EP. 103 | We're Expanding Globally. Become a Community Leader in our Network
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Member Spotlight
This week we want to celebrate a member operating at the intersection of institutional finance, crypto infrastructure, and the next wave of stablecoin adoption.
Meet Olivia Lo 👋
Olivia is Head of Client Management & Operations at OpenTrade, where she is helping scale compliant, real-world-asset-backed stablecoin yield infrastructure for fintechs and institutions.
Before OpenTrade, Olivia built exactly the kind of cross-market experience this moment requires.
→ She supported capital markets adoption at Aptos Labs
→ Helped manage ecosystem clients at BitGo
→ Led institutional product operations at Coinbase
→ Built her foundation in global financial services at HSBC, working across securities services, custody, fund administration, client management, and cross-border markets
Now at OpenTrade, she is bringing that experience into a company building the rails for stablecoin yield at scale.
And what a milestone week.
OpenTrade just raised $17 million in strategic funding, bringing total capital raised to more than $30 million.
The round was led by Mercury Fund and Notion Capital, with participation from a16z Crypto, AlbionVC, and CMCC Global.
The numbers speak for themselves:
→ $200 million+ in TVL
→ $250 million+ in 2025 transaction volume
→ $300 million+ processed in the first four months of 2026
→ $1 billion+ projected transaction volume for the full year
OpenTrade is building infrastructure that allows fintechs, neobanks, exchanges, platforms, and asset issuers to offer stablecoin yield products without building everything from scratch.
→ Permissioned infrastructure for custodial platforms
→ Permissionless infrastructure for DeFi and asset issuers
→ Custom institutional vaults through Curation+
This is what our network is all about.
Keep building.
Show Olivia some love
🥂 West Coast Toast 🥂
Its a Vibe ☺️ 🌴 🏄♀️
We made a big splash when we came to Malibu.
Soho House, Pacific views, elite partnerships, curated connections, and a room that reminded California what Introduction.com does best.
Last night, Introduction.com brought that same standard to Millennium Tower for a private penthouse dinner with Silicon Valley Bank and ZKsync.
For Introduction.com, this is the next territory in a network built around access, trust, and proximity to the people actually moving markets.
While the skyline set the scene, the real story was the gravity of the room.
Capital, crypto, infrastructure, and institutional operators sat at the same table for a private four course dinner built around high signal connection.
SVB brought the banking depth trusted by high growth companies and investors.
ZKsync brought the infrastructure layer for regulated assets, tokenization, and compliant blockchain adoption.
Introduction.com brought the room. Decision makers sitting across from the people they actually needed to meet.
As always, we operated under Chatham House Rule. The identities remain behind closed doors; the ammunition gathered at these tables is now being deployed across the industry.
But these rooms are reserved for the few. We bridge the gap between the world's most guarded boardrooms and the individuals pushing the frontier of technology.
Whether you are seeking a seat at the table or looking to engineer an environment of this caliber for your own ecosystem, the standard remains absolute. This is where legacy power and new-world leverage finally align.
You might have missed Millennium Tower. Don’t miss what’s next.
Access is earned.
Introduction.com & The Community
The Davos of Web3 🇫🇷
Proof of Talk returns to The Louvre Palace in Paris this June, and Introduction.com is proud to be an official Community Partner.
→ 2,500 attendees
→ 85% decision-makers
→ $18T+ in AUM represented
→ 120 speakers
→ Zero pay-to-speak
Names like Jenny Johnson, Tom Lee, Adam Back, Sergey Nazarov, Michael Arrington, Robinhood, Mastercard, JP Morgan, Citi, Franklin Templeton, VanEck, and Swift.
All under one roof.
And beyond the main stage:
→ StableDay, focused on tokenization and programmable money
→ The Bittensor AI Track
→ The Canton institutional infrastructure track
→ Proof of Pitch with top VCs including Dragonfly, Haun Ventures, Arrington Capital, and CoinFund
→ Private investor and VIP dinners where the real conversations happen
This is exactly the kind of room Introduction.com believes in.
And we are giving back to our community with 20% off admission using code INTRODUCTION20.
If you want the inside scoop, post-event debriefs, and access to the rooms where things actually happen…
Membership has its privileges.
Access is earned.
Apply today.
Events
London, the wait is over 🇬🇧 Introduction.com has officially landed.
Assets & Access London is live. Open to the public for now. VIP experiences loading.
This is only the beginning 👀
Builders Welcome.
