Ondo and Superstate Launch Tokenized Stocks, Trump to Tokenize Gaza, & More RWA News - STS 299

Speaker A: Foreign. Uh,

Speaker B: What is going on everybody? Happy Friday. It's an amazing start to the September for RWAs. And we've got episode 299 of the latest and greatest RWA tokenization news news for you. And it's a late night session recording. We got some travel plans coming up. As Kyle mentioned last week, he's heading over to Asia. So uh, a little bit quiet here tonight but wow, it doesn't matter. What a week of news, right? Kyle, how are you this week?

Speaker A: I'm doing great. I'm doing great. I am uh, about to be en route towards Asia so um, I'm getting ready for all my travel there. But I uh, I'm excited to be here for another amazing episode. Herwig. We're uh, we're rolling the through through UH 2025 here already in September everybody's

Speaker B: coming back from their summer vacations and it's clear because we've got a lot to get into so why don't we just get right into it? Kyle, I gotta say I don't really know where to start. We're picking these in no specific order about what the biggest headlines were this week, but I'm going to start it out with uh, with Galaxy. This is a multi billion dollar crypto firm that is now public and uh, has the market's eye if you will after uh, going public this year actually. But now not only are they a multi billion dollar public company for crypto, but they're also on chain, Kyle. So they have announced that through Opening Bell, which is powered by Superstate, the they have natively tokenized their shares on Solana. Uh, and so keyword there natively right directly with Superstate. Not the first time it's actually happened uh through securitized with Exodus, but this is the first time with a m. Multi billion dollar company. Uh, and definitely people are going to take notice. I'm really excited to see what uh, is in store here through the Super State platform. In fact, of course that address is public. You can go check it out. Interestingly enough there's about 100 million according to this already tokenized, held about 12 people and apparently at a discount to the market cap of, of what it's trading on in, in the public markets, uh, off chain, if that's how we're going to start saying it. Kyle.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, well this is interesting because they are listed on three different places. I believe they originally listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange recently this year following Circle's success on the nasdaq. I believe they also listed on Nasdaq and now they have their tokenized shares. And so some, some arguments might suggest that this is a bit redundant, right, that you're on multiple different platforms. But we have seen examples of arbitrage trading creating volume opportunities. Right. If you have prices of these shares on a few different places that are slightly different, perhaps there are ambitious funds or traders that might want to get involved just in order to try to capture some of that spread. And I heard like I think you mentioned there already might be some of those opportunities forming already.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's exciting. I highly recommend people go check out this news. It is part of an onslaught of stock tokenizations that's really kicked off this summer. Although we know it's been around for quite some time actively. But uh, all eyes were of course also this week on Ondo's global market launch. This is a company that's been at this for years preparing this infrastructure, uh, sharing this vision of on chain public markets for the world to access, you know and leverage all of the best of, of blockchain has to offer. They promised a summer rollout. People were starting to get a little nervous as we were getting close to September and boom, uh, they did it. They rolled it out with uh, I think huge success already. I think uh, last time I saw the leaderboard and maybe it's already different again. They were already second in size according to volume. Uh, and that's not surprising given that this over 100 stocks and they, they claim to be having you know, both natively, uh, on chain issuance but also the, the supposed backing of uh, you know, the traditional um, liquid, liquid markets. Right. Having some kind of connection to that, uh, I don't know how they do that in potentially real time. Again this is, this is crazy because they're actually saying there's permissionless, uh, holding similar to stablecoins of a variety of these public companies here in the United States. Again as I've often said it here on the show, Kyle, investors thanks to Ondo now have a better way to access U S stocks than we do as American citizens.

Speaker A: Yeah, no, well, and, and to take it a step further, they now also can utilize these tokens within the defi ecosystem which is, you know, even incredible. Right? So not only is it easier access but now they can even do more with their shares than, than American citizens can.

Speaker B: It's the future. Um, and hopefully we're going to catch right on up. But we talked about this uh, on the show in the past about this is the next moment we saw it with stable coins already look at how the Trump administration uh and really in general you know people are getting behind stable coins and banks and the like. Well stocks uh, are next. Um but Kyle, I gotta move on to this, this next article. It's wild. Um, well uh, we all know what's happening over in Gaza and it looks like the, the Trump admin has come up with a solution that uh, leverages in fact tokenization of all things. So uh, in fact they plan to have some kind of digital token representing uh land rights or an ability to kind of redeem uh apartments. But their goal is to rebuild Gaza, use this kind of method to create this uh, agreement I guess with all the citizens that they will have to relocate millions of people a part of this plan including a uh, resulting super cities uh and I think an Elon musk plant of some sort. Uh I'm not kidding. This is a real article. Uh Kyle, what are your thoughts on this?

