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Metaplanet Announces Joint Study To Bring Bitcoin-Backed Digital Credit To Japan

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Metaplanet Announces Joint Study To Bring Bitcoin-Backed Digital Credit To Japan

Metaplanet wants to turn its bitcoin pile into a credit market. On Friday, Japan’s largest corporate bitcoin holder said it has opened a joint study with three partners to build tokenized credit products backed by bitcoin, a step that pushes the company past simple treasury accumulation and toward the role of a financial platform.

The study group brings together Metaplanet, the yen stablecoin issuer JPYC, the regulated security token platform Progmat, and Siiibo Securities, the licensed brokerage Metaplanet bought last month for 2.1 billion yen, or about $13 million. Siiibo becomes Metaplanet Securities on July 13.

The four firms will examine whether bitcoin can serve as collateral for credit instruments that pay interest each day. Metaplanet frames this as a product that exists in the United States but not in Japan. 

Digitization, the company said, would allow trading and settlement of these instruments around the clock, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with rights management at the holder level, pro-rata interest math handled in software, and redemptions recorded on a public ledger.

Bitcoin-backed credit is a young product class. Public companies that hold bitcoin use the asset as core collateral for debt offerings, and those offerings pay dividends or interest. The design takes a static coin balance and turns it into an instrument that throws off cash.

Metaplanet was blunt about how early this is. “The four companies will examine issues in product design, the need for proof-of-concept initiatives, and the possibility of future issuance,” the company said. “At this time, nothing has been determined regarding issuance timing, terms, yield, product details, distribution methods, or the form of collaboration.” 

Why Japan?

The pitch rests on a gap in Japan’s debt market. That market favors large corporations that can float public bonds. Mid-sized and growth companies face steep costs and heavy operational load around issuance, sales, investor management, interest payments, and redemptions. Many of them stay shut out.

Digital credit, in Metaplanet’s telling, could open the door to those smaller firms. Onchain infrastructure would bridge traditional capital markets and blockchain rails, cut the manual work, and give issuers a path to raise money that a public bond sale did not offer them. If it works, a growth company in Tokyo could raise debt on a system that settles at any hour and tracks every holder in code.

Each partner brings one piece. Metaplanet and its securities arm will design the products that fuse bitcoin with credit, sell them to investors, field customer questions, and manage the instruments after issuance. 

JPYC will test whether its yen-pegged stablecoin can move payments and redemptions through the system. Progmat will supply the regulated tokenization layer, which tracks ownership, processes transfers, and wires the whole thing to the stablecoin payment system.

The division of labor maps onto a full stack: an issuer and distributor with a license, a settlement asset, and a token platform.

Metaplanet’s bigger plan

The study fits a strategy the company calls Project Nova, its plan to build a bitcoin-centric financial platform in Japan. The Siiibo purchase gave Metaplanet a Type I Financial Instruments Business Operator registration, the license Japan requires to structure and sell financial products to retail investors. 

Siiibo, founded in 2019, runs an online platform for private-placement corporate bonds and has backed more than 40 issuers across 100-plus offerings. Metaplanet gains that track record, plus a shareholder base of about 250,000 investors to sell into.

Simon Gerovich, Metaplanet’s president and CEO, has cast the shift in stark terms. “We view Bitcoin not as a treasury reserve asset, but as the foundation of the next generation of financial ecosystems,” he said when the Siiibo deal was announced.

Metaplanet holds 43,000 BTC, worth about $2.47 billion. Strategy and Twenty One Capital are the two public holders ranked above it.

For the moment, the digital credit plan is a set of questions and four companies willing to study them. Whether it becomes a product depends on the proof-of-concept work that remains. But the direction is clear: Metaplanet wants its bitcoin to do more than sit on a balance sheet. It wants the coin to underwrite a market.

Sky Reports Record $419M Revenue Run-Rate for June 2026

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Sky Reports Record $419M Revenue Run-Rate for June 2026

Cumulative sUSDS yield payouts topped $250 million as Grove launched its GROVE governance token and a new Fixed Yield product crossed $44.1 million in TVL.

