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Monero Jumps 30% After ZachXBT Traces $120M USDT Laundering Run Through Privacy Coin

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Monero Jumps 30% After ZachXBT Traces $120M USDT Laundering Run Through Privacy Coin

Monero surged roughly 30% to an intraday high of $438 on Thursday after blockchain investigator ZachXBT traced a $120 million USDT movement that included large purchases of the privacy coin, with Tether subsequently freezing $72 million in connected funds.

Monero surged roughly 30% to an intraday high of $438 late Thursday ET after blockchain investigator ZachXBT traced a $120 million USDT movement that included large purchases of the privacy coin, with Tether subsequently freezing $72 million in connected funds.

ZachXBT posted to his Investigations Telegram channel early Friday that a Tron address received 120.2 million USDT on June 11 and began routing the funds across exchanges and blockchains. According to ZachXBT’s trace, the entity transferred more than $17.5 million to deposit addresses identified as belonging to KuCoin, $8 million to various instant swap services, and bridged another $8 million to Bitcoin and Ethereum via Near Intents, a cross-chain tool.

“The entity created Monero orders which caused the XMR price to spike from $330 to $420,” ZachXBT wrote.

The On-Chain Route

ZachXBT’s trace describes the Tron wallet address TA6YHqB2xh5HhfmC7WoLQaWmqq7Vv4zCoQ receiving the 120.2 million USDT in a single incoming transaction on Thursday. The funds then fanned out across multiple routes, a pattern consistent with layering, a classic stage of money laundering.

Instant swap services convert one cryptocurrency to another without identity checks. Near Intents is a cross-chain settlement layer built on NEAR Protocol that allows swapping between blockchains in a single step.

The Monero purchases were the most visible leg of the operation. Monero is designed so that transaction senders, recipients, and amounts are all hidden by default, making it harder for investigators to follow funds once they enter the network. The large buy orders pushed XMR from roughly $330 to an intraday peak of $438, per CoinGecko, before the token pulled back to trade around $370 by early morning Friday.

Tether’s Freeze

While the laundering trace was still active, Tether froze a related address. At 07:37 UTC on June 12, the company blacklisted the Tron address TBzrPEsStbZAUx2SBhD4oHz8UW3FX9Ak9W, locking 72,030,295 USDT. The USDT/USDC Ban List Telegram channel, which records Tether’s freeze transactions in near real time, logged the action with a status of “Executed.” About 24 minutes later, ZachXBT published his investigation and noted the freeze had just occurred.

Tether retains the ability to freeze balances at the contract level on the Tron and Ethereum networks. Frozen tokens cannot be moved or redeemed. Assets like Bitcoin or Monero have no equivalent issuer-controlled mechanism.

Tether froze $344 million in USDT in a prior coordinated action with U.S. law enforcement. In that case, Tether disclosed the coordination publicly.

XMR Price and Context

At current levels near $370, XMR is up roughly 15% over the past seven days and carries a market cap of approximately $7 billion.

Monero trades on fewer exchanges than most large-cap crypto assets, partly because its privacy features complicate compliance obligations for platforms subject to anti-money-laundering rules. That reduced liquidity means large orders can move the price sharply.

It is unclear where the original $120 million came from. ZachXBT has not published further attribution. As of publication, no law enforcement agency has publicly linked the address to a named investigation.

SpaceX Begins Nasdaq Trading With Tokenized Versions Mirroring Largest IPO in History

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SpaceX Begins Nasdaq Trading With Tokenized Versions Mirroring Largest IPO in History

SpaceX opened for trading on Nasdaq Friday under SPCX, completing what Nasdaq and Morgan Stanley confirmed as the largest IPO in history at $75 billion pre-greenshoe.

SpaceX opened for trading on Nasdaq Friday under the ticker SPCX, completing what Nasdaq and Morgan Stanley confirmed as the largest initial public offering in history.

The offering was priced at $135 per share and raised $75 billion pre-greenshoe, implying a $1.77 trillion valuation at open. Nasdaq confirmed the debut on its official account Friday morning. Morgan Stanley posted confirmation as co-lead underwriter, describing it as the largest IPO ever brought to market.

Asian Investors and the Crypto Demand Signal

Bloomberg reported Thursday that investors across Asia were largely excluded from the SpaceX book and turned to crypto-native products for exposure. The report documented retail and institutional demand flowing into tokenized SpaceX equity and perpetual futures as alternatives to the oversubscribed traditional offering.

