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Fundraising news, analysis and interviews

Venture rounds, token sales and public listings show where capital is going before the products arrive. This desk covers the raises, the investors behind them and the terms, with the disclosures that matter for anyone assessing a project.

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Soda Labs closes $3M seed round for private blockchain transactions

Soda Labs closes $3M seed round for private blockchain transactions

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BlockchainCrypto Coin Show News Team·October 8, 2026·4 min read

Soda Labs closed a $3 million seed round to accelerate deployment of privacy infrastructure for regulated financial institutions moving money on public blockchains, a critical gap as banks seek on-chain settlement without exposing transaction details to competitors or the blockchain itself. The funding validates a shift from research to production-grade infrastructure just as institutional adoption of tokenized finance accelerates.

  • Soda Labs raised $3 million from NextBlock in October 2026, entirely from the Luxembourg venture firm’s $40 million inaugural fund.
  • Soda Bubble, a chain-agnostic coprocessor using garbled-circuit multiparty computation, now processes private workloads on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base and Polygon.
  • Soda Labs reports 500 confidential transactions per second sustained on Arbitrum at $0.14 per million transfers, with five- to tenfold improvement over prior testing.
  • $3M Seed round from NextBlock, entirely funding the October 2026 close
  • 500 tps Confidential transactions per second sustained on Arbitrum protocol
  • $0.14 Cost per million transfers on Arbitrum deployment

Soda Labs disclosed a $3 million seed round from NextBlock, a Luxembourg-based venture firm, to accelerate the transition from pilot deployments to production-grade privacy infrastructure for banks and payment networks. The capital, first reported by Cryptopolitan, arrives as the firm prepares to migrate its core technology, Soda Bubble, a chain-agnostic coprocessor that processes encrypted transactions without exposing balances, amounts or counterparties, from research to revenue operations. Soda Labs co-founder and CEO Avishay Yanai said the round would allow the firm to “take it from pilots to production,” marking the first institutional validation of garbled-circuit multiparty computation (GC-MPC) as a viable scaling layer for confidential enterprise blockchain traffic.

NextBlock backs Soda Labs with full seed commitment from $40 million Luxembourg fund

NextBlock, which launched its first Luxembourg-regulated alternative investment fund in July 2025 with $40 million in initial commitments, directed all $3 million of Soda Labs’ seed round from that vehicle. The fund, managed by an authorised Luxembourg AIFM licensed by the CSSF, invests in early-stage European and American blockchain companies and seeks exposure to both traditional crypto assets and decentralized finance applications. NextBlock founder and general partner Pieter van Poecke cited Soda Labs’ existing paying customers, technical intellectual property and “strong commercial instincts” as the driver behind the all-in commitment, signaling confidence in both the technology and the team’s ability to convert pilots into contracts.

The fund holds plans to increase capital to $60 million, reflecting institutional appetite for regulated privacy infrastructure that can serve banks without exposing them to token volatility or permissionless chain risks.

Soda Bubble’s encrypted computation now active on four major EVM chains

Soda Bubble operates as a multiparty-computation layer that performs calculations directly on encrypted data, splitting information across independent validator nodes so no single operator can decrypt it.

The system achieves confidentiality, not anonymity, by allowing authorized parties such as banks or regulators to decrypt transaction details after settlement, while keeping amounts and counterparties hidden from the public blockchain record.

Soda Labs’ stack runs on standard cloud CPUs using conventional AES and SHA256 encryption, requiring no specialized hardware, and has been audited by Hacken and covered by three granted US patents.

The technology is now active on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Base and Polygon, with Solana integration planned for a future date. Soda Labs reported achieving 500 sustained confidential transactions per second on Arbitrum during July 2026 testing across 15,000 transfers, at a cost of $0.14 per million transfers, five to tenfold better performance than its prior testing cycle.

The firm committed to publishing updated benchmarks in the coming weeks, setting a specific date for verifying claims that have become routine assertions across privacy-focused builders.

This cost and throughput profile directly competes with Tether’s confidential USDT deployment on Zama, which uses fully homomorphic encryption, suggesting two distinct cryptographic approaches are emerging for institutional privacy.

Soda Labs expands beyond COTI ecosystem roots into multi-chain institutional deployment

Soda Labs’ garbled-circuit technology has been live since March 2025 on COTI’s mainnet, where it became the first recipient of COTI’s $25 million ecosystem fund in 2024. The move to Soda Bubble and deployment across four separate blockchains represents a deliberate pivot toward vendor neutrality, decoupling privacy services from any single protocol’s success. 21Shares named privacy as “the missing layer between blockchains and institutions” in September 2026, positioning confidentiality not as a niche feature but as essential infrastructure for regulated finance.

Competing approaches are crystallizing: EthSystems, launched in July 2026 by former Ethereum Foundation researchers, is pitching privacy infrastructure directly to banks. Charles Hoskinson has pitched Midnight’s Night Mode privacy layer, while Aave’s ecosystem is exploring how privacy could enable institutional lending at scale. The market is fragmenting, not consolidating, across encryption methodologies, a pattern that may force banks to support multiple privacy stacks simultaneously rather than betting on one winner.

The CCS read. We see the infrastructure play, not the token thesis. Soda Labs is raising as a service provider to institutions that want on-chain settlement with confidentiality, not as a protocol asking for fee-based governance or yield accrual to holders. The real winner here is NextBlock’s ability to back infrastructure before it becomes a competitive commodity, and the real risk is whether banks will actually deploy beyond pilots once regulatory clarity forces their hand.

Soda Labs has committed to publishing updated performance benchmarks within weeks, a specific deliverable against which institutional buyers can measure the technology’s readiness for production. The open question is whether the firm will disclose which banks or payment networks are now moving beyond pilot status into live transaction volume, and whether throughput and costs scale as confidential workload enters production rather than test environments.