Assets & Access London with Flight3
Thursday, May 28
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM GMT+1
George
London, United Kingdom
The unBanked Conference
Wednesday, June 3
10:00 AM - 4:00 PM GMT+2
Fosbury & Sons Member club Prinsengracht
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Top Raises
Member Activity
Series A
Stitch raised $25M in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with participation from Arbor Ventures, COTU Ventures, RAED Ventures, and SVC, marking a16z's first ever investment in the GCC.
The Riyadh-headquartered fintech runs a cloud-native operating system for banks, fintechs, and enterprises spanning payments, lending, cards, wallets, deposits, and ledger infrastructure, with proceeds earmarked for product development, regional expansion across MENA, and global go-to-market on the back of $5B+ in processed transactions over the past six months and 10x customer growth in 2025.
A16z stays leading the pack! Big shoutout to Maggie Hsu and the rest of the team!
Strategic
Gemini secured a $100M strategic investment from Winklevoss Capital, the family office of co-founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss.
The US-based regulated exchange and custodian supports both retail and institutional clients across 70+ cryptocurrencies, with the founders stepping back in directly to shore up the balance sheet of the post-IPO public company after a turbulent stretch for the exchange.
Love to see Trevor Wells and the Gemini team putting in the work!
Turnkey landed $12.5M in strategic funding backed by Circle Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Archetype, Bain Capital Crypto, Lightspeed Faction, Galaxy Digital, and Variant Fund, bringing total funding to over $65M.
The New York-based crypto wallet and key management infrastructure provider, founded by former Coinbase Custody operators, will direct the round toward the public launch of Turnkey Verifiable Cloud, a secure computing product for digital assets, while scaling engineering and operations across crypto, fintech, and AI.
Lots of friendly faces participated! Special mention to CJ Huntzinger and the galaxy team on their involvement.
LemFi picked up an undisclosed strategic investment from Tether to accelerate stablecoin-powered remittances across emerging markets.
The cross-border financial platform connects communities in the UK, US, Canada, and Europe with family and businesses in Africa and Asia, and will integrate USD₮ as a settlement layer across key corridors to replace multi-day SWIFT chains with near-instant, low-cost stablecoin settlement.
Glad the Tether team is on our side!
AWARP secured an undisclosed strategic investment from Animoca Brands to accelerate sovereign-grade financial infrastructure and RWA adoption.
The Laos and ASEAN-focused project is building national-level on-chain infrastructure spanning RWA tokenization, regulated stablecoin settlement, cross-border payments, and digital ID, and through its key implementation entity LADT (whose NewPay subsidiary already covers 1.3M+ users and cleared over $180M of Q4 2025 transaction volume), AWARP will tap Animoca for asset issuance, product development, and regulated stablecoin use cases across emerging markets.
Animoca has been putting in work recently! Another win for Luca Ioannis and team!
Seed
Osero closed $13.5M in seed funding co-led by Sky (ex-MakerDAO) and Plasma.
The stablecoin savings infrastructure provider lets apps embed institutional-grade yield via SDK integration powered by Sky Savings Rate and Sky Agent Network, with the new capital backing tokenization, deployment, and scaling of institutional assets on the platform.
Sky’s the limit! Big win for Olaf Kudin and the Sky (ex-MakerDAO) team!
Non-Member Activity
Strategic
Dunamu, the operator of Korea's largest cryptocurrency exchange Upbit, received a roughly $670M (1.0033 trillion won) strategic investment from Hana Financial Group, making the banking giant Dunamu's fourth-largest shareholder with a 6.55% stake.
The deal pairs Hana Bank's traditional financial network with Dunamu's proprietary Giwa Chain to expand blockchain-based foreign currency remittance, build out a won-denominated stablecoin ecosystem, and launch a digital-asset-driven wealth management service linking Upbit directly with Hana's platform.
Series D
Elliptic closed $120M in Series D funding led by One Peak at a $670M valuation, with participation from Nasdaq Ventures, Deutsche Bank, and the British Business Bank.
The London-based blockchain analytics and compliance firm screens over a billion transactions weekly for 700+ customers across 30 countries, with proceeds going toward agentic AI tooling that automates manual compliance work as stablecoins, tokenized assets, and institutional blockchain projects scale up.
Series B
Fasset closed a $51M Series B with backing from SBI Holdings, Investcorp, and Arz Portfoy.
The Dubai-based onchain neobank and Shariah-compliant digital banking platform now processes more than $32B in annualized transaction volume across 125 countries and 50+ corridors in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, with the fresh capital funding expansion into new markets, lending and trade finance products for SMBs, and continued build-out of its proprietary "Own Network" stablecoin payment and custody infrastructure.
Seed
Nof1 raised $15M in funding co-led by SUI Group Holdings and Karatage.
