Trust, markets and infrastructure when stakes are real.
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Let’s be clear that ARK tokenizing ARKVX isn’t OpenAI going onchain. It’s shares in an SEC-registered interval fund, tokenized through @Securitize, starting on @ethereum.
What interests me is tokenization reaching further into investments most people can’t access directly. Cash and T-bills were a useful starting point. A venture portfolio brings a different set of reasons to participate and evidence of adoption. It’s a big step.
The usual tech download from our CTO on how we implemented the ARK Ventures fund tokenization using ERC-7540 (which was initially proposed by @centrifuge
and others, credit where it's due) to extend ERC-4626 for asynchronous vaults, given the nature of how we can issue fund shares for this product.
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Looking forward to two great days in Philly.
For 10 years, the Fintech Conference has brought together decision makers across finance, policy, academia, and technology. Join us this year for fresh insights on how fintech is transforming markets and regulation. Registration is still open. bit.ly/4cQydx4
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Very clear signal. So much to build to get ready.
🇺🇸 JUST IN: CFTC Chairman Selig says US markets must prepare for "mass tokenization" as blockchains and AI are "adopted at scale."
Selig told the US Treasury Market Conference that "the next decade will likely bring more change to financial markets than the previous several decades combined."
The CFTC expanded eligible collateral to include stablecoins in February and is looking to drive further adoption across exchanges and clearinghouses.
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3 years ago. I like the analogy and all will agree that an AI swarm escaping its sandbox is not bathtub gin.
The Baptists And Bootleggers Of AI
Economists have observed a longstanding pattern in reform movements of this kind. The actors within movements like these fall into two categories – “Baptists” and “Bootleggers” – drawing on the historical example of the prohibition of alcohol in the United States in the 1920’s:
“Baptists” are the true believer social reformers who legitimately feel – deeply and emotionally, if not rationally – that new restrictions, regulations, and laws are required to prevent societal disaster. For alcohol prohibition, these actors were often literally devout Christians who felt that alcohol was destroying the moral fabric of society. For AI risk, these actors are true believers that AI presents one or another existential risks – strap them to a polygraph, they really mean it.
“Bootleggers” are the self-interested opportunists who stand to financially profit by the imposition of new restrictions, regulations, and laws that insulate them from competitors. For alcohol prohibition, these were the literal bootleggers who made a fortune selling illicit alcohol to Americans when legitimate alcohol sales were banned. For AI risk, these are CEOs who stand to make more money if regulatory barriers are erected that form a cartel of government-blessed AI vendors protected from new startup and open source competition – the software version of “too big to fail” banks.
A cynic would suggest that some of the apparent Baptists are also Bootleggers – specifically the ones paid to attack AI by their universities, think tanks, activist groups, and media outlets. If you are paid a salary or receive grants to foster AI panic…you are probably a Bootlegger.
The problem with the Bootleggers is that they win. The Baptists are naive ideologues, the Bootleggers are cynical operators, and so the result of reform movements like these is often that the Bootleggers get what they want – regulatory capture, insulation from competition, the formation of a cartel – and the Baptists are left wondering where their drive for social improvement went so wrong.
We just lived through a stunning example of this – banking reform after the 2008 global financial crisis. The Baptists told us that we needed new laws and regulations to break up the “too big to fail” banks to prevent such a crisis from ever happening again. So Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which was marketed as satisfying the Baptists’ goal, but in reality was coopted by the Bootleggers – the big banks. The result is that the same banks that were “too big to fail” in 2008 are much, much larger now.
So in practice, even when the Baptists are genuine – and even when the Baptists are right – they are used as cover by manipulative and venal Bootleggers to benefit themselves.
And this is what is happening in the drive for AI regulation right now.
However, it isn’t sufficient to simply identify the actors and impugn their motives. We should consider the arguments of both the Baptists and the Bootleggers on their merits.
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So they are building toward RSI on purpose because that’s how you stay at the frontier.
And they’re telling everyone else the next phase is a coordination problem because once the loop starts feeding itself then a leaderboard is a stupid way to decide how fast the loop should run.
I wrote about the state of AI, why I’m concerned about the next few years, and the choices we need to make to keep the future in humanity’s hands.
An Alien Mind: openai.com/index/an-alien-mi…
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Markets do not wait for conclusive proof. They adopt when the evidence reduces uncertainty enough that the expected value exceeds the remaining risk.
The path is:
claim → credible evidence → bounded acceptance → real use → observed performance → broader adoption
That is why collateral use is such a strong signal. Trading shows interest but accepting an asset as collateral shows that someone has examined the evidence, assigned it value and put their balance sheet behind the decision.
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Regulated custody is necessary but it does not make an onchain asset institution-ready. The missing layer is turning live evidence about contracts, reserves and incidents into each custodian’s own acceptance decision.
