August 2024 Roundup — featuring Tyler Sherwin and Ray Buckton from RWA World.
Tokenised Treasuries doubled from $1 billion to $2 billion in just five months. MakerDAO is preparing to allocate a further $1 billion to the category. Dark pools have arrived on Ethereum. Sony has launched a Layer 2. Bloomberg Terminal users can now access Polymarket prediction data. And the regulatory picture in the United States remains contested — good news for Ripple, a Wells notice for OpenSea, and fresh evidence of what critics are calling Operation Chokepoint 2.0 targeting digital asset-friendly banks. Bluechip’s Garett Jones will return next month; this edition’s analysis comes from QualitaX and RWA World.
Part One: DLT and Blockchain in Finance
Bloomberg Terminal Meets Polymarket
Bloomberg has integrated Polymarket prediction data directly into the Bloomberg Terminal. Polymarket is the world’s largest decentralised prediction market — or more precisely, an information market — built on Polygon. Users can express views on the probability of outcomes across political events, sports, business, and science. The terminal integration means Bloomberg users now have access to crowdsourced, decentralised probability estimates alongside conventional financial data.
The practical significance extends beyond the specific application. The question of whether retail or institutional prediction market data can improve decision-making in traditional finance is a live empirical question. But the integration itself is notable regardless of that answer: a major financial data provider has embedded a product that incorporates DeFi components directly into its core institutional offering. This is another incremental step in the convergence of traditional and decentralised finance — not through a dedicated digital asset initiative but through a data product decision.
Centrifuge’s Institutional RWA Lending Market on Base
Centrifuge has launched an institutional real-world asset lending market on Coinbase’s Base network using Morpho vaults. The mechanism: investors holding tokenised Treasuries — specifically the Centrifuge Anemoy Liquidity Treasury Fund, the Midas Short-Term US Treasury (mTBILL), and Hashnote’s USYC — can now borrow against those holdings without redeeming the underlying T-bills. This is a meaningful operational improvement. Previously, a holder needing liquidity had to exit their tokenised Treasury position; now they can maintain the position and borrow against it.
The compliance architecture is worth noting. This is a permissioned lending market leveraging Coinbase Verification — specifically the Coinbase Verified onchain attestation. Coinbase customers who have already completed KYC can access the market and other eligible applications without repeating identity verification. The underlying infrastructure is the Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) — a public-good protocol for making onchain or offchain attestations about anything.
The EAS point deserves emphasis. As more institutional products are built on public network infrastructure, the shared public goods that underpin those products become increasingly important. The Ethereum Attestation Service is one such piece of infrastructure. As institutional capital flows into the space, a portion of those resources directed toward supporting open-source public goods like EAS would strengthen the foundations on which the entire ecosystem is being built.
Hamilton Lane and Franklin Templeton: Expanding Access and Reach
Hamilton Lane launched its Secondary Fund VI — a $5.6 billion fund — now accessible to qualified individual investors through the Securitize platform, with the fund tokenised on Polygon. The minimum investment has been reduced from $5 million to $20,000. This is a meaningful democratisation of access to private equity secondaries, a category that has historically been available only to large institutional investors.
Franklin Templeton launched its US Government Money Fund (FOBXX) on Arbitrum — its third network launch after Stellar and Polygon. Individual investors can access FOBXX through the Benji investment mobile app on iOS and Android; institutional investors through the Benji web portal. Current Arbitrum activity is modest — three holders and just over $500,000 — compared to over $420 million on Stellar with nearly 500 holders. The Arbitrum launch is early-stage, but it reflects the multi-chain deployment strategy that major asset managers are beginning to adopt.
On the topic of multi-network deployment: QualitaX received a grant from the Stellar Development Foundation in June 2023 to develop an EEA-compliant interoperability solution between Stellar, Starknet, and Polygon. This project builds directly on the EEA DLT Interoperability Specification — the open standard for interoperability between different DLT networks that QualitaX co-developed through its co-chair role in the EEA DLT Interoperability Working Group. The specification covers three layers (messaging, function code, and application) and includes requirements and considerations for interoperability with Corda, Algorand, Starknet, Cosmos, and FIN P2P. The goal of the Stellar/Polygon bridge is to complement Franklin Templeton’s multi-network deployment by enabling holders on one network — for example, Stellar — to sell their digital assets to buyers on another network, such as Polygon, enhancing liquidity and expanding market reach for issuers.
