Clarity blocked, Arc live, Pontes opens, new onchain podcast — Sun 20 Sep

Good afternoon. Five editions this week, and the theme was less about who is building than about what got switched on. A blockchain secured by BlackRock and Visa started producing blocks, a bank settled real money on a public chain, and the European Central Bank set a date for connecting its own money to tokenised securities. Washington, meanwhile, could not get sixty votes.

💎 Arc went live with the institutions that clear the world's markets as its validators
💎 The Clarity Act fell 49-50, and the SEC and CFTC said they will write the rules
💎 Ondo became the first tokenisation platform inside DTCC's fund network
💎 Two regulators declined to say who needs a MiCA licence to sell crypto
💎 The Fed raised rates for the first time since 2023

New Kaupr Weekly out today on whether finance is finally going onchain.

— Morten

It is a question you could have asked more or less every year for the last five or six. This time the answer starts somewhere unexpected: the European Central Bank, which has published official articles under the heading "central banks onchain". Eleven minutes on Pontes, tokenised deposits at DNB, the digital euro, Circle's new network, DTCC's October rollout — and on why a small Nordic publisher testing agentic payments and the euro area's payment infrastructure have ended up working on the same problem.

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Arc opened to the public on Wednesday with more than 100 institutional and ecosystem builders. The founding validators are drawn almost entirely from traditional finance: BlackRock, DTCC, Visa, Mastercard and ICE among them. Fees are paid in USDC rather than a volatile token, which is the part analysts point to as the reason institutions can use it at all. Circle also minted 10 billion ARC tokens, the first listed company to mint a network token for a new Layer 1. It says that is not a commitment to release one.

U.S. Bank settled its first cross-border payment on Stellar, moving funds between its North American and European entities using USBDC, its own dollar stablecoin. The pilot covered the full lifecycle — minting, payment, redemption, freezing and clawback — with the controls written into the protocol and connected to the bank's compliance and risk systems. Most bank blockchain pilots run on private networks the bank owns.

The European Central Bank confirmed that Pontes opens on 21 September, letting tokenised securities on private blockchains settle in central bank money. Security and payment move in one operation. Four operators are registered to connect, three of them German — and Axiology in Vilnius, supervised by the Bank of Lithuania. Separately, DNB joined CBMT, where European banks test tokenised deposits across borders, making the krone the fourth currency after the euro, dollar and yen.

Three different answers to the same question landed in the same week. Circle built its own chain and invited the institutions to secure it. U.S. Bank put its own money on someone else's. And the ECB is connecting central bank money to networks it does not run. None of them waited for a law.

Senate Republicans released a revised bill on Sunday with 126 changes made at Democrats' request, including ethics provisions the president had agreed to. Eight banking trade groups wrote the next day asking for stablecoin rewards to be curbed further. On Tuesday the cloture motion failed 49-50, eleven short of the sixty required. Senator Thom Tillis voted against and then filed a motion to reconsider, which keeps the bill alive.

Democrats who voted no pointed to the same thing: Trump disclosed $1.4 billion in earnings from crypto ventures last year. Senator Elissa Slotkin said the ethics provisions remained too thin. The industry had spent two years treating a friendly White House as the fastest route to legislation.

XRP took the worst of it and bitcoin slipped, while around $571 million in long positions were force-closed — six dollars long for every dollar short. Analysts at Arctic Digital and BTC Markets called it a recalibrated timeline rather than a structural break, noting the cycle is rates-dependent. Within two hours of each other on Wednesday, the CFTC's Michael Selig and the SEC's Paul Atkins said they would write crypto rules under their existing authority.

What the bill promised was permanence. What the agencies can offer is a rule that the next chairman can unwrite through the same process, which is the problem the legislation existed to solve.

Ondo Finance's subsidiary Oasis Pro Markets joined DTCC's Fund/SERV, the platform behind more than 85 per cent of US mutual fund transaction activity, as its first tokenisation member. The connection covers account data, confirmations, reconciliation, distributions and tax reporting through one standardised link, rather than an integration built fund by fund.

