Capital Markets Are Going Onchain.
CMT Digital Is Already There.
Partner Sam Hallene on why 2026 is the year crypto gets boring — and why that’s the biggest bull case yet for stablecoins, tokenization, and the re-architecture of global finance.
Watch the Full InterviewA Trading Firm’s Bet That Blockchain Becomes Finance’s Backbone
CMT Digital is the blockchain and digital-assets arm of CMT Group — a quantitative trading firm operating for nearly 30 years. That heritage shapes everything. CMT entered crypto in 2013 through the lens of counterparty risk mitigation, then sharpened its focus when the Ethereum whitepaper made clear that smart contracts could run financial logic natively onchain. A venture thesis formed, and CMT has been building its portfolio around it ever since.
Today the firm manages over $500M across four funds, with 200+ companies and a number of unicorns — including early positions in Circle, Coinbase, FalconX, Ethena, Figure, and ConsenSys. In November 2025, CMT closed Fund IV at $136M, one of the largest crypto VC raises in a difficult fundraising environment. Watch the full interview above for Partner Sam Hallene’s background and full story.
Four Funds, One Through-Line
“2026 Is the Year Crypto Gets Boring”
Hallene delivered this line with a grin — and it deserves unpacking. “Boring” is the highest compliment a market infrastructure investor can pay. When regulatory frameworks solidify, when tokenized loans trade as freely as any other asset class, when stablecoin yield flows to end users through apps they already use — the speculative premium evaporates and the utility premium takes over. That’s the transition CMT Digital is betting on.
“Now has never been a better time to start a company. A lot of binary variables have swung positive.”
Sam Hallene, Partner — CMT DigitalThe macro backdrop is structural, not speculative. The GENIUS Act is live, giving institutions a regulatory playbook for compliant stablecoin issuance. The SEC and CFTC have issued joint guidance. The US Treasury has a direct incentive to promote stablecoin adoption — stablecoins are currently among the largest marginal buyers of US treasuries. Hallene’s contrarian read: sentiment has lagged fundamentals. Bitcoin soft and a quiet altcoin market have dampened enthusiasm, but for a firm with CMT’s institutional orientation, that gap is exactly where long-term alpha compounds.
Stablecoins as rails
The dollar goes onchain first. Everything else follows. Regulatory clarity is forcing every major tech company to contemplate stablecoin issuance.
Tokenization compounds
Real-world assets gain liquidity, provenance, and programmability onchain. Cost savings force adoption — Figure proved it at 150bps.
Derivatives mature
As institutions enter, demand for structured hedging and volatility strategies intensifies. Options are the next frontier after perps.
Information markets
Prediction markets are becoming mainstream signals. The next generation moves toward real-time sentiment pricing with demographic intelligence.
Distribution Is King — And the Battle Has Just Begun
Tether captured global demand from populations seeking dollar access outside US institutional trust. Circle captured the compliance-conscious business community. Both are entrenched. But the GENIUS Act reshapes the competitive dynamics entirely.
A compliant stablecoin issuer cannot differentiate on the collateral side — the rules constrain what you can do with backing assets, by design. Differentiation shifts entirely to distribution. And distribution belongs to whoever already owns the customer relationship: Apple, Google, PayPal, Shopify, every major bank. The yield-sharing question is the most consequential unresolved variable. The GENIUS Act prohibits paying yield directly on the stablecoin, but doesn’t prevent revenue-sharing agreements with distribution partners — the Circle-Coinbase model is the template. If the Clarity Act extends that logic to end users, deposits could meaningfully migrate toward fintech apps earning money-market-equivalent returns with instant settlement.
Hallene’s honest read on the yield outcome: likely a legal ban, difficult to enforce, ultimately resolved through loopholes and litigation. The direction of travel favors stablecoin adoption regardless.
The Proof Point: From Home Equity Lines to SBA Loans
Hallene’s anchor example is Figure — the home equity line of credit company CMT backed early. A 2019 paper projected 25–26 basis points of origination cost savings by moving the loan lifecycle onchain: cryptographic provenance of underwriting documents, transparent servicing records, frictionless secondary transfers. Real-world execution has now delivered approximately 150 basis points of savings — six times the original projection. Figure is now public.
The principle is simple and powerful: onchain provenance makes assets easier to buy. When buyers can verify every underwriting step without legal review teams and escrow delays, the cost of capital falls. Lower cost of capital forces adoption. The tokenization roadmap follows a logical sequence — dollars first, then dollar-denominated assets, then everything else.
“Cost savings force adoption. We’re seeing that with stablecoins, and with early examples like Figure.”
Sam Hallene, Partner — CMT DigitalThe Companies Building the Onchain Economy
Sam Hallene named several portfolio companies throughout the conversation. Each represents a distinct wedge in CMT Digital’s infrastructure thesis.
Figure
Home equity line of credit origination — onchain. Now public.
CMT Digital’s flagship proof point. Figure originated HELOCs on blockchain rails, demonstrating that cryptographic provenance of loan documents translates directly into lower cost of capital — from a projected 25 bps of savings in 2019 to a demonstrated 150 bps today. The public listing is the first major exit signal from the CMT thesis: real-world credit at scale, built on blockchain infrastructure.