Otherwise risk is not removed. It just changes address.
If stablecoins are going to scale to the masses, balances need to sit at regulated custodians like Anchorage rather than in on-chain programs. We need to take risk outof defi as much as possible for defi to be adopted by the masses.
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He’s right. Great potential
What if owning a stock came with perks?
Tokenized shares could let companies identify and reward their shareholders directly — from exclusive offers to benefits for voting.
@Bullish’s @ThomasCowan93 explains why the real unlock of tokenization may go far beyond 24/7 trading.
@jennsanasie brings you Brand New Rails, presented by @Realfi_co.
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Tom Zschach retweeted
Looking forward to a DC homecoming: seeing the monuments, catching up with friends, and, naturally, discussing programmable settlement.
@thestablecon, I’m excited to explore the future of money, including how stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and interoperable infrastructure can create a more programmable, always-on financial system for institutions and their customers.
I’ll be sharing the stage with Matt Higginson (@mckinsey), Marc Boiron (@polygon), and @TomZschach on September 10 for the “From Correspondent Banking to Programmable Settlement” panel. See you there!
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Everyone building tokenized assets is chasing the same prize which is liquidity.
Instant settlement. 24/7 markets. Collateral that can move anywhere.
For me, liquidity is the unlock. But acceptance is the collision point and algorithmic decision-makers are the deadline.
The clearest way to describe where we are now is: Liquidity is not issued. It is accepted.
An instrument that settles in seconds but takes weeks to accept is not liquid. It is stranded. Static whitelists work for a small, stable universe of familiar assets. They do not scale to thousands of assets whose backing, controls, authority and eligibility can change continuously.
The 2nd force has a hard edge. An algorithm making decisions in milliseconds cannot read a PDF, chase an email or wait for a committee.
When the counterparty becomes software, evidence must become machine-verifiable. Otherwise, the human review queue becomes the ceiling on the entire system.
Tokenization does not unlock liquidity by making assets move faster.
It unlocks liquidity when counterparties can decide, safely and immediately, whether to accept what arrives.
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Why this matters -> a tokenized security has crossed from issuance into the ordinary operations of regulated traditional funds.
This is a major market-structure signal because tokenization is moving from producing assets to having regulated institutions operationally accept them.
BREAKING: $872 BILLION Franklin Templeton just got the first-ever SEC clearance to put tokenized assets inside traditional investment funds.
Its blockchain-based money market fund BENJI can now be held as collateral inside ETFs and mutual funds, bringing tokenized assets into portfolios that never asked for them.
The move could take effect as early as Q4, per Bloomberg.
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The most insightful point is the second-order effect when intelligence becomes cheap, trusted institutions, identity, community, history and physical experiences become scarcer and therefore more valuable. 💯
If you’re a young investor trying to make sense of this market, you have to bookmark this and read it line by line. Josh Kushner (whose a legend imo) wrote his first ever formal letter to backers of his $65 billion firm, Thrive Capital. it offers a rare window into where the smartest capital is actually flowing.
Winning isn't about diversification anymore…
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Great to see @HSBC and @StanChart moving first. Well done. 🏆
🚨JUST IN: HSBC and Standard Chartered complete the FIRST ever cross-border tokenized deposit on Swift's blockchain ledger.
Swift's network connects over 11,500 banks worldwide, and is now piloting 24/7 blockchain settlement with 17 banks across six continents.
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🚀
🇺🇸 White House Crypto Summit recap:
• President Trump says US considers buying "sizable" amounts of Bitcoin & other crypto.
• Trump calls on Congress to pass Crypto Clarity Act.
• Trump says US is ensuring it remains the "undisputed leader" in $BTC & crypto.
• Hyperliquid $HYPE pumps 15% to $69 after Trump says CFTC is working to bring it to US.
• SEC Chair Paul Atkins says "we will ensure that the greatest advances of the technological frontier are realized right here in America."
• Gemini co-founders say "America should lead in crypto and win in market."
• Trump says he "ended the war on crypto once and for all."
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Time to learn about local Ai.
Looks like you can now run a model that is better than Opus 4.6 on your laptop.
We promised open weights for Qwen3.8. Now, time to meet them! 🎉
⚡ Qwen3.8-27B:
- A native multimodal dense model. With just 27B parameters, it outperforms Qwen3.7-Plus overall and shines in real-world coding & office workflows.
- 262K native context, easily extendable to 1M tokens via YaRN.
- Built for builders. Highly efficient, high-quality, and licensed under Apache 2.0.
🚀 The open weights for Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B (Max-level) have also been released recently.
Whether you're shipping lightweight applications with Qwen3.8-27B locally or building agents with Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B, they're yours now!
Download, deploy, and build something we haven't imagined yet. 👀👇
- Hugging Face：
huggingface.co/collections/Q…
- ModelScope：
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