The Rundown: Institutions are coming, but will profits?

ISSUE #5 · August 6, 2026 · By Michael Casey

Welcome to the fifth issue of The Rundown.

This week, in A Conversation With, I sat down with Gabe Otte, CEO and Co-Founder of Dinari, following the company's landmark U.S. launch of tokenized equities.

Dinari is now the first platform to make tokenized U.S. stocks available to both eligible U.S. investors and businesses, offering the industry's largest catalog of tokenized U.S. equities, with 724 tokenized stocks and ETFs. We discuss Otte's vision for the future of real-world assets, the convergence of DeFi and traditional finance, and what's next for tokenized capital markets.

You can meet Gabe and the Dinari team at the Real-World Asset Summit in Brooklyn next month. Last few spots remaining → apply for yours

The Run-Up

26 days until the Real-World Asset Summit Brooklyn 2026
Carlos Domingo (Securitize) joins the speaker lineup
Sonali Theisen (Bank of America) joins the speaker lineup

The Rundown

The news in the tokenization industry is dominated by established financial institutions working on projects, investing and acquiring digital asset platforms, and launching new products. This week is a case in point: The names in The Digest include BlackRock, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, Mastercard, Visa, Western Union, DTCC, and even Korea’s central bank.

You’d be forgiven for assuming this trend meant that the real money being made by tokenization platforms right now is among those directly working with these established, closely regulated institutions, rather than from firms servicing the narrower, crypto-centric environment. After all, the market for bitcoin, ether and other tokens is in the doldrums.

But some items this week — including strong profits at stablecoin provider Tether, whose biggest clients are crypto exchanges, whereas its main competitor, Circle, focuses on mainstream payments — tell a similar story to that of last week’s reports of a booming RWA perpetual swaps market. Even if it’s true that crypto players are now more obsessed with tokenization and RWAs than with trading crypto tokens, they’re doing so most aggressively within the underregulated, “Degen” markets of DeFi. And that’s allowing exchanges like Hyperliquid – as well as the companies that service them, like Tether — to mint nice profits.

Which brings us to Dinari’s Otte, who had an on-point message in our interview this week: to deliver on real change via “massive disruption,” he said, developers should be hoping not for the success of the incumbent institutions but for their failure.

Gabe Otte is the CEO & Co-Founder of Dinari, a regulated financial platform that enables tokenized trading of real-world assets. Before launching Dinari, he founded Freenome, a biotech company that developed AI-driven multiomics blood tests for early cancer detection.

Q: What's the fundamental shift Dinari is betting on?

A: Capital markets have already gone through one major technological transformation. We moved from paper stock certificates and physical ledgers to digital records, making investing faster, more accessible, and more efficient. That shift enabled electronic exchanges, online brokerages, and real-time trading. Today, we're entering the next evolution. Instead of financial assets existing as entries in centralized databases, they can exist as programmable digital tokens secured on blockchain networks. That changes the underlying technology without changing what the asset represents.

A tokenized equity is still an equity, but because it's programmable, it can unlock capabilities that weren't possible with traditional market infrastructure, including instant settlement, seamless interoperability, automated corporate actions, and broader accessibility through modern payment rails like stablecoins. Our recent U.S. launch is an example of that evolution in practice. The technology is changing, but the goal remains the same: making capital markets more efficient, accessible, and programmable while preserving the rights and protections investors expect.

Q: Are big financial institutions genuinely embracing tokenization or just hedging?

A: My experience with incumbents has been varied. Some see the opportunity and the new possibilities tokenization creates. Others are approaching it more cautiously, making sure they have a foothold in the space while they evaluate where it's headed.

My hope is that this technology ultimately proves to be genuinely disruptive. If it doesn't meaningfully challenge the way incumbent institutions operate, then my thesis would be that tokenization wasn't as transformative as many believe. The technologies that have the greatest impact don't just optimize existing systems; they fundamentally change how those systems work.

Q: How far along are DeFi and real-world assets in their evolution?

A: I think it's still far too early to say DeFi has won. We're still in the earliest innings of what could be a much larger transformation. It's easy to forget how massive global capital markets are, and real-world assets today are still a drop in the bucket by comparison. What's exciting is that, after nearly a decade of RWAs being more of a conversation than a reality, we're finally seeing meaningful progress. In my view, we're still at the very beginning of that journey.

