Jack Zhang

WE KEEP SOLVING THE SAME PROBLEM I’ve watched Africa’s P2P market evolve for years. New platforms arrive. Better interfaces appear. More features get added. Yet traders still complain about the same things: Fees. Liquidity. Trust. Payments. Support. Maybe innovation isn’t about adding another feature. Maybe it’s about finally solving the fundamentals. Sometimes, building better means going back to the problem, not copying the solution. What P2P problem do you think still hasn’t been properly solved in Africa?

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💼 Ethena expands team and prepares two new products USDe issuer Ethena Labs plans to expand its team by around 50%, hiring 10 new engineers and specialists in DeFi, security, and product development to work on two entirely new products set to launch within the next three months. Co-founder Guy Young said both upcoming products could reach the same scale as USDe, currently the third-largest stablecoin in the market. Ethena has also been broadening its partnerships — most recently with Jupiter, which will use Ethena’s whitelisting service to launch its JupUSD stablecoin. SOURCE: The Block

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🌴 Tokenized real estate in emerging markets just entered the chat. 🎤 Yesterday at the #WLFI Forum, Eric Trump announced the tokenization of the @Trump International Hotel in the #Maldives. 📊 While much of the tokenization narrative has centered around stablecoins, T-bills, and money market funds, the real structural opportunity has always been something else, increasing capital connectivity into regions that traditional finance struggles to reach. 🌍 This is where T-Blocks is positioned, structuring tokenized instruments that allow emerging market asset managers to access global capital through compliant, institutional rails. Tokenization is not just about efficiency; it is about access. And access is what transforms secluded assets into globally investable opportunities. 🔗 Internet Capital Markets are expanding, and emerging economies are no longer waiting for permission to participate. https://lnkd.in/dekAyncR

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Money can move at internet speed. Bank governance still has to show up on time. That tension sits inside Cari Network $32.5M first tranche, the company's initial external funding round. The capital came entirely from banks, including all 6 institutions that helped design the network: First Horizon Bank, Huntington Bank, KeyBank, M&T Bank, Old National Bank, and SouthState Bank. Glacier Bank and other unnamed banks also invested, while Keefe, Bruyette & Woods advised Cari. Cari's design partners began working with the company in September 2025, shaping the technology, operations, governance, and use cases before funding the next phase. These customers understood the integration burden because they had already been carrying part of it. Founder and CEO Gene Ludwig built Cari around a choice regional and community banks cannot avoid. Digital money is becoming programmable and always on. Rebuilding the blockchain, wallet, controls, portal, and core integration at every bank would turn modernization into a recurring invoice. Cari offers shared infrastructure instead. Its permissioned network lets chartered banks represent deposits as dollar-denominated tokens, move them on-chain, and preserve the regulated relationship. That matters for institutions that compete on trust but rarely have the budget to invent a payment network alone. Cofounder and COO Matthew (Louie) Giacomini and cofounder, CPO and CMO Phoebe Kunitomi are helping build the operating network. Cari says it launched an MVP on March 31 and delivered a full product suite on July 31. Pilot banks can test the mint, transfer, and burn cycle for a tokenized deposit. More than 30 banks have joined, another 40 are in active discussions, and that network plus pipeline represents institutions with more than $10T in combined assets. Those are reported participation metrics, not production payment volume. The capital will support onboarding, integration, more programmable-money use cases, and the operating capabilities required to reach production. Cari now has an investor group that knows exactly where the difficult work lives because those banks helped specify it. Customers becoming owners can tighten the feedback loop. It can also remove the luxury of confusing enthusiasm with deployment. Cari's next proof will arrive when shared governance, bank-grade controls, and always-on settlement survive the same production environment that made the network worth building together. Deeper Analysis 👇 https://lnkd.in/e8_G2cSq #Fintech #Banking #TokenizedDeposits #Payments #VentureCapital

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The prefab model is gaining traction. It facilitates faster capital deployment, quicker time to first token, and accelerates time to revenue for financial partners. Watch the full interview with Harqs Singh, CTO of InfraPartners here: https://lnkd.in/eD2S5twQ #Finance #Investment #BusinessStrategy #Innovation #datacentres #prefab