That demand had already built substantial open interest in Hyperliquid’s pre-IPO SPCX perpetuals before the market open. Open interest was at above $200 million, the Hyperliquid dashboard shows. Hyperliquid’s total open interest across all perpetual markets stood at $8.77 billion on Friday, per DefiLlama, placing it as the largest decentralized perps venue by open interest.

Galaxy Digital co-founder Mike Novogratz described the IPO pricing as carrying speculation comparable to bitcoin, in comments circulated before the open.

The Live On-Chain Stack

Five regulated and crypto-native SPCX products settled into trading alongside the Nasdaq debut, completing a cross-chain tokenized-equity infrastructure The Defiant outlined Thursday:

Backpack Securities SPCX on Solana: Each token is backed 1:1 by a real SpaceX share held in Backpack’s regulated brokerage and is redeemable into a brokerage account, per the Solana Foundation’s official account. The token trades around the clock on SunriseDefi.

Ondo SPCXon: Ondo Finance’s tokenized version of the stock gives non-US retail and institutional users economic exposure equivalent to holding the equity with dividends reinvested, per Ondo’s app.

xStocks’ onchain token, backed by equity exposure via Backed Assets (JE) Limited, launched as planned and traded on decentralized exchanges from IPO morning. Kraken, the US-based crypto exchange, lists the token as its non-US offering, SPCXx, alongside a separate US listing, SPCX, that sources shares through its affiliated broker-dealer Payward Securities rather than through xStocks.

Dinari, the firm behind the dShares tokenized-equity standard, listed $SPCXD as the first tokenized US equity to trade spot on Hyperliquid’s HyperCore, the company said in a statement. Each token is backed 1:1 by a SpaceX share held with licensed custodians and carries dividends, automated corporate actions and redemption rights, and Dinari distributes the dShare across more than 85 jurisdictions through fintech, exchange and neobank partners. A compliance layer withholds ownership rights when a token leaves a KYC-enabled wallet and restores them when it returns.

Hyperliquid SPCX perpetuals: Pre-IPO perps launched by Trade.xyz on Hyperliquid now settle to the live Nasdaq price, converting the pre-market derivative into a spot-tracking instrument.

The Coinbase International Exchange’s USDC-settled SPCX perpetual, launched June 4, also transitions to live-equity settlement at the open.

Not every route held. Binance, Bybit and Bitget canceled their centralized tokenized SpaceX IPO-allocation campaigns Friday and refunded subscribers in full after xStocks, which had agreed to source the underlying shares and deliver them to the exchanges, could not procure them, The Defiant reported.

Binance, the largest crypto exchange by trading volume, had drawn $557 million in onchain subscriptions for its SPCXX campaign before unwinding it with no allocations distributed. The breakdown was confined to the centralized allocation model; the onchain tokens and Kraken’s broker-dealer listing went live on schedule. xStocks has made no public statement explaining why it could not deliver the shares.

The Bitcoin Balance Sheet

SpaceX holds 18,712 BTC, valued at approximately $1.18 billion at current prices, according to CoinGecko’s public-company bitcoin treasury tracker. That places SpaceX ninth among publicly tracked corporate bitcoin holders, behind Strategy (845,256 BTC), Metaplanet (40,177 BTC), and MARA Holdings (35,303 BTC), and ahead of Tesla (11,509 BTC) and Coinbase Global (15,389 BTC).

Bitcoin analyst Pete Rizzo flagged the holding Friday morning, describing SpaceX as the first company of this scale to debut publicly with a bitcoin position on its books. The 18,712 BTC figure has not been confirmed in a public S-1 or prospectus filing; SpaceX conducted a direct listing, and primary SEC disclosures confirming the exact bitcoin count have not been publicly surfaced as of this writing. The CoinGecko tracker corroborates the figure as the consensus tracked count, sourced from pre-IPO corporate disclosures and tracker aggregators; it has not been verified against a primary regulatory document.

At $63,294 per BTC, the position represents roughly 1.6% of the $75 billion raised in the offering, per CoinGecko price data.

