EP. 104 | We're Going All Out for NY Tech Week
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Success is defined by the hands you shake and the company you keep.
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Introduction.com is the interface. But there is a system operating underneath it.
That system is Arcadia, the growth and distribution firm behind some of the most precision-led go-to-market campaigns in the industry.
Arcadia focuses on turning positioning into measurable market movement through narrative design, creator-led distribution, and ecosystem-level coordination.
Across recent work, that has included:
• Demand-Led User Acquisition: onboarding 500,000+ users for a single product launch by aligning audience mapping, creator selection, and message positioning into one coordinated system.
• Signal Amplification Systems: increasing smart reach by 400%+ through structured narrative deployment across high-trust creator networks rather than broad distribution.
• Perception Engineering: driving 300%+ lifts in sentiment by refining how products are framed before they reach the market and shaping early interpretation.
• Conversation Expansion Frameworks: scaling organic discussion by over 100% through positioning-led distribution that prioritizes relevance over volume.
What ties this together is control over how a product enters the market, who interprets it first, and how that interpretation compounds.
Arcadia operates at the layer between product and perception, where market understanding is formed.
For teams expanding into new markets or refining how their product is understood at scale, Arcadia functions as the execution system behind that process.
Member Spotlight
This week we want to celebrate a member building the infrastructure layer for a more connected onchain financial system.
Meet Philipp Zentner 👋
Philipp is Co-Founder & CEO of LI.FI, helping solve one of crypto’s biggest friction points: moving capital seamlessly across chains, assets, and applications.
A serial founder with nearly two decades of experience spanning Web3, SaaS, bioinformatics, and consumer tech, Philipp has built online ventures since 2005, founded multiple companies, and raised over $50M in venture capital.
Today, LI.FI powers $10B+ in monthly volume across 70+ chains, serving 1,000+ institutions, wallets, and protocols including Robinhood, Binance, and Arbitrum.
This week marked another major milestone with the launch of LI.FI Intents, a product designed to make it dramatically easier for businesses to launch onchain financial products.
From stablecoin payments and real-world assets to compliant liquidity and customizable transaction execution, the vision is clear:
Markets do not care about chains.
They care about access, liquidity, speed, and execution.
This is what our network is all about.
Access is Earned. Keep building.
🗽️️️️ NY Tech Week 🗽️️️️
New York is about to get loud.
Panels, happy hours, packed calendars, badge scanning, and more events than anyone can reasonably attend.
So naturally, Introduction.com is bringing the room.
Throughout NY Tech Week, we’ll be active with special updates, breakout rooms, debriefs, member meetups, and a few things we probably shouldn’t post publicly yet…
On June 4, we’re hosting VIP Only: Institutions & Introductions
A private, invitation-only dinner built for executives, founders, investors, operators.
The top 1% shaping what comes next.
Cocktails at The Bazaar Bar. Ritzy energy. Fine dining. Curated conversations.
Decision-makers only.
And we’re not just coming for one dinner.
On June 3, Assets & Access NYC: Tech Week takes over PubKey for our founder, operator, and investor meetup.
This one is open to the public, which is rare for us.
If you have been watching Introduction.com from the outside, this is your chance to step inside before the doors get tighter.
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.
The loudest moments will not be the most important ones.
The real action happens behind closed doors, in curated rooms, with the people building seriously, investing seriously, partnering seriously, and growing with intention.
You might miss the noise.
Don’t miss the room.
Access is earned.
Introduction.com has been on the move.
New York. Miami. London. Malibu. San Francisco.
Private dinners. Penthouse views. Member meetups. Conference weeks.
Rooms worth flying for.
So it only makes sense that the access should not stop when the event ends.
Introducing Entravel: a private members club for luxury hotels, premium stays, and exclusive travel access.
When our members travel, the stay should feel just as intentional as the room.
And because Entravel is an Introduction.com partner, our members get exclusive access to:
→ Up to 64% off hotels and accommodations
→ Luxury hotels and premium stays
→ Simple booking in just a few clicks
→ Secure payment and instant confirmation
Introduction.com members can access these exclusive discounts directly through the member portal.