Centrifuge confirmed that HYB, the tokenised version of New York Life Investment Management's US high-yield corporate bond strategy, is live on Avalanche. NYLIM manages around $807 billion. Subscriptions and redemptions settle in USDC. Most tokenised funds hold Treasuries or short-duration paper; this one carries default risk.

Fidelity International's Emma Pecenicic told Paperjam that putting an existing fund on a blockchain gives an investor no reason to change behaviour — the question is distribution, not technology. Fidelity's tokenised liquidity fund holds around $50 million after six months and required a 24/7 operating model across transfer agent, administrator and payment partners. Kraken, meanwhile, let clients lend out tokenised stocks for onchain yield, and brought DeFi Earn into its self-custody wallet. And the FCA opened a call for input on whether tokenised gold should sit outside the fund rules altogether.

The wrapper was never the hard part. Getting a tokenised fund in front of the platforms that already distribute the industry is, and this week two of those doors opened.

Kaupr asked ESMA and Finansinspektionen whether distributing crypto services under your own brand requires a MiCA licence, when an authorised firm executes behind the interface. Both replied in writing, and both said it depends on how the service works in practice. ESMA pointed to a question on its own site listed as unanswered since January. The Commission has already said an agent must itself be authorised.

Goobit launched Futureproof on Finnish company Kvarn's licence, after Finansinspektionen refused its own MiCA application in July — bitcoin through Kvarn X, gold through Kvarn Metals, the account inside a bank structure. GreenMerc went further and withdrew its appeal altogether, moving the Swedish business onto sister company Northcrypto's Finnish authorisation. Firi took the other route entirely, opening in Sweden on its own MiCA licence, with BankID, Swish and deposits in kronor.

Of 94 MiCA-authorised providers, 62 planned to operate in at least seven member states. Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Poland want ESMA turned into a direct supervisor; Ireland and Luxembourg are more cautious. Separately, the EU's Cyber Resilience Act took effect, giving wallet makers 24 hours to report an actively exploited vulnerability.

One rulebook, twenty-seven supervisors, and a question about branded distribution that nobody will answer in writing. Companies are not waiting for the answer; they are choosing the jurisdiction that gives them one.

The Federal Open Market Committee lifted the target range to 3.75–4.00 per cent on Wednesday, unanimously, with 16 of 18 participants expecting another rise this year. German ten-year yields had already reached their highest since 2011. The dollar had its best day in three months.

Bybit's Ben Zhou put retail participation roughly 30 per cent below its peak, with centralised spot volumes around 67 per cent below October 2025. Bitcoin Suisse is cutting up to 60 of its 120 Swiss positions, moving roles to Bratislava and Vietnam and closing its Copenhagen IT office. Capital kept arriving elsewhere: S&P Global led a $110 million round in Kaiko, joined by Nasdaq, RBC and BNP Paribas.

Grayscale's head of research Zach Pandl said bitcoin's low near $58,000 at the end of June remains his call for the bottom of this bear phase, and the firm is giving clients a green light to allocate. Coinbase's chief executive said something similar the week before. Bitcoin trades around 39 per cent below its record.

The money going into this market is not coming from the same place it used to. Retail is thinner and the exchanges are cutting, while an index provider and three banks put $110 million into the company that sells data about it.

Nineteen British banks and payment firms began raising £50 million for a domestic payments utility, aimed at the card networks.

Sweden's Hilbert Group launched hLEND, funding its loan book with stablecoins from onchain depositors.

Coinbase put stablecoin acceptance and settlement inside more than 1,000 US community banks.

Ripple said the opportunity for RLUSD sits in corporate treasuries, where its GTreasury customers move $13 trillion a year.

Thank you for reading Kaupr Digest. If you find it useful, please share it with a colleague or friend who should be following Nordic and European digital-finance news more closely.

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Wishing you a great Sunday — Kaupr Daily is back tomorrow morning.

Best regards Morten Myrstad Founder & Editor