👨‍💼 From suits to nodes

Remember when I told you that we’d see a slew of crypto-related IPOs post-Circle? I wasn’t kidding. 

The Financial Times reported that Bullish confidentially filed for an IPO. Yes, the same crypto exchange that owns CoinDesk.

Back when special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) were all the rage, Bullish said it wanted to go public on the New York Stock Exchange. However, that clearly didn’t work out. 

Now we’ll see if there’s enough appetite for a more traditional approach.

🌱 In the weeds

Franklin Templeton is introducing intraday yield to Benji users. 

Basically, investors can “own a tokenized security for part of the day, transfer it to another investor, and still earn yield for the period they were a shareholder.”

Franklin Templeton’s Roger Bayston explained: “To actually splice the day, to be able to do that, opens up market opportunities and things like collateral markets, where money may be moving in and around multiple times a day, but as long as you're in Benji, you can earn the interest for that part of the day, and it begins to find application and other things too.”

And investors can now purchase tokenized securities using stablecoins. 

Bayston told me this announcement is just one of the many things he and his team are working on. They have been “heads down” to focus on bringing new utilities to Benji. 

Right now, there’s about $7 trillion in money market fund assets in the US, and there’s room to improve them. 

“So crypto-native private funds that have been using stablecoins as collateral for their structured transactions can now begin to use Benji in that construct…that collateral market activity that's all brand new use cases for money markets; and we see the future where the TradFi markets will begin to use these same feature sets, because these have benefits of moving money really quickly, and that money continuing to earn, right? Continuing to work for you during that whole process,” he explained. 

And, look, I know what you’re thinking: These tokenized funds aren’t the sexiest crypto use case, but there’s clearly a lot of capital to tap there. 

Besides, Bayston believes that if “stablecoins were a killer app for blockchains in general, tokenized money funds are going to be another one because they complement each other.”

He admitted that he’s spending a lot of time looking at how one can get liquidity between the two. 

“Money funds are five business days. Stablecoins are 24/7, and so there is liquidity between those two things, which I think is a future opportunity for market makers and market participants by and large,” he said. 

But he’s also learning that it’s not just about tokenization this year.

“I think what we're learning in 2025 is the use of a lot of different assets on blockchain rails can be effective as collateral, and…if you're acting as collateral, that means you're borrowing something against it. Well, this is the business of banks, right? So the banks have a lot of interest in building infrastructure or beginning to utilize infrastructure where a number of different assets become easier to deal with in the collateral management process,” he explained. 

So far, banks have shown a lot of interest in figuring out how all of this works, especially in different scenarios like a collateral liquidation.

“They do see this as a way of using new and other types of assets, using these blockchain rails for the truth of record and the ease of transferability of those ownership things as a new ecosystem for collateral, which allows them to do what their basic business is, which is lend,” Bayston said. 

So perhaps a bit in the weeds, but it’s an area of potential adoption we haven’t quite explored yet.

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• It’s not just your imagination: Fortune 500 companies are exploring how to integrate blockchain.

• Sandeep Nailwal is taking the reins back over at the Polygon Foundation. He announced that he’ll be stepping into the CEO role and will be making some changes. 

• South Korea’s ruling party might be supportive of stablecoins, Bloomberg reports.

Yesterday, Lightspeed’s Jack Kubinec and I broke that the SEC asked potential Solana ETF issuers to submit amended S-1’s within the next week. 

We’re told that this is a good sign and that this could show that the SEC is serious about approving such products within 3-5 weeks. Though I’ve also been warned that it may take longer. Either way, there’s an October deadline, so at least things are chugging along. 

“We think the SEC may now focus on handling 19b-4 filings for Solana and staking ETFs earlier than planned. Issuers and industry participants likely have been working alongside the SEC and its crypto task force to hash out rules, but the final deadlines for the agency’s decisions on such applications aren’t until October,” Bloomberg Intelligence’s James Seyffart wrote in a note this week.

We were told that the SEC is asking for updated language around in-kind redemptions, and interestingly enough, staking. 

Keep in mind that this looks good right now, but isn’t necessarily a sure-fire indication that we’re going to see staking get approved. Sorry to throw cold water on y’all, but it needed to be said after the amount of DMs I received yesterday. Oh, and also, this is only in reference to the potential SOL ETFs. The jury’s still out on whether the SEC will go back and greenlight ETH ETF staking, which they nixed before those products went live.

With all of that said, this is still a very good sign for these ETFs, especially because it’s no secret that the regulatory agency is pretty thinly staffed right now.