The AI trading lab is scaling Alpha Arena, a public experiment where frontier AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI trade autonomously in real markets with real capital, with the new capital powering the launch of a consumer platform for market coding agents and supporting SUI Group's push to apply Nof1's tech to automated corporate treasury and risk management.
Acquisition
Canopy was acquired by Movement Network in an undisclosed deal, bringing vault infrastructure in-house as Movement builds out its full financial stack.
The DeFi yield optimization platform deploys smart contracts on the Movement Network that let users and independent curators allocate assets and compose strategies on-chain, and will now integrate more tightly with MovePosition, Movement's on-chain credit protocol, as unified infrastructure under the network.
Backprop Finance was acquired by General Tensor from Tensorplex Labs in an undisclosed deal, alongside General Tensor's $5M raise across pre-seed and seed rounds backed by Digital Currency Group, Lvna Capital, and Good Morning Holdings.
The all-in-one Bittensor trading terminal handles roughly one-third of Bittensor's trading volume across its dTAO swap, subnet screener, trader leaderboard, and whale alert suite, and will continue under a full General Tensor development team focused on shipping new capabilities while preserving existing user data and portfolios.
Manadia was consolidated into AurumX in an undisclosed M&A transaction, formalizing the protocol's role as core technical infrastructure within the AurumX ecosystem.
The Web3 data settlement and AI coordination layer (already incubated by AurumX-backed AUR Labs) unifies a verifiable oracle, autonomous AI agent coordination, privacy-preserving settlement, and compliant payments into a single execution framework, with the deal anchoring Manadia's UMXM-powered stack beneath AurumX's multi-chain DeFi platform that bridges TradFi and crypto.
Billionaires In Beijing And The Death Of The Separation Myth
President Donald Trump concluded a highly anticipated diplomatic visit to Beijing this week alongside a powerhouse delegation of prominent American executives. The summit from May 13 to May 15 aimed to stabilize bilateral economic relations and test a fresh global trade framework. Over a dozen corporate leaders including Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook and Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang accompanied the administration to navigate this complex geopolitical pivot firsthand. Early reporting from CNBC confirms this meeting strengthened a fragile trade truce and provided operational clarity for multinational organizations.
The core narrative of the summit indicates Washington is officially abandoning the goal of total economic separation in favor of targeted risk mitigation. The technology industry views this transition as a major relief for maintaining global hardware production and securing critical mineral supply chains. Both nations appear willing to preserve integrated commercial networks for foundational components while erecting strict guardrails around advanced artificial intelligence capabilities. This nuanced policy allows Silicon Valley hardware firms to meet production schedules without violating emerging national security mandates.
This diplomatic recalibration provides immediate confidence for institutional finance operators managing international ventures and complex supply networks. Corporate leaders can now allocate capital toward global manufacturing with a significantly reduced fear of sudden sweeping tariffs. Chinese President Xi Jinping even explicitly pledged to open further to American business to attract corporate expansion. Market observers view this summit as a highly bullish indicator that geopolitical strategy is shifting to protect intellectual property while permitting Wall Street to safely access massive international consumer markets.
The GPU Hangover And The Substation Renaissance
The initial gold rush for artificial intelligence relied on a simple strategy of acquiring chips to secure market dominance. As aggressive silicon acquisition matures, institutional capital is rapidly rotating toward the physical constraints of the industry. This reality is supported by Goldman Sachs projecting a massive $7.6 trillion industrial buildout by 2031 where physical infrastructure serves as the primary scarce commodity. Furthermore, IDC reports that an unprecedented memory shortage could squeeze the market through 2027 because new infrastructure demands consume the global supply of premium components.
The pure compute trade is showing signs of extreme speculative excess across public equity markets. The recent Cerebras IPO achieved a massive $60 billion market capitalization on just $510 million in revenue despite heavy reliance on a single foreign wealth fund. Strategic investors are capitalizing on this frothy silicon market, evidenced by Leopold Aschenbrenner opening over $8.4 billion in put options against semiconductor favorites like Nvidia. Veteran market observers like Michael Burry have joined this trade by purchasing put options on millions of shares of Nvidia and Palantir to bet against overvalued hardware.
While shorting the silicon layer, these institutional funds are maintaining heavy long exposure to infrastructure platforms like Bloom Energy and Bitcoin miners. Major institutional players are now treating artificial intelligence as a physical asset class rather than a speculative technology investment. The $25 billion Blackstone and Google venture functions as a massive bet on data center real estate and direct power access. Even massive hardware deployments like the proposed Cerebras partnership with OpenAI fundamentally rely on securing 750 megawatts of scarce power capacity.