Q: Why did Dinari build a private Layer 1 instead of relying solely on public blockchains?

A: Our Layer 1 is a coordination layer, not a mechanism for locking up liquidity. Similar to how USDC exists across multiple blockchains, we believe dShares should be able to exist on any chain. Our coordination layer maintains a unified view of liquidity across those chains, so when an order comes in, it can source liquidity from across the network and match trades in real time. The objective is interoperability, not fragmentation.

The Digest

BlackRock Expands Tokenized Cash With New Blockchain-Based Money Market Offerings (CoinDesk)

By some measures, it was BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, that Wall Street’s recent embrace of digital assets when it announced plans for a bitcoin-based exchange-traded fund in 2023. Since then, it hasn’t stopped. It’s now servicing the digital asset platforms themselves. Its new tokenized money funds are marketed at stablecoin issuers to hold as part of their backstopping reserves. It also announced it was taking its RWA products into the new frontier of Europe.

Wells Fargo Joins JPMorgan and Citi in the Race to Tokenize Wall Street’s Settlement Rails (CoinDesk)
Wells Fargo is hardly viewed as a digital innovator, which may be why it hasn’t been so prominently featured in blockchain projects – until now. Even still, this development is at the more conservative end of on-chain money: tokenized deposits, not stablecoins.

Mastercard Completes $1.8B BVNK Acquisition in Stablecoin Push (Cointelegraph)

Mastercard and Visa are both spreading their bets widely in the stablecoin industry. They’re both partnering with Circle on a host of projects and integrating its USDC into their payment methods, but they also both joined the consortium behind new Circle competitor Open USD. And now, here’s Mastercard investing in a major provider of infrastructure to support institutional integration of stablecoins.

Western Union and Rain Launch Stablecoin Card in 37 Markets (The Defiant)

In the early days of crypto, a popular proposed use case was the disruption of the highly expensive, inefficient, middleman-dominated industry of remittances. In fact, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies did play a role in changing that market – if indirectly, putting pressure on big players like Western Union to lower prices. But the game was won by fintech players like Wise. Now, we come full circle: Western Union is all in on stablecoins, with Rain’s help.

Bank of Korea Launches 'Asset Tokenization Team,' Kicking Off Government Bond Tokenization Pilot (Biggo)

The Korean government is leading other governments in this effort. Most others are merely addressing regulatory questions and policy-driven programs to develop tokenization in their markets. In South Korea, the central bank itself is spearheading the build of tokenized assets.

Tether Reports $1.5B Q2 Profit as USDT Supply Grows, Gold Holdings Rise (Decrypt)

It’s nice to be Tether, which, until it went on a big hiring kick recently, was widely considered to be the world’s most profitable company, on a per-employee basis. The issuer of the USDT stablecoin's most recent quarterly report, which marked an almost 50% profit increase from the first quarter, underscored its financial health and registered a notable comparison to its main competitor, Circle. The latter reported $142 million EBITDA for the second quarter, up 8%. Here’s what’s key: Tether’s profit might be 10 times that of Circle, but most of it comes from servicing crypto exchanges. Circle’s bet is that the biggest long-term opportunity lies in mainstream payments, both institutional and retail. That requires a longer time horizon and a lot more investment in institutional-grade infrastructure. Time will tell whether it pays off.

Morgan Stanley Cuts Circle Target to $38, Sees USDC Squeezed by Tokenized Alternatives (Circle)

Some analysts aren’t convinced that Circle will be as dominant in payments as it thinks. The emergence of competitors such as new reserve coins like OUSD and yield coins such as Ethena’s USDe has recently gotten some concerned that its pole position isn’t secure.

Circle Taps BlackRock, Visa, and DTCC as Arc Validators Ahead of September Public Mainnet (Crypto Briefing)

But Circle isn’t sitting still. This past week saw both the announcement of its new proprietary blockchain, Arc, along with some heavy-hitter institutions as validators, and the news that, after many years of trying, it had achieved a New York State trust charter to go with its recent federal bank charter from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.