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OKX reaches $25B valuation with strategic investments from Circle, Ripple, QRT and SC Ventures

OKX reaches $25B valuation with strategic investments from Circle, Ripple, QRT and SC Ventures

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Exchange NewsCrypto Coin Show News Team·October 6, 2026·1 min read

OKX said in a statement that it has completed a strategic investment from Circle, Ripple, Qube Research & Technologies (QRT) and SC Ventures by Standard Chartered at a $25 billion pre-money valuation. The round extends the stake Intercontinental Exchange, parent of the New York Stock Exchange, took in March, and OKX did not disclose how much fresh capital the four new investors contributed.

  • OKX confirmed the round values the exchange at $25 billion pre-money, extending the stake Intercontinental Exchange took in March.
  • OKXICE filed with the SEC on October 4 to offer 63 tokenized NYSE stocks to US users, giving listed companies 30 days to opt out.
  • OKX Money launched Tuesday, offering up to 10% annual yield on USDG balances with no staking or lockup.
  • $25B pre-money valuation extending ICE’s March stake
  • 280+ OKX pairs carrying Ripple’s RLUSD since April
  • 63 tokenized NYSE stocks named in OKX’s Oct 4 SEC filing

The investment lands two days after OKX’s joint venture with ICE, OKXICE, filed with the SEC to tokenize NYSE stocks, as CryptoPotato first reported. Each of the four new backers already sits inside OKX’s commercial stack rather than arriving as a passive financial investor.

The round turns existing vendor relationships into equity stakes. That structure is becoming the template for how traditional finance firms are embedding themselves inside crypto exchange infrastructure rather than simply trading on top of it.

Ripple’s RLUSD Trades on 280 OKX Pairs, Standard Chartered Custodies BUIDL

Circle, which OKX’s statement calls the issuer of “the world’s largest regulated stablecoin,” already underpins dollar settlement across the exchange through USDC. The move echoes Circle’s broader pattern of trading equity for exchange access, after the stablecoin issuer sold $100 million of its own stock to Binance earlier this year. QRT, a

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Bitfinex Securities imposes $100,000 minimum fee despite 80% cost-cutting goal

Bitfinex Securities imposes $100,000 minimum fee despite 80% cost-cutting goal

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Real World AssetsCrypto Coin Show News Team·October 6, 2026·4 min read

Bitfinex Securities used an Oct. 5 blog post to set a five-year target: cut the all-in cost of raising capital for companies by 80% industry-wide. Its own published fee schedule shows how hard that goal will be to hit, since a $100,000 minimum charge can run five times higher than the platform’s stated 0.4% formula rate for smaller issuers.

  • A $5 million, one-year bond triggers a $100,000 minimum fee, five times the $20,000 that Bitfinex’s 0.4% formula would otherwise produce.
  • Paolo Ardoino wants the industry to cut capital-raising costs by 80% within five years, benchmarked against a hypothetical $50 million-revenue farming business in Buenos Aires.
  • $100K minimum capital-raise fee versus $20,000 formula rate
  • 7% average traditional equity issuance fee versus Bitfinex’s 4%
  • $40B tokenized real-world-asset market Bitfinex’s $500M sits within

Bitfinex Securities, the tokenization arm of the exchange run by stablecoin issuer Tether, said in an Oct. 5 blog post that the industry has five years to cut the cost of raising capital by 80%. The platform lets companies issue tokenized bonds and equity to a global pool of investors rather than relying on a single local bank or regional exchange. Chief technology officer Paolo Ardoino tied the benchmark to a hypothetical Buenos Aires farming company generating $50 million a year, asking what it would cost that firm to raise debt or equity through tokenized markets compared with conventional ones.

That ambition meets an immediate test in Bitfinex’s own numbers. A $5 million bond with a one-year maturity carries a $100,000 issuer fee under the platform’s published fee schedule, a point first detailed in a report by cryptoslate.com.

Ardoino Ties Success to an 80% Cost Cut, Not Trading Volume

Ardoino’s five-year measure is cost, not adoption or geographic spread. Bitfinex Securities already charges a flat 4% on equity issuance, which it contrasts with the roughly 7% average fee traditional equity issuance carries, per the firm’s blog post. The wider tokenized real-world-asset market is worth roughly $40 billion excluding stablecoins.

If in five years we cannot cut the cost for companies to go through the regulatory process, list and raise capital by 80 percent, we didn’t do a good job. Not as Bitfinex, but as an industry.

Paolo Ardoino, Chief Technology Officer, Bitfinex

Ardoino frames the target as solving a problem trading-focused tokenization does not touch. He points to an SME “in the most remote place on earth” that can only borrow from its local bank branch at whatever rate is offered, with no competitive pressure to improve the price.

$100,000 Floor Outweighs Bitfinex’s 0.4% Formula on Smaller Raises

Bitfinex’s fee schedule computes bond charges progressively by years to maturity, starting at 0.4% for raises up to $20 million and capped at 4% per year of activity. For a $5 million bond repaid in one year, that formula produces $20,000, but the schedule sets a $100,000 minimum for any Capital Raise, so the issuer pays five times the formula amount. Equity fees are also progressive, starting at 4% and dropping as raises scale past $20 million and $100 million thresholds.

The Capital Raise package bundles document review, tokenization, marketing materials and secondary-market listing with no added listing charge, and issuers pay no withdrawal fee on proceeds. A separate Direct Listing, for issuers that have already completed review and distribution, carries a flat $150,000 fee.

Issuers trading their own listed tokens on Bitfinex Securities’ order books pay a flat 0.4% to sell and 0.1% to buy, with no discount for volume.

