Weekly Market Outlook | October 12 - October 18, 2026

Executive Summary

  • A quiet venture week: six disclosed rounds raised $51.4M, led by Sui Foundation's $30M into DATA Network, with Fission ($10M) and Multiliquid ($8M) funding tokenised-asset plumbing. Kraken's parent agreed to buy Lithuania's Saldo Bank and Polygon completed its purchase of US-regulated payments firm Coinme.
  • Base launched Earn & Borrow on Aave and Morpho, Aave V4 proposed native bitcoin collateral through Babylon and passed $300M of deposits on Circle's Arc, Jupiter's 1,000x YOLO product did $1B of notional volume in a day, and Deutsche Bank, Visa, Mastercard and Japan's three megabanks each moved a stablecoin or custody product toward production.
  • Nine companies including Broadcom, Verizon and UnitedHealth objected to tokens of their shares trading on the OKX-ICE venue, and Nasdaq opted out of its own stock, while BNY and Citadel ran the first Treasury repo on a tokenised bond and DTCC set out a 25-security launch. Tokenisation is advancing fastest where incumbents keep the books.
  • MSCI adopted rules that will remove Strategy and other treasury companies from its indexes from November 30. Passive funds hold about 3.1% of Strategy's shares, but the stock fell 9.6% in a day and now trades at roughly 0.84 times its bitcoin, so the model of issuing shares to buy more bitcoin is on hold and funding has moved to preferred stock paying 12–17%.

Venture Capital & M&A Pulse

A quiet week: six disclosed rounds raised $51.4M, led by Sui Foundation's $30M strategic investment in DATA Network, while Kraken's parent agreed to buy a European bank

Top Raises

  • DATA Network ($30M Strategic) – Registry for the origin and payment of AI training data, migrating its chain to Sui; Sui Foundation becomes its largest institutional holder.
  • Fission ($10M Series A) – Buys tokenised fund interests from investors who want out before the fund's own redemption cycle, settling in under 90 seconds for a fee; led by Pantera Capital with Circle Ventures and Borderless Capital.
  • Multiliquid ($8M Pre-Seed and Seed) – Lets institutions swap tokenised assets for stablecoins in one atomic transaction on Ethereum and Solana; seed led by Polychain with Strobe Ventures, CMT Digital and Circle Ventures.
  • Zaria ($5.2M Seed) – Loan servicing, collateral monitoring and automated margin calls for digital-asset-backed lending, with a national trust-bank charter application pending at the OCC; led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
  • IPX Exchange ($4M Seed at $125M) – Tokenised exchange for intellectual property rights built on Base; led by Bitsurge Holdings with YICIPX Holdings Family Office.
  • GetPicks ($3M Equity) – Sports-payments app with USDC payouts and 35,000 users across 21 US states; backed by gaming-industry angels and operators.
  • Spout ($2M Strategic) – USDC loans against tokenised US stocks at 50% loan-to-value, still on Solana devnet; Draper Dragon, Anchorage Digital and Flow Traders.

M&A Highlights

  • Payward x Saldo Bank (Undisclosed) – Kraken's parent agreed to buy the Lithuanian lender, with €197M of assets, €169M of retail deposits and an ECB-issued licence covering Lithuania, Finland, Sweden and Germany, to add deposits, lending and cards to its European business; closing in 2027 subject to ECB approval.
  • Polygon Labs x Coinme (Undisclosed) – Completed purchase of the US-regulated crypto payments provider so Polygon can handle conversions between crypto, stablecoins and bank money itself and keep the fees; it expects the payments business to be profitable in 2027.
  • Network School x Farcaster (Undisclosed) – Balaji Srinivasan's Network School bought the decentralised social network from Neynar, nine months after Neynar acquired it, and will require users to sign a 'social smart contract' or drop to read-only.
  • Mesh x Bluvo (Undisclosed) – Crypto payments network Mesh bought the exchange-connectivity developer to extend its single integration across more than 300 exchanges and wallets.

