best trades happen before consensus locks in. Get $10 free now. Claim Your $10.

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.