Quarterly Reporting and KYC Still Apply Regardless of Tokenization

Bitfinex’s capital-raising process still requires an offering prospectus, know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering checks, and ongoing quarterly financial statements from issuers. Its Astana International Finance Centre-specific guide describes quarterly or yearly reporting depending on the applicable market rules. Moving ownership records onto a blockchain speeds settlement but does not remove that continuing compliance burden, the same requirement a company would face raising capital through a conventional exchange.

That leaves the fee floor as the practical constraint for smaller issuers rather than the percentage headline. A low formula rate can still produce a substantial entry cost once a raise falls below roughly $20 million to $25 million, where the $100,000 minimum binds harder than the 0.4% rate implies. The same dynamic has shaped debate around tokenized equity collateral on lending platforms, where access depends as much on onboarding cost as on the underlying asset.

ALTERNATIVE Fund Pools Smaller Raises Through MK Global Kapital

Luxembourg securitization fund ALTERNATIVE, managed by MK Global Kapital, offers a working example of the pooled alternative to direct issuance. Bitfinex reported in a Dec. 20, 2023 announcement that its ALT2612 bond raised 5,200,100 USDT with a 36-month tenor and a 10% coupon.

The manager’s July 2025 lifecycle report put the program at four issues totaling $6.2 million-equivalent, with one matured $630,000-equivalent issue fully repaid alongside 15 coupon payments exceeding $850,000-equivalent.

By March 2, 2026, the program still totaled four bonds and $6.2 million-equivalent, but three matured bonds totaling $1 million-equivalent had been fully repaid, with 20 coupon payments exceeding $1.1 million-equivalent. Bitfinex separately expects future issuance under the broader tokenized program to exceed $10 million.

The fund sits between securities investors and the entrepreneurs receiving financing, letting smaller businesses access tokenized capital without each preparing its own exchange issuance.

The CCS read. The fee floor is not a design flaw, it is Bitfinex pricing the compliance work a $100,000-plus raise actually requires, and that cost will not fall by 80% through faster settlement alone. The real test sits with issuers like ALTERNATIVE’s MK Global Kapital, whose underwriting and pricing decisions determine whether a Buenos Aires-sized borrower ever sees a cheaper loan than its local bank offers.

Bitfinex Securities is currently applying to become a full Authorised Investment Exchange under Kazakhstan’s AIFC FinTech Lab, a status that would expand what it can list beyond the current framework. Whether the platform’s fee structure changes as that application progresses, and whether any issuer discloses a side-by-side comparison against a conventional loan or bond, remains the open test of Ardoino’s five-year benchmark.

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Jumper spins out from LI.FI to raise capital through JUMP token sale on Legion

Jumper spins out from LI.FI to raise capital through JUMP token sale on Legion

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DeFiCrypto Coin Show News Team·September 28, 2026·3 min read

Jumper, the cross-chain trading app built inside LI.FI, is spinning out into an independent company and will hold its first fundraise through a JUMP token sale on Legion. The structure matters to institutional allocators because Jumper is skipping a parallel equity round entirely, putting every stakeholder, from retail users to venture backers, into the same token rather than splitting equity and token classes.

  • Jumper has processed more than $40 billion in lifetime volume and serves over 100,000 monthly active users.
  • The platform ranks as the #1 aggregator by bridging volume, holding more than 15% market share.
  • Jumper Perps, a perpetual futures aggregator, is scheduled to launch within the coming weeks.
  • $40B lifetime trading and bridging volume processed to date
  • 15% bridging market share Jumper claims over rival aggregators
  • 100K+ monthly active users on the platform currently

Jumper announced Friday (September 25) that it will raise capital for the first time through a JUMP token sale on Legion, the crypto fundraising platform. The move, first reported by BeInCrypto, coincides with Jumper’s formal separation from LI.FI, the orchestration infrastructure firm that originally incubated it. Proceeds are earmarked for product development, user acquisition and distribution as Jumper expands beyond bridging into perpetual futures, tokenized stocks and yield products.

Jumper Splits From LI.FI After Building 15% Bridging Market Share

Jumper began as a bridging aggregator built inside LI.FI, which routes liquidity across blockchains for other applications. It has since become the top aggregator by bridging volume, capturing more than 15% market share against competing platforms, according to the company.

CEO Marko Jurina said bridging was “the starting point,” with Jumper now aiming to become the application users open whenever they want to trade, invest or move value onchain.

The carve-out gives the standalone Jumper platform dedicated capital, leadership and a roadmap separate from LI.FI. LI.FI will keep building orchestration infrastructure for third-party applications while Jumper focuses on the consumer-facing product.

Jumper Rejects a Separate Equity Round for JUMP Sale

Jumper is not running a parallel equity financing round alongside the JUMP sale, a deliberate decision the company says aligns users, contributors and investors under one asset. That breaks from the standard venture-plus-token structure common across DeFi, where insiders hold equity while the public holds only the token.

We believe the token should be the only way to have ownership and exposure to the value being created by Jumper. There shouldn’t be one group holding equity and another group holding a token. JUMP is intended to be the only way users, contributors, and investors participate in Jumper’s growth, so the value created by Jumper is aligned with tokenholders.

Marko Jurina, CEO of Jumper

The JUMP token itself is planned to launch separately, after the Legion fundraising process concludes. Jurina framed the approach as a template he wants “to become an industry standard” across crypto.

Jumper Perps Set to Launch Within Weeks, Adding a New Revenue Line

Jumper Perps, which will aggregate perpetual futures venues into a single trading experience, is slated to go live within the coming weeks. Each new product line, from perps to tokenized real-world assets, gives Jumper an added source of volume and revenue while pulling existing users deeper into one application rather than several.

Jumper’s pitch is distinct: rather than serving as backend infrastructure, it wants to be the single front-end where a user swaps, bridges, trades perpetuals and holds tokenized equities in one interface.