Bitcoin Price Bull Setup ‘Finally Happening’ as Iran Deal Keeps BTC Above $64,000

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Bitcoin Price Bull Setup ‘Finally Happening’ as Iran Deal Keeps BTC Above $64,000

Bitcoin (BTC) circled $64,000 into Sunday’s weekly close as a US-Iran peace deal appeared imminent.

Key points:

  • Bitcoin stays higher as US president Donald Trump pledges an Iran peace deal on Sunday.
  • The Strait of Hormuz, a key global oil route, will be “open to all,” he says.
  • Bitcoin analysis says no bearish chart patterns are active as open interest hints at a lasting price rebound.

Iran peace deal keeps Bitcoin rebound afloat

Data from TradingView showed price action settling after local highs of $64,750 on Bitstamp.

BTC/USD one-hour chart. Source: Cointelegraph/TradingView

These had accompanied an announcement by US president Donald Trump that a peace deal would be signed on Sunday.

“The Deal is scheduled to get signed tomorrow, and immediately after it is signed, the Hormuz Strait is OPEN TO ALL,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social.

Source: Truth Social

Among traders, there was fresh hope that sell pressure on Bitcoin was easing as a result. Trader SuperBro noted that the 200-week simple moving average (SMA) was holding as support.

“In a word, constructive,” they summarized about low-time frame BTC price action in a post on X.

SuperBro dismissed concerns about a bearish breakdown pattern being in play, instead focusing on a point of control (nPOC) level on exchange order books above current spot price.

“$65K-$67K is a big test, at the last swing low and volume POC. If we can rip through this zone then the bear case takes a massive hit,” they concluded.

BTC/USD one-day chart. Source: SuperBro/X

Cointelegraph previously reported on misgivings about the 200-week SMA, which history had shown to be “unreliable” as a bear-market safety net.

Key BTC price setup “finally happening”

Continuing, trading account Cryptic Trades eyed a key combination of rising open interest and falling funding rates on exchanges.

Related: Bitcoin miner ‘capitulation’ comes as trader sees later 2026 bear-market bottom

“It’s finally happening,” it told X followers about what could support more sustainable BTC price strength.

Cryptic Trades suggested that current conditions showed a lack of belief on the part of bulls, removing the risk of new longs getting trapped before a new downturn.

“In other words, these aren’t longs aggressively chasing the move. These are bears doubling down, increasing their short positions, and betting that the downtrend isn’t over,” it explained.

“This is exactly the kind of setup that generally marks durable bottoms. The market starts moving higher, sentiment remains overwhelmingly bearish, and the most keep leaning the bearish. This is how aggressive short squeezes are born.”

BTC liquidation heatmap. Source: CoinGlass

Data from CoinGlass showed that the local highs coincided with a large band of potential short liquidations.

Second Circuit Affirms SBF’s Fraud Conviction and 25-Year Sentence

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Second Circuit Affirms SBF’s Fraud Conviction and 25-Year Sentence

A three-judge Second Circuit panel affirmed Sam Bankman-Fried’s conviction on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, along with his 25-year prison sentence, closing his primary legal path to overturning the 2023 verdict.

Sam Bankman-Fried’s bid to overturn his criminal conviction has failed. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed his conviction on all seven counts of fraud and conspiracy Friday, along with his 25-year prison sentence.

Bankman-Fried’s defense had argued that U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan improperly excluded evidence intended to show Bankman-Fried believed FTX had sufficient funds to cover customer withdrawals. The Second Circuit rejected that argument. Three of Bankman-Fried’s former deputies, all of whom pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors, testified at trial that he directed them to use FTX customer funds to cover losses at Alameda Research, his crypto hedge fund.

Legal Path Narrows

The Second Circuit ruling eliminates Bankman-Fried’s primary avenue for overturning the 2023 verdict. Oral arguments before the appeals court in November 2025 drew skepticism from the bench, with Judge Barrington Parker noting “very substantial evidence of guilt” on the record.

With the appeal dismissed, a presidential pardon remains the only viable route to early release. Bankman-Fried formally filed a pardon petition with the Trump administration on June 8, per Bloomberg. The White House had already signaled the application was unlikely to succeed, reiterating there was no intention to grant clemency. The Defiant reported the filing on June 9, when FTX’s FTT token surged roughly 52% on the news.

