The Rundown: Washington’s dance with crypto and RWAs continues…

ISSUE #7 · August 21, 2026 · By Michael Casey

Welcome to the seventh issue of The Rundown.

We are now in countdown mode: 11 days until the Real-World Asset Summit Brooklyn 2026.

Capacity is getting tight as we seek to optimize for the right audience amid a ramped-up influx of ticket applications, but that’s why you should apply to attend now. Give it your best shot!

We’re thrilled with the lineup. As a newsman at heart, I’m especially happy that the news cycle is playing into our hands, with some of the lead items in this week’s Digest (below) hitting topics that we already have speakers addressing.

For example, we’ll have a fireside chat with Richard Gabbert, Chief of Staff, Crypto Task Force; Senior Advisor to the Chairman at the Securities and Exchange Commission, which this week showed how determined it is to bring clarity to the crypto market, even when Congress won’t pass the CLARITY Act.

Also, President Trump’s news that the Commodities Futures Trading Commission is working to bring perp trading giant Hyperliquid into U.S. markets couldn’t be better timed: podcaster Laura Shin is moderating a panel covering both sides of a raging debate over how heavily to regulate such decentralized exchanges.

Like pretty much everyone in the tokenization industry, speaker Nick Van Eck, CEO of Agora, wants the uncertainty around regulation to lift. But in this week’s interview, he points out that for his business, stablecoins, the biggest opportunities lie overseas in places mostly immune from the drag of U.S. regulatory gridlock. Read on for more.

The Run-Up

11 days until the Real-World Asset Summit Brooklyn 2026
Hayden Adams, Founder & CEO of Uniswap, joins as headline speaker
GSR & Uniswap join as Innovator partners

The Rundown

You could be forgiven for believing the SEC can’t make up its mind. On Friday, for the second time, the powerful U.S. regulator abruptly canceled an announcement in which it was expected to detail a new “innovation exemption” that would have eased some of the regulatory hurdles for firms looking to issue and trade tokenized stocks. But then on Tuesday, the SEC made the surprise announcement of its very first crypto industry-specific rule. “Regulation Crypto” lowers regulatory burdens – purely for native crypto tokens, not for tokenized real-world assets.

With Friday’s cancellation, it seemed the SEC had been pressured from both sides. From one, anti-crypto elements among traditional brokerages are arguing that decentralized exchanges should be held to the same best-execution rules as they are for routing trades. From the other side, CoinDesk reported that a pro-crypto White House was worried the SEC “would kick a hornet's nest” on Capitol Hill if it was seen to be making market structure-defining rules before Congress has voted on the market structure-defining CLARITY Act, making it even harder to pass. In light of that, the Commission’s announcement on Tuesday seemed like its own political statement, as if Chairman Paul Atkins was saying “fine, if you won’t let me set rules for RWA crypto, I’ll make them for pure crypto.”

Perhaps by then there had also been a more favorable nod from the real power within the White House. President Trump seemed unfazed by Congressional Democrats reacting to him sending a positive message to the crypto industry when he talked up the prospect of bringing Hyperliquid’s Wild West trading onshore — something that regulated derivatives and options exchanges have been outspokenly opposed to. The timing of that announcement raised eyebrows, as well; news outlets reported that a very large, unidentified crypto investor was seen accumulating Hyperliquid’s HYPE token just before it soared on Trump’s announcement.

The Trump Administration's dance with crypto continues, in other words, whether through the agencies or the White House – angering nuance-lacking Democratic legislators who see the whole thing as a grift enriching Trump and who hold enough of a balance of power to block legislation the industry wants. It amazes me how much of a shift this represents. Just two years ago it was Republicans in Congress who railed against the Biden-era SEC for being too harsh on crypto.

Meanwhile, the stablecoin industry presses on, almost immune to the politics. Sure, the details of last year’s stablecoin-favoring GENIUS ACT are yet to be completed, which is frustrating to those in this industry, but the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said this week it is seeking to get beyond the backlog of work holding back GENIUS implementation.