The CCS read. A token sale that deliberately excludes equity investors is a governance signal as much as a fundraising choice: it forces Legion buyers to underwrite Jumper’s product roadmap without the downside protection or board access that venture equity typically carries. For institutional desks weighing JUMP, the real question is whether volume from Jumper Perps and tokenized-asset trading can generate fee flow large enough to justify a token with no equity backstop.

Jumper has not disclosed a sale date, valuation or allocation size for the Legion round, and the JUMP token’s public launch will only follow once that fundraising process wraps. The next concrete marker will be the Jumper Perps launch, which the company says is coming within weeks and will be the first live test of its super-app thesis.

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HIFI secures $37M Series A to expand tokenized money settlement tools

HIFI secures $37M Series A to expand tokenized money settlement tools

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Editor's ChoiceCrypto Coin Show News Team·September 25, 2026·3 min read

HIFI, a New York stablecoin infrastructure firm, has raised a $37 million Series A led by Left Lane Capital to build out licensing, card payouts and capital markets tooling for tokenized money. The round lands as HIFI’s client roster already includes Sumitomo, Dapper and Arival Bank, and as the company sits inside two of the most closely watched institutional tokenization pilots run by DTCC and Tradeweb.

  • HIFI’s platform moves more than $7 billion a year, with usage among existing customers up more than fourfold in six months.
  • A Form D filed with the SEC on September 3 shows $21.8 million of a $27.3 million equity offering sold to 24 investors since a first sale on August 19.
  • HIFI joined DTCC’s July 15 production trades alongside BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Nasdaq, ahead of an October launch of DTCC’s tokenization service.
  • $37M Series A size versus the $27.3M SEC offering already partly sold
  • $7B annual settlement volume against fourfold customer growth in six months
  • $307B total stablecoin supply industry-wide, per Blockworks data

HIFI said Thursday that Left Lane Capital led the $37 million Series A, with Matthew Miller, the firm’s managing partner, joining HIFI’s board. The company said the capital will fund additional regulatory licenses, a larger team in New York and abroad, and an expansion from payments into cards and capital markets.

HIFI’s Platform Moves $7 Billion a Year as Usage Quadruples

HIFI said its platform now processes more than $7 billion annually, with usage among existing customers growing more than fourfold over the past six months. Companies building on the infrastructure have onboarded over 10,000 businesses and 200,000 individuals, with payouts reaching 87 countries.

Sumitomo is rebuilding its cash management and trading operations on the platform. Dapper is building digital marketplaces on it, while Arival Bank runs stablecoin payments through the system.

The Form D that HIFI Bridge, Inc. filed with the SEC on September 3 discloses a $27.3 million equity offering, of which $21.8 million has sold to 24 investors since a first sale on August 19. That filing runs alongside, not in place of, the $37 million Series A, giving HIFI two active capital tracks heading into its licensing push.

DTCC’s July 15 Trades Put HIFI Beside BlackRock and Goldman Sachs

DTCC ran production trades with tokenized, DTC-held securities on July 15 across more than 30 firms, including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan and Nasdaq, covering collateral pledges, securities lending and Treasury and repo settlement ahead of an October launch of its full tokenization service.

HIFI said it took part in the tokenized repo pilot and also supported a live tokenized repo trade on Tradeweb between DRW and Marex, settled on Canton with USDCx as the cash leg.

CEO Zach Walsh framed the company’s approach to that convergence of payments, custody and settlement in a single line.

We think of settlement as one problem, not three.

Zach Walsh, CEO, HIFI

Walsh said custody and control remain the hardest technical problems as HIFI extends from payment rails into cards and capital markets, the two areas the new funding is meant to underwrite directly.

Visa Direct Payouts Reach More Than 4 Billion Cards

HIFI this month launched stablecoin push-to-card payouts through Visa Direct, starting with reach to more than 4 billion Visa cards worldwide, and has integrated with the Circle Payments Network. Visa and DTCC are founding validators of Circle’s Arc blockchain alongside BlackRock, Mastercard and Standard Chartered, tying HIFI’s payout rail to the same validator set overseeing that network.

The regulatory backdrop shifted twice in recent months. Payment stablecoins gained a federal framework under the GENIUS Act in July 2025, and the SEC issued an Innovation Exemption on September 17 letting permissioned venues trade tokenized US stocks onchain.

Stablecoin supply stands near $307 billion industry-wide, according to Blockworks, a base HIFI’s licensing plan is designed to plug directly into rather than route around. Matthew Miller said the round positions the company to serve developers working across chains.

“HIFI is building an important layer in that market, giving developers the infrastructure to create products that can operate across networks and borders,” Miller said.

The CCS read. HIFI’s real bet is regulatory, not technical: bringing licenses in-house lets it stand between banks and stablecoin flows without leaning on partner charters. That matters more than the $7 billion volume figure, since scaled settlement rails only survive under the current supervisory push if the operator holds its own approvals.

HIFI’s next test is whether it converts the Sumitomo, Dapper and Arival Bank relationships into direct licensed operations before DTCC’s October tokenization launch broadens the field of institutional counterparties competing for the same settlement business.

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ARK Invest tokenizes $1.3 billion venture fund through Securitize

ARK Invest tokenizes $1.3 billion venture fund through Securitize

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Editor's ChoiceCrypto Coin Show News Team·September 25, 2026·3 min read

ARK Invest is tokenizing its flagship venture fund through Securitize, moving a $1.3 billion portfolio that includes stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Databricks onto blockchain rails. The deal tokenizes ownership and administration of the existing ARK Venture Fund rather than launching a new crypto product or converting the underlying private companies into tradeable tokens.

