
ECB launches tokenized trades in central bank money
Pontes lets banks settle tokenized trades in central bank money. Our take on stablecoin competition, limited operating hours and Europe’s next test.
Understand the shifts changing digital assets and global finance.

Pontes lets banks settle tokenized trades in central bank money. Our take on stablecoin competition, limited operating hours and Europe’s next test.

The Senate killed the Clarity Act 49-50. Two days later the SEC gave tokenized stock venues a five-year exemption. And Deutsche Bank launches digital asset custody.

The SEC legalized onchain US stock trading for five years, by order, two days after the Senate killed Clarity. Almost nothing trading onchain today qualifies.

The Clarity Act died 49-50. The three fights that killed it were not about crypto, and the SEC walks away holding the pen. Winners and losers, by seat.

Clarity Act ethics concessions, developer protections and a proposed stablecoin rewards circuit breaker, plus the Fed meeting and Arc's planned launch.

The final Clarity Act text gives Democrats delayed ethics rules, developers a civil-only shield and banks an 18-month rewards brake. What each side got, and what it didn't.

Stablecoins and tokenized stocks: Nasdaq's Payward deal, U.S. Bank's USBDC pilot, Circle's Tazapay agreement and the Clarity vote.

On September 8, Circle agreed to buy Tazapay, a Singapore B2B cross-border payments company, for $400M in Circle stock, closing in 2027. Investors shrugged; CRCL fell 5.75% to $96.18 on the day. Why it matters: Every write-up says Circle bought the last mile. Wrong frame. Circle keeps 39 cents of every dollar USDC earns in interest and gives the rest to distributors, mostly Coinbase. It will keep every cent Tazapay charges in fees.

A tenth the take.

Shared float.

Hey, it’s Marc.

Narrow banking.

Spend management.

Mastercard closed BVNK, Western Union shipped a stablecoin card, Visa opened stablecoin payouts, and Circle's numbers explain why: volume is exploding while the float lags far behind.

Circle reported $701 million in Q2 revenue this morning, took final approval from the OCC for its national trust bank charter, and set 16 September as the mainnet date for Arc, its own settlement chain, with BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, and Mastercard among the founding validators.

Tether published its Q2 2026 attestation in late July.

In 1973, a group of banks had a problem: none of them trusted a rival to run the wires between them.

Our biggest report on the tokenized private credit opportunity yet.

The market-structure fight is narrowing to a single clause — and the outcome could set crypto's US path for the decade.

DTCC moved tokenized equities from pilot language into production. The real signal is what market infrastructure now treats as deployable.