✍️ GENIUS is Now Signed, Calastone's Acquisition, and More RWA News

Summary and Key Takeaways

1. The GENIUS Act is Now Signed Into Law

The GENIUS Act actually passed Congress and went on to be signed by President Trump on Friday with digital asset leaders behind him like David Sacks (Crypto Czar), Brian Armstrong (Coinbase), Jeremy Allaire (Circle), the Winklevoss twins (Gemini), Sergey Nazarov (Chainlink), and others. This is monumental, bringing the first real crypto legislation in the US. It will spark a lot of new stablecoin issuers like those already in the headlines (Bank of America, Walmart, Amazon, etc.) and others that may be hiding in stealth. This doesn’t provide clarity just for the issuers but also the banks are allowed to offer services to these issuers such as custody, opening up opportunities for partnership with fintechs. As institutions get more comfortable with the technology, expanding to other services across asset classes will come more naturally which will be key as further regulation like CLARITY come into play later in the year. 

2. SS&C to Acquire Calastone for $1.03B

The tokenized funds space is getting more and more streamlined through tokenization and this acquisition is going to bring that to scale. Calastone has a distribution network of over 4,500 financial organizations globally and they’re making it as easy as possible to tokenize and connect to the onchain economy. Expanding and integrating this with SS&C’s (Nasdaq: SSNC) infrastructure could make it available down the road to their 22K clients running $4.5T worth of assets on their technology. Once again, this is the year of consolidation where everyone is putting the right pieces together and tokenization will enter an era of faster adoption with bigger players.

3. BioSig Technologies (NASDAQ: BSGM) Engages CXG to Acquire Broker-Dealer for RWA Tokenization

Along the same lines of bigger players entering the space, BioSig recently merged with Streamex (onchain commodities) and now they’re together looking to acquire a broker dealer to bring more RWAs onchain. As a public company this is a strategic move to position themselves in the digital space versus others mimicking the Strategy playbook, holding bitcoin or other cryptos on their balance sheets. They’ll start with their bread and butter, commodities, but of course we expect they’ll expand to other asset clases. Compliance Exchange Group (CXG) will help them with this M&A process and it’ll be interesting to see how many other public companies start looking at RWA infrastructure as well. 

4. Spiko Raises $22M Series A

Despite BlackRock’s outsized AUM through BUIDL in the treasury/ yieldcoin race, other products that have achieved 9 figure targets shouldn’t be underlooked. Spiko is one of those names that’s carving out a niche in bringing yieldcoins to Europe. Now they’ve raised a significant war chest led by Index ventures, a prominent VC that could open even more doors beyond money. This category of RWAs is just beginning, but growing fast and will outpace stablecoins eventually as yieldcoins become part of their backing and continue to integrate across platforms for increased utility.

5. Equity Enters DeFi: xStocks on Kamino Lending Protocol

 If you missed it on Wednesday’s edition, Kamino is once again leading by example, now offering lending against tokenized public stocks. Specifically we’re talking about xStocks by Backed Finance which have been formulating a couple other partnerships such as Bitget and Bybit. Being able to get a collateralized loan against your portfolio as easily as just connecting your wallet and getting stablecoin the same day is huge and is what makes the tokenized version better (increased utility). This is part of why Kamino won Herwig’s Company of the Week on The Security Token Show and we look forward to seeing what other assets they power next!

This is not financial advice.

RWA Foundation & WALLY DAO

Check out this new ad for RWAs created by STM in-house using AI and a weekend of messing around. The WALLY DAO website is officially live! Check it out at WALLYDAO.xyz

Monday’s Onchain: Weekly X Spaces

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STM.co Data

It’s great to see BUIDL’s continued expansion and use cases, along with other great assets on the Solana ecosystem like ACRED and VBILL, also from Securitize. Check out this great video!

Did you catch our graph come to life? 👀

This is not financial advice.

Think Like Herwig

Hello readers,

After over 15 years since Bitcoin was invented there was no crypto legislation until now! Fitting that it has nothing to do with Bitcoin but the US dollar instead. Now the attention will fall on the CLARITY act to deliver the real crypto framework for industry stability and standardization. The anti CBDC act seems to have some ways to go as the wrong language could do more harm than good.

Meanwhile, despite all the criticism around onchain stock structures for OpenAI or even public equities, we are still seeing bullish talk about this topic weeks after release. The mindshare between stablecoins, yieldcoins (treasuries), onchain stocks, real estate, private credit, even bonds… it will always juggle headline-to-headline. Instead, vaults unlocking yield and borrowing capabilities for all RWAs are the real trend to pay attention to over the next year.

I also can’t help but notice the fresh dose of BD license applications and acquisitions happening as of late too. It’s almost like 2018 all over again!

Happy tokenizing, 
Herwig “Happy” Konings
CEO, Security Token Group 

Follow me on X / LinkedIn

Companies of the Week

Company of the Week - Herwig: Kamino Finance

Company of the Week - Kyle: BioSig

Find out why and more every Friday live around 12pm EST on LinkedIn or X/ Twitter. Past episodes available on Youtube or your favorite podcast platform! 

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.

Helpful Resources

• $30 Trillion by 2030 - STM

• Global Tokenized Real Estate Market Guide 2024 - STM

• TokenizeThis 2024: Highlights and Key Takeaways - STM

• TokenizeThis 2023: Highlights and Key Takeaways - STM

• State of Security Tokens 2023 - Q4 - STA

• State of Security Tokens 2023 - Q3 - STA

• State of Security Tokens 2023 - Q2 - STA

• State of Security Tokens 2023 - Q1 Extended - STA

• Real-World Asset Tokenization 2023 According to STM - STM

• Tokenizing an Asset in 3 Easy Steps - Security Token Show

• Rich Data in Private Assets - STM

• State of Security Tokens 2022 - STA

• State of Security Tokens 2023 - Institutional Edition - STA

• Tokenization for Institutions - What You Need to Know - STM, Arca (YouTube)