Speaker A: Look, I mean sometime today we're potentially going to hear a big announcement from Trump. He posted this on social medias yesterday on Thursday that he had a big announcement coming for today Friday. And so um, perhaps this is what is coming, perhaps it's not. But um, but this seems to be relatively credible that they're looking to launch a full you know development plan here in the region um and are using tokens to represent these redemption factors. And just this is, this is maybe the most ridiculous article in my six year career of covering the news in this industry um, in some really interesting ways. But just, just to think that the US government is using tokenization um at this scale alone is, is just mind boggling. Um and so it'll be interesting to see if, if this is a verified um, you know credible review or report based off of if we, if we hear it from the horse's mouth or not. But um, but you know I've got, I've got high hopes for, for uh, this being an interesting mediation play and uh, and this would certainly you know thrust tokenization into the uh, the, the discussion globally in a way that we haven't seen.

Speaker B: You're not, you're not wrong about that one Kyle. As audacious as his plan want about it, we can kind of laugh at it. This is proof in the pudding that tokenization is one of those better use cases for more effective like it is. Yeah.

Speaker A: If you're gonna do this like it

Speaker B: actually is the most value some kind of uh, uh you know, agreement people put in place with millions of people.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: This is going to be a much more effective strategy to roll out this, this plan if, if it does end up coming, coming to market. And that's just, I think that's the point of what we're doing. Why we've done this show all these episodes, right Kyle, is that whether it's putting title car titles uh, into you know, on the DMV on chain or whether it's a uh, title for actual homes and property like we saw earlier, Bergen county, it's not just stocks and stable coins and everything we're talking about. It's the craziest use cases you can think of. Uh, tokenization. Is there to be a solution? Uh, and moving on Kyle, I think I do want to point this one out. It's not quite targeted towards tokenization but a big deal. We're ah, talking about a top five commercial bank in the country, uh, that has now finally gotten into the crypto custody game through their, their sub partner Nydig. Um, so I believe this was announced actually right before SAB121. Uh, and then boom, you know, the whole banking sector shut down when it came to, to anything in crypto custody and related. And you know this is just a sign of the times Kyle. We're seeing full activity ranging from stable coins as we've already seen earlier announced from many different plans from banks. And now we have US bank moving in with bitcoin custody. And I'm sure that's only going to expand, um, probably be the foundation for a lot more in the future Kyle. So I really wanted to bring this one up. Not necessarily an RWA piece of news, but I think highly relevant, uh, relevant to the massive trend of institutions moving in to this space.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think you're right. And on top of everything that you described, part of the reason why I think you could have confidence that this is going to expand past just Bitcoin is as we've talked about a thousand times here on the show, the technical lift to allow for Bitcoin is pretty much the exact same lift to do any other token. So once you have this infrastructure set up for Bitcoin, it's very, very easy to do it for are tokenized assets. Obviously you need to layer on the compliance, you do these types of things. But that's all off chain in terms of the technical build out. From the software perspective it's exactly the same. And so um, to your point, you're really going to be able to see how that light at the end of the tunnel is now getting brighter and brighter with respect to layering in real asset tokenization. And it's not much more of a lift technically. So it really just comes down to the appetite, if you will, for these types of products. And uh, as companies like Ando, though and others are really driving that institutional adoption through, just kind of bringing it all on in the tidal wave, um, I think that you're going to see more of that coming.

Speaker B: I think you said that very well, Kyle. In the sense that they've done a lot of the heavy lifting here. We're talking about a large bank that is now offering these services in this environment, uh, that that's only going to expand from here. Huge stuff. Uh, moving on. Potentially another huge move we need to talk about here, Kyle, is, uh, there's a shake up over a T0. Uh, we have, we know, you know, and have talked about this in the past, but there was some focal proponents, uh, in the T0 story for many, many years. Marc Cohodes being one of them. And another that came into the picture was Marcus Lemonis. You may have heard of him. He was known as the Prophet. He was a successful entrepreneur with Camping World as well as, uh, now running bbby, I think it is, which took over and beyond. Right. And um, that's, you know, it's a story of its own. A, A sor. Large retailer.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: That kind of went bankrupt and is now trying to make its own success. Comeback story. But there is an interest through all of this because of a, uh, relationship to Overstock and all this good stuff, which of course they acquired.

Speaker A: Overstock, I think. Right, Exactly.

Speaker B: I think that's right. They acquired Overstock one way or the other. Yeah. Which means they acquired, one way or the other an interest into T0. Right.