  • ARK Venture Fund (ARKVX) holds roughly $1.3 billion in assets across private and public technology companies.
  • Securitize will provide the tokenization infrastructure, following ARK’s 2025 strategic investment in the firm.
  • This is ARK’s first fund to move onchain through Securitize, testing whether tokenization can underpin mainstream venture products.
  • $1.3B ARKVX assets under management now being tokenized
  • 2025 year ARK made its strategic investment in Securitize
  • 4 named portfolio companies: OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Databricks

ARKVX is an actively managed closed-end interval fund built around Cathie Wood’s disruptive-innovation thesis, mixing private-market bets with public equities. Securitize will handle the technical work of representing fund interests onchain while ARK keeps running the same investment strategy underneath.

ARK Keeps OpenAI and Anthropic Stakes Off-Chain, Tokenizes Only Fund Interests

The asset being tokenized is the fund interest, not the private companies inside it. OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe and Databricks remain conventional private holdings; only the wrapper investors use to access them changes.

That distinction separates ARKVX from ventures that tokenize equity in a single startup or issue a freely tradeable crypto token. Tokenization here changes how the fund is issued, held and transferred, not the legal nature of the securities ARK holds.

Ownership records, subscriptions and transfers, historically slow and fragmented in venture funds compared with listed securities, become more programmable, though tokenized wrappers do not by themselves solve liquidity constraints or investor-eligibility rules that already govern who can buy in.

ARK’s 2025 Securitize Stake Sets Up Its First Onchain Fund

The ARKVX launch builds on ARK’s 2025 strategic investment in Securitize, extending a relationship that now produces its first live tokenized product. It also lands as large asset managers keep testing blockchain rails under products that already exist in traditional finance rather than building crypto-native alternatives from scratch.

BlackRock’s BUIDL fund remains the best-known example of that pattern. Franklin Templeton and WisdomTree have each expanded tokenized-fund lineups of their own.

ARKVX pushes that same infrastructure into venture investing specifically, a corner of finance where administrative friction has historically run higher than in listed markets.

$1.3 Billion Fund Becomes a Live Test of Onchain Infrastructure

A $1.3 billion strategy moving onchain through Securitize carries more weight than a pilot with a small side vehicle, since it puts an established, actively managed fund’s operations, not just a marketing label, on blockchain rails.

Whether tokenized administration actually reduces friction for subscriptions and transfers will show up in how ARK and Securitize run the fund day to day rather than in the announcement itself.

The tokenized-collateral trend is also spreading beyond fund administration.

The CCS read. The story here is less about ARKVX’s holdings and more about Securitize converting a second high-profile asset manager relationship into a live product after its 2025 tie-up with ARK. Every additional issuer that tokenizes fund administration rather than a standalone token strengthens Securitize’s position as the default rails provider for traditional managers testing blockchain infrastructure without touching their underlying strategies.

ARK has not indicated whether it plans to extend tokenization to other funds in its lineup, and Securitize has not disclosed a timeline for ARKVX’s onchain rollout to eligible investors. The open question is whether tokenized administration measurably eases the subscription and transfer bottlenecks that have historically slowed venture-fund access, or whether investor-eligibility restrictions keep the practical experience largely unchanged for now.

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SBI Group backs dtcpay’s $25M Series A for stablecoin merchant payments

SBI Group backs dtcpay’s $25M Series A for stablecoin merchant payments

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BlockchainCrypto Coin Show News Team·September 21, 2026·3 min read

Singapore-based dtcpay has closed a $25 million Series A round, adding Japan’s SBI Group as a strategic investor alongside lead backer Vertex Ventures. The deal signals that traditional financial conglomerates are moving from watching stablecoin payments to funding the merchant infrastructure that runs on them.

  • dtcpay closed a $25 million Series A round with Vertex Ventures as lead investor.
  • SBI Group joined later as a strategic investor to complete the funding round, not as the lead.
  • dtcpay holds a Major Payment Institution license in Singapore, one of Asia’s key regulated payments hubs.
  • $25M total Series A round size for dtcpay’s payments buildout
  • $25M capital now earmarked for merchant and cross-border settlement tools
  • $25M round that pulled SBI Group onto dtcpay’s shareholder register

dtcpay, a Singapore payments company that lets merchants move between fiat currency and digital assets, has completed a $25 million Series A financing round. Vertex Ventures led the original raise, while SBI Group joined afterward as a strategic investor to bring the round to close.

That sequencing matters: SBI did not lead the deal, but its late entry as a named strategic backer carries weight given the group’s reach across Japanese banking, securities and digital assets.

dtcpay operates under a Major Payment Institution license issued in Singapore, placing it inside one of Asia’s most tightly regulated payments jurisdictions rather than in an offshore gray zone. The company says the fresh capital will fund further development of merchant payment and cross-border settlement infrastructure, per the dtcpay announcement.

Vertex Ventures Leads, SBI Group Follows With Strategic Weight

The distinction between leading and joining is the detail institutional readers should hold onto. Vertex Ventures put up the original capital that anchored the round, while SBI Group arrived later to complete the $25 million total as a strategic rather than financial-first investor.

For a payments company scaling across Asia, a strategic partner with SBI’s banking and securities footprint can open doors that a pure venture check cannot.

dtcpay is not positioning itself as another crypto exchange chasing retail speculation. It is building the merchant-facing settlement layer that sits on top of stablecoin rails, closer in function to a payments processor than a trading venue.

Stablecoins Replace Volatile Crypto As The Settlement Asset Of Choice

Dollar-denominated stablecoins have become the preferred bridge asset for payment companies because they let cross-border settlement move faster without exposing merchants to the price swings of assets like Bitcoin or Ethereum. A stablecoin can travel across blockchain rails while behaving economically like cash sitting in a bank account.