Emerging Themes

  • Venture money went to the plumbing around tokenised assets rather than to new tokens: Fission sells exit liquidity for tokenised funds, Multiliquid settles tokenised assets against stablecoins, Zaria monitors collateral for asset-backed loans and Spout lends against tokenised stocks.
  • Buyers are paying for licences. Payward is acquiring a bank that already holds an ECB licence, Polygon bought a US-regulated payments company, and Zaria's round funds a trust-bank charter application; each is a way to hold client money without waiting for new rules.
  • The largest cheques came from foundations and issuers, not funds: Sui Foundation wrote the week's biggest, and Tether took strategic stakes in three payment and AI-agent startups (EFY Finance, Saber Money and AIsa) without disclosing amounts.

DeFi Launch Radar

Protocol & Chain Releases

  • Jupiter | YOLO Beta - Unaudited product with up to 1,000x leverage on SOL, BTC and ETH recorded $1B of notional volume in its first 24 hours; winners are paid from a house pool funded only by other traders' losses, and profits queue if the pool runs short.
  • Papertrade | Launch on HyperEVM - Same house-pool model on Hyperliquid's smart-contract layer: more than $770B of notional volume in two days, about $32M of trader losses, and a token that is minted only to traders who lose.
  • Polymarket | V2 Switchover on November 2 - Replaces the 2019 Gnosis contracts with a single ERC-1155 token and makes pUSD the sole collateral; canary markets run until October 30.
  • Injective | Fixed Gas for Exchange Transactions - Published gas budgets for orders, cancellations, deposits and withdrawals replace per-transaction estimation, cutting failed trades for market makers quoting continuously.

New Feature Rollout

  • Base | Earn & Borrow - Integration stack letting any app offer stablecoin yield and crypto-backed loans through Aave and Morpho markets on Base; borrowers stay subject to the protocols' liquidation rules.
  • Aave V4 | Native Bitcoin Collateral via Babylon - Governance proposal to lock BTC on Bitcoin itself as collateral for stablecoin loans, with liquidations settled in WBTC because native redemption takes days; risk parameters still to come.
  • Aave V4 | Dollar-Euro Market on Arc - Deposits on Circle's Arc chain passed $300M; a dedicated Forex market lets EURC holders borrow USDC against it from the same liquidity hub as the main crypto market.
  • Uniswap | ETH/USDC Pool With Separate Buy and Sell Fees - The VolatilePair hook recalculates fees on every swap, raising the charge on trades that reverse a large move so liquidity providers keep more of the arbitrage; the pool held about $12,600 at launch.
  • Lido | Direct ETH Staking From Four Layer 2s - Users on Arbitrum, Base, Linea and Optimism receive wstETH from a local pool via Chainlink CCIP while their ETH is bridged and staked on mainnet in the background.
  • Pendle Boros | Fixed Funding-Rate Maturities - November and December maturities on BTC, ETH and HYPE funding let traders lock the funding leg of a basis trade; quoted fixed yields of 25–35% annualised depend on funding staying high.

Ecosystem Expansions

Token Launches & Airdrops

Token Launches

Airdrops

  • Variational – Points Claim - Up to 3,000 points for traders with onchain perps history on other venues, ahead of a second app, Pro.
  • TxFlow – Season 1 From October 20 - Fixed 1.25M trader points a week after a rules revision cut the referral pool; Season 0 pays out before October 27 and no token is confirmed.
  • USD.AI – Season 2 Closed - 225M CHIP allocated to Season 2 participants as the GPU-backed lending protocol closes the campaign; CHIP rose 29% on the week.

Last Week Highlights

Tokenisation Advances in the Back Office and Stalls at the Issuer

Nine Issuers Say No

The first US venue for tokenised stocks is finding out that companies get a say. OKXICE, the joint venture between OKX and NYSE owner Intercontinental Exchange, disclosed on October 15 that nine issuers have objected to their shares trading on it: Broadcom, Verizon, UnitedHealth, CoreWeave, Applied Optoelectronics, Cerebras, AppLovin, Applied Digital and Rocket Lab. Eight were on its original list of 63 stocks, leaving 55 without an objection. Nasdaq separately said it will not allow its own shares to be tokenised under the framework because the venue does not show best prices in real time or report to the consolidated tape. AMC's chief executive told Robinhood the same week that the company does not consent to tokens of its stock in the United States.

