Rahul Shankar

The SEC and CFTC released their first-ever joint guidance on digital assets, a clear, 68-page token taxonomy that classifies Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and many others as digital commodities, not securities. I remember thinking, years ago, that real progress in crypto would only come when regulators finally stopped treating every token like a security by default. This week, that moment arrived. NFTs, utility tokens and payment stablecoins each get their own sensible category. Only tokenized traditional securities remain under full SEC oversight. They even stated explicitly that investment contracts can come to an end, meaning tokens can mature from securities into commodities once networks decentralize. Staking, mining, airdrops and wrapping are no longer treated as securities transactions. The very next day, the SEC approved Nasdaq’s move to allow tokenized securities to trade on its existing infrastructure, a concrete step toward real integration between blockchain and traditional capital markets. This kind of clarity makes it much easier to back the serious builders who share that philosophy, and it’s exactly the environment we’re building toward. Ethereum and the broader ecosystem just got a significant tailwind. What do you see as the biggest long-term impact of this regulatory clarity?

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Absolutely required reading for LPs, particularly large LPs that have been sitting on the VC sidelines for various reasons. One of my favorite points that Jen Kha makes is that "Proximity is not participation" - just because LPs might be sitting on sizable allocations to legacy VC NAV, does not remotely mean that they are positioned to benefit from the current wave of innovation + company creation. And furthermore, VC manager selection is extraordinarily important given return dispersion and concentration. As I often say - VC is the asset class where you get rewarded the most for good selection, and penalized the greatest for poor selection. https://lnkd.in/gRDfx8s6

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Robinhood has climbed roughly 32% over the past 30 days to $122, comfortably above its 50-day moving average, but still sits below its October 2025 high of $152. Triple-digit percentage growth in chain usage metrics doesn't automatically translate one-to-one into equity value, and the stock's more measured move reflects that distinction. Robinhood Chain, launched July 1, 2026, sits at the intersection of five trends that had, until now, been developing in isolation: retail distribution, tokenization of real-world assets, DeFi fee economics, stablecoin competition, and the regulatory normalization of on-chain securities. Two months in, the headline numbers are large enough to invite skepticism, and the obvious question is whether this is a genuine structural shift in how capital markets work, or a memecoin-fueled sugar high wearing an institutional costume. This report works through the growth data, the mechanics of why the chain could succeed where prior tokenization efforts stalled, and, critically, who is actually capturing the economics as the chain scales. The short answer, worth stating up front: the data supports real, durable adoption alongside real, current speculative excess, and untangling the two is the whole game for anyone positioning around this theme. We also identify which assets, stocks and altcoins alike, look like the key beneficiaries investors may want to consider owning. https://lnkd.in/gzvwVKyd Robinhood CoinDesk Coinbase

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#DidYouKnow? Stripe is quietly engineering the permanent replacement to IPOs. It has both good and bad aspects, but should ultimately be instructive for many #funders and practicioners like ourselves as well as for some of the #founders of the most successful and dominant platforms out there. This is a courtesy extract from Linas Beliūnas’ newsletter. The news 🗞️ FinTech giant Stripe has figured out how to be public without being public, and the market is pricing that in. The payments company is arranging a tender offer at a $140 billion valuation, up 31% from its $107 billion mark last fall and well past its 2021 peak of $95 billion. Wow! 😳Bloomberg reported the news today, noting terms could still shift. Stripe declined to comment. The company hasn’t raised primary capital since its $6.5 billion Series I in 2023, led by Thrive Capital. And honestly, it doesn’t need to. Stripe hit full-year profitability in 2024. Let’s take a quick look at this. More on this 👉 First and foremost, what matters here isn’t the number. It’s the mechanism. Since 2024, Stripe has run recurring tender offers as a standing liquidity program for employees and early investors. Co-founder John Collison told Bloomberg in January that Stripe is “still not in any rush” to go public. At $140 billion, with regular secondary sales and no quarterly earnings calls to manage, the rush is hard to see. The tender offer isn’t a waypoint to an IPO. It’s becoming a substitute for one. Stripe is building the payment rails for a world where software buys things from other software, and it’s doing so while processing roughly 1.3% of global GDP through its existing stack. That’s a completely different game to play. THE TAKEAWAY ✈️ What’s next? 🤔 Looking ahead, here’s what to watch. If Stripe can keep running tenders at rising valuations every six to nine months, it removes the single strongest argument for going public: employee liquidity. That changes the calculus for every late-stage company watching from the sidelines. The second-order effect is a growing class of $50B+ private companies that never IPO at all, with secondary markets becoming the de facto exit for early investors. The obvious losers here are investment banks waiting on IPO fees and public-market investors locked out of the best returns. That said, the question isn’t whether Stripe will IPO. It’s whether the IPO, as a default endpoint, still makes sense for companies that can engineer their own liquidity at will. ICYMI: Stripe’s Agentic Commerce Suite signals a new era in AI-powered payments 🤖💳 [what it’s all about & why it’s huge, why FinTech giant’s strategy here is brilliant & what to expect next + bonus dive into Stripe’s quest to become the financial backbone of the AI economy & 100+ battle‑tested tools and frameworks to accelerate your AI projects inside]. Make sure to follow Linas Beliūnas on LinkedIn and Substack for pertinent fintech insights.

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NYC bonds now have a negative outlook from 3 out of 4 rating agencies. Not a great look when it's pricing a $2.6b deal tomorrow. But! The consequences of this have been really overblown — especially by local media. My breakdown of the outlook cuts, and what to expect for this week's deal, here: https://lnkd.in/gWUF794h

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