That combination, speed without volatility, is what makes stablecoin infrastructure attractive to a regulated Singapore institution rather than a crypto-native exchange.

dtcpay’s raise fits the same pattern: banks and payment groups are backing the plumbing, not the trading front end.

Consumer-Facing Fintech Bets Are Chasing The Same Rails

dtcpay’s approach mirrors a broader trend of fintech products embedding blockchain settlement behind familiar financial interfaces rather than asking users to adopt crypto directly.

The CCS read. SBI’s move reads less as a bet on dtcpay’s balance sheet and more as a hedge on which regulated Asian payments rail wins merchant adoption first. Expect SBI to use the stake for distribution into its own banking and brokerage network rather than treat it as a passive financial holding, positioning dtcpay as an entry point into Japanese institutional stablecoin flows.

dtcpay has not disclosed a timeline for deploying the $25 million or named which markets its cross-border settlement expansion will target next, leaving open whether SBI’s involvement extends into Japan’s own stablecoin regulatory framework in the coming quarters.

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CCS Original

Perceptron’s $10M Fund Is Quietly Changing Who Gets to Build with AI

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Perceptron’s $10M Fund Is Quietly Changing Who Gets to Build with AI — CCS Exclusive
CCS Exclusive · Blockchain Interviews July 5, 2026
Perceptron Network

Perceptron’s $10M Fund Is Quietly Changing
Who Gets to Build with AI

In an exclusive interview with the Crypto Coin Show, co-founder Peter Anthony explains how a decentralized data network and a new $10 million AI Data Fund are handing smaller teams a resource only tech giants could previously afford.

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Ashton Addison Host, Crypto Coin Show · Blockchain Interviews

The AI data market has a monopoly problem. Google and OpenAI paid hundreds of millions of dollars to Reddit for access to its user-generated content. None of that reached the people who actually wrote the posts. And if you’re a new AI startup trying to train a competitive model, the cost of quality data alone is enough to stop you before you start.

Perceptron Network — a decentralized AI data infrastructure company with over 800,000 user-run nodes across 150+ countries — was built to fix exactly that. In a wide-ranging conversation on the Crypto Coin Show, co-founder Peter Anthony laid out how the network works, who it’s for, and why the newly launched $10M AI Data Fund could be one of the most consequential moves in the Web3 AI space this year.

800K+ Node downloads globally
150+ Countries in the network
10 TB Avg. daily bandwidth
$10M AI Data Fund launched

The Problem with Centralized Data

Every minute of every day, the average person generates roughly 1.3 megabytes of data per second. That data, the way you interact with social platforms, the searches you run, the content you engage with, is the raw material AI models are built on. The existing frontier models have already scraped the historical internet: around 750 trillion tokens spanning forums, Reddit threads, Twitter archives, and beyond.

But the historical layer is already gone. The real frontier of AI training data is what we’re producing right now, today. And that’s where Perceptron comes in.

“If you charge huge amounts of money, only OpenAI and Anthropic and a handful of others are going to be able to afford to pay those data costs. If you are a new upcoming AI project, you’re never going to be able to access that quality of data.”

— Peter Anthony, Co-Founder, Perceptron Network

Traditional data acquisition runs through APIs: Twitter’s, Reddit’s, LinkedIn’s. These platforms know exactly how valuable their content is, and they price it accordingly. The result is a market where only the largest, best-funded AI labs can stay current. Everyone else is building on stale data, or no meaningful data at all.

How the Network Works

The Perceptron model flips this dynamic by distributing data collection across its node network. When a user installs the node (available as a Chrome extension or on Android and iOS) they’re sharing excess bandwidth. The node doesn’t collect personal data; it gives Perceptron a vantage point on the internet from that user’s IP address and location.

Scale that across 800,000 nodes spanning 150 countries, and you have something centralized providers genuinely cannot replicate: a live, globally distributed lens on what the internet looks like from real human perspectives, right now. Anthony drew a sharp distinction between what large tech platforms do with user data (package and sell it for hundreds of millions) and what Perceptron offers: a share of that value back to the people generating it.

Two Ways to Earn

One of the clearest takeaways from the interview is that Perceptron is designed for both casual and active contributors. The earning model runs on two distinct tracks:

PASSIVE
Run a Node

Install the extension or app, share idle bandwidth in the background, and accumulate points automatically. Your unused data capacity does the work while you sleep.

ACTIVE
Complete Data Quests

Opt into specific tasks — annotating images, contributing voice recordings, labeling datasets, photographing locations — and earn significantly higher rewards. Rare skills and uncommon languages command premium payouts.

TIERED
Build On-Chain Reputation

Contribution quality is tracked on-chain. The more accurately you contribute, the higher your tier and the higher-value quests you unlock. Expert contributors in specialized fields are especially rewarded.

Right now, contributors earn points, pre-TGE accrual ahead of the $PERC token launch. Anthony suggested the token goes live within 8 to 10 weeks, potentially sooner, at which point those points convert directly. Getting in early means building a balance before the conversion rate is set and the network effect compounds.

Quality Control at Scale

A natural question for any crowdsourced data platform is how you prevent gaming: rushing through tasks, submitting junk to collect rewards. Anthony was direct. The platform uses AI to validate submissions before they enter the dataset. For image-based tasks, the system first trains on what a valid submission looks like, then evaluates every incoming entry against that benchmark. Sloppy-but-genuine attempts are treated differently from clear bad-faith submissions; penalties are reserved for the latter. The recently acquired Router framework handles user-level contribution tracking automatically, at scale, with no manual review needed.

“People shouldn’t be in fear of contributing data sets because they might get it wrong — as long as they’re making efforts to do it correctly.”

