[███░░░░]: DTCC, SWIFT, Circle, and Sony Bank

Welcome to the TAC's Progress Bar, where we combed through 1238 relevant tokenization news stories from the week, analyzed the key stories on our weekly podcast, then distilled what you need to know into a few hundred words in this newsletter. Delivered to your inbox in time for Friday happy hour in NYC (usually).

I'm very psyched to give Progress Bar subscribers a first look at the results of our 2026 Leadership survey! An overwhelming majority of respondents are CEOs / Operators as you can see:

Curious what's top of mind for them? Get a first look at the results here.

So what happened this week?

This week felt like a throwback to a decade ago when all the institutions were doing press releases about blockchain innovation and "distributed ledger technology". There are some big names making announcements this week but one thing is different this time.

This time the broader crypto markets are bearish.

In years past the institutions would come to PR-farm the blockchain and crypto space like moths to a flame during bull markets. Once the inevitable crash happened they'd all silently remove words like "blockchain" from their linkedin profiles. Innovation and Digital Asset teams at large institutions would get silently dismantled while going dark on their comms with start ups.

Not so on this go around.

Crypto is down bad and sideways.

Even stablecoins seem to be asymptoting at $300B of circulation.

But HUGE names are pressing onwards with their stablecoin and tokenization strategies.

We'll take a look after going through the metrics, per usual.

Market KPIs (brought to you by RWA.xyz)

📈 RWA market cap was up 1.75% WoW to $34.1 billion
🏆 Biggest RWA winner: Benji (institutional) added $225M to reach $2.6 billion
🏆 Biggest network winner: BNB Chain added $1.1B to reach $5.2 billion, driven almost entirely by iBENJI

📈 Stablecoin market cap was down slightly WoW to $299 billion
🏆 Biggest stablecoin winner: USD Go added $130M to reach $984M
🏆 Biggest network winner: Hyper EVM added $234M to reach $5.75 billion

📈 Onchain risk free rates:
Short term treasuries (1m): 3.60%
Aave / DeFi: 3.60% (onchain rates still below SOFR, holding approximately flat)

Stories we're tracking this week

• Ostium lost $18-24 million in an oracle attack on July 15, draining most of the liquidity vault's roughly $30 million in USDC. The attack manipulated the oracle to make the vault believe certain trades had not occurred, then paid out gains against those phantom positions. The oracle signer key is the most likely point of compromise. Funds were swapped into ETH and sent through Tornado Cash. The team behind Ostium was one of the earliest builders in the offchain perps market and has earned genuine goodwill in the community; we are rooting for them to recover.
• The DTCC completed its first tokenization pilot, converting DTCC-held securities into equivalent onchain positions on both Hyperledger Besu and Canton in a permissioned environment. Participants included JPMorgan, Citadel Securities, Societe Generale, and DriveWealth. This is a milestone proof-of-concept, not a live product; the DTCC has signaled a target of 2027 for Stellar-based tokenization. The near-term beneficiaries are broker-dealers who will see cleaner back-office settlement and atomic settlement capabilities, not individual investors.
• SWIFT announced a blockchain settlement layer for tokenized bank deposits, framing it as enabling "24/7 usable bank money." The move addresses a structural gap: major banks are all building their own tokenized deposit products, but none will hold each other's tokens directly, so interbank settlement still needs a neutral intermediary. SWIFT already sits in that position for traditional cash, making this a natural extension. Fifteen years of Ripple trying to displace SWIFT from the outside suggests the incumbent is very hard to dislodge.
• Sony Bank received preliminary OCC approval to establish Connectia Trust, a New York national trust bank capitalized with $440 million, to issue a US dollar stablecoin supporting payments across Sony's games, anime, music, and digital content ecosystem. Sony Bank is larger than most realize: roughly $39 billion in assets, $24 billion in loans, and 2.15 million accounts. The stablecoin is not expected to go live until 2027. The first-order story is net interest margin on stablecoin reserves; the longer-term story is what Sony can build on top of that bank relationship with one of the most passionate consumer audiences in the world.
• Circle received its OCC national trust charter, an approval that was widely expected but still represents a meaningful unlock for the company. Circle can now manage its own reserves directly and access product lines unavailable to non-bank entities. The stock popped roughly 15% on the news, a reaction that surprised us given how long this outcome had been telegraphed. Congrats to the Circle team on seeing a very long process through to completion.

Tweet of the week

"lots of conversations about base over the last week. wanted to share my candid take after a week of listening and a lot of reflection over the last 6 months. first off - in case it's not obvious, the first quarter of 2026 was a punch in the face. I spent 2024 and 2025 making a"
-- @jessepollak (Jesse Pollak)

FMI Week

This week on The First Trillion, Johnny and Charlie went deep on the most concentrated week of financial market infrastructure news the tokenization space has ever had: the Ostium oracle hack and what it means for the team's future, the DTCC's completed tokenization pilot and the race condition it creates for tokenization-native broker-dealers, SWIFT's move into the tokenized deposit settlement layer and why the incumbent is almost impossible to displace, Sony Bank's preliminary OCC stablecoin approval and the long game Johnny sees in Sony's captive gaming audience, and Circle's national trust charter approval. There was also a genuinely interesting detour into whether T+2 settlement might actually be a feature rather than a bug.

The episode is available below and we've summarized it for you here.

Stay ahead of the curve

Be sure to follow us on X, LinkedIn, and Spotify for real-time updates, behind-the-scenes insights, and the occasional hot take that didn't make it into the Progress Bar or the First Trillion podcast episode or summary.

Until next week,

The TAC Team