Everyone else can check out Entravel and explore their members-only travel platform here: Entravel.com
We are not kidding when we say it:
Membership has its privileges.
Access is earned.
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
Introduction.com Member Meetup: Money2020
Tuesday, June 2
3:00 PM - 5:00 PM GMT+2
The Lobby Nesplein
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Proof of Talk 2026
20% off admission, exclusively for our readers. Use code INTRODUCTION20 for Proof of Talk
June 2nd & June 3rd
The Louvre Palace
Paris, France
The (un)Banked Conference: Presented by Input Global
Wednesday, June 3rd
Fosbury & Sons Members Club
Prinsengracht, Amsterdam
Assets & Access NYC: Tech Week
Wednesday, June 3
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM EDT
Pubkey
New York, United States
Candlelight Dinner by Paybis
Wednesday, June 3
7:00 PM - 11:00 PM GMT+2
Jaap’s Private Dining
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Assets & Access Tampa @ The Copper Shaker
Thursday, June 4
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM EDT
The Copper Shaker Ybor
Tampa, United States
Top Raises
Member Activity
Series A
Variational landed $50M in Series A funding led by Dragonfly Capital, with participation from Bain Capital Crypto and Coinbase Ventures.
The Cayman Islands-based peer-to-peer derivatives protocol runs Omni, a perps app that aggregates liquidity from crypto exchanges, DeFi, and traditional finance dealers rather than from niche crypto shops.
The team will use the capital to open Omni to the public in select jurisdictions and deepen real-world asset liquidity for instruments like oil and commodities.
Big win for Pia Maria Szabo and the coinbase team! Love to see it.
Catena Labs closed a $30M Series A co-led by Acrew Capital and Andreessen Horowitz (a16z crypto), with participation from Breyer Capital, General Catalyst, QED Investors, Oak HC/FT, IDG Capital, and Coinbase Ventures.
Founded by Circle co-founder Sean Neville, the US-based startup is building the first AI-native financial institution, regulated infrastructure that lets AI agents identify themselves and move money under human-set guardrails like spending limits and approved recipients.
It has also applied for a national trust bank charter in New York from the OCC.
A16z stays leading the pack! Maggie Hsu keep it up!
TownSquare raised $16.25M in Series A funding with backing from World Liberty Financial, OKX Ventures, Amber Group, Arcane Group, Animoca Ventures, Stakeholder Capital, Auros Global, Bixin Ventures, DoraHacks, Ankaa, Mulana IM, and Aptos.
The crosschain yield infrastructure provider powers institutional curated vaults and onchain brokerage, working with curator teams on trading strategies across Monad, Ethereum, and BNB Chain.
It also brings the USD1 stablecoin and onchain gold-backed RWAs into its pipeline.
Glad to see OKX getting in the mix. Big shoutout to Diogo Duarte and team!
Strategic
Squid raised $6M in a strategic round led by North Island Ventures, with participation from Ripple, Dialectic, and Borderless Capital.
The cross-chain swap and routing platform enables token swaps, bridging, and value transfer across 100+ blockchains in a single transaction.
It has processed over $6B in cross-chain volume since 2023 and powers cross-chain features in 1,000+ apps including MetaMask, Ripple, and Ledger.
Gladd Ripple is on our team!
DAOKraft secured $3.4M in a private round backed by Animoca Brands and Castrum Capital.
The governance intelligence layer for DAOs helps contributors make better-informed decisions before voting, surfacing the context behind proposals across onchain governance.
Can’t stop Animoca! LFG Luca Ioannis and the rest of the Animoca team!
Jia raised $3M in a round led by Coinbase Ventures, with participation from the Stellar Development Foundation, A100x, The Chernin Group, and Hashed Emergent, bringing total funding to $7.3M.
Founded by Tala alumni and headquartered in the Philippines and Los Angeles, the startup is building a financial operating system for small businesses in Southeast Asia, offering invoice and supply-chain financing underwritten by its proprietary Ossicone AI credit engine.
