🏦 3 $100M+ Raises and tZERO's Expansion to New Licenses and Assets

Your First Captivating Topic of the Week

🚀 3 $100M+ Raises This Week So Far: zerohash, Fnality, and Archetype

Wow is tokenization really taking off this year! Not one, not two, but three raises over $100M each touching this space is not something to scoff at and heads up, this first section is going to be longer than usual to cover the 3. Don’t forget to check out tZERO’s news in the next main topic section!

Let’s start with my fellow Chicago natives, zerohash, who raised a $104M led by Interactive Brokers and other notable investors including Morgan Stanley, Apollo, and SoFi. What do they do? The newly minted unicorn ($1B valuation) essentially offers an easy way to access web3 using APIs. This means rather than building their own onramps/offramps, tokenization engines, and other infrastructure themselves, institutions can simply use zerohash to streamline that. Hear directly from Arin Ray from their team at this year’s TokenizeThis 👇

Shortly after zerohash’s raise announcement, Morgan Stanley updated the public that crypto trading is coming to E-Trade in 1H2026 and of course they’ll be using zerohash to speed up their process. As the article says, it’s the tip of the iceberg and we can expect this to expand to the rest of their wealth management business over time.

Shifting focus to Fnality, this firm is more focused on payments and settlement infrastructure specifically for institutions and central banks - essentially the cash leg, whether in exchange for securities or FX. Fnality’s $136M Series C was led by WisdomTree, Bank of America, Citi, KBC Group, Temasek and Tradeweb, with previous investors doubling down. As they expand to supporting other currencies and onboard more counterparties, Fnality has the potential to grow to being systemically important. This caliber of backers speaks volumes and, like zerohash, Fnality’s backers will likely be implementing them if they haven’t already.

And for the builders in the space, don’t worry you’ll be excited to know Archetype’s newest fund, Archetype III, just closed $100M+ in commitments with some of it already being deployed! If you’re an early-stage venture building infrastructure for the following areas then you should consider reaching out to them: Onchain social networks, stablecoins, payments, crypto AI, modular protocol stack, DePIN, and mobile apps built on crypto rails. This is exciting especially with the SEC looking to streamline crypto innovation and being pro-superapps. Leading up to this point we saw the RWA space go from turf wars to collaboration to consolidation (lots of M&A).

Now the focus is on building robust ecosystems. Examples of this include Securitize embedding Aave Horizon within their platform, multiple companies announcing their own chains (like Circle, Robinhood, tZERO), and zerohash making it easier for banks & asset managers to offer web3 services within their existing apps (like E-Trade). There are a lot of other examples of this but there’s also lots to still be built as RWAs continue to make their way onchain. What’s different? Regulators, VCs, public markets, and other critical factors are finally getting it and ready to help push this forward.

This is not financial advice.

RWA Foundation & WALLY DAO Updates

The RWA Foundation introduced the RWA Pod as “A permissionless way for anyone to support RWAs using crypto with multiple RWA project tokens as yield.”

In partnership with PERQ, the RWA Pod allows you to deposit ETH, USDC, ARB, and S/ Sonic. Participants will receive tokens on multiple blockchain protocols related to RWA projects that the RWA Foundation has qualified and selected as Founding Members.

What’s the Update? Hear directly from your RWA Pod Host Ray Buckton and Founder Herwig “Happy” Konings! 👇

Your Second Captivating Topic of the Week

👩‍⚖️ tZERO to Start Offering Corporate Debt, Derivatives, and More

Alan Konevsky hit the ground running as tZERO’s newly appointed CEO (not interim this time), with 3 announcements in the past week all focused on expanding the platform to support even more assets!

This kicked off with the Alphaledger partnership last week with a focus on distributing private ones and both looking to bring public markets onchain as well. Starting with a tokenized money market fund, this partnership is essentially combining Alphaledger’s primary market assets with tZERO’s secondary market trading venue. How much has Alphaledger tokenized (AKA tZERO pipeline)? $800M+ and growing.

It didn’t stop with just a partnership, tZERO filed to go after two new licenses and they’re not from the SEC… they’re from the CFTC.

I gotcha! The two licenses they’re looking to get are Derivatives Clearing Organization (DCO) and a Designated Contract Market (DCM). Remember what I said in the last section about ecosystems? This is tZERO’s way of enhancing theirs. Not only are they partnering with others to bring more RWAs to the platform, these licenses would enable them to start offering different opportunities such as options, futures, and other derivatives based on those incoming RWAs (like the Rialto Markets and Inveniam partnership we covered on Monday). CFTC oversight in addition to the SEC’s means more rigorous compliance (no problem for Alan since he was their Chief Legal Officer before his promotion) but it also means more flexibility in working with crypto and overall making a more robust platform that offers a more all-in-one experience for the investor.

Last but not least, yesterday FINRA approved tZERO Securities to also start offering corporate debt securities on their alternative trading system for secondary market liquidity. This adds more capability to support diverse assets for their investors to have access to and one day likely create more products around them.

This is not financial advice.

Security Token Show Ends with 300 Episodes!

Check out the latest and final episode of the Security Token Show as well as the full catalog on Youtube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts & Google Podcasts.

Reports

RWA Tokenization: Key Trends and 2025 Market Outlook

Check out a report we contributed to: RWA Tokenization: Key Trends and 2025 Market Outlook. Led by Brickken, this report brings multiple parties together in diving into tokenization, with STM.co supporting with both data and some of the written sections.

What’s Inside?

✅ A Breakdown of Tokenization and Related Benefits
✅ Key advantages for issuers, investors, and institutions
✅ How the market is evolving and trends shaping adoption in 2025
✅ What’s next? Expert insights on regulation, DeFi integration, institutional involvement, and market growth

STM’s RWA Market Prediction for 2030

STM.co is proud to release a thorough report on our prediction on the tokenized real world asset market growth. This report explores the variety of opportunities within each asset class to capture value on-chain.

Tokenization can be applied to just about any object and asset type. Art, carbon credits, life insurance, and other sub $5 trillion asset classes weren’t even considered in estimates.

In order for STM to derive its 2030 market predictions, the following asset classes were evaluated: currency, M2/M3, real estate, commodities, public equities, private companies and funds, bonds, credit and lending markets.

This is not financial or investment advice.