Next week, we welcome founders, investors and institutional allocators to Amsterdam for the 10th edition of Legends4Legends. For us, it is the culmination of a year spent speaking with the people building and financing this industry, bringing their perspectives together to understand what is changing and what it means for investors.
Theme:
From speculations to Institutional Adoption
How blockchain rewires the global financial system
Speakers include:
Patrick Witt – the White House
Emad Mostaque – Intelligent Internet
Marc Cutis – Abu Dhabi Investment Council
Stani Kulechov – Aave
And many more; see the full program here.
The main themes for this years conference will be:
1. Finance is moving onchain
Robinhood Chain offers a concrete example. Its stock tokens bring exposure to familiar equities onto infrastructure where they can trade around the clock and be used in lending and other financial applications. The significance goes beyond another way to trade stocks: established financial businesses can now connect their distribution to shared financial infrastructure. For investors, that raises an important question: where does the value accrue as activity moves onto these networks?
2. A growing part of AI has a crypto angle
From open AI models and distributed computing to financing the infrastructure behind them, the overlap is becoming harder to ignore. Many of the founders and investors pursuing these opportunities come from the crypto ecosystem. We believe investors looking at blockchain and AI in separate silos risk missing an important part of the opportunity. Just as BlackRock wrote about “How digital assets connect intelligence, commerce, and compute” (see our interesting reads).
3. Institutional adoption has two sides
Financial institutions are using blockchain to deliver products and services, while allocators are assessing how to invest in the businesses and protocols behind it. At Legends4Legends, we bring both perspectives into the room, with participants from Franklin Templeton, DBS Bank, Abu Dhabi Investment Council, Temasek and Cambridge Associates.
Very few seats remain for the main event. If you are an institutional allocator and would like to join us, register here.
By way of preparation, as this week’s long read, we share “Blockchain’s moment for serious capital”, by Theta CIO Ruud Smets. It explores a central investment question: why the assets positioned to benefit from finance moving onchain remain largely absent from traditional portfolios.
Read the thought piece: Blockchain’s moment for serious capital
This week’s market
- BGCI Index 10.24%
- Bitcoin 8.21%
- Ethereum 8.55%
- Solana 11.43%
All figures are week-to-date as of today 15:00 CET
Theta Blockchain Ventures content
- Ruud Smets, Managing Partner and CIO Theta Capital, with a brief update on what we believe is an important shift in blockchain adoption (watch here)
Blockchain news
- Federal Reserve Unveils Stablecoin Rules on Reserves and Capital (learn more)
- CFTC says U.S. commodities firms can invest in tokenized assets, use blockchain records (learn more)
- Coinbase opens IPO allocations to US retail investors (learn more)
- Ondo launches onchain portfolio tokens based on BlackRock-developed strategies (learn more)
- ECB deploys Pontes platform to settle wholesale tokenized assets in central-bank money (learn more)
- IBM connects Digital Asset Haven to Swift blockchain ledger for tokenized deposit transactions (learn more)
- NYSE Taps Blockchain.com to Reach Crypto Investors With Tokenized Stocks (learn more)
- SoFi begins stablecoin settlement on Mastercard network for program expected to exceed $25 billion in annualized volume (learn more)
- New York moves to block Polymarket from the state, alleging it’s running an illegal gambling operation (learn more)
Relevant financial updates
- Circle*, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, has received a $100mln strategic equity investment from Binance alongside a new five-year agreement to expand USDC across Binance’s platform
- HIFI*, a stablecoin orchestration platform for tokenized repo and Treasury trades, has raised $37mln in a Series A round led by Left Lane Capital with investments from Antler, Arcanum Capital, and 2 other investors
- dtcpay, a merchant payments provider, has extended its Series A to $25mln with SBI Group joining as a strategic investor, alongside 2 other investors
- Atum*, an open payment network, has raised $13.5mln in a round led by Variant with investments from Paypal Ventures and 6 others
- CatchBack, a collectibles marketplace, has raised $8mln in a Seed round led by Foundation Capital with investments from Y Combinator, Robinhood Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, and the Solana Foundation
- InfiniFi*, an AI-powered global payment and stablecoin financial infrastructure company, has raised $6mln in a Seed round led by SNZ Capital, Reforge, and Enlight Capital
- North Capital, a tokenization platform, was acquired by MoonPay in a $60 million all-stock deal
- Breed VC, a crypto venture firm, raised $15 million for their second fund
*Underlying TBV portfolio position | Prices as per 25/09
Interesting things to read and listen to
- “How digital assets connect intelligence, commerce, and compute” by BlackRock (read here)
- Robinhood’s Head of Crypto unpacks the rise of tokenized stocks and what changes when equities become programmable, composable and available across DeFi on the Bankless podcast (listen here)