The Conviction

A Manhattan jury convicted Bankman-Fried in November 2023 on all seven counts, including wire fraud, securities fraud conspiracy, commodities fraud conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy. The charges covered the more than $8 billion in customer funds that flowed from FTX to Alameda Research before the exchange collapsed in November 2022. Judge Kaplan sentenced him to 25 years in March 2024, with release eligibility in 2044.

No public statement from Bankman-Fried’s legal team has been issued since the ruling.

Q2 2026 Sets All-Time High for DeFi Hack Count With ~70 Exploits, $746M Stolen

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Q2 2026 Sets All-Time High for DeFi Hack Count With ~70 Exploits, $746M Stolen

DeFi logged approximately 70 separate exploits in Q2 2026, roughly doubling the previous quarterly record, even as the $746 million dollar total remains a fraction of historical single-event peaks.

Q2 2026 has become the most-hacked quarter in DeFi history by incident count, according to DefiLlama, which logged approximately 70 separate exploits across April, May and the first two weeks of June. The quarterly dollar total stands at roughly $746 million.

The figures reflect a structural shift in how DeFi is attacked. Total losses are far below peaks reached during single mega-exploits in prior years, yet the attack frequency has roughly doubled the previous quarterly record. April alone set a monthly record with 28 to 30 confirmed incidents and more than $625 million in losses, driven largely by the $285 million Drift Protocol breach on April 1 and the $293 million KelpDAO exploit on April 18. Those two incidents together accounted for 93% of the month’s losses, per Bitcoin.com’s summary of DefiLlama’s data.

April was already covered by The Defiant as the most-hacked month on record by incident count. Q2’s quarterly total adds May’s 41 reported incidents and approximately $84 million in losses, per a June 1 Cryip report, plus early June incidents including the $36 million Humanity Protocol bridge exploit.

The Volume-vs-Magnitude Pattern

The quarterly count of roughly 70 is double the previous record for any single quarter, per DefiLlama’s hacks database. The $746 million total, while significant, is small relative to prior headline-grabbing single events: the February 2025 Bybit breach alone reached approximately $1.4 billion.

Q1 2026, by comparison, saw 34 security incidents totaling approximately $169 million, per DefiLlama data cited by the Bitcoin Foundation. April’s surge was 3.7 times larger than the entire Q1 total. But the larger story at the quarterly level is frequency: incidents are arriving faster, even as no single attack in May or early June approached the scale of the two April mega-events.

May’s incident pattern differed from April’s. Rather than a pair of large bridge and social-engineering attacks, May spread $84.2 million across 41 incidents on 16 blockchains, with the five largest collectively accounting for about 60% of losses. Infrastructure-layer attacks, including multisig tampering, bridge verification bypasses, and vault churn address poisoning, represented 63% of May’s total dollar losses, per the Cryip report.

Ethereum and Bridge Infrastructure Concentrate Risk

Ethereum-connected protocols accounted for $61.9 million of May’s $84.2 million in losses, or roughly 74% of the monthly total, per the Cryip data. Bridge-related incidents have totaled over $328 million across all of 2026 to date, per a June 3 CertiK Skynet report. The KelpDAO wallet compromise alone represents $291.3 million of that figure.

The attack vector breakdown for the quarter reflects the shift away from smart contract code bugs. Three of the four largest incidents in Q2, including the Drift Protocol social-engineering attack attributed to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, the KelpDAO LayerZero bridge message spoofing, and the Thorchain vault churn address poisoning, involved attackers who obtained access through operational or infrastructure failures rather than exploiting on-chain logic flaws.

What’s Not Yet Disclosed

DefiLlama’s figures remain subject to revision as recovery efforts proceed and attribution on several June incidents is finalized. The $746 million quarterly figure does not account for any recoveries or restitutions made after incident reports. Several May and June incidents remain under active investigation, with amounts unconfirmed.

The Q2 record by incident count comes as the DeFi sector TVL has not recovered to pre-April levels following the TVL flight that followed the KelpDAO exploit.

The SpaceX IPO scramble brings early lesson for tokenized stocks

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The SpaceX IPO scramble brings early lesson for tokenized stocks

One person familiar with the matter told CoinDesk that xStocks and its distribution partners gathered more than $1 billion in customer orders. But when underwriters finalized allocations, many of those requests went unfilled.

Binance Wallet, Bybit and Bitget Wallet received no shares and canceled their offerings. Meanwhile, customers of Kraken and xStocks received only a fraction of the allocations they requested.