Global Institutional Issuances
Mercado Libre launched a dollar-backed stablecoin called Meli Dollar in Brazil — its largest market. Mercado Libre operates across 18 countries in Latin America with approximately $14 billion in annual revenue (2023). The Meli Dollar will be pegged 1:1 to the US dollar, available to all Mercado Pago clients through the company app. It will be fee-free for clients, with Ripio serving as exchange and market maker. This expands Mercado Libre’s digital asset offering — which already included Bitcoin and Ether trading — into stablecoins, serving a market where dollar-denominated digital savings are in high demand.
The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) issued its first digital native note, raising $300 million on Euroclear’s DLT platform (the D-FMI platform, which is Corda-based). This is the first digital USD issuance for Euroclear and the first by an Asian-based issuer. The bond is AAA-rated and listed on the Luxembourg Stock Exchange — an institutional-grade issuance that demonstrates growing digital asset adoption at the multilateral development bank level, and commitment from established infrastructure players like Euroclear to embedding DLT in financial market infrastructure.
DekaBank issued Germany’s first digital registered covered bond (Pfandbrief) on the SWIA blockchain with €100 million volume, using blockchain to enable same-day settlement, improved tradability, and reduced risk.
Lido Institutional and ERC-6123
Lido, the largest liquid staking platform, launched Lido Institutional — a B2B white-glove service for institutional clients. The service addresses AML and KYC concerns and allows institutional clients to onboard without requiring transaction history. Lido’s current institutional share of TVL is approximately 25%; the stated goal is to reach 50%. Their positioning: a more decentralised alternative to centralised staking services, with the institutional compliance infrastructure that large players require.
QualitaX published its ERC-6123 paper in August — a 57-page deep dive on financial derivatives, particularly smart derivatives, developed in collaboration with Deutsche Bank, the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, Kinovatek, Hacken, Calor, and others. ERC-6123 is a specification for managing and settling derivative contracts on-chain. The paper covers the current state of the OTC derivatives market, challenges in traditional OTC derivatives (margin management, counterparty default risk), the technical specifications and mechanisms introduced by ERC-6123, existing test and pilot cases, and a technical breakdown of key methods and events. Figure 11 — a summary table comparing key benefits and improvements from ERC-6123 versus current OTC processes — is particularly useful as a reference for institutions evaluating the settlement efficiency gains from on-chain derivatives infrastructure. This paper is a direct complement to the CESR swap work discussed in the previous QualitaX video, providing the settlement layer specification for the staking rate instruments that CESR enables.
Part Two: Real-World Asset Tokenisation with RWA World
Commentary by Tyler Sherwin (Head of Business Development) and Ray Buckton (Head of Research), RWA World
Tokenised Treasuries Cross $2 Billion — Five Months After $1 Billion
August’s headline number: tokenised Treasuries crossed $2 billion in market cap. The $1 billion threshold was reached five months earlier. The acceleration is notable. MakerDAO — which has since rebranded as Sky — has announced plans to allocate $1 billion to tokenised assets, primarily Treasuries, which should push the total toward $3 billion in the near term.
Context on scale: the $2 billion tokenised Treasury market remains a very small fraction of the global T-bill market and still pales next to the $100+ billion stablecoin market cap. Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo’s assessment — that tokenised Treasuries will always intrinsically lag stablecoins in total size — is probably correct. But the velocity of growth is the more important current signal.
Kaiko Research has noted that a potential change in Fed rate policy could moderate the pace of tokenised Treasury adoption, since the category was partly catalysed by the high-rate environment that made non-yielding stablecoins an opportunity cost. But their assessment is that adoption will slow, not stop: the fundamental benefits of tokenisation — settlement efficiency, programmability, 24/7 transferability, fractional ownership — persist regardless of the rate environment. The category has found product-market fit. Rate normalisation would reduce the yield incentive but not eliminate the operational case.
