TLDR

• t54 Labs raised 5 million dollars in a seed funding round co-led by Franklin Templeton and Ripple.
• The company builds identity and risk tools for autonomous agents that conduct financial transactions.
• Anagram and PL Capital joined the round along with several crypto-focused investors.
• t54 operates on networks including XRP Ledger, Solana, and Base.
• The startup plans to hire engineers and a developer relations lead to expand its platform.

t54 Labs has secured $5 million in seed funding to build a trust layer for agentic finance. Anagram, PL Capital, and Franklin Templeton co-led the round with support from Ripple and others. Founder Chandler Fang confirmed the raise and outlined plans to expand infrastructure and hiring.

The San Francisco-based startup launched in January 2025 and focuses on identity and compliance tools for autonomous agents. Fang said no investor received board or advisory seats in the round. He declined to share the valuation or timeline details.

Franklin Templeton and Ripple Back t54’s Seed Financing

Anagram and PL Capital co-led the seed round alongside Franklin Templeton. Ripple, Virtuals Ventures, Blockchain Coinvestors, and ABCDE also participated in the financing. Fang described the raise as the company’s first external funding round.

Fang said t54 employs 12 staff members and plans new hires. The company will add two full-time engineers and one developer relations or business development lead. These hires will support product development and institutional partnerships.

Tony Pecore from Franklin Templeton addressed the investment in a statement. He said, “t54 is building the trust and verification framework that institutional finance will require.” He added that institutions need infrastructure as autonomous agents enter financial markets.

Fang stated that no investor secured governance rights in the company. He confirmed that the round structure remains undisclosed. He also declined to comment on valuation metrics.

Platform Targets Identity, Risk, and Credit for Autonomous Agents

t54 builds tools that verify and monitor AI agents conducting financial transactions. Fang said agents lack standardized identity checks and risk controls. He explained that businesses need accountability when autonomous systems move funds.

The platform includes four core components that address these gaps. It offers identity verification under a system called “know your agent.” It also runs a real-time risk engine that flags suspicious activity before settlement.

The company plans to extend credit lines to verified agents. Credit decisions will rely on identity records, risk scores, and transaction history. The system also combines identity, risk controls, and settlement in one interface.

Fang said, “We’re building the full trust stack that lets businesses hand financial operations to autonomous agents.”

He added that blockchain serves as a settlement and accountability layer. The infrastructure operates across multiple payment rails.

t54 currently runs on the XRP Ledger, Solana, and Base networks. The company also created x402-secure for the Coinbase-incubated x402 agent payment protocol. Last month, Evernorth announced plans to integrate t54’s tools into its XRP Ledger treasury operations.

Evernorth aims to raise over $1 billion for institutional XRP holdings. Under the partnership, Evernorth will use t54 infrastructure for autonomous treasury management. Fang said the collaboration expands institutional deployment of the platform.

A former contender for governor of California has been banned from Kalshi after betting on his own candidacy last year in violation of insider trading rules, the prediction market platform said on Wednesday.

According to a statement from Kalshi’s head of enforcement, Robert DeNault, the politician bet about $200 on his candidacy for governor of California and posted about it on X, leading to a five-year suspension on the prediction market platform and a $2,000 penalty.

Kalshi did not name the politician, but said he is no longer running for governor and is now running for Congress.

The description appears to fit Kyle Langford, a former Republican turned Democrat who is now running for election to the US House to represent California’s 26th Congressional District.

In an X post published on May 25, 2025, Langford shared a video of himself placing a $98.76 bet on Kalshi, wagering that he would win.

Kalshi said the account did not withdraw any profits and that the case was reported to the CFTC.

Cointelegraph reached out to Langford for further comment but didn’t receive an immediate response.

Meanwhile, Kalshi said it also handed out penalties to a YouTube editor who traded about $4,000 on YouTube stream markets between August and September 2025 — also violating Kalshi’s insider trading rules, resulting in a two-year penalty and a roughly $20,000 fine.

“Our surveillance systems flagged his near-perfect trading success on markets with low odds, which were statistically anomalous,” said Kalshi, which, with the help of other traders on the platform, identified where he worked and concluded that he likely had access to material non-public information.

While Kalshi didn’t name the YouTube editor, mainstream media have widely reported that the editor is Artem Kaptur, an employee of the popular YouTuber MrBeast.

Kalshi, a Commodity Futures Trading Commission-regulated platform, said it has investigated 200 cases and frozen several flagged accounts. It has more than a dozen active cases.

Earlier this month, Kalshi strengthened its surveillance efforts by establishing a surveillance audit committee and partnering with crypto trading surveillance platform Solidus Labs to “detect, investigate, and address market abuse.”

Those efforts come in response to an uptick in regulatory scrutiny of prediction markets as they enter the mainstream.