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker B: So there has been a push, which is a great thing. Marcus Lemonis huge fan of tokenization, obviously. Now. Um, but, um, the idea that I think ICE behind all of this, which I think was one of the talking points for TZERO many times. Right. Uh, with David Goon taking on that CEO position was uh, a real strong indicator of man. This company has a huge trajectory if ICE decides to get big on tokenization. Well, I don't know if that's going to happen anytime soon. And frankly, I don't even know if that's going to happen with T0. Uh, David Goon is out and uh, our good friend Alan Kanefsky's back in. So he was interim CEO before. Uh, and now he is officially CEO. No interim, uh, again. So you, uh, know I know he's got big plans for the company. They obviously announced earlier, uh, a couple months ago or even just a month ago about their new L1, as well as some other plans that, uh, they're launching, including a token related to that. So, Kyle, I think this is great timing. I think there's been a lot of sort of eyes on why isn't there more happening from one of these OG players in the space. Uh, we all know that there's always things happening. We know it's not easy to just push RWAs forward overnight. Um, but I do think this is going to be a positive accelerant for T0. So I hope that is indeed the case. And congrats to, uh, to Alan. What are your thoughts on this, Kyle?

Speaker A: Hey. Ah, come with the king. You best not miss Shout out to Alan Kanevsky for coming back into the role. We just absolutely love to see it. Alan. Alan's a good guy. Uh, has been committed to this business in particular, like on top of the industry. He has been committed, right, to be the chief legal officer to then be promoted into this interim role to then, you know, for lack of a better term, uh, be replaced in that role. Um, and to resume his previous position and now to be back again in the driver's seat. It's, uh, it's cool to see for him. But yeah, the company really feels like it's at a. It's an important spot right now where they, they really haven't quite figured it out. And uh, and this feels like, you know, a really important step for Alan to be able to take this over and, you know, now come at ondo. I mean, you know, considering they have now taken that institutional approach and um, you know, they clearly weren't interested in the private securities space that much. Um, they really didn't scale their listings. They didn't want to spend a ton of time brokering these smaller deals, especially with New York Stock Exchange ICE parent company investing in them. It kind of gave this impression that they were really trying to be that kind of pre IPO almost super state like business and weren't quite able to to f into to those types of businesses. And now you have Superstate and Ando that are both firing on all cylinders to kind of taking some of that market share that they, I think originally felt very comfortable sitting in. So, um, it's a very important time for this business to maintain the fact that they probably, honestly even today are still the best known brand in this industry. I hear from people all the time that, that I talk to that don't know much about the industry and most people have heard of Tzero in one way or another or ask about it or ask what's going on with it. I still think they have really strong brand. They did really well. Um, but now they, they need to, you know, the rubber needs to hit the road. They got, they got to execute.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, that's, that's 100%. But uh, you know, the opportunity is right there. It's still the early days of RWAs for everybody, folks.

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker B: Uh, that's what's so exciting. And that is why it's also acquisition season, because there's a lot of, a lot of players making big vision plays. Uh, as well as we know there's a lot of tradfi activity looking at this, but in this case I'm talking about none other than the Redstone acquisition of Credora Cordora, the risk assessment uh, and ratings firm. Okay. This is focused typically on, on chain credit as well as other defi applications. Okay. And Redstone we know is the official uh, Oracle provider for Securitize and many other RWAs, uh, that we actually use and track over at STM Co as well. Um, but in this case, what does this mean, Kyle? They're bringing in this risk rating expertise. They're saying that they are now first Oracle that unites prices, risk ratings and collateral intelligence all under one roof. And I gotta say, when it comes to the full picture of DEFY and RWAs taking over with yield and collateral, borrowing, lending and all that good stuff. This is I think a very smart play. Uh, love this team up if you will. Uh, and good, smart move on Redstone that clearly they're not just, you know, being a single source Oracle solution. They are, they're. They've got plans to become something much bigger, it looks like. Can't uh, wait to see what that turns into. But a great move already here. Kyle, what do you think about this acquisition?