The shortfall wasn’t limited to crypto platforms, though. Data compiled by Access IPOs showed that some retail investors at traditional brokerages received only a portion of the shares they had sought.

An xStocks spokesperson said “overwhelming demand” prevented all orders from being fulfilled and that funds tied to unfilled subscriptions had been returned.

The firm’s tokenized SpaceX stock, trading under the ticker SPCXx, was still launched after the IPO. About $24 million in tokenized shares were circulating onchain at the time of publication, according to Arkham data. Ondo Finance and Dinari, which did not offer pre-IPO access, also launched tokenized SpaceX products following the company’s market debut.

‘Performed as designed’

The episode underscores a key lesson for tokenized assets. Creating a token is easy; securing the underlying asset is crucial.

“What appears to have gone wrong… is that demand significantly exceeded the available supply of underlying shares,” a spokesperson for tokenization platform Dinari said.

“If the underlying stock cannot be sourced, allocated and held within the necessary regulatory framework, there is ultimately no asset to tokenize.”

Why crypto’s future may look more like traditional markets

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Why crypto’s future may look more like traditional markets

Those markets function because trading activity sits atop a vast network of credit relationships, clearing brokers and prime brokerage arrangements, Mercer says.

“That’s what the world’s economies and capital markets are built on,” he added.

When LMAX launched institutional crypto venue LMAX Digital in 2018, Mercer expected similar infrastructure would quickly emerge in digital assets. Eight years later, he believes its absence remains one of the industry’s biggest constraints.

Mercer remains an enthusiastic supporter of blockchain technology, citing instantaneous settlement amd transparent onchain records. But while atomic settlement and delivery-versus-payment transactions are valuable, he argues they are not sufficient for global capital markets.

“The world today is built on leverage and credit, and it will remain so,” Mercer says.

The collateral problem

A central challenge is the inability to move collateral efficiently between traditional and digital financial systems.

Today’s institutions often operate within separate regulatory and operational environments, with traditional assets, digital assets and stablecoins trapped inside distinct “walled gardens.” Collateral cannot move freely between them, reducing capital efficiency and limiting participation.

Market volatility during the first quarter highlighted the issue, Mercer said, as investors rotated between equities, gold and bitcoin in response to macroeconomic uncertainty.

“If you’ve pre-positioned fiat at a centralized exchange, you can’t necessarily deploy that collateral elsewhere when opportunities arise,” he said.

Thanks to you, 25% of ‘Mag8’ firms now hold bitcoin

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Thanks to you, 25% of ‘Mag8’ firms now hold bitcoin

Michael Saylor, co-founder of Strategy, the world’s largest publicly listed bitcoin holder, has a new term for Wall Street’s most elite stocks and a congratulatory message for Elon Musk.

Following SpaceX’s historic Nasdaq debut on Friday, the Strategy chairman took to X to congratulate Musk, noting that with SpaceX now public, 25% of what he calls the “Mag8” firms now hold bitcoin on their balance sheets.

“Thanks to you, 25% of the Mag8 now holds bitcoin on the balance sheet,” Saylor wrote.

The Mag8 appears to be Saylor’s expanded version of the widely used Magnificent Seven group, which includes Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Tesla. He has added SpaceX as the eighth member following its $1.75 trillion IPO, the largest public offering in history.

Both Tesla and SpaceX, the two Musk-led companies in the group, already held bitcoin on their balance sheets before the IPO.

SpaceX is already the eighth-largest public bitcoin holder, with 18,712 bitcoin on its balance sheet, according to BitcoinTreasuries.net. Tesla, meanwhile, holds 11,509 BTC.

Strategy remains the leader with a coin stash of 845,256 BTC worth over $54 billion.

Hester Peirce Bids Farewell to the SEC After Nearly 30 Years

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Hester Peirce Bids Farewell to the SEC After Nearly 30 Years

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce delivered her farewell remarks Tuesday at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Capital Markets Summit, closing a tenure defined by crypto-industry advocacy and dissent from the Gensler era.

SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce delivered her farewell remarks on Tuesday at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Capital Markets Summit in Washington, D.C. The address closed a tenure that made her the agency’s most prominent voice for crypto-industry clarity.

In the speech, titled “Peirce Out,” Peirce confirmed she is leaving the agency after nearly 30 years in Washington, saying she is “moving to the beach.” She will join Regent University School of Law in Virginia Beach as an associate professor in November, per Bloomberg. Her second term as commissioner expired in June 2025 and she has been serving in a holdover capacity since.