Institutional Developments: Block Building Concentration, Dark Pools, and the Layer 2 Boom
Ethereum block building concentration: According to Ledger Insights, Beaver Build was responsible for over half of all blocks built on Ethereum in August. This is worth distinguishing carefully: block building is different from block validation. Ethereum has approximately 1.3 million validator nodes securing the network. But the actual construction of the block to be validated — the ordering and selection of transactions — is performed by a smaller set of specialised block builders. Beaver Build’s dominance at over 50% of blocks built is a meaningful centralisation risk that the ecosystem needs to address.
Dark pools on Ethereum: Up to 30% of Ethereum transactions are now flowing through dark pools, according to Ledger Insights. Dark pools are quasi-private transaction environments — a long-established feature of institutional equity markets, where large banks route major orders to avoid market impact from public order flow visibility. Their arrival on Ethereum reflects both the presence of institutional participants who are accustomed to these mechanisms and the genuine problem they are solving: MEV (Maximal Extractable Value) sandwich attacks and other extractive transaction ordering strategies that are endemic to public mempool environments. For institutions that would otherwise avoid Ethereum due to front-running exposure, dark pool access provides a practical mitigation — while raising questions about the character of Ethereum’s public mempool.
Franklin Templeton and SBI Holdings announced a joint venture for digital assets in Japan. Both institutions have expressed comfort with dark pool mechanics, reflecting their familiarity with institutional financial practices.
Sony launched a Layer 2 testnet and associated incubator — a dedicated blockchain that attests its data to an underlying chain (in this case Ethereum). Sony’s potential use cases are distinctive: a unified blockchain experience across Sony’s portfolio of products spanning gaming, entertainment, and consumer electronics could unlock a unique category of creator and consumer use cases that general-purpose Layer 2 networks have not specifically targeted.
Layer 2 proliferation: According to L2Beat, there are currently 74 active Layer 2 networks with over 80 more in the pipeline — putting the ecosystem on track for over 150 Layer 2s. Whether the market can sustain this many is a genuine question. But the structural logic of a multi-chain future in which all Layer 2 activity ultimately attests back to one or a small handful of Layer 1 chains does provide a coherent architecture for scaling that avoids fragmentation at the settlement layer.
NASDAQ is now looking to launch Bitcoin options, following NYSE’s lead. The competitive dynamic between major exchanges on digital asset products has shifted: with NYSE having moved first, the first-mover premium is gone, and broad adoption is now more likely to accelerate.
Regulatory Developments: Good News, Bad News, and Operation Chokepoint 2.0
Ripple vs. SEC — final outcome: The SEC’s case against Ripple has concluded with Ripple fined $125 million — significantly less than the $1 billion the SEC had sought — and barred from future violations. Ripple XRP has been confirmed as not a security. This is a concrete legal precedent for the industry. The “barred from future violations” language reads as an unusual formulation, but the substantive outcome is a meaningful win for Ripple and for the broader industry’s effort to establish legal clarity on digital asset classification.
SEC Wells Notice to OpenSea: The SEC issued a Wells notice to OpenSea, the dominant NFT trading platform, for the alleged issuance of unregistered securities. OpenSea joins Robinhood Crypto and Consensys as recipients of Wells notices from the SEC in this period. The enforcement pattern under the current SEC regime continues: novel platforms transacting in digital assets are being evaluated under existing securities law frameworks rather than through new regulatory guidance.
Customers Bank ordered to limit digital asset exposure: The Federal Reserve ordered Customers Bank to limit its digital asset exposure by restricting the types of digital asset clients it can onboard. Tyler’s characterisation — drawing on three years’ experience at a similar fintech infrastructure bank — is worth quoting directly: this reflects a pattern that critics have labelled Operation Chokepoint 2.0.