— Peter Anthony, Co-Founder, Perceptron Network
// New Initiative
The $10M Perceptron AI Data Fund
Launched to lower the entry barrier for AI startups and Web3 projects that need real-world, high-quality training data but can’t afford what centralized providers charge. Teams accepted into the fund get direct access to Perceptron’s live data pipeline, a resource that until now has been out of reach for most builders.
  • Open to AI and Web3 projects at any stage, crypto-native or Web2 backgrounds welcome
  • Access to Perceptron’s live, globally sourced datasets for model training and fine-tuning
  • Strategic pathway: fund recipients become long-term paying data clients
  • Apply via Perceptron’s official X account (@PerceptronNTWK) to begin the conversation
  • Designed to prove what decentralized infrastructure can do that centralized models cannot

The Bigger Play: Business Intelligence

Beyond AI training data, Anthony revealed where Perceptron’s long-term value truly lies: live business intelligence. Because the network holds hundreds of thousands of distributed vantage points worldwide, it can observe things no centralized model can. How a product ranks on Amazon in New York versus Dubai versus São Paulo, in real time, with no API access required.

The same infrastructure powering crypto sentiment analysis for quant traders can be pointed at e-commerce, price comparison, ad performance tracking, and more. The node network, Anthony argues, is the real moat. Building 800,000 real, distributed, human-operated nodes isn’t something you shortcut. It took him five years to build a YouTube channel with 300,000 subscribers. Perceptron already has that network effect locked in.

Why This Matters Right Now

The AI data market is at a tipping point. Models need more data to improve. The best data, live, human-generated, and contextually diverse, is increasingly locked behind paywalls or owned by platform monopolies. The cost barrier is freezing out the next generation of AI builders before they can even start.

Perceptron’s bet is that a decentralized network of real human contributors, rewarded fairly for what they produce, is both the ethical and the pragmatic answer. The $10M AI Data Fund is the opening move in making that case concrete, not just to the crypto community, but to the broader AI industry watching from the sidelines.

If you’re already contributing your data to AI systems every day and receiving nothing in return, the question is simply: would you rather keep doing that, or start getting paid?

// Get Started

Join the Perceptron Network

Download the node, accumulate points before the TGE, and explore data questing tasks matched to your skills and location.

Download the Node Explore Data Quests
Filed under Perceptron AI Data Web3 DePIN Blockchain Interviews $PERC
symbiotic-article
CCS Original

The Protocol Rebuilding Crypto’s Financial Spine: Symbiotic

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CCS Exclusive  ·  DeFi Infrastructure

The Protocol Rebuilding Crypto’s Financial Spine

Symbiotic isn’t just restaking — it’s a universal collateral layer designed to power credit, insurance, RWAs, and every financial primitive that’s missing shared infrastructure.

By Ashton Addison Blockchain Interviews July 2026 Exclusive
$1.6B+
Total Value Locked
14+
Active Networks
$34.8M
Total Funding Raised

In the summer of 2024, a question was quietly circulating inside some of crypto’s sharpest engineering rooms: if every new protocol has to rebuild the same security scaffolding from scratch — the validators, the slashing conditions, the capital allocation rails — is the industry actually progressing, or just repeating itself at scale?

For Misha Putiatin, Co-Founder of Symbiotic, the answer was obvious. And the solution was to stop letting every team reinvent the wheel.

The Problem Nobody Wanted to Admit

The multi-chain era opened a Pandora’s box. Rollups, sidechains, app-chains — the ability to launch a new network exploded. Experimentation accelerated. But so did a quieter, more dangerous trend: every protocol was copy-pasting not just ideas, but security models.

“Experimentation in terms of product is really interesting,” Putiatin told CCS. “But experimentation in security models and general capital flow is super dangerous — especially if it’s done not because you’re solving a unique problem, but because you don’t have access to ready-to-use solutions flexible enough for your protocol.”

The consequences showed up on-chain. Bridges hacked. Oracle failures. Liquidity fragmented across dozens of isolated pools, none able to serve each other. The multi-chain world had delivered velocity — but at the cost of coherence.

“The idea was quite simple: let’s build infrastructure anyone can use.”

Misha Putiatin, Co-Founder, Symbiotic

Shared Security, Generalized

Symbiotic launched in January 2025 as the first fully permissionless restaking protocol with slashing support on Ethereum mainnet — backed by Paradigm, Pantera Capital, and Coinbase Ventures. The premise: a single, immutable infrastructure layer that any proof-of-stake network, rollup, oracle, or data availability layer could plug into, without asking permission or paying platform fees.

The core contracts cannot be upgraded. No gatekeeping. No fee changes post-deployment. For a co-founder whose previous companies were smart contract security firms — Statemind and MixBytes — this wasn’t idealism. It was engineering discipline applied to a systemic problem.

By mid-2026, Symbiotic had grown to over $1.6 billion in total value locked across 14+ active networks, with 100,000+ users and a partner ecosystem that includes Chainlink, Lombard, Ethena, Avail, Nexus Mutual, Cap Labs, and Midas.

Symbiotic Ecosystem — Active Partners
  • Chainlink — decentralized oracle network integration
  • Lombard — Bitcoin bridging, enabling BTC as collateral in Ethereum/Solana
  • Ethena — synthetic dollar protocol, delta-neutral strategies
  • Nexus Mutual — on-chain insurance underwriting
  • Cap Labs — decentralized credit markets
  • Midas — tokenized real-world assets, T+0 settlement (Instant Liquidity)
  • Avail — modular data availability layer

Core V2: From Restaking to Financial Infrastructure

After nine months of development, Symbiotic is preparing to ship its most significant architectural upgrade: Core V2. The shift is conceptual as much as technical. V1 was designed for proof-of-stake network security. V2 expands the same primitives into finance itself.