Speaker A: I think it makes a lot of sense. It's uh, we. Acquisitions generally I think are a good thing for the industry. It shows the health of the market that these firms A have cash and, and B have valuable equity but, but C it obviously provides returns for early investors. So whoever is an investor of Crypt Dora, congratulations on, on having a liquidity event or, or certainly some sort of stock transfer or something like that. Um, and I like the, the rating style of agencies. I think that that's an important, important part of this market is research, is information, is transparency on these types of Investment vehicles, especially when you're talking about whether it's private assets that don't have that much information publicly, where maybe there's a deal room and things like that. But you may or may not have access, especially on a secondary market style transaction. But increasingly with all of these looped tokens, we're talking about these private credit deals where you're taking a private credit instrument, you're selling that to someone and then someone's taking that private credit instrument and then leveraging that as collateral, pulling out more capital and then reinvesting in um, that similar asset or a different type of asset. Um, when you start to have these multi collateralized type vehicles, um, it will start to get a little bit too complex for the average person to really start to diligence. And even research teams I think are going to start being overwhelmed by the complexity of some of these deals, where the money's going, where it's pointing to, what assets are collateralized by other ones. Um, and so understanding a lot of those risk metrics is going to be more and more difficult to do manually. So having firms that, that are doing some of that blockchain based forensics from an accounting perspective I think is going to be crucial. Um, so I think this makes a lot of sense as an acquisition, especially for an Oracle company.

Speaker B: Data, trust, ratings, it's all connected. Um, and that makes a lot of sense. And you know what, we're ending this segment Kyle, on a pretty cool one, Take it for what you will, but our administrations here in the United States are following to the tune of the mandate that the President set out at the beginning of the year, which is to make America the home of blockchain innovation, the future of crypto markets. Uh, and that's, that's definitely been the case I think. Right Kyle? We've seen both the SEC and the CFTC active separately making huge strides in advancing the space. Uh, separately, uh, they, they had sort of the project uh, crypto at the SEC and the crypto sprint over at the cftc and now we have a joint initiative or a joint announcement saying that they are working together through cross agency initiatives. Uh, let's see, in furtherance of the SEC's Project Crypto and the CFTC's Crypto Sprint to coordinate efforts regarding the process for enabling the trading of certain spot crypto asset products. Uh, so one of the big things that I think that you know, U.S. citizens have been left out in the whole world of crypto, uh, again we're starting to see that that change I Think that was one of the original missions at the begin of the year is like, we need to make sure Americans have access to all of crypto again. And these are the first steps, uh, because we need, and we were missing these, uh, these regulators to actually make sure there's clarity, make sure there are rules, make sure that our markets can conform, and also participate in what has been very active, uh, internationally already. So, uh, Kyle, I just have to say, you know, some people could kind of see this as business as usual, or they're doing what they're told. But, uh, I just, I just love to see this stuff, man. It's, it's been nice after basically a decade of no support, uh, that, uh, that this is happening.

Speaker A: Yeah, I will note that this is a pretty marked shift from the previous. Again, I don't want to put blame on a particular administration, but let's just say five years ago it had nothing to do necessarily with who, who was president at the time. Um, but there seemed to be a bit of a turf war between the CFTC and the commodities side of these assets, as well as the SEC and the securities side of these assets. And it did not seem like they played very well together. Um, it seemed like they were both trying to fight kind of over this, this asset class to have leverage and jurisdiction over. Um, and it seemed like the only way that we were going to really be able to mediate this was to have Congress step in. Which obviously in an ideal world, you know, that would be a solution. I think that would give everybody clear peace of mind. But as we see in the US political system, it doesn't seem like it's very easy to get bills passed and to get bipartisan support. And not, um, only that, but it seems like every bill has a thousand other things that it's also trying to do. Um, and these bills just become these huge, you know, amalgamations of a variety of different topics, um, that become so complicated that it just is incredibly, incredibly slow. Um, and so this is by far the most favorable solution, which is, hey, look, it's probably unlikely that, that Congress is going to get anything out anytime soon. So the next best option is that the SEC and the CFTC just have to figure out how they're going to do this and how they're going to approach this together collectively, um, for the sake of the U.S. economy. Um, and so I'm happy to see these first steps just, you know, know, like anything, if it's easy to do it, it's also easy to undo it. So let's hope that they can, they can work towards something that, that results in something actually codified into federal law. That would be the end goal here.

Speaker B: As you said, this is the next best, best thing. And it absolutely can be uh, turned back if we don't see some action from Congress. Uh, so all eyes are still, hopefully maybe if we're lucky, some action in September around that Clarity act and a few others. But you're right. Uh, but what I am also excited about is we got several more years with this uh, with this action happening. So I gotta say I'm pretty bullish uh, hearing things like this. And what I'm even more bullish about is a huge announcement from the RWA foundation we're going to get into and the fact that we've got so many more RWA updates to cover on this episode alone. So let's just move it right along, shall we Kyle?

Speaker A: Let's do it.