It will direct the capital toward scaling its Jia Accounts platform and deepening on-chain infrastructure across Base, Stellar, Arbitrum, Celo, Polygon, and Ripple.
Coinbase racking up the W’s this week! Lets not forget Kevin Leffew, congratsa on the win!
Seed
Checker closed an $8M seed round backed by Galaxy Ventures, Framework Ventures, Bitso, DFS Lab, Onigiri Capital, Escape Velocity, and SNZ Holding.
The stablecoin infrastructure startup offers a single API for financial institutions to launch and scale stablecoin products across FX, payments, trading, and investment use cases.
It also plans to expand into settlement financing and AI-enabled agents.
Out of this world … I mean galaxy! Huge shoutout to CJ Huntzinger and the Galaxy team on the participation.
Sorted Wallet raised $4.4M in a seed round co-led by Tether and Gnosis, with participation from Movement.
The non-custodial wallet is built for emerging markets and is just 10MB, light enough to run on stripped-down feature phones.
It has surpassed 500,000 downloads across Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Madagascar, and Mexico, with the capital funding new mobile operator integrations and a new payment mechanism.
Glad Tether is with us!
Acquisition
Decent.xyz was acquired by MoonPay in an undisclosed deal, the payments company's fourth acquisition of the year, alongside the launch of MoonPay Trade.
The cross-chain routing and liquidity company brings proprietary routing algorithms, bridge infrastructure, and a liquidity layer for onchain execution, settlement, conversion, and payments across 200+ chains and protocols in-house.
To the Moon! Congrats Halsey Huth and the Moonpay team!
Blocknative was acqui-hired by Deloitte in an undisclosed deal, with its team set to drive Web3 innovation across Deloitte's client portfolio.
The crypto infrastructure firm is known for real-time mempool monitoring, gas-fee prediction, and transaction management since 2018.
It is winding down its APIs and Gas Network, with services expected to run through June 19 as the company ceases independent operations.
Massive shoutout to Sean O'Connor and the Blocknative team! Love seeing TradFi and DeFi join teams.
Non-Member Activity
Strategic
Kalshi raised an additional $200M from Baillie Gifford and Layer Global, holding the $22B valuation set in March's $1B Series F led by Coatue.
The CFTC-regulated prediction market exchange lets users trade binary "event contracts" on real-world outcomes spanning politics, sports, economic indicators, and weather.
Each contract resolves to $1 if the event occurs.
SignalPlus secured $40M in a strategic investment from HashKey Group.
The enterprise technology company builds options trading infrastructure for digital assets, including advanced risk management, smart automated orders, and multi-exchange connectivity.
It serves both retail and professional traders with real-time market data across major venues.
PopDEX raised $30M in a round led by Foresight X.
The trader-first perpetual DEX is focused on capital efficiency, trading experience, and returning platform value to active contributors.
It is currently refining the product with selected traders through a closed test program covering trading process, capital efficiency, risk control, and user experience.
Series B
JPYC closed a $19.5M Series B backed by Life Design Fund, IHD Strategy Fund, Awagin Capital, and Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance.
The Japanese fintech and stablecoin issuer provides yen-pegged digital assets for blockchain-based payments and Web3 commerce.
It focuses on regulatory compliance and enterprise integrations within Japan's evolving digital-asset framework.
Seed
AEON raised $8M in a round led by YZi Labs (ex-Binance Labs), with participation from IDG Capital, HashKey Capital, Blockchain Builders Fund, Oak Grove Ventures, SevenX Ventures, Draper Dragon, and UpHonest Capital.
The project is building a foundational settlement layer for the emerging agentic economy, infrastructure it argues becomes necessary as AI gains economic agency.Apply Today
Regulation Roundup
United States 🇺🇸
CLARITY Act Clears Senate Banking Committee on Its Way to the Floor
The Senate Banking Committee advanced the CLARITY Act, the long awaited crypto market structure bill, to the full Senate with a bipartisan 15-9 vote, with Senators Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks joining Republicans in support.