The key insight driving the redesign: collateral is collateral. Whether it’s securing a rollup’s validator set or collateralizing an on-chain credit obligation, the underlying mechanism — locking capital, enforcing conditions, enabling slashing — is identical. V1 wasn’t built to express that. V2 is.

“The underwriting segment was actually booming and they didn’t have a solution for the same problem that Symbiotic was already solving,” Putiatin explained. “They didn’t have the common infrastructure that can be used.”

Capital Facilities: The Core V2 Primitive

The headline feature of V2 is what Symbiotic calls capital facilities — a mechanism that allows vault capital to remain enforceable while it’s deployed across whitelisted DeFi protocols between settlement events. Think of it as collateral that stays on-call: deployed and earning, but automatically recalled the moment an obligation triggers.

This matters because V1 vaults had a problem that mirrored what went wrong in TradFi before risk-based frameworks arrived — curator vaults could allocate capital with relatively arbitrary discretion. V2 introduces strict, predetermined limits on what creators can do. Permissioned action sets. Auditable on-chain. No more going “willy-nilly into a protocol that nobody heard of,” as Putiatin put it.

🔒

Enforced Capital Rules

Vault creators operate within predetermined action sets — no arbitrary deployment, auditable at every step.

⚡

Capital Facilities

Collateral stays enforceable while earning yield in whitelisted protocols. Auto-recalled when obligations trigger.

🏦

Underwriting & Credit

Private credit and insurance use cases that couldn’t run on V1 — now first-class citizens in V2.

₿

BTC & ETH as Collateral

Volatile assets with low cost of capital unlock new application categories where stablecoins are too expensive.

The Stablecoin Problem (And the Bitcoin Opportunity)

There’s a cost structure problem at the heart of DeFi collateral that rarely gets discussed openly. Stablecoins — USDC, USDT, yield-bearing variants — are convenient. But at 4–7% annualized cost of capital, they’re expensive. For high-risk applications, the cost climbs further. For low-yield applications — like smart contract insurance — they’re simply uneconomical.

Bitcoin and Ethereum tell a different story. Their cost of capital is structurally lower. They represent an enormous pool of underutilized collateral held by people who want yield but aren’t willing to take excessive risk to get it.

“Most of the protocols and applications that are going to launch on Symbiotic — Bitcoin and ETH is going to be used,” Putiatin said. “Because of the same opportunity here: underutilized capital.”

For Bitcoin specifically, the technical path runs through bridging protocols like Lombard, which bring BTC into Ethereum and Solana’s smart contract environments. It’s a workaround for a network that wasn’t designed with on-chain programmability — but it works, and V2 is built to take full advantage of it.

Liquid Lane: Solving the RWA Liquidity Problem

If Core V2 is the engine, Liquid Lane is the first major application it makes possible — and potentially one of the most important pieces of DeFi infrastructure for institutional adoption.

The problem is well understood: real-world asset tokens (RWAs) — tokenized Treasuries, private credit, money market funds — have illiquid redemption windows. Sixty days. Ninety days. Sometimes 180. That’s fine in traditional finance. In DeFi, it’s a deal-breaker. You can’t use an asset as collateral if you can’t liquidate it. You can’t build a lending market on top of something that might take six months to exit.

“That kind of breaks what we’ve built in DeFi. You can’t use them as collateral anywhere — because if push comes to shove, how do you liquidate it?”

Misha Putiatin, Co-Founder, Symbiotic

Liquid Lane is a Request-for-Quote (RFQ) engine that solves this directly. Liquidity providers deposit into a pool. When a holder needs to exit an RWA position immediately — for liquidity, for strategy, for any reason — Liquid Lane matches them with a buyer at a small discount. The exit is instant. No waiting.

The elegant part is what happens to the liquidity pool while it waits. Rather than sitting idle collecting dust at below-market yield, it gets deployed across multiple Symbiotic applications simultaneously — layered yield, in the restaking tradition. This is what makes the math work: the pool earns enough across multiple applications to justify holding RWA exposure at a discount.

Liquid Lane — How It Works
  • Liquidity providers deposit into a shared pool, earning yield across multiple Symbiotic applications
  • RWA holders needing to exit submit a Request for Quote
  • Liquid Lane matches them with pool liquidity at a small discount — immediate settlement
  • First live deployment: Fasanara’s mGLOBAL tokenized fund, in partnership with Midas (announced April 2026)
  • Core V2 is a prerequisite — Liquid Lane cannot run on V1 architecture

Looking Ahead: The Protocol Stack Nobody Built Before

Three financial verticals — credit (Cap Labs), insurance (Nexus Mutual), and RWA liquidity (Liquid Lane with Midas) — are now running on or preparing to run on a single shared collateral infrastructure. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a design thesis playing out in practice.

The question Symbiotic is answering isn’t “what is restaking?” — it’s “what is the minimum shared infrastructure needed for any financial obligation to be expressed and enforced on-chain?” The answer, if V2 ships as designed, is that Symbiotic is that layer.

The next product categories are already visible: delta-neutral strategies, structured products, cross-chain insurance pools, institutional prime brokerage rails. Each one needs what Symbiotic offers: permissionless capital allocation, auditable enforcement, and the ability to layer multiple obligations on the same dollar.

With over $1.6 billion in TVL, a $34.8 million war chest, and a technical architecture that’s spent nine months being rebuilt for exactly this moment — Symbiotic isn’t waiting for institutional crypto to arrive. It’s building the rails it will have to run on.

The protocol that started as “restaking infrastructure” is quietly becoming something larger — the financial operating system for a multi-chain world that finally has somewhere to put its capital.

Watch the Full Interview

This feature is based on an exclusive interview conducted by CCS with Misha Putiatin, Co-Founder, Symbiotic, recorded for Blockchain Interviews in 2026.

🔗 symbiotic.fi   🐦 @symbioticfi

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