Speaker B: Foreign. Well, we have another major announcement if you've been following along with the RWA Foundation. Our goal is to create a voice for the crypto community for RWAS in the intersection with defy. Uh, we've been gathering members. We announced many new members uh, just a few weeks ago. We're now over 40 strong of some of the leading chains, marketplaces, token issuers and even engines and infrastructure. Uh, and now we have our first ever initiative we're bringing to market to let you to let anyone around the world participate in both supporting RWAs through crypto. So we have officially announced the RWA Pod. You can learn more about this on X uh, at our uh, account at RWA Foundation Underscore or on our Medium blog. But basically the concept is simple. You'll be able to deposit USDC on base Ethereum, Arbitrum or Sonic and earn yield. That gives you both pre TGE tokens to Wally and nine other RWA project uh, tokens. So this will be across infrastructure, across different asset classes. You tell us what you'd like to see in the pod. We're going to make sure it's happening. A huge, huge announcement coming up on the 15th as we open it up. But we'll be revealing who's involved and new ambassadors joining the RWA foundation all coming up in just the next week or two here. Oh, it's hard to contain such excitement. It's coming to you soon. So with that, appreciate everyone who's already in the herd, but tap in if you aren't and let's get back to the show.

Speaker A: Kyle.

Speaker B: Uh, we have a heck of a Couple of months coming up before the end of the year. I know you're heading over to Asia for a tour. Really? That's going to put you busy but we know there's a lot of activity happening here and as I mentioned before, I RWA Summit in New York in uh, just a few weeks as well. There's also Meridian, uh, by Stellar that's organizing a bunch of folks over in Brazil around policy and regulation. So many good things. But I do want to point out, if you're going to be in New York, hit me up. There's also an event called Capital Markets and Cocktails, just focused on institutions and RWAs. It's going to be in New York City the day before on 9:15 that Monday before RWA summit. So if you're already in town or you're attending, definitely check this out. If this is up your alley or hit me up in a DM and we'll make sure you get approved for that event. But uh, Kyle, why don't we jump right into all the new STO updates and offerings or RWA updates.

Speaker A: Yeah, let's do it.

Speaker B: Big news as we saw with global markets from Ondo launching as well. But Back finance has been capturing all the names, doing a lot of expansion on a lot of different crypto exchanges from Kraken to Gemini and many others. Uh, and now they've expanded X stocks to Ethereum. They were originally on Solana and now they've expanded to Ethereum with 60 of their stocks including Nvidia and Tesla. Uh, so you know, the race is on. There's a lot of different structures out there. There's a lot of different licenses and access and capabilities and assets available on these different platforms and on different venues. It's really exciting to see this space grow. Moving on, we saw Raise announce that they are doing a hundred million in a tokenized private credit vault, uh, which is exciting to see further more private credit action. But Raise, as we've been covering, is now mobilizing their tokenization engine and clearly onboarding some great projects. You know, I love the private credit, uh, vault game if you will. RWA Vaults, uh, Deuce D E U S S is launching a platform in Europe, uh, for the EBSI BL chain, uh, to target small business digital bonds. Digital bonds have been a common, uh, use case. Tokenized bonds are very popular across Europe. So this doesn't surprise me one bit. Uh, then over in Hong Kong, Shenzhen Fuchsun Investment holdings has uh, issued their first offshore yuan denominated bond, uh, via GF securities, one of the leading investment banks over there in Hong Kong raised about 70 million for this bond. So that's no small offering. Again bonds can scale quickly. We track billions of them already. STM Co. Uh, speaking of Korea, where I believe Kyle, you might be headed, over there, Seoul City, uh, is tokenizing underutilized real estate assets starting with actually a closed off police station. Very interesting use case of tokenization throughout this episode. Uh, and Japan staying in the Far east. Uh, the Japan Post banned bank is actually tokenizing, uh, is you know looking at tokenizing deposits for next year and they're working with the current dcp. Uh, but uh, tokenized deposits is something we've been talking about. Now forget stable coins. Banks are going to be issuing tokenized deposits. And Thailand, they're looking to issue a bond as well. About 155k worth. So not as big but another bond out into the market that, that's on chain. And the last RWA offering update is Aurora Opto Electronics, which is issuing a little over a million dollars in AI server back tokens. A uh, use case. We've been seeing uh, grow and grow. Not surprisingly given demand for uh, you know, AI servers for all the usage, uh, behind the servers that you know people are using AI for, it's driving a lot of demand. So Kyle, any of of these offerings stick out to you that you want to talk about?