Sky Frontier Foundation, the entity handling reporting for the Sky Ecosystem, disclosed a record $419.08 million annualized gross revenue run-rate in its June 2026 Financial & Operational Update, published Friday. Sky, formerly MakerDAO and now a $6.12 billion-TVL lending and stablecoin protocol per DefiLlama, also reported cumulative sUSDS savings-rate yield distributions surpassing $250 million since inception.

The update, also summarized by Sky’s official X account, said the month brought “record revenue run rates” and “continued Sky Reserves growth.” Sky Reserves, the protocol’s onchain buffer asset holdings, reached $82.5 million, up $33.7 million since March, according to the forum post.

Grove, a Sky-affiliated real-world-asset initiative, launched GROVE, its native governance token, during June, the update said. Separately, Sky’s Fixed Yield product built on sUSDS crossed $44.1 million in TVL in its first month live, the report said.

DefiLlama’s own fee tracking, which counts total user-paid fees rather than Sky’s “gross revenue” framing, shows Sky generating $30.14 million in fees over the trailing 30 days, an annualized pace of roughly $367 million. That is in the same range as Sky’s self-reported $419.08 million figure.

Circle (CRCL) Wins Final OCC Approval For National Trust Bank

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Circle (CRCL) Wins Final OCC Approval For National Trust Bank

Circle Internet Group secured final approval from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency today, to establish a national trust bank, a milestone that sent the stablecoin issuer’s shares higher and deepened its ties to the federal banking system.

The regulator cleared Circle to charter First National Digital Currency Bank, N.A., which will operate under the name Circle National Trust. 

The company, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker CRCL, said the charter places the new entity under direct federal oversight by the OCC, the primary supervisor for national banks and national trust banks.

Circle National Trust will provide fiduciary custody services for digital assets held by Circle and its affiliates. Under the business plan the OCC approved, the bank could extend custody services to a limited set of institutional customers, with a focus on banks and regulated derivatives organizations. 

The charter opens a path for the bank to manage the reserve backing USDC, the largest regulated stablecoin, which would bring that multibillion-dollar pool under federal supervision.

National trust banks differ from traditional lenders. They safeguard client assets and provide fiduciary services, and they do not take deposits or issue loans. The structure aligns its digital-asset infrastructure with a long-standing model for holding client assets under strict fiduciary standards.

“OCC approval to establish Circle National Trust marks a defining step in bringing blockchain technology and digital assets into the core of the U.S. financial system,” said Jeremy Allaire, co-founder, chairman, and chief executive of Circle. He said federal oversight of the trust bank “sets a new standard for transparency, governance, and scale” and unlocks a phase of adoption in which large financial institutions can build on public blockchains with confidence.

Investors welcomed the decision. CRCL shares climbed as much as 14% on the day of the announcement, a rebound from a three-month low. Other crypto-linked names, including Coinbase and Strategy, posted gains near 5% this morning as bitcoin bounced.

CRCL shares have since settled to 5% gains.

Circle’s federal framework

The approval caps a process that began when Circle filed its application on June 30, 2025. The OCC granted conditional approval in December 2025, alongside peers such as Ripple, BitGo, Fidelity Digital Assets, and Paxos. 

The final decision arrives as the GENIUS Act, the federal stablecoin law enacted in July 2025, moves toward full implementation in early 2027. 

That statute requires OCC supervision of large stablecoin issuers, and the trust charter positions Circle to meet the mandate while bringing USDC reserves into a federal framework.

Circle has built a record of regulatory engagement across markets. It received a BitLicense from New York in 2015, became the first global stablecoin issuer to comply with the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets framework in 2024, and holds licenses in the United Kingdom, Singapore, Bermuda, and Abu Dhabi.

The charter strengthens USDC’s role as regulated digital-dollar infrastructure for payments, settlement, and capital markets, Circle said.