The bill sets out how digital assets are sorted between the SEC and the CFTC, carves out a separate category for stablecoins under joint oversight, and creates a framework for tokenizing securities, but it still needs to be reconciled with the Senate Agriculture Committee's version before a floor vote and then merged with the House's own CLARITY Act.
This was the moment the effort stopped being a wishlist and became real legislation, though a contested conflict of interest provision and last minute worries about how the final text could disadvantage DeFi mean the hardest negotiations are still ahead.
Warren Accuses OCC of Illegally Granting Crypto Bank Charters
Senator Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to OCC Comptroller Jonathan Gould on May 18 accusing the agency of unlawfully granting national trust bank charters to at least nine crypto firms, including Coinbase, Ripple, Circle, Paxos, BitGo, and Fidelity Digital Assets, and demanding all related records by June 1.
Warren argues the OCC violated the National Bank Act by chartering firms whose core activities, such as staking, lending, and stablecoin issuance, are not the fiduciary services trust banks are meant to provide, and she pointedly asked for communications between the agency and the Trump family tied to the approvals.
The industry hit back fast, with the Digital Chamber urging the OCC to stand firm, setting up a fight over whether the federal banking on ramp that firms like Coinbase and Ripple have already won can survive political and legal scrutiny.
SEC Moves to Issue Its Tokenized Stock "Innovation Exemption"
Following last week's reports that it was preparing the ground, the SEC is now moving to issue its "innovation exemption" for tokenized equities, with the rollout targeted for on or around May 18.
The exemption would let crypto native platforms, and notably some DeFi protocols, offer onchain trading of tokens tied to publicly listed US stocks without full broker dealer or exchange registration during a limited experimental window, with qualifying projects receiving a 12 to 36 month runway under the agency's Project Crypto framework.
Where the earlier Nasdaq and NYSE approvals kept tokenized trading inside the existing market structure, this exemption is the clearest signal yet that regulators want to give crypto native venues a real on ramp to bring equities and other securities onto blockchain rails.
CFTC Goes to War With the States Over Prediction Markets
The CFTC is moving on two fronts at once, drafting new rules to set clear standards for prediction markets after withdrawing its earlier proposed ban on political and sports event contracts, while simultaneously suing Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, and Wisconsin to defend its claim of exclusive federal jurisdiction.
The fight escalated after a federal appeals court ruled in April that New Jersey could not bar residents from using Kalshi to bet on sporting events, handing the agency and the platforms a key win in the clash between federal commodities oversight and state gaming laws.
With Democrats pressing the CFTC to rein in sports betting and address insider trading on these venues, the outcome will decide whether event contracts on Kalshi and Polymarket are regulated as federal derivatives or left exposed to a patchwork of state gambling regimes.
International 🌏
EU Bans the Entire Russian and Belarusian Crypto Ecosystem
The EU's 20th sanctions package took effect on May 24, imposing a blanket prohibition on all crypto asset transactions with any crypto asset service provider established in Russia or Belarus, a shift from targeting individual platforms to banning the whole ecosystem.
The package also delivers the first sovereign stablecoin blacklist in history, adding the ruble backed RUBx and the digital ruble to its list of prohibited assets, with the digital ruble ban deliberately preemptive ahead of Russia's planned CBDC rollout in September.
Brussels explicitly cited the futility of one off designations, pointing to cases like the Garantex to Grinex migration where sanctioned operators simply relaunched under a new name, and is now treating the architecture of evasion, rather than individual firms, as the target.
UK Folds Stablecoins and Tokenized Deposits Into Its Payments Regime
Announced during Fintech Week in London, HM Treasury set out a plan to bring stablecoins and tokenized deposits inside the same regulatory framework as traditional payment services, with stablecoins used for payments sitting under a new issuance and payments regime aligned with Bank of England and FCA oversight.
The package includes fresh funding for the Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology and the appointment of Chris Woolard, an EY partner and former interim CEO of the FCA, as Wholesale Digital Markets Champion to lead work on tokenized wholesale finance.
Rather than treating digital money as a separate regime, the UK is signaling it wants stablecoins and tokenized deposits competing on the same rails as bank payments, part of a broader push to position the country as a global hub for regulated digital finance.
