Korea just gave us a deadline, and we built for exactly this. We opened our Seoul office in January, ahead of this announcement, because we believed this moment was coming. DARE certifies companies and professionals on digital asset governance, the readiness gap that regulation alone cannot close. Phase one is legally live February 2027. That is not far away. Japan and Singapore made similar moves the same month. This is not a Korea story, it is the direction the rest of the world is heading, and Korea is just where we are positioned first. We are putting together a small bridge round ahead of our Pre-Series A, to fund sales and marketing in Korea and move fast while this window is open. If you are an angel investor who wants to hear more, DM me.

🚨HUGE: Crypto funding in Southeast Asia has DOUBLED to $680 MILLION in 2026, but most of it went to a single company. Crypto dot com's $400 MILLION raise alone made up nearly 60% of the entire region's total. The number of deals actually FELL, from 46 last year to just 25, as investors pile into a handful of mature firms instead of early startups. Singapore dominates completely, taking 82.5% of all blockchain funding the region has ever raised.

🇸🇬 JUST IN: Singapore proposes BANNING stablecoin issuers from paying yield to holders. The Monetary Authority of Singapore wants 100% reserve backing at all times, segregated custody, stress testing, and mandatory wind-down plans. Only licensed issuers can call their tokens "MAS-regulated stablecoins." The US GENIUS Act, the EU's MiCA, Hong Kong, and Japan already enforce similar rules. FIVE of the world's biggest financial hubs now regulate stablecoins as payment tools, not investments.

🇸🇬 NOW: Singapore's MAS proposes amendments to the Payment Services Act to establish a formal regulatory framework for stablecoins, open for public comment until October 16.

BREAKING: Charles Schwab to add Solana to Schwab Crypto Direct SOL access for 39.9M brokerage accounts, sitting on $13.04T in client assets

Aura Memecoin Frenzy On Solana Picks Up Pace AURA has surged roughly 50% over the past 24 hours, reaching $0.0246. The Solana based memecoin is now up more than 110% over seven days. Its market capitalization has climbed to approximately $23 million during the rally. solana:DtR4D9FtVoTX2569gaL837ZgrB6wNjj6tkmnX9Rdk9B2 draws its identity from the viral social media trend around “aura points.” The project turns that cultural meme into a community driven token ecosystem. Its ecosystem also includes a native meme generator designed to drive community engagement.

🚨 $AURA (@auracoinsolana ) emerges as the top gainer among the top 30 Solana memecoins.

JUST IN: Amazon delivery drivers in Japan will be paid in stablecoins AZ-COM Maruwa, Amazon's largest delivery partner in Japan, will pay 2,300 carriers and independent drivers using yen-backed stablecoin JPYC. It marks the country's first large-scale corporate stablecoin rollout.

🚨BREAKING: SWIFT confirms 17 banks are now preparing to pilot CRYPTO-style cross-border payments. The pilots will use tokenized deposits on Swift’s new blockchain ledger, allowing banks to move funds 24/7. Banks include: 1. ANZ 2. BNP Paribas 3. BNY 4. Citi 5. DBS 6. First Abu Dhabi Bank (FAB) 7. FirstRand Bank Limited 8. HSBC 9. Itaú Unibanco 10. Lloyds Bank 11. Mashreq 12. MUFG Bank 13. OCBC 14. Standard Chartered 15. UBS 16. UOB 17. Wells Fargo Swift says its infrastructure moves the equivalent of world GDP every 2 to 3 days across 200+ markets.

Circle just lost a fifth of its value in a single day, and the blow came from its own inner circle. Its stock fell 17 percent after a new stablecoin launched, which is normal. What is not normal is who built it…. the asset manager that runs roughly 80 percent of Circle's reserves, the exchange that co-founded USDC and is paid nearly a billion a year to distribute it, and the bank that holds the money. BlackRock, Coinbase, and BNY Mellon all backed a rival to the coin they help operate. The story is not really about a competitor. Circle makes money one way, and it explains the whole reaction. $USDC is a digital dollar. For every one in circulation, Circle holds a real dollar in cash and short-term Treasuries, roughly 74 billion dollars of reserves, and the interest those reserves earn is almost the entire business. About 80 percent of that pile sits in one fund, the Circle Reserve Fund, managed by BlackRock and custodied by BNY Mellon. To get USDC into the world, Circle pays distributors. In one recent year it paid Coinbase alone 908 million dollars. On June 30th more than 140 companies launched a competitor called Open USD, and it inverts the one thing Circle relied on. Instead of the issuer keeping the reserve interest, Open USD shares almost all of it with the businesses that use and distribute the coin. Free to mint, free to redeem, no caps. For any firm that had been helping Circle earn that interest for a fee, the math flips: stop collecting a fee to build someone else's yield, and collect the yield yourself. The names that signed on are the core of Circle's own machine. The exchange that co-created USDC and earns close to a billion a year distributing it is not only backing Open USD, it is launching it on Base, the blockchain that exchange itself owns. The manager of roughly 80 percent of USDC's reserves is backing it too, and so is the custodian bank. The firms paid to run the reserves, sell the coin, and hold the assets are helping stand up an alternative. This was clearly written into the incentives from the start. Coinbase earning 908 million to distribute Circle's product is Coinbase working for Circle. Coinbase owning a share of a rival that runs on its own chain is Coinbase working for itself. Once a distributor can own the economics instead of renting them, loyalty to the issuer means leaving money on the table. And the Coinbase deal is up for renewal in August, so Circle now renegotiates with a partner that just helped launch the alternative. That does not make the outcome certain. It changes who holds the leverage. The deeper pattern reaches far past Circle if you look carefully. It is the risk in any business whose profit comes from sitting in the middle of other people's money. Circle's role was to be the middleman on the digital dollar, holding the reserves and keeping the interest while everyone else moved the coin. That works until the parties on both sides decide they can route around you and split what you kept. The reserve manager, the distributor, and the custodian do not structurally need the issuer to capture that yield, and Open USD is the first serious attempt to prove it. None of this means Circle is doomed, and the fair reading matters. This is also just rational diversification. BlackRock earns fees across every rail it can touch, backing a new one does not require abandoning the old one, and Open USD does not launch until later this year. USDC is still trusted, deeply liquid, and regulated, and Circle's CEO argues the market is big enough for many winners, which may well be true. But the message in the stock is hard to miss. A company whose whole moat was owning the middle just watched the firms on either side of it agree to build a road around it. The most dangerous rival is rarely the stranger. It is the partner who already knows exactly how you get paid.

Lee Kuan Yew was a genius

We are hiring, if you are looking for 3 inside sales roles. Some experience required but will consider fresh grads who are interested. Please feel free to DM me or connect me 🙌🏻🙏🏻 @Wush_co

🇸🇬 JUST IN: Singapore's DBS bank to launch tokenized physical gold for retail customers via its digibank app.

24 years old. Fully paid off Costco hotdog. It's not "parents money". It's not luck. It's consistency. It's discipline. I grind EVERYDAY to live this lifestyle.

This is fantastic regulatory claritythat paves the way forward

BREAKING: The SEC has formally classified SOL as a digital commodity in its new crypto asset taxonomy, alongside BTC, ETH,  and 14 other assets. SOL is not a security.

Still kinda hot tbh