Ex OpenAI Leopold Aschenbrenner current alleged positions
Headlines
The Google Breakup Plan
The Department of Justice is officially pushing for Google to sell Chrome as part of its antitrust case against the company’s search dominance.
The argument is simple: Chrome is not just a browser. It is one of the most powerful distribution pipes on the internet, giving Google default access to billions of users before they ever make a search decision.
If the court agrees, this could become one of the most significant Big Tech breakups in modern history, reshaping search, browsers, advertising, and the default pathways people use to access the web.
The Trump Mobile Launch
Trump Mobile says its long delayed gold toned T1 phone is finally shipping this week, nearly a year after the company first announced the device.
The phone was originally marketed with heavy America first branding, though the company has since softened some claims around domestic manufacturing and now says the device is assembled in the United States.
The launch turns the T1 into more than a gadget story. It is a test of whether political branding can move real hardware in a market dominated by Apple, Samsung, and price sensitive Android buyers.
Persistent Core Inflation
Core inflation remains sticky, with April CPI data reinforcing the market’s growing belief that rate cuts are not coming quickly.
StoneX noted that stagflationary pressure, weaker growth, energy shocks, and persistent inflation risks are keeping the Fed boxed in, with the odds of a near term cut still pinned near zero.
For markets, that means the easy money trade has a problem. If inflation refuses to cool, risk assets may have to keep pricing a world where capital stays expensive for longer.
OpenAI vs Google Week
This week has become a major AI platform showdown, with OpenAI rolling out GPT-5.5 and Google hosting its I/O keynote across May 19 and May 20.
OpenAI is positioning GPT-5.5 as a major step forward for coding, research, analysis, and complex professional workflows, while Google is using I/O to showcase the next phase of Gemini, developer tools, and AI native product integrations.
The battle is no longer just about model quality. It is about distribution, ecosystem control, developer loyalty, and who owns the interface layer for the next generation of computing.
AI Citizens Divide
South Korea has rattled global tech markets by floating the idea of a national citizen dividend funded by AI driven productivity gains.
The proposal would effectively redirect a portion of excess AI related profits back to the public, turning the AI boom into a broader debate over who actually captures the value created by automation.
Markets did not love the idea. But politically, the message is clear: as AI enriches chipmakers, hyperscalers, and automation platforms, governments are starting to ask whether citizens deserve a cut.
Regulation Roundup
United States 🇺🇸
SEC Readies Tokenized Stock Framework as Wall Street Moves Deeper Onchain
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly preparing an “innovation exemption” that would create a new framework for trading tokenized versions of publicly listed stocks, potentially allowing crypto platforms to offer blockchain based exposure to traditional equities.
The proposal could let tokenized stocks trade on decentralized platforms without requiring the consent or backing of the underlying public companies, though the tokens may not carry traditional shareholder rights such as voting privileges or dividends.
The move marks one of the clearest signs yet that U.S. regulators are treating tokenization as a market structure issue rather than a niche crypto experiment, giving Wall Street a clearer path to bring equities, ETFs, and other securities onto blockchain rails.
Minnesota Banks and Credit Unions to Offer Crypto
Minnesota has enacted a first in the Midwest law allowing state chartered banks and credit unions to offer regulated crypto custody services beginning August 1.
The law permits certain virtual currency custody services to be offered by financial institutions, creating a path for local banks and credit unions to compete with crypto native custody providers while keeping digital asset safekeeping inside regulated banking channels.
For U.S. crypto adoption, this is not the flashiest headline, but it may be one of the more practical ones. Custody remains the foundation for institutional and consumer access, and Minnesota just gave traditional financial institutions permission to enter the room.
International 🌏
Polish lawmakers passed a long delayed crypto assets bill designed to align the country with the European Union’s MiCA framework, moving ahead of a key implementation window that could determine whether domestic firms can continue offering crypto services under EU rules.
The vote comes as prosecutors investigate Zondacrypto, Poland’s largest crypto exchange, over alleged losses exceeding 350 million zlotys, or roughly $96 million, with thousands of users reportedly still unable to access their funds.
The bill turns MiCA implementation into more than a compliance exercise. For Poland, crypto regulation is now tied to fraud prevention, consumer protection, and national security concerns.
B2C2 Europe has secured authorization under the EU’s MiCA framework, allowing the institutional liquidity provider to offer crypto asset services across Europe.
The license enables B2C2 to provide OTC spot trading services through MiCA’s passporting mechanism, giving institutional clients regulated access to digital asset liquidity across the European market.
The approval shows MiCA moving from policy text to competitive advantage. As Europe’s transition deadline approaches, firms with licenses in hand are positioning themselves as compliant rails for institutional crypto trading while slower competitors are still sorting paperwork.
