Gm, and happy Thursday!

The SEC’s proposed rulemaking on Regulation Crypto Assets and Trump’s meeting with industry leaders on US tech innovation catalyzed a decisive and broad rally, with every crypto sector we track outperforming equities. 

Below, we discuss today’s RapidFile launch and what the SEC’s proposal could mean for token issuers. 

There’s no better reason to be bullish than having no reasons to be bullish. This perhaps best describes sentiment over the past few months: CLARITY stalled, STRC smoked, Saylor sidelined, exploits continued and AI equities stole all the attention. What was there to be optimistic about? Nothing. What was the catalyst going to be? Hard to name. But in an environment like this, with few reasons to be bullish, any positive catalyst can have an outsized impact. That is exactly how this week played out.

On Tuesday, the SEC released proposed rulemaking for Regulation Crypto Assets, offering clear guidance on the frameworks through which token-based projects can raise capital, and the requirements for doing so (discussed more below). Absent CLARITY, the SEC is moving forward with guidance the industry has been desperate for, moving the regime from high uncertainty (which markets hate) to low uncertainty (which markets love). 

Coupled with this, Trump hosted crypto industry executives and financial regulators at the White House yesterday for a meeting on US tech innovation as the administration seeks to advance new rules governing digital assets. Industry representatives included Brian Armstrong, Vlad Tenev, Arjun Sethi and Sergey Nazarov. Their firms and activities were once threatened with lawsuits from some of the same regulatory bodies represented at the meeting.

A notable quotation from Trump in this meeting includes “I understand that Mike (Selig, CFTC chairman) is also working to bring Hyperliquid into the United States in a fully compliant and legal fashion.” Additionally, a strategic Bitcoin reserve and additional purchases were brought up, and participants reportedly responded positively.

The market was caught offside by these two catalysts this week, driving a sharp, broad-based rally. BTC broke range highs and traded up to $72.4k, a 15% move on the week and the highest price since June 1st. Every crypto sector we track moved deep in the green, with every one outperforming equity indices and the majority outperforming BTC. Perps led the day, up 20.9%, on the back of Trump namedropping Hyperliquid, a catalyst few had on their bingo cards. Just like that, risk is back on the table, and plenty of it can be found in crypto.

— Luke

Banks are racing to prove tokenized deposits can move onchain without breaking the rules that make them deposits in the first place.

However, bank issuance is gated by three requirements no stack has met at once. This is the problem ZkSync's Prividium was built to solve, and the Cari Network is its first deployment.

Read the full report by Blockworks Research to unpack the first proof point of the regional-bank tokenized-deposit thesis.

Trust Can't Wait

Today Blockworks launched RapidFile, a free filing platform for the Token Transparency Framework. RapidFile lets any project build years of trust in minutes, streamlining a process that has historically taken around three weeks, according to our internal data on past filings. The platform drafts initial answers from uploaded source material, incorporation documents and allocation schedules included, then flags gaps question by question before submission. Teams invite collaborators across legal and finance, then export a formatted PDF for counsel review at any stage.

The launch targets a cost problem. If a complete filing requires weeks of bespoke work at large-firm rates, small and mid-cap issuers cannot afford transparency, and opacity stays the default at the long tail where holders operate blind. In May, we made a bet that trust is a market problem before it is a legal one. Exchanges and market makers run diligence on every token they touch, and issuers who hand those desks standardized disclosures clear diligence faster.

To date, 114 disclosures have been filed under the TTF. The Transparency Alliance behind the framework counts more than 70 members representing over $400B in market cap, and Blockworks targets more than 200 protocols with public disclosures by year-end.

On Tuesday, the SEC proposed Regulation Crypto Assets, the first registration exemption framework built for token investment contracts. The proposal contains two exemptions:

• A one-time option for offerings up to $5M over four years.

• A second permitting up to $75M per 12-month period, with financial statements and ongoing reporting attached.

It also contains a conditional safe harbor. Once an issuer completes or ceases the essential managerial efforts promised under an investment contract, the associated crypto asset falls outside the "investment contract" prong of the securities definition. The proposal preempts state registration requirements for exempt offerings, and the comment window runs 60 days from Federal Register publication.

The proposing release runs past 400 pages, and the details reward a close read. Per the release, once a network or application is functional, services to secure and improve it do not count as essential managerial efforts, and the Commission puts funding development projects in the same bucket. Ongoing foundation work after mainnet does not re-trigger Howey. An issuer claims the safe harbor by filing a transition report through EDGAR: a certification that its promised efforts are complete, plus an analysis a reasonable investor could follow. The SEC expects the exit ramp to outdraw the on-ramp, estimating 475 safe harbor filings per year against 130 new exempt offerings.

Rule 103 organizes required disclosures into ten topics, including the offering, management and conflicts, development plans, token economics, governance and risk factors. The rule also requires disclosures to stay consistent with an issuer's public statements across its website, official social accounts and whitepapers.

The Commission's math puts a price on compliance. At the release's $635 hourly rate, the SEC prices the startup track's notice filing at ~50 hours (~$32K) and the fundraising track's full offering statement at ~717 hours (~$455K), with annual, semiannual and current reports stacked on top. The release cites those burdens as reasons to preempt state registration, noting a prior estimate of ~$80-100K in legal fees for a 50-state filing.

After the comment window come revisions, a final vote and whatever litigation follows most major rulemakings. That process runs on Washington's clock. Issuers launching tokens this quarter cannot wait it out, and neither can the exchanges and market makers running diligence on them.

— Nick

Can MetaDAO Reinvent Crypto Capital Formation?

Michael Rinko of Colosseum joined the 0xResearch podcast to trace MetaDAO's pivot from a governance SaaS product that Jito and Drift declined to adopt into a capital formation platform with an estimated 20 to 30 launches across permissioned and permissionless raises. He framed decision markets as rug protection for internet fundraising, citing the early Proposal 6 fight. In that case, small holders traded against a whale that spent a few hundred thousand dollars trying to force through an OTC deal.

He also outlined Colosseum’s STAMP structure, which lets teams accept its $250K accelerator check in exchange for a commitment to launch on MetaDAO rather than issue equity. Rinko also flagged tokenized equities and AI-assisted building as his two structural bets, noting Colosseum's Frontier hackathon drew nearly 2,900 submissions with nontechnical founders shipping Solana smart contracts.

We’re One of the Largest TAO Holders and Want Builders on Bittensor to Raise Equity

Sami Kassab of Unsupervised Capital, which describes itself as one of the largest TAO holders, argues that tokens and equity can coexist when the token sits in the production path rather than on the cap table. He cites Venice AI’s $65M equity raise and the selloff in Grass after the team reported $17M in H1 2026 revenue on a network call. In both cases, value reaches tokenholders at the team’s discretion. He contrasts this with Bittensor subnets, where miners earn the token and a growing business benefits from a higher token price because it expands the available incentive budget.

Manifold Labs anchors the thesis: The Targon operator buys its own subnet token with profits because its compute rental business depends on the miner supply those emissions fund, though the piece reads as a large holder making the case for its own position. Kassab published the article on X Monday.