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Pluggy Raises $3.5M Series A Pluggy, a Brazil-based open finance infrastructure fintech, has raised $3.5 million in a Series A funding round. #Financial #Payments #OpenFinance #PaymentInfrastructure #BankingTech #Fintech #SeriesA #Funding #Pluggy https://lnkd.in/gYDwsMWR

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Ondo Brings $2B+ Real-World Assets to Solana Ondo Finance is bridging TradFi and DeFi by integrating with Solana to tokenize U.S. stocks, ETFs, and bonds unlocking 24/7 trading and seamless access. Launching early 2026, it leverages Solana's lightning speed and low fees to bring $2B+ in assets on-chain. Ondo’s institutional-grade tokens like USDY (yield-bearing stablecoin) and OUSG (tokenized U.S. Treasuries) are expanding from Ethereum and others, delivering regulated yields from Treasuries and bank deposits. Announced in December 2025 following the BNB Chain rollout and partnerships with BlackRock and Ripple this targets retail and institutional users with automated compliance via Ondo Chain. ONDO is the governance token (10B supply) powering DAO voting, incentives, and fee sharing.

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We just pioneered onchain fixed-rate lending backed by securities, an important milestone for Institutional DeFi. Full breakdown of the usecase here: https://lnkd.in/dnPZyZzQ Together with Securitize, we executed the first fixed-rate, oracle-free institutional loan on ethereum using Apollo Global Management, Inc. $ACRED as collateral two months ago, and we have now taken the next step: closing a full loop between Kamui and Keyrock. This demonstrates how institutional lending can run end-to-end onchain with the stability and predictability these players expect. These pilots allowed us to test Zharta's flexible protocol and credit infrastructure in a controlled environment, validating how TradeFi yield + DeFi composability unlocked new, interoperable use cases for institutional participants. Why it matters for institutional credit: - Institutions don't move without fixed rates. Fixed rates provide them with precise control over funding costs and, by removing liquidity-driven rate volatility, more traditional in DeFi, enable sharper allocation decisions and enhanced asset selection, reinforcing the strategies that define their edge. - Zharta's protocol enables them to shape credit exposure with accuracy, manage risk effectively, and execute higher-conviction strategies across tokenized markets. Another step toward a more mature Institutional DeFi landscape. Part of Zharta's broader work in the BLOCKCHAIN.PT consortium, with the support of the European Union (NextGenerationEU) and Portugal's PRR. hashtag #RecuperaçãoEmAção

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We backed Will Beeson, CFA to bridge the $35bn liquidity crisis in tokenization The repo market moves $2tr - $4tr every day. It's the plumbing beneath global finance and few outside Wall Street have heard of it Multiliquid by Uniform Labs is rebuilding that plumbing onchain. We invested alongside CMT Digital, Metalayer Ventures, The Venture Dept. & Generative Ventures to bring the protocol to life and accelerate its development Will is one of the most thoughtful, well-connected operators we've encountered in the digital assets space. This is his fourth startup as a co-founder in fintech and crypto. At Standard Chartered, Will spent two years building Libeara, where he shipped the first investment grade-rated tokenized fund on a public blockchain; he didn't just observe the pain points of institutional tokenization, he lived them. Before that, Will co-founded Allica Bank in the UK, which is one of the most heavily regulated banking environments globally. He raised £70m, built a 100-person team, obtained a full banking charter and launched a profitable institution that now ranks among the UK's fastest-growing tech companies. Building a bank from scratch teaches you things about money movement and regulatory navigation that you simply cannot learn any other way This combination of deep institutional finance experience, hands-on blockchain expertise and a track record of building regulated financial products is precisely what's needed to build infrastructure that bridges traditional finance and crypto Multiliquid will deliver the functionality that actually drives order-of-magnitude improvements over legacy rails. It gives institutions both the means and the reason to move onchain We're thrilled to partner with Will and the Uniform Labs team on this journey -- Read more: https://lnkd.in/gk-s3-S8

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