For these reasons and more, stablecoin issuers like Agora’s Nick Van Eck are mostly sanguine about it all. For a teaser of his on-stage appearance next month, read what Nick had to say in his interview with me this week.

Nick van Eck is the CEO of Agora, the issuer of the dollar-backed stablecoin AUSD. Nick describes Agora as “an institutional-grade stablecoin infrastructure provider” that has an “all-in-one solution” for enterprises looking to integrate stablecoin capabilities across a spectrum of use cases. Prior to building Agora, Nick spent his career as a technology investor at General Catalyst and JMI Equity.

Q: You're not the only stablecoin play in town. What is Agora solving that the others aren't?

A: With State Street as the cash custodian and fund administrator of the Agora reserve fund, and with VanEck as the investment manager, we have the scale, but also the financial plumbing, to meet the demands of institutions. We also believe a dollar is worth a dollar, and so minting and redeeming AUSD for fiat is free, which we believe is core to any real use case. We have developer-friendly APIs, which means technology companies, but also RWA issuers, can seamlessly build their structured products on top of AUSD and use it as a subscription and redemption asset. And then last is that we share rewards with our clients. That is one of the main differentiators, where Circle and Coinbase have one economic partner in each other. We want to have a plurality of partners, and we really are building the infrastructure and the foundation for anyone to tap into our network.

Q: A big theme of our event is that there's a lot of issuance across tokenized assets but limited adoption. Stablecoins are further ahead than anything else, but they're still well short of that massive TAM. Are we at the turning point?

A: I think a lot of the core pieces that were uncertain have fallen into place. The GENIUS Act, which is really the most important piece of banking legislation that's happened in my lifetime, has set in motion clear accounting rules and regulation around these assets, which is what is foundational for enterprises to start adopting them. Obviously, we are still in that period prior to GENIUS going live. They're still in the rulemaking period. It is still not fully in effect as legislation. But now enterprises are gearing up. So I would say all the big uncertain blockers have been removed. The CLARITY Act is probably the last outstanding one, but there's a lot of movement, either coming from the SEC or coming from legislation, on that front. So the biggest risks to delaying adoption are being removed.

That said, the adoption of technology takes time. I expect this to be a 20-to-30-year adoption cycle, very similar to how Salesforce went public 20-plus years ago, but cloud software is still growing enormously and penetrating more and more pieces of different organizations. So I think we're maybe just past the turning point and real adoption is starting to happen now. And this is only the second inning.

Q: Where does that adoption actually start? I've had corporate treasury people at mainstream U.S. banks tell me they have a hard time convincing their manufacturing clients that a stablecoin beats the wire they already send.

A: I think it always starts with the people that have the biggest problem. And the eurodollar market is the obvious opportunity. It's cross-border payments, enabling instant settlement, enabling greater dollar access. In emerging economies, but even developed economies, dollar access isn't easy, and stablecoins enable better dollar access. And then earning more on those dollars is also important. If you have dollars offshore, you're typically earning nothing on that. Being able to earn 2% or 3% is a big difference and is a motivator for you because it falls right down to your bottom line. Why would you not do that if it's accessible to you?

So I think it'll start in places where the pain is a 100x improvement, and then a 10x improvement. Candidly, stablecoin adoption in the United States is really going to take off where you need 24/7 settlement or cheaper transactions or better scalability. But the payments and capital market infrastructure in the U.S. is already quite good. So maybe you only get a 2x improvement, and then that adoption curve is way down the line.

Q: NYU professor Austin Campbell points out that dollar stablecoins effectively re-onshore American rule of law — you get the dollars, but also the U.S. regulatory perimeter. What does the internationalization of dollar stablecoins do to monetary sovereignty elsewhere?

A: I actually agree with Austin on a lot of the points around this. The U.S. dollar stablecoin market will really weaken monetary sovereignty in emerging-market and developing-market economies, because the dollar is a preferred alternative and store of value. And now being able to get access to it and build wealth and financial products around it globally will bring a lot of people in those markets just into the dollar system — on products that happen to be regulated by U.S. entities. I think that's the natural end state here. If you really get outside the G10 and the G20, most people are just going to run on dollars.