Speaker A: I just, I don't want to, you know, I want to beat a dead horse if you will. But I just keep thinking about these tokenized stock announcements and thinking like man, a lot of the early ATS guys must be frustrated that, that you know, they were just unable to bring a lot of solid, attractive listings to the marketplaces and um, back to doing a great job bringing 60 tokenized stocks. I mean I remember we had months and years of begging these, these platform just bring more assets to market. Right. A lot of, a lot of the early struggle in the industry was just the, the inability to bring anything to market to trade, let alone um, 60 um, plus assets that are high quality, ah, stock tokens. So um, shout out to them. The one thing is, I just want to note is I haven't done research on backed asset structures in particular. But as a reminder, as always, I think it's important to continue to highlight to people not all tokenized stocks are created equal. So just make sure that whichever platform you're on, you understand what you're buying. It doesn't mean that if it is a tokenized stock or if it's a Mirror chair or whatever. Like that's fine. There's a, there's an opportunity to invest in any of those things and use any of those things for a variety of reasons. Just understand the risks that you're taking. Um, and when, when you should be, be wary of those things before you really um, do any serious volume there. Raise. Finally, like for those guys, I actually um, was able to um, to speak a little bit about uh, about this deal with them. And uh, I've seen what they've done with their, with their private credit deal previously in the Pharaoh, uh, titanium space. I was actually an investor in that. And uh, and this is a, a new project that they're bringing to market. A really good issuer. Cool guy. M. So I just, I know how hard they've been working and, and how, how uh, it's cool to see them bringing successful deals to market in the private credit space because that's. Everybody's talking about it. But I still feel like there's not that many assets assets in the private credit space despite the fact that everybody's interested in this type of deal. So um, Ray is doing some good stuff. I think it's a name to watch.

Speaker B: No, I'm excited for that too. And you're spot on. Always do your own research. Folks know exactly what you're buying. The ecosystem, the setup, how it's all connected. Uh, this is a whole new world of investing. Uh, and there are more announcements. Kyle. Uh, we saw that Zero Hash, which is a big stable coin infrastructure provider, they're now getting into the Custody game with 0/ash Trust Company as a qualified custodian. Uh, Utila has raised $22 million led by Red Dot Capital for their stablecoin infrastructure, uh, focusing on now expanding into emerging markets. Uh, RWA Inc. And 8 Lens, they've partnered up for on chain lending, uh, which is very exciting because of course tokenized lending is again I think something that's going to be huge. So the more players that actually start to provide services around this underwriting rwas, the more we can start to grow. This we already saw on the institutional side with a horizon that, you know, there's demand for this stuff for sure. And Fin Loop, uh, they're joining the tokenized stock game out of Hong Kong, uh, trying to be that technical solution over there. Uh, institutionally in Europe, the Borg or Stu Guard launched their Saturn uh, settlement plan platform which is supposed to cover across Europe. Here Stratx launching a routing protocol, uh, supposedly with Sec OFAC and Treasury policies embedded for compliance. I'M not sure exactly what that means other than they probably have a lot of frameworks built in uh for their routing protocol by Stratx, uh, Aria, uh, which is focusing uh, on IP tokenization as route raised $15 million by polychain and co led by Neoclassic Capital and Story Protocol Foundation. Also a uh, participant in this. This goes to show you some heavy hitters behind Aria here. Gonna go check that one out. And finally Power Metal Resources proposes a three million dollar investment into Mind Starters uh in order to start exploring tokenized global mineral exploration and the related development projects. Uh, which is pretty exciting. A whole nother asset class that again most people probably would have never get exposure to these types of opportunities. So uh, Kyle, a lot of updates there. Again anything that you really want to provide some insight Colorado.

Speaker A: Well Herwig, you know that I am a commodities guy and so um. My, my mind immediately goes to Power Metal Resources and uh, and their work with, with mind starters here. I um, have continued to spend so much time in this sector. I still am um, in a majority of my time is spent in the commodity space. And as we've continued to work with emerging markets specifically um, small upstart nations. Right. And I don't mean upstart necessarily in terms of uh, how you know, new they are necessarily. But these are nations that know that they have valuable resources whether that's you know, petroleum based products, whether that's precious metals, whatever. Um, but it's really hard to get financing for a variety of reasons. Maybe you know a big case is they may not even have the banking infrastructure to support financing of a lot of the different assets that they have. Let alone um, other complications around banking and compliance and and things like that. So I do think tokenization presents an awesome opportunity here. Even if it's just purely for the movement of capital, the storing of capital and de. Risking some of those, those, those components um, I think is, is really huge. So um. This one caught my eye for those reasons. I think that that's great. Um, happy to see RWA Inc. Doing stuff. Um, I, I've met their team in, in different places and uh, and like what they're doing and some, some really good nonsense here. I don't want to just reread everything that you just said but uh, I think all of these were fantastic. And Stradx doing some great stuff in the compliance space. Not enough people.

