🧑‍⚖️ SEC Sued by Ethereum Giant Consensys - This Means War

Tokenized assets just topped a new billion-dollar record! 🥳

But that’s not the biggest news… the industry is going to war. ⚔️

🎯🔥 Rapid Fire Takeaways:

💹 Real-World Assets Hits New Peak With $8 Billion Locked, Reports Messari

🏅 BlackRock's BUIDL Becomes Largest Tokenized Treasury Fund Hitting $375M, Toppling Franklin Templeton's

👀 Did SEC classify Ether as a security before Gensler’s Congressional testimony?

💰 Tokenized Asset Issuer Backed Raises $9.5M as Crypto's RWA Race Heats Up

🏛️ Quincy US municipal bond issued on JP Morgan’s Onyx blockchain

🕝 Digital euro unlikely to launch before 2028/2029 – Bundesbank

🗼 Tokyo subsidizes digital securities issuance costs

Battle lines are being drawn as regulatory clarity no longer seems inevitable. 👀

The SEC is either on the ropes or stringing up the gallows for blockchain technology in the United States. ⚖️

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Join us every Thursday at 2 pm EDT, where the brightest minds in the industry dive deep into the topics that matter most for the future of finance. 🔮

🥊 New Highs, Old Foes 

First, the good. We’ve hit new all-time highs for tokenized assets, with $8 billion locked. This figure doesn’t include private blockchains like Provenance, which alone claims to have $13 billion in assets under administration. 💹

Public permissionless blockchains are becoming a crowd favorite for regulators and issuers, so it should be only up from here. 🚀

Unless… Gary! 👴

The SEC sent Consensys a Wells Notice on April 10th. Apparently, Metamask’s swapping and staking function violates securities laws. Recall Uniswap received its own Wells Notice three weeks ago, claiming it enables swapping unregistered securities. 😬

Now, Consensys has filed a lawsuit against the SEC, claiming overreach on the part of the agency! Folks are not happy with Gary Gensler’s wishy-washy attitude toward digital assets, and now they’re fighting back! 💥

They’re not alone. Financial Services Committee Chair Patrick McHenry took to Twitter to grill Gensler’s SEC for overreach. McHenry is particularly interested if Gensler told a bald-faced lie to Congress in April 2023 when he said Ether wasn’t a security. 😯

Is this finally the checkmate for Gary’s crusade against digital assets? ♟️

🤝 Investments, Partnerships, and Acquisitions

Time will tell if this is Gary’s last stop, but tokenization keeps growing regardless! 🌱

BlackRock had a great week – it's officially the largest US Treasury tokenizer with a cool $375 million. What’s more, they led Securitize’s $47 million round. 😎

Similarly, Backed Finance, a Swiss-based company offering its own asset tokenization services, closed a $9.5 million round led by Gnosis. Further downstream, Talos, an institutional trading platform for digital assets, acquired Cloudwall to bolster its risk assessment technology. 💰

Everyone wants a piece of the tokenization pie. 🥧

New tokenization teammates are also taking shape! There’s a lot of partnerships this week, so here’s a rapid-fire: 🧢🔥

• Anchorage Digital, a digital asset-friendly bank, has partnered with Arca Labs to custody their tokenized US Treasuries. 🔑

• Automation provider Globacap has partnered with Tokeny, a seasoned tokenization technology company, to make further inroads in private capital markets. 💽

• Laser Digital, a subsidiary of Nomura, wants liquid staking in its funds and has partnered with Kelp DAO to make it happen. 🌿

• Zodia Custody scored the largest publicly listed Bitcoin mining company, Marathon Digital, as a client in their recent partnership. ⛏️

🌏 Europe and Japan Grand Slam… Sort Of

Opposite sides of the Old World couldn’t be further apart. 🗺️

The EU passed anti-money laundering applying to crypto, surprisingly omitting NFTs and DAOs. Self-hosted wallets are also left untouched, so the Genslers of the EU have lost their battle. 🏳️

But Germany’s Bundesbank remains unconvinced. Their recent report recommended smaller holding limits of up to €2,500 for a potential digital euro, citing bank run concerns. Given that they’re not seeing a digital euro coming online until at least 2028, they have some time to nail down their strategy. ⌚

Meanwhile, Japan has launched a CBDC sandbox complete with APIs for testing, with the goal of optimizing their forthcoming digital Yen. 💴

But they’re not stopping there. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government is officially subsidizing the issuance cost for tokenizers to attract more startups to the nation’s capital. Up to $31,000 is covered - a sweet deal if you’re island-side and looking to go on-chain. 🗼

🦅 Stateside Taking it in Stride 

While Gary has rained on the tokenization parade a bit, the US presses onward. 🦾

Outside Boston, the City of Quincy used JP Morgan’s Onyx network to tokenize its $10 million municipal bond offering. 📜

Just in time, too. The DTC says Bitcoin ETFs cannot be used as collateral. While that may sound worrisome, other risky assets were also removed from the approved collateral list in a broader de-risking move. 🔒

Over in the private sector, Stripe has officially added more support for stablecoin payments, and Visa has released a comprehensive dashboard for stablecoins. They managed to account for arbitrage and wash trading, and it’s one of the best we’ve seen thus far. 💻

🌷 May Days Ahead

With spring in the air, digital asset progress is blooming worldwide. ☀️

Will this give way to a tokenization summer, or are we headed for a deep freeze? ❄️ 

One thing is for sure: we’ll be here for it either way. Remember to mark your calendars for 2 pm EDT on Thursdays, and join us and Wolf Web3 for all things tokenized assets! 🎧