[███░░░░]: Japan and Patent Drama

Welcome to the TAC's Progress Bar, where we combed through 1278 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).

Next week we'll be unveiling the results of our 2026 TAC Leaders in Toke' Survey. And not the kind of toke you exhaled through a dryer sheet puffer in your college dorm room (oddly specific reference). So far over 70 leading operators and investors in tokenization have responded to the survey. As a teaser, one top of mind issue in tokenization was estate planning. If that doesn't resonate with you then you have the weekend to get your voice heard and fill it out.

This was a somewhat triggering week for me since tZERO and Securitize are trading blows over patent infringement. I shudder when I'm reminded of my former life as an attorney, extracting value instead of creating it. I hope the issue gets resolved (ahem, tZERO) and we can get back to BUIDLing (low blow, I know).

Elsewhere we spent most of the podcast on Japan. GYen to all who celebrate.

But first, as always, let's check the metrics.

Market KPIs (brought to you by RWA.xyz)

📈 RWA market cap was down 1.5% WoW to $32.1 billion
🏆 Biggest RWA winner: USYC added $50M on Base chain
🏆 Biggest network winner: Solana added $55M

📈 Stablecoin market cap was flat/slightly down WoW to $296.0 billion
🏆 Biggest stablecoin winner: DAI (legacy) added ~$500M to $4.7B
🏆 Biggest network winner: Ethereum added $244M to ~$160B

📈 Onchain risk free rates:
Short term treasuries (SOFR): 3.62% (flat)
Aave / DeFi: 3.38% (down 7 bps WoW, now 25+ bps below SOFR)

Stories we're tracking this week

Japan's Payment Services Act amendment took effect June 1st and the downstream effects dominated the week's headlines. Elsewhere, US crypto legislation is on the clock.

• Japan's amended Payment Services Act opened the door for USD stablecoins, clearing both Circle's USDC and Ripple's RLUSD for listing on Japanese exchanges and use by Japanese financial institutions. Prior to June 1st, Japanese companies were effectively locked out of USD stablecoins entirely. Given Japan's role as one of the world's largest creditor economies and a foundational player in global FX markets via the yen carry trade, this is a far bigger unlock than the headline suggests.
• Circle and Nomura announced a partnership to launch a real-time FX settlement service targeting Japanese companies, with a 2027 rollout. Companies would convert yen into USDC, send tokens over Circle's infrastructure, and receive foreign currencies on the other side. Nomura is one of Japan's largest banks with a major global presence, making this one of the most significant institutional stablecoin endorsements of the year.
• SBI Group launched JPYSC, a yen stablecoin on Ethereum, already at $70 million, classified as an official electronic payment instrument under the new Payment Services Act. It is the first yen stablecoin issued under Japan's new trust structure framework, with reserves in a segregated account and direct legal claim for holders. The target use case is institutional cross-border FX settlement.
• The US Senate voted 85 to 5 to effectively ban a Federal Reserve CBDC until 2030, embedding the provision inside the 21st Century Road to Housing Act as a concession to House Republicans. There was never a serious Fed CBDC plan in motion, but the lopsided vote signals just how politically toxic the idea has become, largely due to the perceived contrast with China's surveillance-oriented digital yuan program.
• tZERO sent a cease and desist to Securitize alleging patent infringement on core digital securities infrastructure, and Securitize responded by filing for injunctive relief to declare non-infringement. Both companies built similar regulatory stacks early in the tokenization era, including ATSs linked to broker-dealers. The move drew sharp criticism given the open-source foundations of the space, and will require expensive litigation to resolve regardless of outcome.
• Nouriel Roubini, the economist who once called Bitcoin the mother of all scams, launched a tokenized macro hedge fund on Securitize, ticker USAFi, targeting commodities, gold, and short-term treasuries as a macro hedge strategy. The fund is live on the Securitize platform. Roubini going onchain with his flagship strategy is a notable signal of institutional sentiment, whatever you think of the underlying thesis.
• Goldfinch Protocol, one of the original pioneers of onchain emerging market lending, officially wound down. Goldfinch launched in late 2020 and was backed by Andreessen Horowitz, with a mission to bring real-world credit underwriting onchain for underserved global markets. The team learned that underwriting and servicing credit globally at scale is genuinely hard. They were also founding TAC members. They'll be missed, and we expect to see the team back building.

Tweet of the week

"The fact that orbital compute is (soon) the most efficient way to build datacenters says a lot about how much excessive regulation has harmed progress on earth. It's more efficient to fly to outer space than to try and build on land. Freedom is always on the frontier."
-- @brian_armstrong (Brian Armstrong)

The Japan Episode

This week on The First Trillion, Johnny and Charlie dug into Japan's stablecoin regulatory unlock and the cascade of institutional moves it triggered, from Circle and Nomura's FX settlement partnership to SBI's new yen stablecoin. They covered the tZERO vs. Securitize patent spat (with some colorful editorial from Johnny), the Senate CBDC ban tucked inside a housing bill, Nouriel Roubini's surprise tokenized fund launch, Ondo's Mirae Asset partnership, and a fond farewell to Goldfinch. They also revisited the chaotic story of GYEN, the yen stablecoin that got mistaken for a meme coin and ran 700% above peg in a single day before a Coinbase decimal glitch made everything worse.

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