Category: Business

Solomon pointed to the shift toward electronic stock trading almost 50 years ago, which once raised similar concerns about the future of Wall Street’s trading desks. Goldman adapted to that change and its equities business grew. Tokenization, he said, could follow a similar path.

“The developments are obviously creating more products, greater activity, potentially new clients, broader distribution channels,” Solomon said on Tuesday’s call with analysts.

Tokenization, clearing and settlement

The bank has spent years investing in digital asset infrastructure, though perhaps more quietly than most of its competitors. It built GS DAP, its own platform for tokenized assets, as long ago as 2022 and has worked on tokenizing bonds, money market funds and real estate.

In July, the bank participated in a half-day run of a tokenization service from the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), which handles much of the plumbing behind U.S. securities markets and processes quadrillions of dollars of transactions each year.

Goldman is now looking at ways to use that service on a larger scale, with Solomon claiming tokenization could help cut costs, automate transactions and make assets easier to trade. But he was careful about how much business it represents today.

“I’d say the activity so far is small and at the margin,” he said.

Instead of opening a ride-hailing app, typing an address and picking a car, you tell the phone where you want to go, and its agent—software that takes a goal and carries it out on its own—handles the remaining steps.

StepFun told the launch audience that in the agent era AI is no longer an add-on to a smartphone but the product itself.

StepFun first showed the agent, the operating system, and the STEPX brand in Shanghai on July 13, without a price or sales date. The company said at the time that conventional smartphone software was never built for autonomous task execution.

Siri and Gemini are assistants that live inside iOS and Android. StepFun says its Step AOS 1.0 was instead built from scratch for the agent, with long-term memory, task scheduling, and security controls in the base layer. The company describes the system as a mix of Android, Linux, and real-time operating system components.

Step AOS breaks phone functions such as messaging, apps, files and settings into small blocks the agent can call directly, using Model Context Protocol, or MCP, a shared standard that lets AI programs plug into other software. Users get two entrances: the familiar app grid and a separate space for the agent.

The agent, called Amoo, keeps one memory for the user’s facts, habits, and preferences and another for what it has learned about carrying out tasks. Simple commands like setting an alarm run on a small model inside the phone, some of them offline, while harder requests that span several apps go to a larger model in the cloud. A second MiniLED screen on the back shows what Amoo is doing.

Nearly 100 companies and products, including Alipay, Tencent, Ctrip, Didi and Meituan, have signed on to Amoo, and payments, travel bookings and content creation are still completed by their own platforms. That is StepFun’s alternative to the screen-reading and simulated-click approach Doubao used.

StepFun, founded in 2023 by former Microsoft vice president Jiang Daxin, builds its own large language model, or LLM, the kind of AI system behind ChatGPT. Its flagship, Step 5 Preview, arrived in September with 600 billion parameters, the internal numbers a model adjusts while training, of which 27 billion are active at a time.

Step 5 Preview can take in up to 1 million tokens, the chunks of text AI services count and bill by, at once. The smaller Step 3.5 Flash, released earlier this year, is open-source under an Apache 2.0 license.

The 3,999-yuan price includes 12 months of the STEPX Token Plan, which provides 100 billion tokens a month, and StepFun has not said what the AI costs after the first year.

Polygon Labs expects its regulated payments business to become profitable in 2027 as it moves beyond blockchain infrastructure to enter the payments processing industry dominated by companies such as Visa (V) and Stripe, CEO Marc Boiron told CoinDesk.

The company, the developer of the Polygon blockchain, said Wednesday that it completed the acquisition of Coinme, a U.S.-regulated crypto payments provider, giving theCayman Islands-based company the ability to handle conversions between cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and traditional money using its own resources.

The deal is part of a shift in Polygon’s business that includes January’s introduction of the Open Money Stack, a framework to support stablecoin-based payments and streamline cross-border transfers. Now, in addition to providing the technology for moving money around, it can also collect fees for converting and transferring that money, a source of revenue that previously went to other businesses, Boiron said in a video interview.

“I have not considered us to compete with blockchains for a while now, to be frank,” Boiron said. “It’s very much that we’re a payments-focused company that just uses blockchains to move money, and in particular, Polygon.”

The largest share of the allocation, approximately 191.7 million $DBR, belongs to ecosystem allocation. Approximately 133.3 million $DBR will be released for core contributors, and 113.3 million for strategic partners. Approximately 83.3 million $DBR will each be released from community, launch, and foundation allocations, while 13.3 million $DBR will be released from the validator share.

The project’s official token economy envisages the release of remaining allocations in the relevant portfolios over a three-year period, according to a quarterly schedule.

The unlocking of the tokens does not mean the issuance of new tokens or the confirmation of the approximately $12 million sale. While existing tokens become transferable, whether holders will send them to exchanges will be seen in separate transactions.

*This is not investment advice.

There were decentralized exchanges, automated lending protocols, crypto wallets and increasingly elaborate financial plumbing, but if all of it was mainly being used to trade one cryptocurrency against other cryptocurrency, the obvious question remained: what was the infrastructure actually built for?

Tokenization may finally provide a convincing answer.

U.S. Treasuries, credit, stocks, funds and other assets are increasingly moving onchain, and once they are there, the point isn’t simply that an investor can trade Nvidia at 2 a.m on a Sunday.

The more interesting argument Citrini made is that tokenization can make financial assets behave more like software: moving between applications, serving as collateral, being borrowed against or plugged into other financial products without each platform rebuilding custody and settlement from scratch.

Those pieces are also starting to come together. Stablecoins put cash onchain. Wallets, exchanges and DeFi protocols have matured. Retail-facing trading platforms like Robinhood (HOOD), Coinbase (COIN) and others bring distribution. And regulators – in the U.S. and around the globe – are beginning to give tokenized securities a clearer path into markets.

Why this is a big deal

Citrini isn’t discovering tokenization. Crypto-native investors have talked about real-world assets (RWA) for years.

What’s different is seeing a widely followed research shop outside the crypto bubble translate the thesis into the language that large investors care about most: where do you actually make money?

Leading the outflow charge was BlackRock’s IBIT led the outflows this week, with around $240 million withdrawn, followed by Fidelity’s FBTC, which recorded approximately $163.2 million in net outflows.

This week’s outflows showed a major improvement compared with the previous week, when Bitcoin ETFs recorded $818.8 million in total outflows between October 5 and 9, marking a decline of about 50%

These withdrawals show that institutional demand remains weak, even though selling has eased from the previous week.

U.S and Iran Tensions Add to Market Pressure

Rising tensions between the U.S. and Iran have added to fears of a wider conflict. The U.S. reportedly asked Iran for permission to strike the Pickaxe Mountain nuclear site without retaliation, but Iran rejected the request.

An Iranian official warned that “Trump’s statements today point to war within the next 24 hours,” adding that Iran’s military forces were “in a state of complete readiness.”

Meanwhile, tensions around shipping routes have kept Brent crude oil near $106 a barrel, while U.S. 10-year Treasury yields have climbed to 5.25%

Bitcoin Struggles to Recover Above $84K

Despite the slower pace of ETF withdrawals, Bitcoin’s price continues to drop. Since last week, BTC price fell from around $87,000 last week to $80,395 before recovering to $84,352 this week.

However, the recovery failed to hold, and Bitcoin later dropped below $81,000, touching nearly $80,250.

Bitcoin’s next move will depend on whether ETF outflows continue to ease and whether economic and geopolitical tensions calm down.

For now, Bitcoin needs to reclaim the $84,000 level to stabilize and prevent further declines.