How the Opt-Out Works

The objections come from the SEC's Innovation Exemption of September 17, which gives trading venues five years of conditional relief to run listed US stocks on a blockchain. The conditions:

  • The venue must notify a company in writing before offering a token of its stock issued by a third party, and wait at least 30 days.
  • If the company objects in writing within those 30 days, the venue cannot trade that token; it must publish the objection within five business days.
  • Token holders must receive the same rights as shareholders, including dividends and votes; each token is a claim on one share held by an SEC-registered broker-dealer.
  • Buyers must pass identity, sanctions and wallet checks; on OKXICE, trading runs in permissioned Uniswap v4 pools on X Layer against USDC, USDG or USDT.

An objection blocks one token on one venue; it is not a veto over tokenisation. Nasdaq-listed Perpetuals.com, run by the former head of FTX Europe, filed its own notice of intent under the exemption on October 14 and now sits in its 30-day window.

Two Kinds of Stock Token

The products growing fastest today are not the ones the SEC framework covers. DWF Labs puts tokenised equities at $3.8B, up from $654M in January, with weekly spot trading on decentralised exchanges at $2.54B, Ondo at $1B and Binance's bStocks and xStocks near $950M each. Robinhood reports $15B of cumulative stock-token trading and about 200,000 holders 100 days after its chain launched. All of these are offshore wrappers: Robinhood's tokens are debt securities of a Jersey company, EQX's new Hyperliquid listings are limited-recourse notes of a BVI issuer, and none is sold to US persons or carries shareholder rights. The IMF found that more than half of this trading happens while Wall Street is closed, 80% of trades are for less than one share, and prices run about 1.5 times as volatile as the underlying stocks because the market is small.

The Plumbing Moves Faster Than the Product

While stock tokens argue with issuers, the institutions that already keep the books are tokenising the records themselves. BNY and Citadel Securities bought a two-year Treasury on Tradeweb, recorded it on BNY's private ledger within minutes instead of the next day, and used it the same evening as collateral in an overnight repo funded by BNY, the first such use on a major triparty platform. BNY manages $8.2 trillion of collateral and plans round-the-clock Treasury clearing in 2027. DTCC set out the launch scope of its own tokenisation service the same week:

  • 25 securities at launch: large US stocks, ETFs and Treasuries, on Canton and DTCC's private Besu chain, with about $30 trillion of eligible assets behind them.
  • Tokens are backed one-for-one by securities held at DTC, keep the same CUSIP and rights, and DTC keeps the official record.
  • Transfers between registered wallets run 24/7; conversion back to book-entry runs on business days with a 15-minute target, and cash legs stay in fiat until 2027.

JPMorgan extended its JPM Coin deposit token to Ethereum for approved institutional clients, and Wells Fargo says tokenised deposits already settle its cross-border payments in two minutes.

What It Means

Tokenisation is splitting into two markets. Incumbents are tokenising the asset record while keeping custody and the official books, so the gain is hours and collateral mobility rather than new owners or venues; Goldman's chief executive called the activity so far "small and at the margin". Public stock tokens are growing on offshore debt wrappers for non-US buyers, and the US pathway now depends on issuer non-objection, so the onchain float will concentrate in companies that want it. In our view the issuer objections are the more important signal: a company that controls its own shareholder register will not hand it to a venue without transparency it recognises, and the IMF's findings on liquidity and volatility give boards a reason to wait. The exemption is temporary and the venues are unlaunched, so the test of the framework is still ahead.