Frankly, from my perspective, it's deserved. If you are in one of these economies, the only reason that you are going to be transacting in a non-local currency is if you are worried that it's going to continue to depreciate at an extraordinarily high level. A lot of that is earned by bad local fiscal and monetary policy. If you have good local fiscal and monetary policy, then you probably are reinforcing your own monetary sovereignty. But if you're making bad decisions that are leading to bad outcomes, your citizens as individuals now have the ability to opt out of that system and opt into the dollar system, which I think is really good for competition and holding people accountable. There's no one really to hold U.S. fiscal and monetary policy accountable, but at least there might be some sort of competition.

Q: Agora is now seeking an OCC trust charter. Why is that an important part of the strategy?

A: For us, what it means is we are able to operate in the United States under one unified federal framework, which gives us the ability to serve all the clients that we would like to without it being sort of this patchwork of money transmitter licenses or state-by-state regulation. It also holds us to the highest standards, which is the OCC. So it gives our clients confidence in the oversight of Agora.

And then lastly, it enables us to offer really unique products and services and build this all-in-one experience, because we'll be able to offer digital asset custody as well as transaction-based services, in addition to the issuance that we already do, under this unified federal framework. So if you're a business and you want to start adopting stablecoins, we can be that one-stop shop. Whether it's minting and redeeming, transfers, providing you wallets, providing you custody to hold fiat assets — there's one vendor, and it's Agora. You don't have to be going to four or five different folks.

The Digest

HYPE jumps 11% as Trump says CFTC is working to bring Hyperliquid to U.S. (CoinDesk)

We have every reason to believe CFTC Chairman Michael Selig and his staff are indeed “working hard,” as President Trump said, to bring Hyperliquid legally into the U.S. under U.S. regulations, which would allow U.S. investors to trade in it. We can also assume that in making their determination, the CFTC will seek the right balance between unlocking the positives of “perp” innovation, such as liquidity and price discovery, and protecting U.S. investors. But it would be so nice if, just once, the main course of President Trump’s pro-crypto announcements wasn’t delivered with a side of “whale account makes a ton of money buying before the news.”

U.S. SEC to again delay 'innovation exemption' for tokenization amid Wall Street, White House concerns (CoinDesk)
One question I still have is what delays in these exemptions mean for the big changes coming from giant members of the Wall Street establishment, such as the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq and the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, to make way for tokenized equities. Presumably, because their clients are institutions, not retail customers, it doesn’t matter. It’s ironic, then, that some of their member companies — the brokerages in particular — are resisting changes that would affect their direct-to-retail businesses. It’s also a mark of how far RWAs have come that they represent the part of the SEC’s work that’s getting official resistance, not the crypto native work that came up in Tuesday’s announcement.

OCC races to finalize GENIUS Act stablecoin rules by November (The Block)

Meanwhile, a third leg in the stool of the crypto market structure that would be defined by the CLARITY Act is vowing to finalize GENIUS Act rules for stablecoins that should have been out by now.

Can tokenized assets continue to scale faster than the revenue models behind them? (CryptoSlate)

Friendly regulation is all very well, but is there enough recurring, underlying demand for tokenized assets to justify the hype? I thought this CryptoSlate article, while a little bearish for a lead-in to our event, asks some important questions. While its conclusions are aimed at the broader industry, it uses Securitize’s newly public quarterly reporting to question whether revenue growth can be sustained if it is purely driven by primary issuance of tokenized assets when underlying demand and secondary market trading remain sluggish.

FalconX partners with Ethena on $1 billion warehouse financing facility to expand institutional lending capacity (FalconX)

And yet the innovation keeps happening. Overcollaterized lending through smart contracts was a hugely important feature of the early DeFi movement, opening up new credit mechanisms in crypto tokens. Now, we’re seeing these facilities applied to real-world lending needs. One way or another, finance will be reformed.

Elon Musk's X is exploring stablecoins to pay influencers and content providers (CoinDesk)

This idea always seemed like a no-brainer to me. If it goes forward, X will have to very quickly come up with a solution to prove those influencers are humans and not bots.