The original Operation Chokepoint, during the Obama Administration, involved FDIC regulators pressuring banks to avoid certain industries deemed politically unsavory — not through formal policy but through informal guidance, off-the-record instructions, and after-the-fact reprimands. Research by Nick Carter and others has documented a similar pattern of informal regulatory pressure on banks serving digital asset clients over the past four years. Banks that have tried to serve digital asset businesses have faced examination pressure, guidance comments, and reprimands that function as de facto restrictions without the accountability of formal rulemaking.
The consequence is practical and direct: digital asset companies rely on banks for fiat on and off-ramps. If regulated banks are systematically pressured to avoid digital asset clients, the industry’s access to the conventional financial system is impaired regardless of whether the digital asset activities themselves are legal. Tyler’s expectation is that this pattern will not resolve until there is a change in leadership at the FDIC or a change in political direction. The November election is the relevant variable.
Ecosystem Developments
MakerDAO rebrands as Sky: Alongside its $1 billion tokenised asset allocation announcement, MakerDAO rebranded to Sky. The rebranding reflects a pragmatic adjustment: as centralised institutions increasingly seek to engage with DeFi protocols, the DAO governance structure — with its anonymous participants and decentralised decision-making — creates friction for institutions that need known counterparties and defined communication channels. A more institutional-facing governance presentation reduces that friction.
Tether vs. Celsius: Tether is actively fighting a Celsius lawsuit in which Celsius — currently in bankruptcy proceedings and having repaid over $2.5 billion (80%+ of capital) to creditors — is pursuing clawback claims against parties including Tether, targeting anyone who withdrew more than $100,000 from the platform. Tether’s position is that the lawsuit is predatory and has no legal basis, stemming from a withdrawal transaction properly submitted by Celsius to Tether. The parallel to the Mt. Gox situation is instructive: underlying assets held in escrow have appreciated massively since the bankruptcy filing, and the distribution of those appreciated assets among creditors creates a complex set of competing claims.
MetaMask debit card: MetaMask — the world’s most widely used Web3 wallet — is launching a blockchain-based debit card developed in conjunction with MasterCard. The combination of MetaMask’s 30+ million users with a familiar payment form factor could represent a meaningful mainstream accessibility improvement, despite MetaMask’s historically complex user experience.
RWA World partners with Segment: RWA World announced a partnership with Segment, a wholly owned subsidiary of VanEck Europe, focused on dashboarding services for tokenised watches and other collectible assets. RWA World will provide API solutions and high-fidelity data to the Segment platform — described as a Web3 eBay for collectibles backed by VanEck’s institutional credibility.
Key Takeaways
DLT in Finance
- Bloomberg Terminal’s Polymarket integration is a quiet but significant step: a major financial data provider embedding a DeFi-based product in its core institutional offering
- Centrifuge’s RWA lending market on Base enables borrowing against tokenised Treasuries without redemption — the composability that makes on-chain assets more useful than their off-chain equivalents
- Hamilton Lane’s minimum investment reduction from $5M to $20K via Securitize demonstrates tokenisation’s democratisation potential for private equity secondaries
- AIIB’s $300M digital native note on Euroclear’s D-FMI platform is the first digital USD issuance for Euroclear — multilateral development banks are now issuing on DLT infrastructure
- ERC-6123 paper published — the on-chain settlement specification for financial derivatives, including the CESR swap use case, with Deutsche Bank and EEA collaboration
RWA Tokenisation
- Tokenised Treasuries crossed $2 billion in August — five months after the $1 billion milestone — with MakerDAO’s $1 billion allocation likely to push the category toward $3 billion imminently
- Beaver Build’s 50%+ block-building share on Ethereum is a meaningful centralisation risk distinct from (and independent of) the validator decentralisation that Ethereum is known for
- Dark pools now account for up to 30% of Ethereum transactions — institutional MEV mitigation mechanisms have arrived on the world’s largest smart contract network
- 74 active Layer 2 networks with 80+ in the pipeline; the multi-chain future is arriving faster than most predicted
- Operation Chokepoint 2.0: informal regulatory pressure on banks serving digital asset clients continues — Customers Bank is the latest example; November election is the key variable for resolution
- Ripple confirmed as non-security — a concrete legal precedent; SEC Wells notice to OpenSea continues the enforcement-first regulatory pattern