Crypto Gets a Nod in the Farewell

Peirce did not give the speech over to crypto. Her remarks at the Chamber of Commerce summit covered a broad sweep of securities regulation, from climate disclosure rules to the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act to the SEC’s use of disgorgement as a remedy. But she singled out the agency’s digital assets work as an example of the Commission returning to its statutory lane.

She described the past year-and-a-half of SEC crypto work as the agency’s effort “to tie our crypto regulatory and enforcement activities to the statutes we administer.” That framing was a pointed contrast to the Gary Gensler era, when Peirce repeatedly dissented from what she called the agency’s reliance on litigation rather than rulemaking. After Gensler’s exit, the SEC’s digital-asset enforcement and rulemaking was reset under Chairman Paul Atkins through an initiative known as Project Crypto.

Peirce’s dissent from the Gensler approach dated back years. She once called the agency’s enforcement-first posture a “paternalistic and lazy” way to regulate, and described the rules for the space as a “regulatory version of an escape room” offering no way out for compliant firms.

What She Is Leaving Behind

Beyond crypto, Peirce used the speech to catalog the work she sees as unfinished. She raised constitutional concerns about the SEC’s pay-to-play rule for investment advisers, arguing it functions as a financial disincentive against political speech. She also pushed back on the agency’s expansive reading of internal-accounting-controls requirements under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, calling it a “lever” to discipline companies over controls unrelated to accounting.

The Consolidated Audit Trail, which she described as “a massive market surveillance monitoring operation,” also drew scrutiny. The SEC issued a concept release in April asking questions about the CAT’s civil-liberties and privacy implications, a direction Peirce endorsed.

She cited several recent Commission actions as progress: the rescission in May of the rule preventing settling defendants from publicly denying allegations, the proposed rollback of climate disclosure rules, and the April effort to trim the Form PF reporting burden on private funds.

Peirce closed with a call for bipartisan ground around what she called the “boring basics”: updating transfer agent rules, modernizing investor disclosure technology, reforming investment-company proxy processes. “We will not agree on every detail,” she said, “but the joint work of getting to a good place might build good will that can be applied to areas of deeper disagreement.”

A Thinned Commission

Peirce’s departure will leave the SEC at two commissioners. The agency’s rules allow it to operate with fewer than three, but a two-person commission has no modern precedent and would complicate rulemaking and enforcement proceedings where a tie vote produces no decision.

The Defiant has covered Peirce’s work on tokenization in recent months, including her efforts to clarify the line between tokenized securities and synthetic instruments and her guidance on the scope of the proposed innovation exemption for onchain stock trading. Those positions remain in force until her seat is filled.

Peirce joined the SEC in 2018, filling the seat vacated by Commissioner Daniel Gallagher, and was renominated by President Trump and confirmed to a second term in 2020. She is the last Republican holdover commissioner.

Tokenization mirrors the $20 trillion ETF boom as blockchain and AI converge, new Ondo exec says

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Tokenization mirrors the $20 trillion ETF boom as blockchain and AI converge, new Ondo exec says

“ETFs were referred to as weapons of mass destruction,” Hoffman said, recalling the skepticism that surrounded the structure before it became one of the dominant ways investors access markets.

When he joined the ETF industry in the early 2000s, the market held roughly $200 billion in assets, he said. Today, it’s nearly a $20-trillion global asset class, according to a PwC report.

He said tokenization is following a similar path, but much faster than ETFs.

“Every market that digitizes gets larger,” he said. “And tokenization is really the digitization of capital markets.”

Building for an agent-driven future

For Hoffman, tokenization will become the foundation for what comes next: AI-driven financial services.

He said he envisions a future where autonomous agents continuously monitor markets and allocate capital through professionally managed portfolios that update in real time as conditions change.

“Our end state will be portfolios that are professionally managed, real-time and adjusting to market circumstances and data changes,” he said.

To get there, the industry first needs tokenized assets, onchain prime-brokerage infrastructure and asset-management strategies that can be executed natively on blockchain networks.

Ondo is building toward that vision, he said. The firm already offers tokenized U.S. Treasury products and plans to expand into stocks, ETFs and perpetual futures through its tokenized marketplace.

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