Speaker B: There's a few more to uh, to cover there Kyle. Uh, including I think a pretty cool one, State street who's starting to get More and more active at least we still have yet to see an actual kind of product offer as far as I know. But they're making investments and partnerships. And now another investment into none other than Apex Fintech Solutions, which is the rebranded tokeny, uh, after Apex had taken the majority control. Uh, so a pretty big institutional move here knowing that they now have a tokenization engine and likely, uh, potentially some kind of custody partnership there with State Street. Uh, talk about a win win there. Uh, and then also some regulatory updates. The European Central bank president is urging stablecoin legislation to be passed by uh, the European Union. Uh, and of course the European Commission itself is releasing proposals on a saving and investment union by December that's tied to RWA tokenization. Uh, so again these are scalable infrastructure models that are being used whether it's to save Gaza or whether it's a proposal on savings and uh, investment unit. Uh, and finally we have the US Federal Reserve hosting a payments innovation conference. How cool is that? Uh, coming up, October 21st is of course all about stablecoins and tokenization. Really cool, innovative stuff again. I just can't believe I'm saying these things would have never.

Speaker A: October 21st.

Speaker B: My birthday too.

Speaker A: So it's just a day to be doing it. So maybe I can find my way into that to. To those meetings just on the basis of it being my. My special day. You don't get it, Jay Powell. Like I. I need to be there. It's my birthday. You know. You can't turn down the birthday boy.

Speaker B: I'm looking forward to your keynote.

Speaker A: Exciting. Let's. Let's uh, let's close out the show, shall we?

Speaker B: Yeah. If you've got no other comments on that, then uh, let's do it. You know what we've got to do next.

Speaker A: The Companies of the Week. 299 episodes M598 winners. Maybe a few less. We've missed a, uh. We've had a couple Company of the Year choices. We've. We've had one or two episodes where we missed one or something like that. So let's call it 575 winners Herwig of this illustrious award, which is so exciting and of course gets you nominated for the Companies of the Year award. A title that, that not many have held and not many more will. And so I just. It's an honor to be here every week in the position as voted by the committee to select our Company of the week this week for my half of the award winning and her wig of course you have the other nomination here for this amazing, incredible award and achievement. So I'd love for you to regale us with your tales of your choices of who is your winner for this week, episode 299 of the Security Token Show.

Speaker B: Yeah, this isn't influenced by any sponsor or any kind of metric or a rule or framework. You know, this is just purely who, you know, you or I just, you know, it's just love of the game, who we thought, you know what, I want to put the spotlight on this company because I thought that was the biggest move and gosh, it might just make them company of the year for what they did. But in this case, uh, I'm going to be talking about none other than Galaxy. Kyle, I was just so excited to see such a major crypto company again. Not the first, but truly a major company that's going to get a lot of recognition from this, in my opinion. They sort of set off the firing gun for the race to start tokenizing. Natively tokenizing your company if you're a crypto company. That's right, Kyle. I'm calling out everybody else right now except for Galaxy, because you're my, my company of the week. But if you're Coinbase, if you're Gemini, if you're Kraken, if you're anybody else, you need to figure out how to get your shares public to the people. I don't care if you're not a public company yet, go and direct register and do it through tokenization. Um, this is a huge sign, Kyle. Galaxy. And hopefully through opening Bell with Super State, they're going to enable a whole new, you know, RWA enabled stock market. Uh, and Galaxy seems to be the first public company to leverage that. So again, for all of those reasons above and a big win for Solana, which is the native chain of choice here, uh, Galaxy, you're my company of the week.

Speaker A: Wow, great winner. Awesome company. Just as we maybe mentioned before, the other upside here is that Galaxy is a huge market maker and liquidity provider in the traditional crypto side. And so the hope is that, you know, they're an investor in Superstate, they've now tokenized their shares. Obviously it's a little bit hairier in terms of how to provide liquidity into regulated assets as opposed to non regulated assets. But that doesn't feel like it's something that Galaxy wouldn't be able to solve in one way or another, whether that's directly or through a subsidiary with which they can provide a credit revolver or something. I'm sure there's a way to solve that. Um, but this move signals to me a broader switch into this industry of, of you know, potentially market making for um, a lot of the tokenized stocks that exist on the market and a variety of these different factors which is going to be really, really important for the health of this space.

Speaker B: Ah, uh, now Kyle, again I completely agree. But you know what, I'm not the only one. And looks like for the last nomination of the two hundreds of the security token show episodes, uh, since this is 299 right Kyle, who's it going to be?