Polymarket Applies for US License to Offer Margin Trading

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Polymarket Applies for US License to Offer Margin Trading

The filing would let Polymarket users open positions without posting full collateral, following Kalshi’s FCM-backed perpetuals launch.

Polymarket has applied for a US futures commission merchant license to offer margin trading on its prediction markets, Bloomberg reported Thursday. The move would let traders open positions without posting full collateral upfront.

The application, filed July 3 with the National Futures Association through Polymarket affiliate Coming Home GBA LLC, seeks FCM registration, according to documents cited by Bloomberg. Polymarket must also win approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to amend its rulebook to permit non-fully collateralized trades, the filing shows.

A Polymarket representative confirmed to Bloomberg that the application had been submitted, with the goal of attracting more institutional investors to the platform. Under the proposed rules, users of margin products would face additional identity checks, including providing employer information, Bloomberg reported.

Following Kalshi’s Lead

The filing tracks a similar path taken by rival Kalshi, which obtained an FCM license earlier this year and subsequently launched perpetual contracts that generated more than $5.5 billion in trading volume within two weeks. Polymarket has been rebuilding its US footprint since receiving CFTC approval to operate domestically last November, following a earlier report that it had sought full CFTC sign-off for its main platform in April.

Meta’s Chief Data Officer Says Agentic Commerce is the “Next Tier of Business”

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Meta’s Chief Data Officer Says Agentic Commerce is the “Next Tier of Business”

In a wide-ranging conversation on CoinDesk Spotlight, Schultz laid out a view of Meta’s future in which agentic commerce is not a product category but an inevitability.

“We think it might be the next tier of business for our entire company,” he told host, Sam Ewen.

The Agentic Economy Is Already Here, But It’s Unevenly Distributed

Schultz framed the agentic economy the same way science fiction author William Gibson framed the future: already present, not yet mainstream.

“We are building business agents for all businesses,” he said. “We have over a million weekly active businesses with Meta agents[…] from basically nothing at the start of the year.”

The use case he outlined was deliberately mundane: coordinating a child’s birthday party. Agents booking times, checking calendars, finding venues, communicating with other parents’ agents, all on WhatsApp. The point of the mundane example is that it scales. If agents can handle low-stakes logistics, they can handle supply chain negotiations, financial settlements, and cross-border commerce.

“You write that example large,” Schultz said, “and then if you’re us, you hope that you do it over WhatsApp”

The payments layer inside that vision is stablecoins.

U.S. Representatives Urge Senate To Vote On CLARITY Act In July, Address Ethics Concerns

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U.S. Representatives Urge Senate To Vote On CLARITY Act In July, Address Ethics Concerns

Rep. French Hill wants a deadline. 

One year after the House passed the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act, the Arkansas Republican who chairs the House Financial Services Committee used a Fox Business interview with anchor Maria Bartiromo to press Senate leaders for a floor vote before the August recess.

“I’ve encouraged Senate leadership to put it on the floor,” Hill said. “I think if you schedule a floor date here in the month of July, that will cause these final meetings, these final discussions to take place. You’ve got to have a deadline in Congress to get people to move and find consensus.” 

Hill thanked Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Cynthia Lummis, John Boozman and Tim Scott for working toward a deal, and pointed to the 78 Democrats who backed the House measure a year ago.

Hill’s central argument is that the CLARITY Act would resolve the ethics concerns now used to block it, rather than deepen them. 

Critics point to President Trump’s crypto ventures, including $TRUMP meme coin licensing and World Liberty Financial token sales, which a July 1 financial disclosure tied to about $1.4 billion in 2025 income. 

Hill contends a market framework offers the transparency those critics want. 

“If we passed the CLARITY Act last summer, many of the things that people are expressing concern about — meme coin issuance, co-investment, use of exchange, investing in exchanges — all that would be under a market framework of regulation with clarity, no pun intended, and that would provide a lot of transparency to people that are concerned about the Trump family’s investments,” he said.