Welcome back!

Here’s what I’ve got for you this week:

Brian Chesky, Airbnb's co-founder and chief executive, frames it simply: the internet makes information liquid, and tokenisation does the same for ownership. His prediction is that tokenisation keeps scaling until owning a slice of anything, anywhere, feels obvious.

Now, let’s jump right into this week’s newsletter! 

Click on any underlined heading/hyperlink to learn more.

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On 9 July, the European Parliament passed Chat Control 1.0. 

In plain terms, it is a temporary exemption from the EU's privacy rules that permits but does not compel providers to scan unencrypted private messages: direct messages on Instagram, Snapchat, and Discord; mail on Gmail and iCloud. 

The manner in which Chat Control 1.0 passed, in particular, deserves scrutiny. More MEPs voted against the measure than for it, 314 to 276. But the vote was fast-tracked and structured as a motion to reject, which required an absolute majority of 360 to kill it. As a result, the law passed by falling short of defeat rather than by winning support.

The danger now lies downstream with Chat Control 2.0. That proposal reaches for mandatory detection orders and client-side scanning: inspecting content on the device before encryption is applied. This leaves cryptography architecturally intact, sure, but it also makes it practically pointless. 

There is a better route: security-by-design obligations on platforms; a European centre with the mandate and the budget to take illegal content off the public internet at source; and detection orders aimed at actual suspects and authorised by a judge, rather than blanket scanning at the discretion of the tech industry. That is police work with warrants, the model every liberal democracy already accepts.

If governments keep overreaching, and keep winning on procedure rather than persuasion, people will start standing up. Signal did not grow because users read the ePrivacy directive, it grew because each new surveillance proposal made the alternative legible. The same dynamic is now arriving in money. A payment rail is a communications channel with a balance attached, and once legislators establish that scanning private messages is a routine instrument of policy, the argument for scanning private transactions writes itself. 

Every threshold-passed law is an unintentional subsidy to the tools built to make the next one unenforceable. Europe may get Chat Control 2.0. It will not get the compliance it imagines, and the privacy stack (encrypted messaging, shielded transactions, and self custody) will be larger, better funded, and more widely used as a result.

Blimey! Fifty-four financial institutions, among them Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, BlackRock, and Coinbase, have joined a UK government-backed taskforce. The initiative, supported by the City of London Corporation, will spend the next year working on tokenisation use cases across financial markets.

Dominoes Falling: Vanguard is recruiting a Head of Digital Assets for the first time. The role will own the strategy, roadmap, and enterprise execution for Vanguard Personal Wealth. It will also define how the group evaluates, prioritises, and builds digital asset capabilities and operating models in a manner intended to serve clients and shore up a long-term competitive position.

Tokenised Deposits: Swift's blockchain-based shared ledger has gone live with seventeen banks, among them BNY, Citi, UBS, BNP Paribas, Standard Chartered, and Lloyds. The constraint on tokenised deposits has never been the technology but the perimeter, since each bank's token is redeemable only within its own network. Round-the-clock movement is thus available inside an institution but unavailable between institutions, which has kept the corporate uptake of tokenisation modest. Swift's shared ledger is designed to bridge those separate systems, so that interbank transfers can clear at any hour rather than queuing for business hours.

Stablecoin Remittance: Hyundai has completed a live stablecoin remittance between two overseas subsidiaries, moving an intercompany payment from the United States to Mexico using Tether's dollar-pegged USDT on the Avalanche blockchain. The transaction settled a real billing obligation rather than a test balance. It ranks among the first cases of a large industrial conglomerate, as opposed to a crypto-native firm or fintech, leveraging cross-border stablecoin transactions.

Konbini Crypto: Lawson, the Japanese convenience store operator, is preparing to trial payments in JPYC, a yen-pegged stablecoin. The pilot is expected to begin in early August at one of the group's Tokyo stores. Should the pilot succeed, stablecoins would edge markedly closer to everyday retail use in Japan.

Joint Venture: Staying in Japan, SBI Holdings and the Solana Foundation are forming a strategic partnership under the name SBI Solana Global. The venture will issue stablecoins, tokenise real-world assets, build cross-border settlement rails, and develop payment infrastructure for AI agents. All of it will run on Solana.

Federal Oversight: Circle has secured final approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to establish a national trust bank. The charter permits no deposits, no lending, and no FDIC insurance. It does, however, place the infrastructure behind USDC under direct federal supervision, beginning with custody.

And that's a wrap!

You can reach me anytime over on 𝕏 or drop me a line.

Talk soon!

J264G

_{DISCLAIMER
None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research. Lastly, please be advised that we discuss products and services from our partners from which our team members may hold tokens/equity.}