Speaker A: Well my company of the week is a repeat winner here. Ondo they brought 100 plus tokenized stocks to the market. And I have the list here. I just wanted to you know as a fun throwback because I used to do that market trading segment her way where we would cover some interesting stats um, if anybody was interested. Of the 104 tokenized stocks that are currently available on the Ondo Global Markets platform, the number one trading volume or buy volume asset is the S P 500 tokenized index which makes a ton of sense because that's one of the probably the most liquid stock on the stock market as well. Um, but it makes a lot of sense to keep that basket passive exposure. Um, and so I'm going to read the, the next two or three. The, the next one is another S P 500 index product. Um then we have the 20 plus year treasury bond tokenized ETF QQQ by Invesco is number four, which is kind of a um, an ETF mutual fund, uh, or it's ETF, excuse me, um, investing in a bunch of innovation. And then the final one is another ETF. In fact ETFs represent the top 11 um, stocks here. And uh, number 12 is Walmart actually. So Walmart being the, the most traded tokenized stock on Ondo to date with 428000 in volume in the last I guess 24 hours. Number one being the S P 500 from Spider SPDR, which is SPY is the ticker, um, has 1.9 million and so they have four tokenized stocks. The top four, four stocks are over a million dollars in volume each. Um and so interesting stuff here. A lot of, a lot of normal companies on top of tech, uh, you know they've got McDonald's, they've got you know Pexico, they've got Chevron. So there's, there's many normal stocks as well as just the, the technology ones. Um, with most of Them with some nominal amount of trading volume. There's only call it, call it 10 or so that have not really traded yet. Um, but many of them are in the tens of or hundreds of thousands of dollars. So Ondo doing some good stuff there. Um, for bringing all those products to market and driving liquidity, probably close to I would guess $15 million in trading volume today alone. That puts them kind of head and shoulders above most of the uh, traditional players in the market and they're using that ATS that got passed around from, from Exchange to Exchange. So um, cool to see that that finally actually ended up of being useful for something. So shout out to Ondo.

Speaker B: Yeah, I uh, definitely hope it's already powering all this. It's pretty exciting but a lot of takeaways there right? Like the ETFs. You know, that's the sign that this is a great use case. It's organization, it's the future of ETFs. It's right there in the pudding. Also is all international investors. Right. So the fact that Walmart was actually the top choice is very interesting as a international brand that is clearly desired as a portfolio holding apparently for at

Speaker A: least the folks that are trading represents the American consumer.

Speaker B: Yeah, they want access to that. Um, but also uh, you know as as we noted earlier too like their trading volume is great. They executed with a huge library, you know, inventory of options. A lot of them have all, all the volume that proved them I think to be already in second place in volume in the, in the war of volume across these stock solutions, uh, token solutions. But man Kyle, what a, what a great choice. So proud and happy for that Ondo team for, for doing such a great job. And I know it's just the beginning now that they're. They're actually live and we're only going to build on this and if you start to kind of maybe factor in some growth rate to this, uh, those numbers are pretty strong. We might be looking at a very healthy on chain Ondo global market in terms of volume by the end of the year. In this case. Very uh, very exciting stuff. Great to choice.

Speaker A: Well that's, that's about it for the show tonight, Herwig.

Speaker B: That sure is Kyle. Any final concluding uh thoughts? Maybe updates from global Settlement?

Speaker A: Well, you know we uh, it looks like we've been approved for our first CBDC sandbox which is pretty exciting. Um, and uh, so unfortunately I can't share which country that is but, but we are moving in that direction which has been been an interesting thing to See, um, from my perspective, a lot of it actually comes from, from, as we said, from a commodities perspective, there's opportunities to fundraise for a lot of these commodities projects, but some of the infrastructure, uh, surrounding these projects are not as developed as you might need for this type of investment and for the size of the opportunity. So rebuilding a lot of that infrastructure is paramount to having a successful and productive economy in an emerging market. Um, so we found ourselves diving down that rabbit hole and doing everything we can to build sustainable economics for countries all around the world. World.

Speaker B: That's a huge congrats, man. That's awesome. Congrats to you and Ryan and the whole Global Settlement team. And I can't wait to hear the announcement and see which country that is, and I'm sure the first of many. Um, and with that, everybody make sure you go check out that RWA pod announcement. It is the future of finance that you get to stake using your idle crypto. What are you waiting for? It's gonna be awesome. Uh, and with that, make sure you hit us up if you wanna, you know, meet us in person, either in New York or Kyle across Asia the next, you know, couple of weeks or over a month. You know, I know you always are out there for a little while, so, uh, you know, you just go follow him. Go follow both of us, if you aren't already on X. And you could definitely tap into our schedules. But with that, of course, uh, we'll be back again with episode 300 next week for you. And with that, have a great weekend and happy tokenizing.

Speaker A: Hmm. Sam,