We’re back! After a two-week hiatus that straddled the Real-World Asset Summit in Brooklyn.

I needed those two weeks to recover. What a great event! Huge turnout – many familiar faces, but also, refreshingly, so many new faces from across both TradFi and DeFi. The enthusiasm, the packed ballroom and networking areas, and the rich on- and off-stage conversation focused on finding collaborative solutions to growing the tokenization industry. All of it felt very validating. Thanks to all the speakers, partners, and, of course, attendees who made it such a memorable occasion.

Time to move forward. Our noses are back to the grindstone as we’re now officially two months out from the Real-World Asset Summit Singapore 2026, which we announced on stage in Brooklyn.

On November 17, we’ll be hosting the Real-World Asset Summit at Marina Bay Sands within the Insights2040 Annual Meetings, organized by GFTN, the team also behind the massive Singapore FinTech Festival taking place that same week. Applications to attend are opening soon, so keep an eye on your inbox. In the meantime, applications to speak and partner are already live.

And, of course, there’s the news to catch up on. But before we get there, let’s draw once more from our flagship event earlier this month.

In A Conversation With, we feature Andrew McCormick, Head of Institutional at Chainlink, one of our valued Brooklyn partners and this week’s newsletter partner. With a background spanning legal and business development roles serving both retail and institutional clients across traditional finance and crypto at E*TRADE, Morgan Stanley, and eToro, Andrew neatly fits the bridge-builder role needed in this moment of convergence. Read on for the Q&A. 

For Circle’s launch this week of its new blockchain Arc, which it describes as an “economic operating system,” the USDC issuer chose New York as the place to showcase its vision for the infrastructure of a future onchain, AI-ready global financial system. Yet, at the same time, news out of Washington offered a clear reminder that progress toward such a vision will, for now, be at least partly framed by what the policymakers in the U.S. capital do — or don’t do, as the case may be.

This week, U.S. senators put out of its misery the crypto market framework bill CLARITY, whose lack of sufficient support in Congress meant it was mostly D.O.A. But while this failure shone a light on how partisan Washington politics is stalling progress, it wasn’t all doom and gloom out of Washington.

On Thursday, the Securities and Exchange Commission released its previously delayed “Innovation Exemption” rule, essentially creating a safe harbor framework for companies to experiment with tokenization without fear of triggering SEC enforcement action. And although the Federal Reserve’s return to rate hikes this week is bad news for Bitcoin and other crypto asset markets, I make the case in this week’s Digest that this tightening cycle might actually be constructive for tokenization.

Have a read of these and other observations below. And, if you’ll excuse the pun, The Rundown will always seek to give you clarity on these issues, even if your representatives in Washington keep muddying the waters.

But before then, learn about how Chainlink is getting traditional institutions to understand the value of oracles and decentralized data.

Not a single Democrat – not even New York Senator Kristen Gillibrand, who had co-sponsored very similar legislation with Wyoming Republican Cynthia Lummis — voted “yes” for this bill. So, now the blame game begins. Crypto Democrats will say that, if only President Trump hadn’t launched a memecoin for personal and family profit, more of their party would have supported CLARITY. Republicans like Republican Whip Thomas Emmer, a big crypto fan, are pointing the finger at Democrats for bringing their narrow partisan concerns into a technology that should be apolitical.

Me? I think the crypto industry is to blame — mostly for allowing what is and always should be a back-end technology for resolving trust and settlement efficiency to be captured by a speculative mania that has misaligned builders’ incentives away from the interests of mainstream adoption. And yet despite all these setbacks and failures, with blame to go around among all, the good part of this technology and its integration into finance continues to make progress – not as fast as many of us would like, but with real progress. With or without Washington, change is coming. And hopefully when it does, we put aside the ugly spectacle of memecoins and get-rich-quick schemes and just recognize the real, indisputable value of exchanging assets onchain.

SEC issues “innovation exemption” to facilitate the trading of tokenized NMS stock and request for comment

If you’re looking for a reason to keep your chin up, it comes from the SEC, which is now magnitudes more crypto-friendly than it was under the Biden Administration. Last month, CLARITY Act supporters talked the Commission out of announcing this eminently sensible move to grant tokenization innovators temporary protection from enforcement because they worried it might send the wrong signal to Senators whose support they wanted for the Act. Well, now it’s a moot point. So the SEC is marching forward. No doubt, some crypto critics could criticize the SEC for executive overreach, which would be a nice irony given that this was a criticism Republicans leveled at the prior, Democrat-controlled SEC. But when it comes to everyone looking to bring tokenized equities into the mainstream — think NYSE, Nasdaq, DTCC, etc. — this is a valuable green light.

Bitcoin faces 2022 parallels as Federal Reserve resumes rate increases. Is tokenization immune?

Of course, Bitcoin and other crypto token markets aren’t happy about the Fed tightening monetary policy this week. Most investors view these as risk assets and the central bank just made it more expensive to hold risk. Although the modest initial reaction suggests the prospect of this is, for now, priced in, this CoinDesk article points to the prior U.S. monetary tightening cycle to suggest that more declines are to come.

However, I’m not sure the tokenization industry needs to be so pessimistic. Of course, a spike in the cost of money is never good for any form or investment. However, there’s an argument to make that over time, higher interest costs help make the case for the kind of efficiency gains that tokenization can bring. If the cost of capital has risen, perhaps lenders will look to widen their margins by extracting costs from settlement and coordination activity — and that’s where onchain solutions come in.

Circle launches Arc mainnet, an economic operating system for the internet

At the launch of its Arc blockchain this week, Circle’s CEO, Jeremy Allaire, laid out a vision that goes far beyond it being a more cost-effective means of making onchain exchanges in USDC — Circle also has its designs on agentic AI development, with privacy and proof-of-runtime rolled in. Whether it succeeds will be measured by how many developers move over to Arc and start building a growing network of value. That’s an open question, but it’s worth pointing out that Arc has one huge advantage over so many other chains: it has one of the few successful digitalized versions of the biggest liquidity network in the world: the U.S. dollar.

Robinhood plans share redemptions, voting rights for stock tokens, after criticism

Robinhood took concrete steps to demonstrate that its onchain, synthetic, derivatives-like tokens don’t trample on equity investors’ rights to the underlying asset, promising redemptions into actual shares and voting. It’s not clear how it will execute on these promises if the onchain tokens do not themselves integrate those rights. However, it was an interesting extension of a deepening feud between Robinhood and AMC Entertainment. Recently, AMC’s CEO, Adam Aron, complained about Robinhood setting up synthetic exposure to its stock without the company’s endorsement — a position that Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev rejected by arguing that public companies should not have veto power over their stock.

Kaiko extends Series B funding round to $110 million with S&P Global, BNP Paribas

In a clear sign of how the real-world asset narrative is helping bring liquidity into the digital asset industry, onchain data firm Kaiko showed off its TradFi connections with this upsized financing round. Notably, the deal included S&P Global, an important partner at the RWA Summit that is going all in with tokenization — so much so that this week it also announced its acquisition of onchain security player S&P Global has agreed to acquire smart contract security firm OpenZeppelin.