NEWITY
SBA 7(a) lending platform bringing $350B in underserved credit onchain.
In February 2026, CMT led NEWITY’s first-ever external raise — $11M as a SAFE — to accelerate its pivot from AI-driven SBA lending into blockchain-native loan origination. The case starts with a stark fact: small businesses represent 99.9% of US firms and nearly half the nation’s workforce, yet face a $350 billion annual funding shortfall.
NEWITY has already demonstrated scale: $12 billion in loans to over 125,000 businesses since 2020, with AI-first underwriting that compresses traditional 12-week SBA timelines to roughly 21 days. The onchain play is a liquidity unlock — SBA 7(a) loans are government-guaranteed and highly homogeneous, making them ideal tokenization candidates: pools represented as digital instruments, tradable on secondary markets, recycling capital back to new borrowers at scale.
What has to be true for this to work? Regulatory clarity for tokenized SBA instruments must hold; NEWITY’s compliance-heavy origination workflows need to migrate onchain without sacrificing underwriting speed; and institutional or DeFi-native capital needs to show up as secondary market buyers. CMT’s bet is that NEWITY’s 125,000 borrower relationships and $12B in loan history give it an insurmountable head start over crypto-native credit protocols building from scratch.
STS Digital
The options infrastructure layer institutional crypto has been waiting for.
Offering options on 400+ cryptocurrencies simultaneously is genuinely hard — technically and from a risk-management standpoint. Most platforms haven’t solved it. STS Digital has. Founded by derivatives veterans from Credit Suisse and UBS, the Bermuda-regulated firm delivers a unified platform for spot, vanilla and exotic options, and structured products across 400+ tokens.
In February 2026, CMT led STS Digital’s $30M strategic round alongside Kraken parent Payward, F-Prime (Fidelity), and Arrington Capital. The timing reflects a market reality: crypto options open interest has crossed $40 billion, and institutional demand for hedging tools is compounding as perp-only exposure no longer satisfies sophisticated risk managers. Hallene’s case for options over perps is direct: the October 10 mass liquidation event showed how cascading perp liquidations amplify selloffs catastrophically. Options cap maximum loss and remove auto-deleveraging risk. As institutional flows enter crypto, they bring the risk management toolkit of traditional finance — and that toolkit is built around options.
Hallene’s conviction phrase says it all: STS has built a meaningful liquidity moat in crypto options, and liquidity is the most durable competitive advantage in any financial market.
TBD.vote
Sentiment markets — where polling meets skin in the game.
TBD.vote isn’t trying to out-Polymarket Polymarket. Hallene is deliberate on this distinction. Polymarket excels at deep liquidity in long-duration, oracle-resolved questions. TBD attacks a different surface: any user can create a poll, KYC-verified voters resolve it through consensus, and timeframes are arbitrary — including tomorrow.
The KYC demographic layer is what makes TBD commercially interesting beyond pure prediction. Segmented voter behavior — verified cohorts wagering on specific policy or market outcomes — produces signal that political strategists, media companies, and brands will pay for. The resolution mechanism also removes oracle trust assumptions entirely, which matters as prediction markets become serious institutional information sources. Hallene’s framing: we’re in early innings of prediction markets being treated as mainstream signal, and TBD is positioning for that transition as a sentiment intelligence layer, not a Polymarket clone.
FalconX
Institutional crypto prime brokerage — the market’s plumbing layer.
A CMT portfolio company since 2019, FalconX built the infrastructure institutional crypto participants had been missing: credit lines, cross-collateralization, portfolio margining, and consolidated execution across venues. In Hallene’s framework, prime brokerage is what enables the derivatives market to mature — you need trusted intermediaries willing to warehouse risk and extend credit before large-scale institutional trading becomes operationally viable. CMT has been a hands-on partner across product roadmap, fundraising, and hiring for over five years.
Raising Capital in the Sentiment Gap
Hallene’s advice for founders in tokenization and capital markets was candid: it’s a difficult time to raise. Bitcoin soft and altcoins quiet have created a cautious funding environment even as structural progress has never been clearer. His view — CMT is open for business, actively investing, and the binary regulatory variables that were existential risks twelve months ago have now resolved in crypto’s favor.
Quantify your onchain wedge
CMT backs entrepreneurs who can demonstrate measurable improvement — cost savings, speed, liquidity. The Figure model (quantify the basis points) is the benchmark.
AI usage is now a diligence question
CMT has added “how are you using AI?” to their core underwriting checklist. Teams leveraging AI to punch above their headcount weight are viewed as structurally advantaged.
Don’t mistake sentiment for fundamentals
CMT has seen this movie before. The smart money buys infrastructure during the sentiment trough — not at the top of the cycle.
The Boring Future Is the Bullish Future
There is a version of crypto’s future that looks nothing like its past — no speculative frenzy, no memecoin supercycles, no dramatic collapses from overleveraged offshore intermediaries. Just tokenized treasuries settling in seconds. SBA loans trading in liquid secondary markets. Stablecoin yield flowing to users through apps they already use. Options desks hedging institutional portfolios across 400 digital assets with the rigor of equity derivatives.
That’s the future CMT Digital has been quietly building toward since 2013. Hallene calls it boring. After two cycles of not-boring, boring sounds excellent.
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