MSCI's Exclusion Test Hits Strategy's Premium More Than Its Bitcoin

What MSCI Decided

MSCI adopted rules on October 15 that remove "non-operating companies" from its Global Investable Market Indexes, the benchmarks that passive funds track worldwide. The rules replace the temporary freeze it had applied to companies holding more than half their assets in digital assets. How the test works:

  • First screen: does the company have substantial operating assets, defined as more than 50% of total assets.
  • Companies that fail face five financial ratios: operating assets, operating expenses and operating cash flow relative to total assets, the size of fair-value swings, and dependence on raising capital to buy assets. Four flags out of five means ineligible.
  • Existing index members are removed only after failing in each of their two most recent annual filings; MSCI may also use the latest interim filing.
  • The current list, on September data, marks Strategy, Metaplanet, Yellow Cake, Upexi and Iceland's Skel for deletion, with SharpLink, SUI Group, TON Strategy and Solana Company among 17 names on a watchlist.

The final list is published on November 11 and the changes take effect at the close on November 30.

The Direct Selling Is Small

Strategy's own estimate is that funds tracking MSCI indexes hold about 13 million of its shares, 3.1% of the total and about 60% of one day's trading volume. JPMorgan's scenario from last November put forced selling at roughly $2.8B if MSCI alone removes the stock and up to $8.8B if other index providers follow, figures that predate this year's fall in the share price. The market reaction was larger than the mechanics suggest: Strategy fell 9.6% to $136.83 on Friday while bitcoin fell 1%, though the Nasdaq lost 2.1% and bitcoin miner MARA also fell 9.6% that day, so not all of the drop belongs to MSCI. The stock is about 69% below its peak.

The Premium Is the Real Issue

What matters for Strategy is not the passive selling but what it does to the gap between the share price and the bitcoin behind it, known as mNAV. Strategy holds 848,250 BTC bought for $64B at an average of $75,444; at Friday's close that bitcoin was worth about $69.1B, $5.1B above cost, while the company's equity was valued at about $57.9B. On our calculation the shares trade at roughly 0.84 times the bitcoin they represent; adding about $13.8B of preferred stock and $6.7B of convertible debt and subtracting $5.5B of dollar reserves gives an enterprise mNAV near 1.05. Why that number runs the company:

  • The model was to sell shares above the value of the bitcoin behind them and buy more bitcoin per share; below 1.0 each sale dilutes holders, so share issuance has slowed to a trickle.
  • Funding moved to preferred stock instead: STRC raised about $7.5B in the first half and helped buy nearly 100,000 BTC, but K33 puts annual preferred dividends at $1.56B, up from $830M earlier this year.
  • K33 estimates STRC's $725M share of that bill costs about 8,740 BTC a year at $83,000, against a gain of only 4,947 BTC over what Strategy would hold without it.
  • Last week Strategy bought 250 BTC for $21.5M and spent $192M buying back STRC, which trades just under its $100 par; the dividend stays at 12% until it does.

Index exclusion removes a steady passive buyer of the common stock, which is the instrument whose premium the model depends on.

Does It Reach Bitcoin?

Only indirectly, and the direction is slower buying rather than selling. Strategy owns about 4% of all bitcoin that will ever exist and becomes a forced seller only if it cannot pay dividends: its $4.88B dollar reserve covers roughly three years of the current bill, and its June capital framework permits bitcoin sales to fund dividends as a last resort. The pressure shows up instead in the cost of money for every treasury company:

  • Strive priced $630M of SATS preferred stock at $90 with a 15% dividend on a $100 face value, a 16.7% yield before fees, to keep buying bitcoin at about $83,000.
  • DeFi Development raised the dividend on its CHAD preferred to 14% to grow its Solana holdings.
  • France's Capital B reported a $78M first-half loss from writing down its bitcoin while raising another $66M to buy more.

In our view the risk case is a long stretch below 1.0 mNAV combined with bitcoin under the $75,444 average cost, about 9% below today's price, when preferred investors demand more and reserves start to be drawn. Dates to watch: the shareholder vote on daily STRC dividends on October 28, MSCI's list on November 11 and the index change on November 30.

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